In the King's Service Read Free Page A

cousin-kin to Keryell’s mother. Among all those von Horthy children, I doubt Sobbon much noticed three extras.”
    “Was there not a prior marriage,” Dominy said thoughtfully, “and a son by that marriage?”
    “Cynfyn,” Vivienne supplied promptly. “His mother was a daughter of one of the Torenthi dukes. But he died young, leaving Keryell without an heir—a riding mishap, while returning from his knighting.”
    “Which was what impelled Keryell to go seeking a new bride and a new heir,” Michon supplied, shaking his head. “Unfortunately for us, his loss coincided with the passing of Stevana’s grandfather, Duke Stiofan—and the rest, as they say, is history.”
    “What of the daughters?” Vivienne asked, a frown furrowing her fair brow.
    Seisyll shrugged. “After Ahern, the eldest—Alyce is her name—is heiress presumptive to Corwyn—though I’m sure that Keryell has set aside dower lands for her, in her own right. Her brother will be the next duke, when he turns twenty-five.”
    “Unless, like Keryell’s previous heir, he suffers a fatal mishap,” Barrett pointed out. “These things do happen.”
    “Aye, of course they do,” Seisyll said. “Which is why the king will have a say in whom she—and her sister, too—eventually wed. He will not gamble with the fate of a duchy so rich as Corwyn, in case Ahern should not inherit.” He swept them with his gaze. “This means that the king must approve their eventual marriages—which eliminates any suitor from Torenth, for Donal would never consent to Corwyn lands passing into Torenthi control. One of the Forcinn states, perhaps.”
    “He could always pack them off to a convent,” Sief murmured.
    Dominy glanced at him frostily. “With your Jessilde, Sief?”
    “It was her choice,” Sief shot back.
    “As if you gave her any other!”
    “Peace!” Seisyll interjected. “We have often done things we would rather not have done. Never forget that we serve a higher cause than our own desires.”
    His admonition left a tense silence in its wake, only lifting as Michon cleared his throat.
    “On a more constructive note, I suggest that we return to the recommendation regarding young Ahern,” he said. “His position, when he comes of age, will be of immense importance—but only if he can, indeed, convince the king that he is worthy to take up the title of his great-grandfather.”
    “And pray that it no more passes through the female line,” Seisyll muttered. “I, for one, shall be greatly relieved when he’s grown and married and has an heir. At least Stevana had a boy, God rest her, and blood is blood. . . .”

Chapter 1
    “Is it not a grief unto death, when a companion and friend is turned to an enemy?”
    —ECCLESIASTICUS 37:2
     
 
 
 
 
 
FAR from where the Camberian Council sat in secret session, crafting their careful, deliberate plans for the future of their race, the wife of one of its members lay propped amid the pillows of their curtained and canopied bed and waited for the nurse to bring her infant son for feeding. Two days after his birth, Lady Jessamy MacAthan was feeling far stronger, but both the pregnancy and the delivery of this latest bairn had taken more out of her than any of her previous children, even the stillborn ones.
    Of course, she was older than when she had birthed any of the others—past forty now—and with a growing history of miscarriages and stillbirths. She had not even been certain she could conceive again, much less carry a child to term.
    But this child was important, destined for a secret but very special role in the future unfolding for Gwynedd and its kings to come. It was too soon to tell precisely what young Krispin’s magical potential would prove to be, but his parentage ensured that he would be no ordinary boy.
    The nursery door opened, and Mistress Anjelica brought in the fretting, wiggling bundle that was her son, shushing and cooing over him as she laid him in his mother’s