In the King's Service Read Free Page B

arms.
    “He ’ s very hungry, milady,” the woman said, as Jessamy put him to her breast.
    “Yes, I can see that,” Jessamy replied, smiling. “And greedy, too. He’s like a wee limpet. Thank heaven he hasn’t any teeth! But you needn’t sit with me. I know you must have things that need doing. Are the girls asleep?”
    “Yes, milady.”
    “Good. I’ll call you when we’re finished.”
    She readjusted the child in the hollow of her arm and settled back to let him feed as the nurse retired, allowing the sweet lethargy of his suckling to drift her into idle remembrance, wondering what Sief would say, if he were ever to penetrate past her shields to learn the truth—though Jessamy would resist him to the death, were he ever to try.
    She had never wanted or intended to marry Sief, who was sixteen years her senior. But her mother had died when she was but ten, and the loss of her father the following year had left her in the hands of guardians who insisted on the match: powerful Deryni, who had feared what Lewys ap Norfal’s daughter might become, and had sought to minimize the danger by seeing her safely wed to one of their own. Though she had never come to regard Sief with more than resigned acceptance, she loved the children he had given her; and she had learned to live with the arrangement because she must, and to wear the façade of a dutiful wife, because outward compliance allowed her at least an illusion of freedom here at the court of Gwynedd—if only Sief knew how free. Her love of her children was one of the honest things about her life, as was her affection for the queens she had served here in Rhemuth for the past thirty years.
    By now, memories of any other home had mostly receded to a distant blur, dangerous though it was to be Deryni in Rhemuth. Even before Rhemuth, her parents had never stayed long in one place, lest their Deryni nature be discovered—and Lewys ap Norfal had never been good at hiding what he was for long. Had they lived in Gwynedd those early years, she now thought it unlikely that Lewys would have survived long enough to sire any children. Even so, he had been notorious among his own kind, and had met his end attempting magic usually deemed impossible, even among the most accomplished of their race.
    Putting an end to that nomad existence, Sief had brought her to Gwynedd’s capital immediately after their hurried marriage, giving the care of his frightened child-bride into the hands of the king’s daughter-in-law, the gentle and sensitive Princess Dulchesse, who had been the wife of then-Crown Prince Donal Blaine Haldane.
    That pairing, at least, had prospered, for the two women had liked one another from the start. Dulchesse, but one-and-twenty herself and already six years married, had yet to give her husband an heir, but she had gladly taken the orphaned Jessamy under her wing and assumed the role of elder sister and surrogate mother, giving her the fierce protection of her royal station as the still-hopeful mother of kings. Indeed, in all but name, the princess had been functioning as Gwynedd’s queen for all her married life; for Roisian of Meara, King Malcolm’s queen, had withdrawn to a convent the same year Dulchesse came to court. The rift had come the previous year, after Malcolm was obliged to lead an expedition into rebellious Meara and execute several members of Roisian’s family. One of them had been Roisian’s twin sister.
    Alas for Sief, placing his young bride in the household of the crown princess had not turned out at all as he expected; but by the time he realized that he had become the victim of feminine solidarity, it was too late to change his mind.
    “You may be certain that I shall school her to a wife you may be proud of, my lord,” Dulchesse had told the disbelieving Sief, on learning that he planned to allow Jessamy but a year’s grace before consummating their marriage, “but you shall not touch her until her fourteenth birthday. She’s but