The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince (4 page)

But they never did.

There was a morning when they had outpaced me deliberately, marooning me behind them on my placid mount while they rode out of my sight. I had no chance of finding where they had gone, nor could I return to the castle without inviting questions as to where my lady was. The day grew hot as I plodded along and, seeking relief from the sun, I turned from the trail and rode to the lip of a little dell shaded by beech trees. Caution had once more ignored her name, for in their eagerness she and the Stablemaster had not ridden far. The turf was deep, and the two of them were too engrossed in one another to be aware of me as I halted my mount and stared down on them. Her discarded dress was like a wilted blossom on the grassy sward. She was so pale, a moon of a woman spread wide on his night-blue cloak, her head thrown back in ecstasy. She shuddered with each of his thrusts; his eyes were closed and his teeth showed white in his tanned face. Nearby, her mare grazed, heedless of them. But the Spotted Stud watched them so avidly that even he was unaware of me and my horse. When Lostler fell forward atop her, head bowed in completion, she seized his face in both her hands and moved his mouth to hers to kiss him so passionately that I could not doubt her love for him.

Cold with dismay, I turned my horse’s head and quietly withdrew. What I had seen sickened me. For I loved Queen-in-Waiting Caution and desired no harm or scandal to come her way. Had I not raised her, at the expense of my own childhood? Had I not stood at her side, shielded her from punishment and, as often as not, claimed her misdeeds as my own? Had I not offered her my own body for her pleasure, to help her to stay virginal for her wedding bed? If I had offered her my heart as well, then I had done so freely, knowing that she could never reciprocate what I felt. I had always accepted that in our relationship I must love her more than she loved me, for I was merely a servant, and she was a Farseer and would someday be queen of all the Six Duchies.

But it was him she chose. She loved the Stablemaster, a man born a slave and a Chalcedean, not even an honest Buck-born servant like myself. To that common man she had given her heart and the body that I had cared for and cherished since she was born. Another might have felt jealousy, but I write the truth that Redbird bade me keep clear: I felt only fear for what might befall my darling.

And yes, I feared for myself as well. I knew that if my knowledge became public, I would fall just as swiftly as the princess, for although no one had ever said I was her chaperone, I knew that was what they had expected of me.

As soon as I was sure, I ran to my mother for advice, for she was at court in those days, nursemaid to Lady Everlon’s twin daughters. Busy as she was, she still made time for me, and found a quiet place where I could spill out my tale of scandal and fear.

When I had told out my woe, my mother shook her head. “You must keep them apart,” she counseled me, and when I said I could not, she scowled. “Then you must be ready. I will tell you the herbs you can mix with her drink that will make conception less likely, but none of them are certain. Sooner or later, if she is with the man, she will get with child. And if that happens, there is but one path for you. See that you, too, are quickening with life.”

“But no man wishes to marry me!” I protested, and my mother shook her head.

“Learn what the Queen-in-Waiting knows. You do not have to be married to lie with a man. You do not even have to hold his heart. There are minstrels in plenty at the court, and all know that a minstrel will lie down with any woman for an hour, and play a sad song about her the next day. So choose one and ready him, so that if you need his services, he will be eager.”

“But why?” I asked. “What will it avail me to be with child when my lady is?”

“Just do as I say, and all will be made clear with time,” she told me. And then she shooed me from her chamber, for Lady Everlon had returned.

So I went, resolved that I would follow her advice, though I did not see the wisdom of it.

As the winter wore on the Queen-in-Waiting did not rise as willingly from her bed as she once had. She turned aside from food, and the perfumes she had once loved now sickened her. She ceased going out to ride. I knew, I think, even before she suspected. I fled to my mother, and mixed with Caution’s morning tea the herbs my mother gave me for shaking a child from the womb. So sick was the Queen-in-Waiting for the next week that I was certain the child must let go, and worried only that I had given my dear Caution too much of the remedy. Slowly she recovered and I dared to hope, but when I dressed her hair, and when I smelled her skin as I slept beside her, I knew I was wrong. The child still clung within her and I dared not try to dislodge it again.

Her ladies began to whisper, and as the days passed and Caution puked at the sight of food and slept half the day away, the whispers rose to a roar. My best efforts to keep her safe had failed. The Queen-in-Waiting was with child and soon her symptoms were such that there was no hope of concealing it any longer. There came a day when her mother summoned her to a private audience, and when she returned silent and gray-faced, I knew that her mother had had the truth of her condition from her.

Some say this brought so much sorrow to her mother that she lay down and died. It is beyond me to know the truth of such things, but before the winter was out, Queen Capable was in her grave. This doubled the grief of King Virile. He rebuked his daughter, but Caution was unrepentant. Many a noble man offered to wed her, some even to let her keep the unborn child in her household. She refused them all. Nor would she name the father of her child, but when her nobles asked her, “Whose child is that which grows in your belly?” she would laugh almost wantonly and say, “Obviously, the child is mine. Cannot you see it grows within me?”

Then her duchies reproached her as well, dukes and duchesses all, saying, “Our Queen-in-Waiting you are, that is true, but you are not yet our queen. Your father still holds the throne, and should he name another heir in your place, perhaps we would listen to him.”

She stared round at them and with a grim smile replied, “My father knows I am his daughter. And any child that grows within me is his grandchild, and the rightful heir. He knows that. If you doubt that, you insult my mother’s memory. Take that thought to my father and see how well it sits with him.” Thus she made their doubts of her an insult to her mother, and knew her father would never hear them.

Yet for all her boldness in public, I knew that at night, when she thought I was asleep, she wept and berated herself for what had come to pass. Too late she had learned to follow her name, for though the Stablemaster daily brought the Spotted Stud, saddled and bridled, to the courtyard, she did not go down to him, nor so much as wave her dismissal from a window. So every day he waited, an hour or sometimes two, and then he and the horses would return to the stables. Sometimes I peeped from the window to see him standing there patiently, holding the reins of our mounts and looking straight ahead.

To me alone Caution spoke of her sorrows. She felt the loss of her mother keenly, even though they had not been close since she was a little girl. Her mother had always been the one to temper her father’s anger and when he would have disciplined her more strictly, her mother had always intervened. King Virile’s dark eyes were full of hurt when he looked at his daughter now, and the two of them seemed to avoid one another instead of being drawn together by their grief. So Caution felt her father was lost to her as well. Since her pregnancy had become known, Virile had asked his wife’s younger sister to keep watch over his daughter and to regulate her conduct.

Lady Hope was as feisty as a yapping dog, and fully a match for my mistress’s resourcefulness. That stern chaperone was never more than a few steps away from her charge, severely restricting her activities to those she considered appropriate. She might sew, or walk with her ladies in a garden, or listen to music. There was no hope of her going out to ride, even if she had felt well enough to do so. In the evenings, the key was turned in the lock to our suite of rooms, and two guards stationed outside it lest so much as a slip of paper be slipped beneath the door.

And so she pined for her lover as well as suffering the early trials of her pregnancy. I wondered if she had managed to convey to Lostler that she carried his child. She had not been out of my sight since my ill-fated attempt with the herbs, and sending him a secret note would have been useless, him being unlettered in any language. He would surely hear, though, of her disgrace. I hoped he would be wise enough not to try to contact her, for if he betrayed her secret, it would not go well for any of us.

Why no one else made the obvious connection, why her father did not dismiss the man or order him flogged, I did not understand. Perhaps a princess dallying with her stablemaster was too shameful a thing for him to imagine possible. Perhaps those who might suspect did not openly accuse Lostler for fear of deepening the Queen-in-Waiting’s disgrace and earning the king’s disfavor. Perhaps the king deluded himself that the child was nobly bred, if not legitimate, and that the father might yet step forward to claim his get. Or perhaps the death of his wife and his daughter’s disgrace had so unmanned him that he had no heart left to solve such a sordid mystery. Daily it stabbed me that I had not been firmer with her, that I had let her fall into this disgrace.

And in another way I failed her. I was my mother’s child, but seemed to lack both her nerve and her fecundity. I had dithered and delayed, hoping in vain that Caution would be done with the stablemaster before his seed took root in her. And then I told myself that my herbs would shake the child from her. Although I was the first to know she carried a child, still it was hard for me to choose a man to aid me in my plan likewise to conceive.

At last, in desperation, I settled on a man I thought I could seduce. Copper Songsmith was a young apprentice to the court. He was not as handsome then as he would grow to be, for he was wild-haired and gangly and had not yet seen a score of years, although even then he possessed a voice that made women swoon. I was not skilled in the ways of seduction and he was not a man expecting to be seduced. So we were both awkward at our task, and I at least was pretending to an ardency I did not truly feel. He was not a skilled lover and I did not care. Our matings were hurried and brief. When even after this my courses still came at their appointed time, I knew despair.

Again I sought my mother. She folded her lips tight and shook her head at my foolishness. “Well, what can you do but try again? If Eda favors you, then you may still get a lusty babe that will come early, or perhaps your lady may carry hers past term. But you had best be about it, and not be too fussy. What sort of a simpleton did I give birth to, a woman who cannot coax a man to settle between her legs?”

Her words stung, but it was advice I heeded. Before the next moon turned, I felt morning sickness. Being rid of Copper was no problem: at a hint that I might carry his child, his master whisked him off to Bearns Duchy for the winter, and I was glad to be shed of him. I did not at first tell my mistress what I had done. When the nights grew cold, and her worries pressed her, she still sometimes called me to her bed, not to take pleasure of me, but to lean her head on my shoulder and natter on about her secret love and how sorely she missed him.

Sometimes she spoke longingly of her lost freedom to take out the Spotted Stud on a long gallop and return in a leisurely fashion. Even then, she believed that I was ignorant of who her lover was. Such a fool she thought me! And so, not unknowingly of how it pricked me, she taunted me with hints of him, of the smoothness of the skin on his back, or the softness of his mouth when he kissed her. She spoke, too, of a hundred different plans for eluding her draconian chaperone, to slip away to be with her lover. Her plans were wild and foolish, yet when she hammered at me to agree to help her, what could I do but promise to aid her? Time after time she tried to set them in motion, and time after time I managed to delay her. She was growing both impatient and angry with me, and daily I feared she would attempt an escape that would end in disaster for us all. Her longing for him cut me deeper than she knew. And so, on the night that she first divined that I, too, was with child, I suddenly discerned a way to perhaps break her bond with the Chalcedean stableman and put an end to her plans for escape.

We were in bed together, cuddled close for warmth. Outside the shuttered windows of her bedchamber, a snowstorm was blowing fiercely. The wind whistled past the shutters and the flames of the hearth fire danced to their tune. Occasionally a blast struck with enough fury to send a ripple through the tapestries that lined the cold stone walls of the room. “Hold me, Felicity! The night is so chill,” she whispered to me, and I was glad to comply. But she turned her face away from mine, exclaiming, “Your breath is foul with vomit! Are you ill?”

I shook my head and decided that night I would share my secret. “Only as ill as you are, my lady. The babe that grows inside me roils my belly.”

“You?” She sat up in astonishment, letting the cold air of the room rush into our shared bed. “You with child?” She laughed aloud, but it was not a joyous sound. Her incredulous manner mocked me. “By whom?” she demanded, her mouth full of cold smiles. “What boy or gaffer did you waylay in a dark stairwell?”

I am not a beauty, nor even pretty. It is kind to say that I am plain. I am crook-toothed and thin-shanked and pock-faced. I know that the kitchen lads call me ‘Pig Eyes.’ I cannot explain then why her mockery cut me so deep, save that she had never before spoken me so. Sometimes I look back and wonder, did she feel I had betrayed her? Had she secretly wished that my heart would always be hers and hers alone? Why else whet her tongue against me?

But I had been schooled to my place in her world for every day of my life. So even at that moment, no angry retort passed my lips. My plan to save her, and myself, sprang full-formed to my mind at that moment. So I only smiled, showing my crooked teeth and said, “Perhaps the Stablemaster is not as keen of sight as others, for he did not seem to find me uncomely when he took me to warm his bed.”