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  The Queen_s Bastard

  ( Inheritors Cycle - 1 )

  C. E Murphy

  C. E Murphy

  The Queen_s Bastard

  SANDALIA DE PHILIP DE COSTA

  12 OCTOBER 1561 Lanyarch, north of Aulun

  She wears a sheepskin against the wind that shrieks around cathedral walls. The skin is soft and smells surprisingly good, and its creamy warmth seems a more fitting nod to wedding colours than the tartan blues and yellowed whites that the man at her side wears. Her gown beneath the sheepskin is sturdy, not fashionable; it has been made for travel. Indeed, she’s come from the ship to the carriage and thence to this lonely, wind-whipped cathedral with no time to arrange herself as suits her station. She was told it would be thus, and if she feels disappointment, she’s put it away in the name of duty.

  Her hair is still damp and tangled from the wind that beats grey stone into submission and whips grey clouds into hungry, gaping scars across the sky. Rain clatters against stained glass until Mary, Mother of Christ, weeps with it. No shard of sunlight streams through to bring joy to her tears. It’s said that rain on a wedding day is good luck, though that seems contrived; certainly no one claims sunshine is ill luck.

  Voices murmur beneath the violent rain, echoing within bleak stone walls. They’re critical, sympathetic, disdainful, sorrowful, curious, and above all without respect.

  It is not done to whisper and comment during the marriage of one royal to another. After, yes, and before most certainly, but as a priest’s sonorous tones ring through the dismal cathedral there should be silence. Respect. Awe. Even when the wedding is done in haste, and with none of the pomp that might be expected, it should be an occasion for solemnity, not gossip. In time, those who chatter and mock will come to regret their loose tongues, for it will be made clear to them why their lands are forfeit; why their children are made involuntary guests; why a handful of heads roll and feet kick in the depths of serene dark forests.

  But that is in time, and not a thought to be entertained on a wedding day.

  Sandalia, aged fourteen years, sister to the prince of Essandia and soon to be queen of oppressed Lanyarch, lifts a warm brown gaze to the bishop who bestows her husband’s name upon her, and smiles. They’re done together, the marriage and the crowning. Rough Lanyarchan rubes clamour to make oaths to the aging king and his fresh bride. He’s old, too old, for a girl of her age, though he isn’t yet feeble. What he is, is too wedded to his faith. He’s taken no wife until Sandalia, and that’s done only under pressure from Rodrigo, Essandia’s ruling prince and Sandalia’s brother. Aulun, the sister country to Lanyarch’s south, chokes under the Reformation Church’s hold, and Ecumenic Lanyarch suffers for it. Should Charles, last of the house of Stewart, pass without an heir, there will be no stopping the Red Bitch in Aulun from sweeping over Lanyarch and bending it to her rule.

  Rodrigo, as in love with his faith as Charles but far more pragmatic, will not allow that to happen. Sandalia remembers his apology as they stood on an Essandian dock, in the moments before she climbed aboard a tall ship to sail north and meet her fate. In memory, he takes her hands in his, studying her with sad eyes. Rodrigo is twice her age, handsome and fit in the prime of his life, and he doesn’t like sending a young sister away as a piece on a playing field. He murmurs words of sorrow, words that hang in Sandalia’s mind even now, for all that she’s tried to forget them. She is a princess of Essandia, and did not, does not, will not, need the prince’s apologies: she is young, but she knows her duty, and would do anything for her brother besides.

  So now, with the weight of a queen’s crown on her head, she turns from the man who crowned her and holds the hand of the one she’s wed, and speaks in a clear strong voice and in a language that is not her own. People will admire her mastery of the Aulunian tongue now, and later say her speech held wisdom and charm beyond her years.

  “I stand before you now a queen, and beside my husband as protector of our faith. Lanyarch is like my child to me, and I will not see it fall beneath Reformation rule. I will be mother to this brave northern country and mother to its heir, standing beside my lord until God finds it fit to help us all shake off the law that has been so cruelly brought down upon us. I have received the blessing of our beloved church, but now I beg of you to share your own blessings of hearth and home with me. I come from a warm country far to the south. Let me now know the warmth that is Lanyarch!”

  All the voices that had babbled in contempt now rise in a furor, raw welcoming cheers and stamping feet, tartaned men sending ear-shattering whistles to drive back the sound of rain. They swear fealty, one after the other, while Charles stands at Sandalia’s side, distant and polite. He doesn’t see the masses before him; his gaze is cast to the glorious stained glass windows that tell of Christ’s suffering. He thinks not of his country’s future, but of his own part in the King of Heaven’s tale.

  Sandalia, her absent king at her side, rides the breadth and width of Lanyarch all through the winter, chapping her fine skin and accepting dark bread and ale as her nightly meals. She sleeps before the fire in common rooms and learns, poorly, to weave a tartan, but most of all she learns the laughter of the crude Lanyarchan people, and learns to share it.

  In the springtime she retreats to the capital city of Agned, insisting she can hardly be expected to bear an heir when she and Charles spend their nights crowded into common rooms with little time to themselves. The people whistle and roar and share ribald winks, all of them more than half in love with the dusky princess from the south, and grant her privacy to tend to the serious business of making a child.

  Fifteen months from their wedding date, Charles’s story ends in a phlegm-filled fit of coughing, leaving his wife without the rounded belly she’s promised her people. Rumour whispers Charles has gone to the grave as godly and pure as he came from the womb, no woman ever breached by his sword.

  Sandalia, queen of Lanyarch, belovйd to her people and no longer protected by a husband whose claim to the throne is incontestable, gathers her skirts and flees her adopted northern land with the threat of the Titian Bitch at her back.

  SANDALIA, QUEEN OF LANYARCH

  17 October 1563 Gallin, northeast of Essandia

  She wears a sheepskin, not against biting wind, but to remind her deserted country that she has not forgotten it. The skin doesn’t suit a silver-shot gown encrusted with pearls, nor the mildness of the Gallic day; the sky lies against the horizon as pale and calm as it does directly overhead, autumn’s sunshine enough to make the day bright and delightful without blinding the youthful Lanyarchan queen.

  She wears a sheepskin to remind the gathered throngs who call her name as she rides through Lutetian streets in a carriage behind six matched white horses that she does not come to their king merely a princess, but as a queen in her own right. A queen in exile, to be sure, but a queen loved by her people, and a queen whose faith supports her. She has forgone a crown; such an obvious symbol of power speaks of desperation, a crassness in announcing who she is. Sandalia needs not stoop so low.

  But she wears the sheepskin, and no one who sees her on her wedding day will forget it.

  She rides alone that day, and when the carriage stops before the cathedral entrance, it is her brother who steps forward to offer his hand. Rodrigo, who sent her north to Lanyarch as winter came on, and who made her a queen by doing so. He had not been there to see her crowned that day, and the softness in his eyes offered apology for that now, two years later, as she goes to make another match in the name of duty.

  “A new fashion?” he murmurs as she steps down from the carriage. “Will you set Lutetia on its ear and have them wearing sheepskins before winter has set in?”

  Sandalia�
��s laughter, easy and bright, rolls through the autumn air and reaches the cathedral ahead of her. Behind her and to all sides, voices soar in approval of the young queen’s mirth. It is a good sign, the people agree, that Sandalia goes happy to their king. That she’s a princess of Essandia and not one of their own Gallic-born high ladies is forgiven today, on her wedding day, in face of her delight. Laughter is an omen of the things to come, and the people will forgive her anything for her joy.

  “No,” she answers beneath the roar, but smiles as she says it. “Though now that you’ve put the idea into my head, perhaps I’ll make that my legacy. A new fashion for every season. I’ll be even more frivolous than the Red Bitch.”

  Amusement quirks Rodrigo’s mouth. “Be careful, Dalia. Such things legacies are made of.”

  Sandalia tosses her hair and laughs again. “I’m only a woman, dear brother. No one expects my legacy to be anything greater than sturdy heirs and fashionable clothes.”

  “So long as you provide the one, I can accept the other.” Steel slips into Rodrigo’s voice and Sandalia casts a coquettish glance at him.

  “Do you doubt me in the bedroom, Rodrigo? Charles was old. Louis is not. There will be an heir.” The same steel, as well-tempered if lighter in tang, comes into her own voice. “My son will be born within a year.”

  “May God’s blessings be on you all.” Rodrigo releases her at the doors, and she walks the aisle alone to face the man who will be her new husband.

  He is slender and aesthete, blond hair loose in a manner that dictates fashion because of his rank, not his sense of style. That he dresses beautifully is through no deliberation of his own, heavy collar and broad padded shoulders lending him a gravitas that the youthful bloom of his cheeks doesn’t support. He plucks at the collar discontentedly, actions of a man too unfamiliar with fashion to have it made to suit him, rather than the other way around.

  Still, he makes a finer picture beside Sandalia than Charles had, the blue of his gaze sharp and strong. It is only Sandalia, standing at his side, who sees in her new prince what she also saw in the old: that the light in his eyes comes to life as he gazes piously on the windows depicting the lives and deeds of saints and disciples.

  God save her, she cannot help but think, even as she speaks her vows. God save her from men whom God had saved. Is she to be damned by their presence all her life, wedded to those whose souls were already bound to a higher being? Even Rodrigo, now in his early thirties, seems too fond of God and not enough of flesh, though he, at least, dances in careful negotiations with the Aulunian queen, whose years are still tender enough to bear children, should she finally bow to a marriage bed. That’s the hand Rodrigo wants, not for love, but for the Church: with an Ecumenic king the heretical country might yet be brought back into the fold. If wedding Lorraine is the price, it is one Rodrigo is willing to pay.

  Louis at least comes to the bridal chamber, more than Charles ever did.

  When it was clear Charles would not come to bed, Sandalia told him through gritted teeth that there would be an heir to Lanyarch if it took her dying breath to make it so. He gazed at her without apparent comprehension, and agreed that there must be a child. Sandalia, innocent, betrayed, furious, turned her eyes from the king in search of a man who could be used and discarded.

  She found better in the guise of a hazel-eyed man who wore the collar of a priest. He remained apart from her court, alluring for his remoteness. She warmed to him, seeing in his sharp features and collar a creature that could be used and kept: for all her faith in the Church, she had equal faith that it desired power on the throne, or behind it. Better by far to own a priest than be owned by one. He had long hands, beautifully shaped and soft, and the virgin queen ached with unfamiliar desire at the thought of his touch.

  She was trembling on her hands and knees, his soft hands stroking and exploring her sex, when word came that Charles was dead.

  And then she was a virgin no more, her priest’s urgent weight behind her, pinning her with a desperation to couple that they both understood. For the rest of her life colour came to her cheeks when she thought of that night; of that week; of the hope to catch soon enough to call the child a king’s. But her blood came, and with it the last chance of pretending a pregnancy that was her husband’s. Sandalia fled Lanyarch, a failure as a woman and a queen, her priest and confessor and no-more lover at her side. She resigned herself to a convent with the memory of a few days’ passion to warm her for the rest of her days, until Rodrigo came to her and spoke quietly of the young Gallic prince and his need for a wife.

  Enough time had passed that it was clear there would be no Lanyarchan heir, save through Sandalia’s claim to that throne. The Church declared her fit to be taken as Louis’s bride, and when he makes a feeble, uncertain pass at her breast in the bedchambers, exasperation floods her and she unlaces his breeches and climbs atop him, more determined to be successfully bred than caring for decorum. She will not look to her priest in the days and weeks to come, though he remains at her side. Louis approves; it is well that Sandalia shows such faith, and her piousness makes him more eager to share a bed with her. They will make a godly child, he promises her, and she sets her teeth and keeps her gaze from her hazel-eyed priest.

  Ten months later, his young wife pale with the first weeks of pregnancy, Louis rides east to lead a border skirmish against encroaching Reinnish troops, an ongoing dispute that goes back before Sandalia’s memories.

  A harried, misery-pelted courier rides back six weeks after that, just a few days ahead of the sledge that carries young Louis’s body home to his devastated country.

  Sandalia closes herself away when the cramping and bleeding begins, claiming shock and horror that no one doubts. She will see only her priest, whose soft hands she has not again allowed to touch her. The people whisper she commends Louis’s soul to heaven so often she has no other words left to speak.

  Behind locked doors, she claws her fingers in her man’s throat and demands, raw-voiced and full of rage, that a child be found to replace the one her body rejects. It is too well known how far along she is, too long a recovery from a child lost to a new one made, to risk her priest’s long slim body again. If she has regrets they are buried beneath the fury of orders given: a child must be found; a boy, born six months hence. Kill its parents, she says, and because the priest is no fool, he will vanish the same night he brings the child to her. She has given orders for his death; she trusts that his disappearance and that death are one and the same.

  At seventeen, widowed twice, exiled queen of one country, young regent to a second, princess to a third, Sandalia de Costa will have her heir.

  At any cost, she will have her heir.

  BELINDA PRIMROSE

  15 March 1565 Brittany, north of Gallin

  “It cannot be found out.”

  She knew the words as if they’d come down to her through the blood, in the first moments of awareness. There was darkness, red-tinged and warm, a battlefield of sound filling it: explosions and grumbles that came so steadily they were comforting rather than cause for alarm. There were voices, both low, but one more distant than the other. The first voice, closer, tickled through her to the very centre of her being, becoming a part of her that could never be cut away. It was that voice that carried fear into her, intense and sharp: “It cannot be found out.”

  In the first moments of cold, with the air screaming all around her, she heard the voice again, high and distorted. She grasped with tiny fingers at a blurred, weary face that retreated before her wide, tearless gaze. She was pressed against a different warmth, scratchy and soft and scented. She would come to know the scent as chypre, and associate it with safety for the rest of her life. She was enclosed in strong arms, the world shifting perspective dizzily as she was taken from the first, the last, glimpse she would have of her mother for twelve years.

  Behind her, from the breadth of a man’s chest, the less familiar voice echoed the words that seemed to define her, even at m
ere minutes of age: “It cannot be found out.”

  Then he spoke again with more clarity, the certainty and strength of love colouring his words with richness: “I know. It will not be found out, my lady. Have faith. I’ll return by dawn, and by the ninth bell you must be dressed for court. You must be seen well, or their hearts will fail. Attend her.” The last words were spoken to someone else, somewhere else; a murmur of reply in a deep voice came, and then the woman spoke again:

  “Yes. Go. Go, Robert. And be seen with a woman in the small hours of the morning.” Weariness is left behind by command. “There are too many who see you dance attendance on us already. We demand they find nothing of import. We shall be furious with you when we learn of your dalliances. Now go!”

  A single image, burned into a newly made memory: slender shoulders, a proud straight spine. Linens clutched over milk-heavy breasts and wrinkling over a still-swollen belly, contracting with afterbirth labors. Thin grey eyes, a high forehead, and a proud chin, lifted in expectation.

  Titian hair worn loose, bloody curls against translucent skin.

  Enormous hands enveloped Belinda’s head, turning her away from her mother, into the warmth of her father’s body.

  BELINDA PRIMROSE

  8 February 1577 Aulun, isolated by the sea

  Memory, from what others said, did not stretch so far back.

  The dream came often, sharp enough to take her breath on waking, but no one remembered the moment of her birth, not with clarity; not at all. It was only a dream, nothing more. Belinda crawled from her bed, pulling a duvet, down-filled and heavy, with her: the keep fires were long since banked for the night, the comparative heat of the winter day left behind. Her first steps were warm, onto a tapestry rug that told the story of hunting a white deer. The next steps were icy, nimbly taken on tiptoe before she scrambled into the velvet-cushioned window seat. The duvet hissed across unheated stone as she hauled it up.