The kings queen, p.1
The King's Queen, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
More by Val Saintcrowe
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
THE KING’S QUEEN
Fear, Fae, and Foes, Book Two
Val Saintcrowe
THE KING’S QUEEN
© copyright 2023 by Val Saintcrowe
http://vjchambers.com
Punk Rawk Books
More romantic fantasy by Val Saintcrowe
The Realm of the Living Flame
The Clash and the Heat trilogy
The Beast of the Barrens
The Ryzmn Job duology
The Nightmare Court trilogy
The Red Echoes Duet
Rise of the Death Fae series
Gaslamp Monster Romances
Fireseed
Hoofbeats
—
Villains burn everything down for love.
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CHAPTER ONE
IT WAS A Loneeday afternoon, and Queen Catriona of Emmessia was in a blind panic.
Her husband, King Herrick, had just returned from a campaign across the seas where he and his armies had soundly trounced the forces of the neighboring country of Vostria and established a settlement on an island country they were calling New Emmessia.
Likely, the country had a name before that.
Likely, they would have known that name had Elske the Formidable, the fae magician and advisor to the king, Catriona’s lover, gone along with them. Elske was good with languages, and he usually made it his business to learn to negotiate in the native tongue of the conquered peoples.
But Elske stayed back in Emmessia while Herrick went out on the seas these days.
And Elske’s scheming was put to work not against the natives of the countries that they conquered, but against Vostria itself. Elske had once spent an entire season in the court of the Vostrian csaer, and the intelligences and contacts he’d made during that time had proved to be quite advantageous for Emmessia.
None of this was why Catriona was in a panic.
Her eldest child, the Princess Ella, had changed her eyes to a bright golden color, and she was smiling in a way that reminded Catriona far too much of the man who had planted her within Catriona’s belly in the first place—a knowing, pleased smile, a superior smile.
Ella’s father was a god, the stagman Fadh, who took but a careless interest in his daughter’s life. Enough to be proud of his paternity but not enough to ever really spend more than a few hours here and there with his daughter.
One of the things Ella could do, due to her half-god status, was to change the color of her eyes or the texture of her skin. Another thing she could do was get into the minds of certain people and read their thoughts. She also had an affinity with plants.
She was seven years old.
Catriona sometimes thought she was a demon child.
“Where is your brother?” Catriona demanded in a voice full of unchecked fury and terror. “What have you done with him?”
Ella shrugged. “Who says I did anything with him?”
Catriona folded her arms over her chest and tapped her foot and glared at her daughter and waited.
Ella changed her eyes to blue.
“Ella!” snapped Catriona. “I have told you not to do that in front of people.”
“Yes, but you said that they would try to hurt me, and I wouldn’t let them.” Ella gave her mother a withering look, as if her mother was the stupidest person on earth.
“You are not all-powerful, Ella. You might be able to stop a few people from hurting you, but a large number would overtake you and I would be unable to stop them and—” Catriona cut herself off, letting out a groan of frustration. “Oh, never mind this. What have you done with Leon?”
Ella flipped her long dark hair over one shoulder and mimicked her mother’s voice. “What have you done with Leon?” she repeated.
Catriona bared her teeth. “I swear to you, Ella, one more outburst like that and I will take a switch to you.”
As a princess, Ella was not actually supposed to be punished in that way. Originally, there had been whipping boys to take the punishments, but Catriona had found this abominable, so they’d turned all the whipping boys into playmates for the children and instead, Ella was usually punished by having things taken away—her dolls, her dolls’ dresses, the toy soldiers she had begged for from the king and gotten, sometimes her dinner if Catriona was in a temper.
She’d never actually hit the girl.
Not even the time when she’d found Leon tangled up in a vine and hanging upside down over a fountain in the castle courtyard.
Leon had been laughing, thinking it all a game, but if he had fallen out of the vine, he might have hit his head very hard and been submerged in the fountain, unconscious, and drowned.
Ella had used the vine to imprison her little brother, to threaten his life.
This was why Catriona thought she might be a demon child.
This, and the conversation afterward.
You could have hurt your brother very badly.
I know.
You can’t have wanted to hurt him.
Of course I did. I don’t like him.
Ella, you love your brother. Sometimes he annoys you, but—
I don’t love him. He follows me around all the time and he won’t leave me alone. He’s very irksome. I tied him up in the vine because I just wanted some peace and quiet! Like most small girls, she was given to copying adult speech to a mostly adorable affect, but this was a bit chilling.
If you hurt your brother again, I will take a switch to you. An empty threat thus far.
It was maddening, of course, because no matter what it was that Ella did, Catriona still loved her, and it wasn’t like any love she’d ever felt before, it was a love borne of the madness of motherhood, a sort of obsessive devotion that made no sense, even as it was twisted up entirely in guilt and fear and a crushing sense of inadequacy.
Catriona had been thirty when Ella was born, far older than most women were with their first child. If she had hoped her maturity might make her feel more equal to the task, she was sadly mistaken. She often thought that younger people had more energy and worried less about it all. They were too overwhelmed to try to think things through, and they simply acted, and then it was done.
She agonized over her parenting decisions.
And no matter what she did, it didn’t seem to work.
Here she was with this little girl who actively hated her brother.
Why?
Ella changed her eyes back to gold. “What have you done with Leon?” she mimicked again, defiant.
Catriona yanked the girl into her arms and administered several whacks to the girl’s backside, crying out, “Your father is even now in the harbor and we are to meet him and you will tell me where your brother is this instant.”
Ella dissolved into immediate tears. She wailed. “Mama! Mama!” She threw her arms around Catriona’s neck, burying her face there.
Guilt.
God, had she just done that? Hit her daughter in anger, out of control like that? And now, Ella was flinging her tiny body into her mother’s arms for comfort, the person who’d administered the blows.
“I’m sorry,” Catriona found herself whispering. “I’m sorry, my darling girl. I didn’t mean it, but I am frantic. You must tell me where he is.”
“The willow tree, the willow tree,” said Ella, wailing. “I’m sorry, too. Oh, I’m so sorry. Please, please, I don’t mean to be a bad girl.”
Catriona scooped the girl up into her arms, even though she was really too big to be carried these days. It hurt her back, but she clutched Ella to her, covering her in kisses. “You’re not a bad girl. No, you’re Mama’s good girl, and let’s go and get your brother right now.”
The willow tree was nearby, and when they approached, they could hear the sound of a small voice singing a little song. It was one of the songs that they sang in the chapel on Solieedays, a song about the twin gods of Emmessia, a song about night and day.
There, tangled up in the wood of the tree, bark all the way up to his neck, was little Leon. Leon was five years old, with a head of curly dark hair and bright dark eyes. When he saw them approaching, he stopped singing. “Mama, I want out of the tree now. Get me out, please.”
Catriona set down Ella, trying to control herself. “You… you made the tree grow around him.”
Ella shrugged. “He’s too big now and he breaks the vines.”
“Ella!” Catriona said.
Ella flinched from her.
Wonderful, now her d aughter was terrified of her.
“I’ll fix it,” said Ella, scampering over to the tree and touching the bark. It came alive under her daughter’s touch, peeling away, flowing and growing in other directions.
Leon climbed out of the tree and gave his sister a hug.
Ella hugged back. “Did you like the tree game, Leon?”
“Very much,” said Leon with a grin. “Except it got boring.”
“Ella, that is not a game,” said Catriona. “Apologize to your brother.”
“But he liked it,” said Ella.
“Ella.”
Ella glared up at her. “You always get mad at me. He never gets in trouble. Why don’t you tell him not to bother me, hmm?”
Catriona picked up Leon, who was really too big to be picked up either and squeezed him tightly. “Don’t bother your sister,” she breathed in his ear.
“Mama, put me down.” He struggled his way out of her arms.
Catriona ran a hand over her hair, letting out several deep breaths, trying to collect herself. “All right, we are late. We have to get out to the docks to greet your father’s ship.”
“Dada?” said Leon, jumping up and down. “Is he here finally?”
“Yes, I told you it was today,” said Ella.
“Let’s go, let’s go!” Leon took off running as fast as he could, streaking around the castle.
“Leon, not so fast!” Catriona called, picking up her skirts and going after him. She cleared the castle and had him in her sights before looking over her shoulder to make sure Ella was coming.
She was, but she was taking her sweet time.
Catriona hurried after the little boy.
Leon ran over the drawbridge and through the gate. He hurried down the cobblestone road that led toward the docks. And then Catriona saw that he was intercepted by a tall robed figure with blue hair who swept the little boy off his feet. She let out a sigh of relief.
Elske had him.
She turned back to Ella. “Come on. You want to see Dada, right?”
Ella nodded, catching up with her mother. “I know you like him better than me.”
Catriona turned on Ella. “What?”
“Leon, you like him better. Everyone does,” muttered Ella.
“That’s abundantly not true,” said Catriona dryly, and it was not. But she supposed that maybe there was a grain of truth when it came to her, but only because Leon was so small and so human and so vulnerable and she worried so much about him. She put her arm around her daughter and kissed her on top of her head. “I love you more than life, sweet darling. I always will.”
Ella looked up at her, her expression searching for truth in Catriona’s face. Seemingly satisfied, she pushed away and ran off over the drawbridge herself.
When she reached Elske and Leon, the fae put the boy down and immediately hoisted Ella up on his shoulders.
See?
That.
Well, she supposed Elske had an excuse, because Herrick was pointedly possessive about his son. He knew that Ella was not his own by blood, and so he had made an issue about how Leon must be his and his alone. Ella called Elske Pepe. Leon was not allowed to do any such thing. He must address Elske only as “Elske” and nothing more, and if Herrick saw Elske being what he deemed too affectionate with the child he threw a fit, rather like a tantrum.
Sometimes, Catriona fantasized about strangling Herrick to death.
Perhaps in bed.
Perhaps while they were fucking.
But even Herrick, despite his protestations, favored Ella. He was always defending her if Catriona came to him worried about things the girl had done to her brother. Oh, she’s just a child, Catriona, he would say. And I think it’s adorable how tough she is. I like that in a girl, you know. Then he’d wink at her.
She is going to kill your heir, Catriona would say.
You’re exaggerating things, he would reply.
Leon was, of course, oblivious to all of this in the way of small boys. He was convinced the sun rose and set with him, and since he was a prince and heir to the throne, there were plenty of other people who agreed with him. Those who didn’t he paid no attention to. Or else he misinterpreted whatever it was that they did as being all about him anyway.
Catriona finally caught up with Elske and the children. Leon was now literally running in circles around them, eagerly interrupting with questions like, “Will we see the ship? Is Dada going to be on a row boat? Will Dada have oars?”
Catriona answered the questions.
Elske ignored them and talked to Ella, looking up at her as she perched on his shoulders. Occasionally, he glanced sidelong at Catriona and gave her a secret look, one that made her feel shivery all over.
They were all late.
Herrick was already ashore when they got there, and the ship was far out in the harbor, and the rowboats that had brought the men ashore were being rounded up to be pulled back to the ship.
When Herrick saw them, however, he broke away from the lords who were bowing to him and kissing his hands to hurry toward them.
Leon ran for his father on his chubby little boy legs, screaming out, “Dada! Dada!” at the top of his lungs.
Herrick went down on his knees, arms wide, and the two collided, their features both identical and opposite. Leon looked just like his father, but he had his mother’s dark coloring.
Herrick got to his feet, hoisting Leon up onto his hip with an oof. “He’s huge!” he called to Catriona. “What are you feeding this child?”
She laughed. “I would have thought you would have gotten stronger out there fighting battles, Your Majesty.”
“I’m an old man now,” said Herrick, setting Leon down to pull Catriona into his arms. He kissed her. A full, open-mouthed kiss, tugging her tightly against him.
This, of course, wasn’t proper. The Herrick she used to know, the one who’d been married to a different queen, would never have engaged in such things in front of the gathered court.
But Herrick, of course, didn’t do it for the benefit of the courtiers, but for Elske’s benefit.
He was re-staking his claim.
They never talked about it, but they were all aware of the fact that when Herrick left to go on expeditions and he left Elske in charge of his kingdom, Elske not only sat on the throne but did Herrick’s duties between the sheets with Catriona.
When Herrick was home, she and Elske stopped such activities.
This was because Catriona wanted to get pregnant again, and she did not want to have Elske’s child. A fae baby would be distinctive. Everyone would know. There was no reason for there to be living, breathing proof of Elske’s and Catriona’s affair, after all. Elske had clever fae magic and he could keep her from ever becoming pregnant at all. They were able to dally as they liked without any concern about that.
But it had been five years since Leon had been born, and Catriona had not gotten pregnant in that time.
Well, once she thought maybe, but it might have only been that her bleeding was a few weeks late. Even so, if she had been, she had lost the babe, and it was easier to think that nothing like that had happened.
Part of the fault must be with Catriona’s body, but part of it must be laid at the feet of Herrick, who was away from the kingdom much of the time. He was very concerned with the business of expanding the reach of Emmessia.
This was ostensibly for the country itself, to bring riches and wealth to Emmessia, a cold country in the north with a short growing season, a country that needed trade to supplement its ability to eat.
But as time had gone on, Catriona suspected that Herrick did it just because he liked it. He liked exploration. He liked the warmth of the southern waters. He liked crushing the primitive natives with his superior technology. He liked being important.
This made her hate him sometimes.
But she supposed she couldn’t entirely fault him, not without being a hypocrite.
She hadn’t done everything she’d done in her life, risen to his side to be his queen because she had no interest in being important, after all.
She wanted to be important as well.
So did Elske, if it came to that.
Perhaps Elske wanted it the most of all of them. Elske wanted importance and he wanted power. He got singular pleasure from manipulating others, and especially if they did not even realize they were being manipulated.
