The kings queen, p.15
The King's Queen, page 15
Catriona said something at some point, that she was going to go stand in the hallway to deflect anyone who might be coming through, and he barely acknowledged her, so intent on his task was he.
He thought it might have taken him half an hour to accomplish it entirely, but when it was done, there was nothing left of Gisila. Her clothes had been rotted up in the process. There was an outline of black dust on the floor.
It had been grueling. He could barely stand.
Catriona helped him back to bed, tucking the sleeping baby in next to his body.
He barely registered something about how she was going to sweep that into the the fireplace.
Darkness took him, a rolling tide sucking him under.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“WHY IS ELSKE still sleeping?” said Herrick to the baby in his arms.
“I don’t know. I suppose it was traumatic for him, delivering a baby,” said Catriona. She had covered up the evidence of Herrick’s mother’s death and then gone directly to the king, knowing he wouldn’t be pleased that he’d missed out on being told about the baby’s birth. For one thing, it didn’t look right. For another, she still worried that Herrick had been far too obliging about the idea of her bearing another man’s child.
“You seem all right.” Herrick looked her up and down.
“I’d like to sit down,” she said, and then flung herself down on a couch in the sitting room where they were speaking. She could have gone back to sleep herself, truly. If she hadn’t been so worried and on edge, she would have.
“Why did you go to him?”
“What?”
“What does Elske know about delivering babies?” said Herrick.
“I didn’t think he would deliver it. I thought he’d go to the midwife for me,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t do that.”
“No, I would have dispatched a servant and gotten you somewhere comfortable, not a chair in my room,” said Herrick. He shook his head at her. “You wanted to give him the final chance to kill the baby, didn’t you?”
“No,” she said. She had sort of thought… maybe Elske would elect to do nothing. Maybe he would take the early labor as a sign that the gods were granting what he wanted, taking away any offspring he might have.
“You’d deny it regardless,” Herrick said.
“I would not have hurt my child, Herrick. You know me better than that.”
Herrick hesitated, then inclined his head, giving her the point. He turned back to the baby. “And his ears…?” Herrick touched them. “Are we sure he’s not mine?”
Catriona licked her lips, debating on what to say about that.
“Elske did this,” said Herrick. “He used magic on the ears. But it’s remarkable. It’s all healed. There isn’t even a scar. What did he do?”
“It was like…” Catriona shook her head. “His power is overwhelming sometimes, is it not?” She was overwhelmed by it, she had to admit. Sometimes, it was terrifying, but she trusted him. Now, with the baby, this tie between them, she felt more sure of Elske than she ever had.
“True,” said Herrick. “It’s good he’s on our side, I suppose.” He gave her a wry smile. “Well. I suppose we let him sleep for now.”
She smiled back. “Yes, I doubt we could wake him.”
“I wish he wasn’t asleep in your chamber, of course,” said Herrick. “That’s not the least bit convenient.”
“Well, his chamber was the site of the birth. He couldn’t have stayed there while it was being cleaned,” said Catriona. “I don’t know, Herrick, but these servants live here in this isolated castle to the north, and there are already rumors, and we weather those, so—”
“There have never been rumors about Leon not being my son,” said Herrick.
“That’s because he looks just like you,” said Catriona. “And we knew that if we did this with Elske that it was a risk.” She shook her head at him. It was as if he’d not thought the consequences through at all.
“I suppose,” said Herrick. He turned back to the baby in his arms. “Well. The new prince needs a name, doesn’t he?”
“I thought perhaps we might ask Elske—”
“Oh, nonsense. He won’t mind,” said Herrick.
“I have thought of a few names that I like,” said Catriona.
“Catriona, he’s my son,” said Herrick. “I may not have begotten him, but for all intents and purposes, he is mine. So, I will name him.”
“Of course, Your Majesty,” she said with a yawn. She wanted to go back to bed.
“Soli,” said Herrick.
“After the sun god?” She blinked at him.
“A name to grow into,” said Herrick, smiling down at the baby. “He’s very tiny now, Catriona, but I think he’ll grow into quite the man in time.”
The baby stirred in his arms. Little Soli fought against his swaddling bands, opened his brilliant blue eyes—blue just like Elske’s, practically glowing—and let out a squalling cry. Herrick immediately deposited the child in her arms. “Gods, he’s likely hungry.”
She set about trying to get the baby to latch. She didn’t actually have milk yet, but the babe’s suckling would bring it on soon enough.
Herrick shook his head. “You know, Catriona, perhaps you should rely more on a wet nurse this time. It’s taking a bit of a toll, don’t you think? Your breasts are nothing like they used to be.”
She looked up at him. “Ah, and here I was laboring under the impression that the purpose of breasts was to feed babies. They seem quite equal to that task, even still.”
He rolled his eyes. “Where is my mother?”
She forced herself not to react. “No idea,” she said breezily.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WHEN ELSKE WOKE, his mother had returned with the midwife, who’d come and gone, having examined both Catriona and the baby. The baby’s skin had turned yellowish in the time since he’d fallen asleep and woken—ten hours or so, and he was still exhausted. Elske’s magic was not at full strength. He was utterly depleted.
The midwife said that yellowish skin was not uncommon. It would go away if the baby was given a ready supply of milk. She called in a wet nurse who took the baby for hours at a time from Catriona, who fretted about her own milk supply.
Everyone was alarmed about Gisila, who was missing.
Notably, of course, Elske’s mother was beside herself. She had devoted her entire life to Gisila. Gisila had been the most important person in the world to Elske’s mother. If she ever found out what Elske had done, he knew she’d never forgive him.
Similarly, he couldn’t expect that Herrick would forgive him either, though Herrick’s feelings on losing his mother were likely to be fraught with conflict.
For now, there were frantic search parties, organized with the help of the neighboring Brith of Cumberbin’s men, looking all over for her in the frozen wasteland that surrounded the castle, even though everyone knew that no one could survive out there.
Obviously, no sign of the woman was found.
Herrick was plagued by it. He would sit with Elske and speak of nothing else for hours, sipping wine and going through it all. It didn’t make any sense. His mother would never leave voluntarily. None of her things were gone. No carriage had gone from the stables. She must have been taken by someone, but who could have come and spirited her away without a trace?
One night, nearly a month after the baby was born, Herrick finally came around to this: “She was killed by someone in this castle.”
“What?” said Elske. “There’s no reason to assume she’s dead.”
They were still here after a month because the new baby was not strong, owing to his being born early, undoubtedly. Little Soli was very tiny. He could not always seem to stay awake long enough to get as much milk as he needed to grow. He was often cold and must spend all his time bundled in close to the warmth of someone’s body. And because of the early instruction to fight off the yellow skin, and because of Soli’s own inability to stay awake to nurse, Catriona’s milk supply was not plentiful, and she was not confident in her ability to be able to feed him on the journey south.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Herrick said, looking Elske over with a strange expression on his face, one Elske did not like.
“What do you mean?” said Elske. “It doesn’t make sense at all. If she’d been killed, we’d have found her body. There’s nothing to do with it here. There’s no way to bury it in the ice-covered ground. We’d have seen evidence of a pyre.”
“Maybe, but what if something else was burning in a fire that also contained her body?” said Herrick. “We might never have noticed that.”
“I don’t remember any fires,” said Elske. “Not recently.”
“Well, we weren’t paying attention to such things, were we?” said Herrick, and now he was glaring at Elske.
Elske looked back into the king’s eyes. His heart was pounding, but he forced himself to remain calm. “Why would someone kill your mother?”
“I don’t know,” said Herrick. “That’s what I don’t know. I hope someone wouldn’t have thought I’d think of it as a favor to me, that I wanted my mother dead.”
“No one would think that,” said Elske softly.
“So, then, maybe my mother did something that provoked the killer?”
“I don’t think your mother is dead.”
“It seems to me you have come up with precious little in the way of theories as to what may have happened to her. I think it’s because you know what happened to her,” said Herrick.
“Me?” Elske touched his chest.
“Oh, stop it,” said Herrick. “Stop it, not with me. Don’t do it to me, Elske.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Herrick lowered his face, letting out a broken laugh. “I didn’t get to say goodbye to her.”
Elske swallowed. “I’m sure we’ll find her. We simply need to—”
“What if it was your mother? What if I had killed your mother?”
Elske let out a noisy breath. “Are you accusing me of—”
“I’d tell you, you know,” said Herrick. “I assume you had a good reason. If I did it, I obviously would have had a reason as well.”
“Well, you’re the king, and you can get away with anything,” said Elske.
Herrick pressed his lips together.
Elske inwardly cursed himself. Oh, wonderful. You’ve as good as admitted it. “But, regardless of that, I do not know what happened to your mother. My own mother is losing her mind because we cannot find her. Do you really think I would cause that much pain to both her and you? Is that who you think I am?”
Herrick laughed again, a harsh sound. “You’re far too good at lying, Elske, that is the problem.”
“Herrick, I am not lying to you.”
“You’re the one who can get away with anything,” said Herrick.
Obviously, though they stayed in the north for three more months, they never found any sign of Gisila. Herrick’s and Elske’s relationship grew strained in this time.
The sexual element of it actually took on frequency and intensity.
With Catriona having just given birth, she wasn’t interested in having sex with either of them, and there were not a vast array of women here for Herrick to choose from, so he made do with Elske.
Elske had his hands or mouth on Herrick’s cock at least twice a day.
But they rarely spoke except to arrange sexual interludes or to make filthy and arousing exchanges between the two of them. There was more buggery. Herrick begged him for it. Fuck me, Elske. Make me your bitch.
Elske did as he was told, taunting the king as he took him that way, calling him an array of demeaning things, each seeming to make the king’s pleasure more pronounced.
Then, finally, the baby was strong enough, and they all left.
The children had been similarly devastated by the loss of their grandmam, but they had latched on to Elske’s mother as a replacement in the meantime, and it helped to make his mother’s fascination with Baby Soli a bit less odd, since she was now close to all the children.
She came with them when they went south.
Once they left the north, there was no more sex between Elske and Herrick.
It stopped entirely.
Herrick’s sexual relationship with Catriona never quite rekindled either. Herrick cut them both off, and it was like being thrust out of the warmth of a summer day into a dark, damp cavern. It hurt.
Oddly, little Soli became Herrick’s special favorite. He was enamored with the little prince, spending more time with the baby than he’d hitherto done with any of his children, and Herrick was a fairly attentive father for a busy king.
True, Herrick’s attentions were interrupted constantly by various expeditions to the south, because Herrick had seemingly no interest in anything quite as much as traveling and conquering and going across the seas.
But when he was home, it was Soli who he took on father-and-son hunting trips. It was Soli who he called up to sit with him at the high table with the other men as they drank ale and told coarse jokes. It was Soli who he would throw his arm around and say to others, “Look at my son. What a boy he is. Takes after me, doesn’t he?”
He left Leon to Elske and Catriona, ignoring the boy much of the time, though Herrick seemed oblivious to the inequality of it. If Elske mentioned anything to him about it, Herrick would brush all that aside, claiming that he loved both his boys the same, and that besides, he would think Elske would be grateful that Herrick had taken such pains to make sure no one in court doubted that Soli was truly his blood.
Had he done that? Well, perhaps to some degree. It couldn’t be denied that Soli’s eyes were a little too blue, that his features a little too fine, his skin a little too hairless. But his hair was dark, his coloring was dark, all of that. His mother’s blood had wiped out some of his fae characteristics.
Elske didn’t know what would happen if or when his son’s magic came to him. That was something that appeared around puberty, and they were not quite there yet.
There were still rumors, of course. But then, there had been rumors for some time about what went on at King Herrick’s court.
Yes, perhaps what Herrick had done had been quite helpful to quash the worst of the damage, in the end, because the rumors persisted, but no one did anything about them. No one dared to suggest Herrick’s favored child could possibly have been fathered by the fae advisor.
But that was not why Herrick had done it.
Elske knew that.
He’d done it to show Elske how nothing actually belonged to him, including his own child. Everything is mine, Herrick was saying. Your son is mine. You are mine, and even if I stop touching you, you’re still mine.
And it was true.
Elske could never leave now, that was the truth of it. Perhaps there had been some point in which a thing like that might have been possible. Even though he loved Catriona and he loved Ella. (And Leon, to some extent, though he’d been stymied in Leon’s youth to be close to the boy.) Even though he was threaded through all of their lives and he cared about them, these ties could have been severed. Nothing like blood or marriage kept him there.
But now, Catriona had borne his child. Until the end of time, she was the mother of his son. That could never be undone.
And now, there was his child.
His blood.
His Soli.
He was never leaving court.
Maybe that’s why Herrick had done it all in the first place. Not because he wanted to give anything to Elske, but simply because he needed some way to control the fae, to balance the power between them, to tip the scales in Herrick’s favor.
Elske had always underestimated the king.
The king had several times protested rather insistently in favor of his intelligence, and Elske had denied he thought the king was not intelligent, but he must have thought so, because otherwise he would have been more wary.
Well, it was done now.
Soli…
Elske had loved Catriona for years and years when his son was born, and he had not thought it was possible to love her more, but he’d been wrong. The experience of it all, the way it bonded them even tighter together, entering into a pact to conceal murder…
Well, there were more reasons, he supposed, besides the fact that she had physically carried his offspring and delivered the baby into the world, that she had fed little Soli out of her body, and that she was the only person on earth who loved the little boy like he did.
Even Herrick didn’t. Elske didn’t trust the love Herrick had for Soli.
Because Elske loved the child with a love that frightened him sometimes in its intensity, which seemed to border on madness. He loved Ella—had always loved Ella—and even still loved Ella. Indeed, because of his love for Soli, because of understanding the depth of love a father could feel for a child, his love for Catriona’s other children had only grown stronger.
But before Soli, he just hadn’t… known.
Sometimes, he was ashamed of it. It didn’t seem right, and it shouldn’t matter.
What difference did it make, the knowledge that he’d made the child with Catriona?
He’d done the act that created children with her a thousand times. And she’d had other children. The fact that this time the act had resulted in his child, it shouldn’t mean anything.
But it did.
He was a weak and physical creature. He was affected by the reality of that truth. He was not beyond it. No, he was just as susceptible to such things as everyone else.
Of course, the thing was that Soli was unaware that Elske was his father, and that he was not allowed to tell the boy.
Soli wouldn’t understand, for one thing, because he was not yet of an age to have the making of children explained to him, and it would only confuse him. Because of the way that Herrick favored him, Elske thought it would also wound the boy, and he wouldn’t hurt him for the world.
Elske spent more time with Leon.
This was partly because he felt as if he needed to make up for the deficit of attention that Leon’s father heaped upon Soli, for Leon’s sake. But it was also because Leon needed to be a better king than Herrick was. Herrick had Elske and Catriona to take care of almost all of the business of running the kingdom for him.
