In the King's Service Read Online Free PDF Page B

comprehend.
    “Listen to me, Sief!” Donal’s urgent plea only barely penetrated the scarlet agony blurring his vision. “Don’t make me kill you! I need the boy. I need you! ”
    “Lies!” Sief managed to whisper from between gritted teeth, as the child— Donal’s bastard! —started wailing. “Faithless, forsworn whoreson! I’ll mind-rip you!—kill the bastard!—kill . . . you . . . !”
    Enraged beyond reason, Sief tried again to launch a counter-attack against this man— his king! —who had betrayed him, bucking upward from his slumped position and dragging himself to hands and knees, clawing a hand upward to help him focus—but to no avail. To his horror and dismay, the other’s might was crushing him down, smothering the life from him—but he was too proud to yield, and too stubborn. All his life he had been so careful in how he used his powers, taken such pride in his abilities. He had always known that the Haldanes had powers that were akin to his own, but now, in extremis, he had not the strength or the abandon to turn his own powers to the wanton response that might have saved him.
    He could feel his mind ripping under the onslaught of an attack he wondered if Donal even comprehended. ( Where had he gotten such power, and the knowledge of how to use it?)
    Hardly a whimper could he manage to force past his lips—nor could it have been heard, over the child’s bawling!—but he could feel himself being dragged toward oblivion, all too aware that the damage only worsened as he struggled—and he couldn’t not struggle! But somehow he had known, from that first flare of Donal’s mind against his own, that there was neither any turning back nor any defense against this.
    His last coherent thought, just before the darkness claimed him, was regret that he would leave no son from this life—for Krispin was Donal’s son.
    Yet still he tried to cling to that final image of the infant’s puckered little face before his vision—the son that should have been his—as pain dragged him into an ever-darkening spiral downward and the last vestiges of awareness trickled into oblivion.

Chapter 2
    “Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.”
    —PROVERBS 22:28
     
 
 
 
 
 
THE king could feel the pulse pounding in his temples as he made his outstretched fist unclench, face averted from the sight of his friend sinking into death, but he knew that he had had no choice, once the deception was discovered.
    He had feared it might end this way if Sief found out. He knew Sief’s jealousy, and something of the chilly relationship between Sief and Jessamy; he well remembered when Jessamy had arrived at court as Sief’s reluctant child-bride.
    That had been over thirty years ago. It had been clear from the beginning that the two cared little for one another, though in time they appeared to have achieved a reasonable coexistence. Sief had shown a decided aptitude for diplomatic work, and had proven himself increasingly invaluable to both Donal and his father; and Jessamy, when she was not attending on a succession of Gwynedd’s queens, had spent much of her time in child-bearing—though Donal knew that she had never departed from her marriage vows before Donal approached her.
    Donal himself could not say the same, though he had told himself that it was different for men, and for kings, and that his first queen’s failure to provide an heir justified his occasional trysts with other ladies of the court—though never, until Jessamy, with the wife of a friend. The several children that had come of such liaisons at least reassured him of his own virility, but there had been no true-born heir until the passing of Queen Dulchesse had allowed his remarriage with the Princess Richeldis, followed by the arrival of Prince Brion.
    And none too soon, for Donal was no longer young. The child crown prince was thriving, and Donal was honestly enamoured of his new wife, but a king in his fifties might