The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince Read Online Free PDF Page B

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