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 mere 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
