Fey 02 - Changeling (5 page)

A true smile.

And her heart melted.
 
She lived for these moments, when he actually reached to her, actually saw her.
 
At these times, all the love and hope of his babyhood returned.
 

She hugged him, and waited until he hugged back, feeling his tentative movements against her back.
 

"Mistress?" A male voice ruined the moment.
 
She didn't pull out of Sebastian's embrace right away — doing so always startled the boy — but eased her way out, then kissed his hands before replacing them in his lap.
 

She turned without getting up.
 
She hated feeling ungainly.
 
She was more agile than Nicholas when she wasn't pregnant.
 
Her loss of grace at these times felt like a definite disadvantage.

The man in the door was one of the pages.
 
He had seen no more than seventeen summers, but his voice already had a man's depth.
 
He bobbed in an approximation of a bow when he saw her looking at him.

"Mistress, 'tis yer presence His Highness requests.
 
He says ta make haste."

Normally she would have smiled and put the boy at ease.
 
She had a way with the Islanders.
 
They expected her to be fierce so she wasn't.
 
She was charming, and that made them forget that she was taller than most of them, her hair black where theirs was fair, and her features upswept when theirs were square.
 
They still noted her dark skin, and winced when she moved quickly — as if they were afraid she was going to turn them into hogs — but they had become more tolerant over time.
 
She still couldn't train them to use her name, however, in the Fey manner.
 
They insisted on a title, although she could not get used to the word "Highness."
 
"Mistress" was the most she would tolerate.

"Did he say what had happened?"

The boy shook his head.
 
"Tis something terrible, Mum.
 
He cried out when he heard it."

Her hand was still over her heart.
 
She pressed, just a little, wondering if her body had foreseen something her mind had not.
 
Visions had been miserly in this place.
 
It bothered her that she had not had one about her son.

"Is he in audience?"

The boy nodded.

"Tell him, then, that I will be there as soon as I can."

The boy did not wait for her, but bobbed his head again and ran off.
 
Jewel took a deep breath before placing her hands on the chair and levering herself up.
 
Sebastian was still watching her, but it didn't appear that his dark eyes saw her.
 

"I'll be back, Sweetness," she said to him.
 
Then she glanced at the nurse.
 
"See if you can get him to do more than stare."

"Yes, Mistress."

Jewel took a deep breath and braced her hand at the small of her back.
 
The baby would come any day now.
 
For that, she felt a great relief.
 
She knew this ungainly stage of pregnancy was only temporary, yet on a deep level, it frightened her.
 
She — the most agile of all the Fey, the best swordsman in the Infantry — unable to make quick movements or bend easily.
 
Sometimes she feared that her agility would never come back.
 
She would lose a great part of herself to the child within.

Yet that had not happened with Sebastian.
 
If anything, his birth had made her more agile.
 
She actually practiced swordfighting with her husband.
 
She and Nicholas had met in battle and were evenly matched.
 
When his swordmaster died during the year of the war, he had no one to turn to.
 
Practicing with Nicholas was an exercise in physical strength and mental prowess since they were evenly matched on all sides.

The King, of course, had opposed that from the beginning at first afraid that Jewel would use the practices as an excuse to kill Nicholas.
 
When it became clear that she would keep her bargain, she was warned by the King's advisors (never the King himself) that such behavior was unladylike.
 
She countered that sewing was unFeylike, although that wasn't true.
 
If she had been raised a Domestic she might think otherwise, but she was the Black King's granddaughter, a Visionary and a Warrior, and she had never held a needle in her life.

The corridor was cool compared to the heat of the nursery.
 
The nursery was on the floor she shared with Nicholas.
 
Theoretically, they were supposed to have separate suites, but they had never managed it.
 
They slept in his.
 
The nursery was off her suites.

What she called a corridor, in parlance she had learned in the Great Houses of Nye, was actually a gallery by Islander standards.
 
It was as wide as many rooms she had lived in and ran the length of the floor.
 
Portraits of Princes and their wives, all looking solemn and square, lined the hall.
 
Her portrait was painted shortly after Sebastian's birth, and even though she still carried weight from the baby, she looked gaunt compared with Princesses of old.
  
Dark and exotic.
 
All of the others had been cut from the same mold — blonde, blonde hair, pale blue eyes, bone white skin ("alabaster" Nicholas had once called it in a moment of levity) and rosy round cheeks.
 
When her portrait was hung next to Nicholas's, the religious leader, the Rocaan, had remarked under his breath that Jewel looked like a demon in a field of angels.

She looked at the chairs lining the corridor longingly.
 
If she hadn't known that they were the most uncomfortable chairs in two continents, she would have stopped for just a moment.
 
But the page had said to make haste, and the quicker she found Nicholas, the quicker she would be off her feet.

She turned before reaching her own portrait, and took the stairs down, using the railing for balance.
 
The stairs were carved of stone, and very sharp.
 
She had nightmares about falling down them, pregnant and unable to get up, bleeding from wounds on her back and sides, the baby dead within her.

Because the nightmares came when she slept, she knew they were not a Vision.
 

At the landing, she paused. The baby chose that moment to kick again.
 
Jewel placed her hand over the movement, feeling the fluttering —

—and suddenly she was in the west wing.
 
A young girl Jewel had never seen before sat in the window seat, looking down at the garden below.
 
The girl had black hair and skin not quite as dark as Jewel's, but when the girl turned and glanced around the room, her face had a suggestion of Nicholas.
 
Jewel crept closer. The girl wore flowing robes.
 
A maid hovered near the dressing table, exhorting her to get dressed, but the girl leaned out the window, watching something move through the garden.

Jewel stood behind the girl's shoulder.
 
The garden was bright — sun-dappled, the flowers huge and overpowering.
 
There, among them, was a boy only a few years older than the girl.
 
Tall, and thin, and graceful, with black, black hair —

And then Jewel was back in the stairwell again, leaning against the stone wall, her breath coming in large gasps.
 
The stone was cold against her back, but the ache in her heart had receded.

A Vision.
 
The girl in the Vision had the look of Nicholas with Fey features.
 
And her face was alive, her eyes bright with curiosity, her movements quick, just as Sebastian's were not.
 
A Vision.
 
About her second child, and not her first.

She closed her eyes, and felt relief flood through her.
 
This child would be all right.
 
This child would have all the promise that Sebastian did not have.
 
This child had even provided a Vision.
 
Already.
 
Such powerful magic at work.
 
Visionaries rarely had Visions about babes in the womb.

Jewel continued down the stairs, disoriented from the intensity of her Vision, unable to move swiftly because of her bulk.
 
They probably started the meeting without her.
 
They had done that when she was pregnant with Sebastian.
 
A pregnancy that early had been a mistake.
  
She should have kept her strength in the first few years, not lost it to children and tradition. She was here to unify the Fey and the Islanders, and she was still having trouble.
 
The Islanders did not consider her part of government, merely a wife of the heir to the throne.
 
Only Nicholas felt differently, and he was Prince, not King.

She had other problems as well.
 
Her own people would not work in the palace.
 
A few tried, but left when threatened by Islander poison.
 
She suspected that the Islanders often did not initiate the threat, that they were responding to something, but she fought a losing battle.
 
Her friend Burden established a colony outside Shadowlands, but it had become merely an isolated Fey community with sunlight instead of grayness.
 
Those Fey were unable to become part of Island society as well.

Fears.
 
She was battling fears and a prejudice she hadn't even known existed when she made this pact.
 
And to have Sebastian be a dullard made matters worse.

She cradled her stomach, glad for the first time for this child.
 
This baby would prove that the match between Fey and Islander was not a mistake, that the two cultures would integrate.
 
And they had to integrate for the rest of her plan — the plan she had once proposed to her father — to work.

When she had married Nicholas, she had believed that the Fey and Islanders would mingle on Blue Isle.
 
They would become a united community.
 
Then when her grandfather, the Black King, finally decided to conquer Blue Isle, he would arrive to discover that the Isle was already part of the Fey Empire.
 
Instead of being conquered by force, it would be conquered by intermingling, by families composed of both Fey and Islanders.

The stairs led directly to the wing with the audience chamber.
 
For once, she was glad for the proximity.
 
It saved her endless walking.
 

She hurried as best she could through the Great Hall.
 
Her wedding banquet had been held here, one of Nicholas's favorite rooms.
 
The hall was long and wide and had arched ceilings because it connected two towers and had no floor above it.
 
The arched windows matched the ceiling in design, some of the few windows in the palace with rare glass.

The hall was the least Islander place in the palace.
 
Swords hung from the inner wall, and none were ceremonial.
 
The Islanders were not a warlike people — they had never been invaded until the Fey arrived — but they had had their share of uprisings and revolts.
 
The hall had an air of power the rest of the palace lacked.

Still, she didn't linger.
 
A sense of urgency that she hadn't really felt when the page summoned her was growing within.
 
She went through the door that led to the corridor which housed the audience chamber.

Four guards stood in front of the oak door.
  
They were Islander, of course, and did not acknowledge her as a member of the royal family.
 
But two of them did move in unison to pull the door open as she approached.

Nicholas stood inside, his hands clasped behind his back.
 
He wore his long blond hair in a queue.
 
He was as tall as she was — a rarity among Islanders — and, although he was broad, his build had strength.
 
He wore a blouse gathered at the wrists, but untied at the neck, and tight breeches that tucked into long black riding boots.
 
His eyes were red-rimmed and he had a tight expression on his face that she had never seen before.

Lord Enford stood beside him.
 
Enford wore breeches as well, something Jewel had never seen.
 
He was covered with dirt, his hair matted against his skull, strands pulling out of his queue.
 
His eyes looked more sunken than usual in his gaunt face.