The Black Raven - Katharine Kerr [66]
In a little while they woke her. When Degwa brought the new prince to her bed, he mewled like a kitten. Bellyra took him with unsteady hands and settled him at her breast. He grabbed the nipple in his mouth and began to suck the false milk so hard that her breast ached.
“Oh, he’s so beautiful,” Degwa crooned. “What a little love, isn’t he?”
“Just so,” Elyssa said. “What lovely little hands he has!”
In truth, Bellyra thought, Marro was red, wrinkled, and squashed-looking about the face still. His sprinkling of pale hair lay coarsely on his skull. She lay back on the mounded pillows and stared up at the bed hangings, embroidered with a repeating design of three ships bound round with interlacements. The ships were brown, the waves blue, and the interlacements red. She could remember embroidering them, back when she was first married and still happy.
“You must be so proud,” Degwa said. “Two sons for your lord!”
“I’d hoped for a daughter, in truth,” Bellyra said. “But you remind me. How is Casyl? Jealous?”
“Of course.” Elyssa was smiling. “But I explained to him that he’ll always be the oldest and the Marked Prince, while his brother will have to make do with a lordship. I don’t think he truly understood, but he was the happier for it.”
Bellyra smiled, and at that moment her new son opened his cloudy-blue eyes and looked up at her with such an intense animal devotion that she laughed.
“You are precious!”
He shut his eyes tight and slept. When Bellyra handed him back to Degwa, she could read the profound relief in her dark eyes. Elyssa too was smiling.
“We need to send the prince the news,” Bellyra said.
“I thought we’d best wait a few days,” Elyssa said, hesitating. “Just to make sure that little Marro lives.”
“True spoken. Unfortunately. Still, Casyl was healthy enough, so I have hope.”
Bellyra spent the next few days in a pleasant sort of exhaustion. Although all the important men in the kingdom had followed the prince off to war, the noblewomen who lived within a day’s ride came to see the new princeling and to offer her their congratulations. All morning she would sit with the guests and gossip. In the middle of the day the sun poured into the women’s hall; she sat in a chair at a window with her women while they embroidered the pieces of the dress she would wear when her husband was finally invested as high king. Yet every night the fog slid over the town and turned her heart cold.
All too soon the morning came that she’d been fearing. She woke, sat up, pulled back a bed curtain, and burst into tears at the sight of the chamber beyond. She flung the hanging closed. For a long while she wept, until Elyssa heard and came hurrying in. She pulled back the hanging and peered round the edge.
“I’m just so tired,” Bellyra stammered. “It’s all the visitors and such. Just let me sleep a bit more.”
And yet she stayed abed all that day. Finally, in the evening, when Degwa carried in the new prince for a feeding, Elyssa insisted on pulling back the bed curtains.
“To let some air in, Your Highness,” Elyssa said. “There. Isn’t that better?”
The cold grey fog light hung in the chamber and seemed to pick out every detail in an unnatural glare. The streaks and chips on the stone wall, the grain on the wood windowsill all seemed marks in some mysterious writing. If she could read them, she knew, they would tell her tales horrible beyond her imagining. She forced herself to look away. In the breeze from the open window the hangings swayed. The ships seemed to bob up and down on their embroidered waves.
“Your Highness?” Elyssa’s voice had turned tentative. “You seem so sad. Would you like us to sing to you?”
“I wouldn’t.” Bellyra looked at her suckling and wished she didn’t hate him. “Get him away from me! Get him a wet nurse! It’s all starting again.”
She felt the tears run, but sitting up to wipe them away lay beyond her. Clucking and murmuring, her serving women swept the squalling baby away and at last left