C. Harris: Why Kings Confess

Saturday, 30 January

T he babe might have turned, but Hero labored hard all that night and half of the next day. At first, Sebastian helped her walk back and forth before the fire as the storm outside whipped wild gusts of wind and driven rain against the house. Then, when the pains came so hard and fast she could no longer walk, he sat beside her, her hand held fast in his. If he could have taken her pain into his own body, he would have done so. After a few more hours, he thought that if he could give his life to stop this endless, inhuman agony, he’d do that too.

And still the babe refused to come.

“Mother of God, why don’t you do something?” he raged once at Alexi Sauvage sometime around midafternoon. Gibson had insisted on deferring to the French doctor, saying she’d delivered more babies in the past year alone than he had in his entire career. But as the hours dragged on and on, and Hero labored in grim-faced, silent endurance, Sebastian had to doubt his friend’s wisdom.

The Frenchwoman looked at him, her own face flushed and etched with lines of exhaustion. “Your son will come when he is ready, my lord.”

“First babes do have a habit of taking their own sweet time,” said Gibson softly.

How much time? Sebastian wanted to scream. But somehow he swallowed it and plastered a facade of calm over a cold, soul-destroying terror.

Occasionally he could hear the voices of Hendon, Jarvis, and Lady Jarvis, waiting together in a tense vigil downstairs. Claire Bisette kept bringing food that Gibson and Alexi both ate with a hearty appetite that Sebastian found revolting. And then, just when Sebastian thought Hero could surely endure no more, Alexi said, “It’s coming.”

He couldn’t look. And so he looked instead at Hero’s face. And he knew that any man who’d ever arrogantly boasted of the male sex’s superior strength, endurance, and courage had never watched a woman give birth.

“You did it, my lady,” said Alexi, her voice thick with a rare emotion.

Hero clutched Sebastian’s arm, her fingers digging deep into his flesh, her entire body shaking and heaving with exhaustion and triumph. “Is it all right? Please tell me it’s all right.”

She was answered by a lusty squall that brought a sting of tears to Sebastian’s eyes, so that he had to bury his face in the sweat-soaked tangle of Hero’s hair.

“You’ve a fine son,” said Alexi, holding up a kicking, screaming infant smeared with a hellish mixture of blood and something white and waxy.

Hero gave a tired, shaky laugh, her arms opening wide to receive her son.

She lay smiling down at the screaming infant for the longest time, an expression Sebastian had never seen before softening her features. Then she looked up, her gaze meeting his, and he fell in love with her all over again.

“Told you it was a boy,” she whispered. “The next one can be your girl.”

Just the thought of putting her through this again made his legs suddenly feel weak, and he found he had to sit.

“Have you decided on a name?” asked Alexi.

“Simon,” said Hero. After months of wrangling, they’d finally reached a compromise: She could name the boys, while he would name the girls. “Simon Alistair St. Cyr.”

She shifted the babe to face Sebastian, so that he got his first really good look at his son. He had a head of thick dark hair plastered to his skull, but his eyes were screwed shut, his face contorted and flushed red with his howls.

“What color are his eyes?” asked Gibson.

“I don’t know,” said Hero. “He’s screaming so hard I can’t see.”

And then, as if aware of the intense scrutiny directed upon him, Simon St. Cyr drew in a shuddering breath, ceased his cries, and opened his eyes.

“The Lord above preserve us,” said Gibson.

They were yellow.

Tuesday, 2 February

The day dawned gray and blustery, the clouds heavy with the threat of more rain.

Paul Gibson stood beside the grave of Damion Pelletan. A small hole had been dug down through the grave’s soft, recently filled earth. Alexi stood at his side, a small wooden box containing her brother’s heart held in her hands. The wind whipped the hair around her head and flapped the black skirts of her mourning gown. Her face was pale but composed, her head held high. He wondered if she was praying, and realized he didn’t even know this about her-if she believed in a God, or sought solace in her religion.

He’d asked her last night as they lay in each other’s arms if she was truly certain that Damion Pelletan was her father’s son and not the Lost Dauphin of the Temple. She’d looked at him quietly for a moment. Then her gaze shifted to someplace far, far away. She shook her head, her breath catching, and said, “No.”

He supposed they’d never know the truth. Perhaps some questions were never meant to be answered. He wondered if anyone would ever know or even care how many millions had lost their lives in this endless war that raged from one end of Europe to the other. Some died filled with that oddly altruistic hubris known as patriotism; some died for glory or God or money to buy ale and whores; others for a dimly understood-or misunderstood-principle. But most died simply because they were in the wrong place, or because they were doing what they were told.

He figured arrogant men of overweening ambition and insatiable greed would always manage to convince or coerce others into dying for them.

He watched Alexi nestle the small wooden box containing Damion Pelletan’s heart deep into the space that had been dug for it, then take a handful of dirt from the pile beside it and release it in a rush of falling earth.

Gibson nodded to the sexton, who began to fill the hole with heavy shovelfuls that quickly hid the box from their sight.

The heart of an uncrowned king or a simple physician’s son; did it matter which they buried? Gibson wondered. He thought not, although he knew that for questions such as this wars were fought and men died, and other men such as he limped through life on mangled limbs.

They stood together side by side until the last of the earth lay heaped upon the grave and the sexton walked away. And still they stood, her hand creeping out to take his, their gazes meeting as the wind snatched at her hair and her lips curved into a trembling smile.