Katherine Kurtz: In the King's Service

«Aye, but blood is blood, Sire», Sief said, echoing the words of the Council not an hour earlier. «Richard is as much a Haldane as you or the new prince».

He thought he saw Jessamy stiffen slightly at those words, though her gray-streaked head was bowed over the infant in her arms.

«Indeed», the king said mildly. «I trust you aren't presuming to instruct me in my duties as a husband?»

Sief raised a placating hand, hesitant to even consider pursuing the subject; but Donal's manner seemed increasingly evasive, making Sief wonder whether he had, indeed, stumbled on something he would be happier not knowing.

He ventured a cautious probe, but Donal was tight-shuttered against even a surface reading. That was hardly unusual for the king, for Sief had long ago realized that Donal had shields as good as any Deryni’s — though whether they would stand up to any serious attempt to force them remained an unknown question. What alarmed him was that Jessamy likewise had retreated behind shields far stronger than he had believed her to possess.

Chilled, he turned to look at her sharply — and caught just a hint of something in her eyes…

With a little sob, she turned away from him in their bed, shielding the infant Krispin behind her body. In that instant, in an almost blinding flash of insight, Sief knew what more she was hiding — and Donal, as well.

«You!» He whirled on the king, fury and betrayal in his dark glare. «He's yours, isn't he? You've made me a cuckold! Was it here, in this very bed?»

Even as he said it, his clenched fist lifted and he lashed out with his powers, fully aware that he was threatening violence against the king to whom he had sworn fealty — and not caring, in his rage. To his utter astonishment, Donal Blaine Haldane answered with like force: potent and altogether too focused for what Sief had always imagined was the limit of the king's power. Before he could pull back, power slammed against his own closing shields and reverberated to the deepest core of his being, forcing a breach and starting a tear in his defenses that gaped ever wider, the more he tried to seal it.

With that realization came fear and pain — more pain than he had ever experienced in his life or even imagined he could feel. It began in his head, exploding behind his eyes, but quickly ripped downward to center in his chest, like a giant fist closing on his heart. At the same time, he felt his limbs going numb, losing all sensation as his legs collapsed under him and his arms flailed like the arms of a marionette with its strings cut. Through blurring vision, he could just see Donal, right hand thrust between them with the fingers splayed in a warding-off gesture, and Donal's lips moving in words whose sense Sief could only barely comprehend.

«Listen to me, Sief!» Donal's urgent plea only barely penetrated the scarlet agony blurring his vision. «Don't make me kill you! I need the boy. I need you!»

Lies!» Sief managed to whisper from between gritted teeth, as the child — Donal's bastard! — started wailing. «Faithless, forsworn whoreson! I'll mind-rip you! — kill the bastard! — kill… you…!»

Enraged beyond reason, Sief tried again to launch a counter-attack against this man — his king! — who had betrayed him, bucking upward from his slumped position and dragging himself to hands and knees, clawing a hand upward to help him focus — but to no avail. To his horror and dismay, the other's might was crushing him down, smothering the life from him — but he was too proud to yield, and too stubborn. All his life he had been so careful in how he used his powers, taken such pride in his abilities. He had always known that the Haldanes had powers that were akin to his own, but now, in extremis, he had not the strength or the abandon to turn his own powers to the wanton response that might have saved him.

He could feel his mind ripping under the onslaught of an attack he wondered if Donal even comprehended. (Where had he gotten such power, and the knowledge of how to use it?)

Hardly a whimper could he manage to force past his lips — nor could it have been heard, over the child's bawling! — but he could feel himself being dragged toward oblivion, all too aware that the damage only worsened as he struggled — and he couldn't not struggle! But somehow he had known, from that first flare of Donal's mind against his own, that there was neither any turning back nor any defense against this.

His last coherent thought, just before the darkness claimed him, was regret that he would leave no son from this life — for Krispin was Donal's son.

Yet still he tried to cling to that final image of the infant's puckered little face before his vision — the son that should have been his — as pain dragged him into an ever-darkening spiral downward and the last vestiges of awareness trickled into oblivion.

The king could feel the pulse pounding in his temples as he made his outstretched fist unclench, face averted from the sight of his friend sinking into death, but he knew that he had had no choice, once the deception was discovered.

He had feared it might end this way if Sief found out. He knew Sief’s jealousy, and something of the chilly relationship between Sief and Jessamy; he well remembered when Jessamy had arrived at court as Sief’s reluctant child-bride.

That had been over thirty years ago. It had been clear from the beginning that the two cared little for one another, though in time they appeared to have achieved a reasonable coexistence. Sief had shown a decided aptitude for diplomatic work, and had proven himself increasingly invaluable to both Donal and his father; and Jessamy, when she was not attending on a succession of Gwynedd's queens, had spent much of her time in child-bearing — though Donal knew that she had never departed from her marriage vows before Donal approached her.

Donal himself could not say the same, though he had told himself that it was different for men, and for kings, and that his first queen's failure to provide an heir justified his occasional trysts with other ladies of the court — though never, until Jessamy, with the wife of a friend. The several children that had come of such liaisons at least reassured him of his own virility, but there had been no true-born heir until the passing of Queen Dulchesse had allowed his remarriage with the Princess Richeldis, followed by the arrival of Prince Brion.

And none too soon, for Donal was no longer young. The child crown prince was thriving, and Donal was honestly enamoured of his new wife, but a king in his fifties might not live to see his heir grown to manhood — even an heir with the potential to wield the mystical powers of the Haldane royal line.

Unless, of course, that heir had a powerful protector: a Deryni protector. The very notion was dangerous — and Donal had never considered Sief himself, who might have other aspirations than merely to serve his king and, besides, was no younger than Donal. But what if a Deryni could be found who was bound to the young prince from a very early age? What if the protector himself was a Haldane, as well as carrying the powerful Deryni bloodline? It meant, of course, that such a child would require a Deryni mother…

It could be done — and had been done. Donal told himself that it had been no true betrayal of Sief, for he had not taken Sief s wife out of lust or even covetous desire; it had been an affair of state, in the truest sense of the word.

But not in Sief’s eyes. Whatever his original intentions in marrying Jessamy, Sief would have regarded royal poaching on his marital prerogatives as, at very least, a breach of the feudal oaths that he and the king had exchanged. Donal regretted that.