A/N I'd just like to make it clear that this is one of those stories with no particular plot that I write largely to amuse myself. Anyone else's amusement is a byproduct. That said, I do ferel duty bound to point out that the story will have more chapters than just this one (eleven more to be precise) so this isn't "it", so to speak.
The King of Swords
The peasants of Asturias believe that in every wolf-litter there is a dog whelp which the mother kills, because otherwise, when it grows large, it will devour the rest of her young.
However, La Dolcequita was from Andalusia, and so was ignorant of this superstition. So, when the baby began to whine fretfully she picked him up unhesitatingly, looking down at her new son as he mewled and smote the air with delicate, impotent fists, red and wrinkled and for all the world like a blind puppy. She put the child to her breast and, gradually, he was pacified. Dolcequita too felt a sort of contentment steal over her, a mildness which lead her, fleetingly, to live up to her sobriquet.
She had called herself 'Dolcequita' only because sweetness and softness were what men expected of women, and she found it profitable to live up to expectations. In truth there was nothing soft about this she-wolf with her whelp, but, nonsensical as it may sound, even the beasts have their humanity and, at that moment, Dolcequita was happy. She was happy to no longer be pregnant, hating the way it had slowed her down – mentally as much as physically. Now she was free to dance the sevillanas of the mind as much as those of the body. She was happy that all had passed well and safely, and to be in a room that was warm and almost comfortable – it pleased her that she had got something for nothing. She was also unaccountably happy about the small, rather ugly creature at her breast, even those all he truly meant was another mouth to feed. He was, after all, her first son, and Dolcequita already knew that she loved her children (for children now it was) with a ferocity that was almost tigerish. Even if that love translated itself into the real world into care that was, at best, haphazard.
The baby drifted off to sleep, snoring slightly through a piggish nose, and she laid him down to sleep beside her. Gazing at the child, Dolcequita became curious as to what the pup, the little scrap of nothing, would become, of what would become of him. She reached for the cards she kept always close about her person, even during her travails, and drew one: the King of Swords.
She interpreted it on its simplest and most literal level: A dark haired man with sallow skin, one who demands respect and whose advice is to be trusted. Astrong character. Foreign Affairs and Law and Order . . .
Not so very inauspicious a beginning.