PRELUDE
Havenfold House, South of Alicante, March 1518
There was something altogether pathetic about being unnerved by a child. Especially one that had barely turned three. Yet here Jocelyn was, creeping like some kind of thief through her own nursery and stealing time with her children.
Covertly, she tried to slip her heels along the heavy carpets that blanketed every free inch of flooring, since a fear of childhood tumbles had been instilled in her. Her mother had insisted on the carpets, stuffing them into every corner and cranny she could locate the very moment Jonathan had successfully hauled himself upright (albeit using the nurse's fingers and not his mother's) and taken his first solo steps. Jocelyn was glad of them, as they in the least muffled her approach into the sunlight rooms at the front of the house that served as a playroom.
In spite of her best efforts at stealth, the blazing gold eyes snapped to her almost immediately.
Years later and the startling colour of those eyes still threw her peace of mind asunder. Not golden brown, not flecked with gold, they rather were pure gold. She knew not where on earth the child had got them. Stephen's eyes had been blue and Celine's an extremely ordinary hazel. It was one of the many puzzlings Jocelyn picked apart in her brains at late hours, when the rest of the palace was asleep.
She schooled her features blank and whipped her strides onwards, as if she did not feel the hot curiosity of that young gaze on her. She never could evade the sense that the child was judging her, that he assessed her with an intelligence far beyond his years. It did not help that when he moved, the boy could do so with almost utter silence if he wished. His words were few and, even at three they gave the impression of being carefully selected.
In her mind Jocelyn had taken to calling him "the other Jonathan." She would not, could not, bear that he bore the same name as her own blessed son. But apparently it had been imparted to the yowling babe in his mother's parting breath, and for whatever reason Valentine had allowed it to stick when he had taken the orphan into their household. Put him in Jocelyn's nursery, without discussion or warning.
Keeping her eyes turned forward as though she had been blinkered, the Queen of Idris paced to the little patch of sun below the slightly cracked open window. Until she reached the crib there.
Midwives were constantly wrangling back and forth as to whether or not fresh air was to be recommended with babes. Some argued that the risk of chills outweighed any potential benefits, but Jocelyn had been raised in the country and had spent every moment she could rambling out of doors. Still, while she hadn't given leaving Jonathan to nap in the gardens a second thought, this time around she worried. She constantly did with her daughter.
Amalia was nowhere near as robust as her brother had been at her age. While Jocelyn's ladies all fell over one another to reassure her such was often the way with girls, Jocelyn remained unconvinced. She needed no experience as a midwife or knowledge as a physician to see Amalia was not thriving.
Her baby daughter blinked up sleepily at her as she were scooped up, not protesting with as much as a squeak or a wriggle. Jonathan had been an eerily quiet baby too, but not to this extent. With Amalia, Jocelyn rather got the impression the child could not make noise rather than would not. As if she knew herself that every scrap of energy she had ought to be preserved.
The room was quiet as the queen began to rock her youngest. Jonathan had charged outside the instant that the rain had stopped, and the nurses knew to give Jocelyn a wide berth when she visited. Not because she was some kind of demon in her governing her children's miniature household- though she had heard tales of mistresses who were a holy terror. Jocelyn knew that each of the women had been carefully chosen because they knew what they were doing when it came to the raising of children, even royal ones. But she saw little enough of her son and daughter as it were, her many queenly duties kept her occupied. Even when they did not, Valentine was adamant that it was not proper for her to spend too much time and effort mollycoddling the children. Jocelyn often tried to reason with him, but short of using the argument that not all mothers were a sealed up, stone-hearted harpy like his had been, she was not likely to sway him.
She was struggling to sway Valentine on anything these days.
That was Stephen's fault. When his treachery had been exposed, something inside Valentine had broken, perhaps irreparably.
He was increasingly shutting himself off with his Councillors and paid his wife very little heed. He pulled away from Luke too, she'd learned. Now Valentine trusted nobody. Jocelyn was not even sure he trusted her anymore. If a cousin could aim a knife at your back, why not a wife?
Surely Valentine knew her better than that. She loved him. She owed him everything. If not for Valentine, Jocelyn would still be sitting out in the shires, collecting cobwebs.
Jocelyn tried to settle her concerns and focus on the child in her arms. It only granted the conditions for yet another set of worries to breed.
The two were not as distanced as she might hope. She was beginning to feel that Amalia's poor health was frustrating more than concerning to Valentine. Jocelyn had taken to avoiding the topic of her with him.
There was no use in bothering Valentine when there was nothing he could do about it. No sense in annoying him needlessly. She tried to reassure herself that it was simply a case of her husband taking out his helplessness on her. Of course, it was distressing their child was wasting away and there was naught either of them could do to stop it.
Still, it was hard to ignore that there were more and more issues that Jocelyn had taken to ignoring. Yet more lines of discussion she was stopping herself from pursuing with Valentine, for fear of provoking his ill moods.
She settled herself in a nearby chair and started to sing softly, trying to soothe herself as much as her child.
The true distraction proved to be Jocelyn's discreet inspection of the interloper.
The Herondale child never ceased to baffle her. This Jonathan was relatively quiet, but equally, if the mood took him, he proved insatiably inquisitive. He could walk and talk with the roots of that same sharp carelessness Stephen once had. Yet there already lurked behind the bravado something of his mother's vulnerability. He was a child who kept himself to himself, already tending to avoid her Jonathan, even at times the nursemaids. They tended to overlook him, and Jocelyn wondered that were the cause or the product of his detachment. The real source of her discomfiture were the times when he would look at her as if he were evaluating her every move. When he did so, he could have been Valentine's very likeness.
The realisation never failed to send a stab of something not quite anger and not quite dread through Valentine's queen. She longed to peel her eyes away from the child chittering to himself softly on the carpet, fiddling with some of the wooden toys the prince had discarded, but Jocelyn failed to do so. If anything, her perusal intensified, searching for what she shrank from possibly seeing.
As though thinking of him had acted a conjuring, Valentine appeared in the doorway. The queen's head snapped up at the sudden unannounced entrance, and she felt her eyes widen in surprise as her mouth popped open. Valentine's attention had yet to cross her.
His eyes went immediately to the child that wasn't theirs and he paused to crouch and pat his head before advancing to where his wife waited, resisting a glower.
Jocelyn would once have been relived to get an opportunity to be alone with him like this, but these days she never knew what to say. Once she had been glad of Valentine's company, now she seldom knew what to do with it. He asked her opinions less and less. These days he tended to dislike them, whenever they were offered, much more often than he approved.
Valentine spared Amalia a peek before glancing at Jocelyn finally. "How is she?"
The anger fizzled out instantly with her quiet admission, "Much the same."
Valentine nodded slowly, dropping into the nearest seat and leaning forward, omitting a long sigh. "There is nothing else to be done." His eyes were piercing Jocelyn now, as though there were something of great importance he wished to convey.
Jocelyn refused to be baited, "There is always hope, and prayer. She has made it this far against all odds."
"I know, dearest, I know that. But you cannot spend all your days clinging to her."
"I do not," She protested roughly.
"Perhaps not physically, but you are letting this cloud all you do. We have another child Jocelyn. I know Amalia is dear to you-"
"And she is not to you?" The accusation shot across twice as viciously as she had intended, but there was no time to try and dilute or amend it, as Valentine broke in with equal force, "On the contrary! I had a particular plan for her."
"Have a plan for her Valentine. She is here! Look at her!" The rising tenor of her voice shuddered with the beginning of a sob.
If anything, that sapped what remained of her husband's patience. He pressed on with the harsh truths no one else dared tell her, "Not every child makes it to adulthood, you know that. It is more than common to lose a child."
"But not my children!" She all but screeched in return, "I am the queen! My children are not anyone's!"
"I have done all I can, paying a small fortune in doctor's fees. None of their remedies work. She is a sickly child, Jocelyn. She may well live, but it will always be as such."
For the first time ever, Jocelyn wanted to hit her husband. How could he sit there and provide her such solemn facts as if it were not the life of their own daughter they discussed? A small move caught in the corner of her eye, and Jocelyn was diverted from her horror-struck rising fury. She shot a fuming, tear blurred glance across to where the forgotten child had stiffened into place, alarmed to have been remembered.
That, in fact, proved to be the final proverbial straw. "Get that child out. Out of here, right this instant!"
For a second Valentine froze, then with the sigh of the long suffering sprang up and began to usher the little boy out of the room, asking loudly as to the whereabouts of his nurses. Jocelyn meanwhile ducked her head down, kept biting back her sobs. She clutched Amalia to her with renewed vigour, starting then to rock back and forth in her misery.
By the time Valentine returned to his vacated seat again, alone, he seemed angered further, "I appreciate that you are emotional, but there is no need to vent it on a child."
"Is there not?" It was so universally unfair, that Stephen's child- who by many accounts should not have born- was the very epitome of health and happiness while Jocelyn's precious little girl faded away faster than the summer roses at the first breath of autumn.
Valentine released another sigh, hesitated once more and then allowed himself to be baited, "What in the name of God does that mean?"
Jocelyn felt the vague hiccup of breath that followed her inability to swallow past her dry mouth. At first there was only the tolling of a dozen unfinished thoughts and questions in her mind: every happy glance Valentine had ever shot Celine and vice versa, his willingness to entertain the newlyweds, the insistence the Duchess come to court. The demand that Celine be brought into his protection to give birth after her husband's arrest, the wild pursuit when she tried to leave, then having the child seized from her still warm corpse. Above all the insistence the boy be raised here. Like one of his own.
Jocelyn did not want to appear hysterical. No, she need be perfectly serious when she asked this question. "Tell me once and tell me true."
Valentine's exasperation peaked, "Jocelyn."
"Is he your son?"
It was rare she caught Valentine entirely off guard. In fact, Jocelyn could not think of another incident where she'd managed to thrust him into such a confounded silence. The King's entire face was frozen, his eyes flared and his mouth fell open.
It took a long moment for him to compose himself long enough to splutter, "What?"
She might have dropped the line of interrogation there and then, but she knew her spouse to be a convincing actor. Years of kingship taught one that if nothing else. Jocelyn seized in another breath, so violently that her shoulders jerked and little Amalia, quite disregarded, gave a rare fidget.
Jocelyn held the question back for months, privately scouring the child's features for any similarity to her own son's, pretending not to hear the whispers as to why the King was so happy to suffer the traitor's son. Better than suffer. He could have taken wardship of the boy and bundled him off to any other noble household, yet Valentine had chosen to disinherit the boy and then place him in the royal nursery.
Jocelyn could take it no longer. She decided that even if she could not bear the truth she needed to hear it. "Is the boy your bastard?"
Jocelyn's voice was level, but Valentine was still trying to piece himself together after the last question. He was quite unprepared to be hounded on it.
"Christ Almighty, Jocelyn. No. No. He's Stephen's son."
"Are you sure?" She snapped drily. She knew all too well that Valentine's instinctive response to many an accusation was dishonesty. "He hardly resembles him." And she had it on good authority that the Duchess's bed had not been one of the Duke's favourite haunts, though of course Valentine did not know she had knowledge of that.
"He is Stephen's son. I assure you."
"You do." It was too flat to be a question, yet there remained an imploring to elaborate.
Valentine shook his head disbelievingly, throwing his weight back in the seat and toying absentmindedly with the ring that never left his finger, that godforsaken sapphire that had always reminded his wife that the king was married to his country before he was her. He even had the audacity now to expel a rapid clatter of droll laughter, "You sound as if that is not the answer you wanted."
They were silent for a time then, Jocelyn not knowing what else to say and Valentine having nothing further to say for himself.
For a long silence he considered his wife closely. At last, Valentine spoke again, "I shall prove it to you. Though things would be more convenient if he were my blood," She gasped aloud at that, only to be ignored, "Alas, the boy is a Herondale through and through. Which is problematic for obvious reasons. Why do you suppose I deny him an inheritance entirely? You think me prone to such acts of needless cruelty?"
Jocelyn dared not respond, though he was addressing her she could tell these were entirely rhetorical questions. "Because I wanted to make this boy mine Jocelyn. I wanted him utterly dependent on me. There is so much to be gained by having the very last of that great bloodline beg me for his supper, knowing that without my blessing and goodwill not so much as a crumb would pass his lips. I do not do so out of callousness, though I will not deny the sense of power gives me satisfaction. It was God's will that Jonathan live and be delivered to my keeping. There is as much to be gained from his blood as it might cost us. Its value, ultimately, cannot be overestimated."
He smiled at her conspiratorially, though Jocelyn could not be certain she followed this at all. Until his eyes flicked downwards and settled on the babe dozing in her arms. "I would tie his bloodline to ours, my love." She stiffened, then lurched upwards into a straighter position. Her eyes cast about the room desperately, as though she'd woken suddenly to a strange surrounding. There was no one else there, of course, so eventually Jocelyn had to return to Valentine. "You cannot mean it."
He shrugged, unrepentant. "It is my duty as a father to make plans for my daughter's future, is it not?"
"Not before she walks or talks." The implication Amalia may never do so hung between them. Valentine's smile slipped off his face. He grew irritable again.
That was why Amalia's failing health bothered him so, not because it made him feel helpless, but because Valentine so hated it when his plans were thwarted. Again came the urge to put her hands on Valentine, to beat this hateful streak out of him. Overriding it was Jocelyn's longing to press Amalia closer to her chest, to spirit her far away from here.
What good would it do? What good would any of it do? She could rail at him all she wanted, but nothing would put strength into the too-small body of her darling daughter. None of it would keep Amalia's heart beating and her breaths flowing.
Valentine however, had yet to move from the previous topic, "It is a gift we have been given. The last of the Herondales was always meant to be mine. I will rid Idris of the old dynasty once and for all, not through destroying it but by utilising it. No one could ever again challenge the right of me or my kin to rule." It brought him to life, the very notion; that vision of the bright future for every King of Idris to come, the one had single-handedly constructed.
Then the sole hurdle that brought him back to the present. Valentine looked again at the tiny heap of blankets which all but concealed the tiny girl from view. Though his eyes were on Amalia, his thoughts were beyond her. "Perhaps not this time. Perhaps not with little Amalia. But this is God's will and mine. If not this daughter, we shall have another."
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