«Unless, like Keryell's previous heir, he suffers a fatal mishap», Barrett pointed out. «These things do happen».

«Aye, of course they do», Seisyll said. «Which is why the king will have a say in whom she — and her sister, too — eventually wed. He will not gamble with the fate of a duchy so rich as Corwyn, in case Ahern should not inherit». He swept them with his gaze. «This means that the king must approve their eventual marriages — which eliminates any suitor from Torenth, for Donal would never consent to Corwyn lands passing into Torenthi control. One of the Forcinn states, perhaps».

«He could always pack them off to a convent», Sief murmured.

Dominy glanced at him frostily. «With your Jessilde, Sief?»

«It was her choice», Sief shot back.

«As if you gave her any other!»

«Peace!» Seisyll interjected. «We have often done things we would rather not have done. Never forget that we serve a higher cause than our own desires».

His admonition left a tense silence in its wake, only lifting as Michon cleared his throat.

«On a more constructive note, I suggest that we return to the recommendation regarding young Ahem», he said. «His position, when he comes of age, will be of immense importance — but only if he can, indeed, convince the king that he is worthy to take up the title of his great-grandfather».

«And pray that it no more passes through the female line», Seisyll muttered. «I, for one, shall be greatly relieved when he's grown and married and has an heir. At least Stevana had a boy, God rest her, and blood is blood…»

«Is it not a grief unto death, when a companion and friend is turned to an enemy?»[2]

Far from where the Camberian Council sat in secret session, crafting their careful, deliberate plans for the future of their race, the wife of one of its members lay propped amid the pillows of their curtained and canopied bed and waited for the nurse to bring her infant son for feeding. Two days after his birth, Lady Jessamy MacAthan was feeling far stronger, but both the pregnancy and the delivery of this latest bairn had taken more out of her than any of her previous children, even the stillborn ones.

Of course, she was older than when she had birthed any of the others — past forty now — and with a growing history of miscarriages and stillbirths. She had not even been certain she could conceive again, much less carry a child to term.

But this child was important, destined for a secret but very special role in the future unfolding for Gwynedd and its kings to come. It was too soon to tell precisely what young Krispin's magical potential would prove to be, but his parentage ensured that he would be no ordinary boy.

The nursery door opened, and Mistress Anjelica brought in the fretting, wiggling bundle hat was her son, shushing and cooing over him as she laid him in his mother's arms.

«He's very hungry, milady», the woman said, as Jessamy put him to her breast.

«Yes, I can see that», Jessamy replied, smiling. «And greedy, too. He's like a wee limpet. Thank heaven he hasn't any teeth! But you needn't sit with me. I know you must have things that need doing. Are the girls asleep?»

«Yes, milady».

«Good. I'll call you when we're finished».

She readjusted the child in the hollow of her arm and settled back to let him feed as the nurse retired, allowing the sweet lethargy of his suckling to drift her into idle remembrance, wondering what Sief would say, if he were ever to penetrate past her shields to learn the truth — though Jessamy would resist him to the death, were he ever to try.

She had never wanted or intended to marry Sief, who was sixteen years her senior. But her mother had died when she was but ten, and the loss of her father the following year had left her in the hands of guardians who insisted on the match: powerful Deryni, who had feared what Lewys ap Norfal's daughter might become, and had sought to minimize the danger by seeing her safely wed to one of their own. Though she had never come to regard Sief with more than resigned acceptance, she loved the children he had given her; and she had learned to live with the arrangement because she must, and to wear the façade of a dutiful wife, because outward compliance allowed her at least an illusion of freedom here at the court of Gwynedd — if only Sief knew how free. Her love of her children was one of the honest things about her life, as was her affection for the queens she had served here in Rhemuth for the past thirty years.

By now, memories of any other home had mostly receded to a distant blur, dangerous though it was to be Deryni in Rhemuth. Even before Rhemuth, her parents had never stayed long in one place, lest their Deryni nature be discovered — and Lewys ap Norfal had never been good at hiding what he was for long. Had they lived in Gwynedd those early years, she now thought it unlikely that Lewys would have survived long enough to sire any children. Even so, he had been notorious among his own kind, and had met his end attempting magic usually deemed impossible, even among the most accomplished of their race.

Putting an end to that nomad existence, Sief had brought her to Gwynedd's capital immediately after their hurried marriage, giving the care of his frightened child-bride into the hands of the king's daughter-in-law, the gentle and sensitive Princess Dulchesse, who had been the wife of then-Crown Prince Donal Blaine Haldane.

That pairing, at least, had prospered, for the two women had liked one another from the start. Dulchesse, but one-and-twenty herself and already six years married, had yet to give her husband an heir, but she had gladly taken the orphaned Jessamy under her wing and assumed the role of elder sister and surrogate mother, giving her the fierce protection of her royal station as the still-hopeful mother of kings. Indeed, in all but name, the princess had been functioning as Gwynedd's queen for all her married life; for Roisian of Meara, King Malcolm's queen, had withdrawn to a convent the same year Dulchesse came to court. The rift had come the previous year, after Malcolm was obliged to lead an expedition into rebellious Meara and execute several members of Roisian's family. One of them had been Roisian's twin sister.

Alas for Sief, placing his young bride in the household of the crown princess had not turned out at all as he expected; but by the time he realized that he had become the victim of feminine solidarity, it was too late to change his mind.

«You may be certain that I shall school her to a wife you may be proud of, my lord», Dulchesse had told the disbelieving Sief, on learning that he planned to allow Jessamy but a year's grace before consummating their marriage, «but you shall not touch her until her fourteenth birthday. She's but a child. Give her the chance to finish growing up».

«Your Highness, she is a woman grown», Sief had protested. «She has begun her monthly courses».

«Yes, and if she should conceive so young, you are apt to lose, both wife and child. You shall wait».

«Your Highness-»

«Must I ask the king to tell you this?» she retorted, stamping her little foot.

Before such fierce determination, Sief had been left with no recourse but to bow before the wishes of his future queen.

Accordingly, Jessamy had been allowed to spend those stolen days of extended girlhood as a pampered pet of the princess's household, acquiring the skills and graces expected of a knight's lady and carefully beginning to craft the façade that she hoped would protect her in the future. For Sief had warned her, on that numb journey from Coroth, that her very life would be in danger, were it to be discovered at court that she was Deryni.

«The king will guess», he had told her. «I know he has surmised what I am, though we have never spoken of it openly. But others will not be so tolerant, should they even suspect what we are».