3. The Royal Bastards

Protocol dictated that no questions be asked of the six visiting dignitaries until they and their attendants had satisfied their hunger. Faerie, as Bruno had not forgotten, had tremendous appetites even when they weren't fasting. Haunch after haunch disappeared down their graceful throats. The only sounds in the banquet hall were the rustle of silks, the shuffle of footmen's feet, the rattle of plate and crockery, and the occasional chime of spoon on glass as the faerie lords took it in turn to offer a silent toast to their host's hospitality. Each time glasses were raised and drained, another row of footmen darted forward with decanters of wine to refill the emptied goblets.

King Bruno hardly knew how he could endure the feast, knowing that his bride could give birth at any moment. He survived chiefly by receiving regular updates on her condition. The intervals between Queen Sophie's cramps had been growing shorter until the time came for him to change for dinner. But since then, it seemed, the contractions had come to a stand.

The first prince to arrive, and without doubt the first in rank, rose to his feet at some subtle signal that the feast was over. He raised his glass and broke the silence with this short speech: "Your Majesty, I greet you in the name of my mother, the Lady Bergamot of the Westfall clan. She sends you hearty wishes on the birth of your heir today"--the king's heart leapt into his throat at these words--"and bids you read the private word here sealed."

The orange-haired faerie passed a small box of beautifully inlaid wood to one of the footmen, who brought it to Baldwin. The latter examined it, observed that it was properly sealed, and handed it to the king. At the king's touch, the seal broke and a silver brooch in the shape of an oak leaf fell out of the box and into his lap. With it came a slip of paper which trembled in the king's hand as he read. Baldwin later copied it into the king's correspondence diary, with a full description; thus we know that it said: "Bergamot to my sweet Bruno, affectionate greetings. I trust He will recall the occasion on which He presented to me the favor enclosed. I return it to Him with my deepest regard and with the hope that He will look favorably upon its bearer's petition. Know that he is both the fruit of our night of passion and the worthiest candidate for cavalry service in either your realm or ours. My best to the Lady Sophie, and my blessing upon her child."

Understandably, Bruno had gone white in the face by the time he reached the end of this missive. He looked up, first at the fine young faerie standing before him, then around the table at the others, who he now truly feared would prove to be brothers.

"O king and ally," said the noble petitioner in a clear, strong voice, "hear my prayer. Altair of clan Westfall is my wayname; among kinsmen I am called by steadname Sorrel. I offer you my loyal service as a mounted officer, if you will but remove from me the stigma of bastardy. I beg Your Highness"--at this the king closed his eyes, realizing that nothing could prevent the rumor of this speech reaching his wife's bedside the instant it was over--"to acknowledge me his firstborn son, with a rightful claim to the social status becoming one of noble, yea, and royal parentage."

The king's mouth was too dry to form a reply at first. After a sip of water he was able to ask, "Who is the second petitioner?"

Altair Westfall of the orange hair and livery dropped into his chair with an ashen look. A moment of hesitation came before the second faerie lord, he of the black hair and deep green cloth, stood up.

"Know that I am Baham of clan Aeolian," he declared with a brave show of cheerfulness, "called by steadname Fisher. I bear His Majesty greetings from the lady Juniper"--here he handed one of the attendants another sealed casket made of inlaid wood--"and a petition very like that of my good Sorrel." He nodded toward Altair Westfall, having very meaningfully named him in the familiar manner.

The king opened the casket, fondled the ampoule of perfume he found inside, and read the letter to himself. According to Baldwin's transcript, it said: "Juniper to my most delicious Bruno, greeting. May the fragrance herewith returned to thee its giver remind thee of the hours we savoured together, so that the aroma of its bearer's petition may be pleasing to thee. By the numerous times I have poured fragrant balm upon his wounds after engagements with the barbarians to Your Majesty's west, I bear witness to his valour. Grant him but one boon, sire, and I daresay he will win many another grievous wound for thee. Farewell."

"I will hear your petition, Baham," said the king after he had returned the letter, ampoule, and casket to his footman.

"I beg His Majesty to recognize me as His son," said Baham Aeolian, "neither firstborn nor last, neither heir nor successor, yet worthy of a noble calling, and of the titles and lands owed to my faerie kinship. Heretofore I have served my country as a conscript. Henceforth, with my father's blessing, I would serve Him as a volunteer."

"Be seated," the king said. "I will hear the other petitions before I answer. Who speaks next?"

The third young stranger now stood, crowned with sandy hair and served by a footman in light green robes. The ten-stringed lyre leaned against the wall behind his chair, a waiting presence of its own. "Deneb of clan Saltwell speaks, Your Highness," he said in a piercingly clear, smooth voice. "I am also called Cardoon by those who know me. Will His Highness receive a token of greeting from a devoted lady?"

"Certainly," the king said aloud. "As if I could avoid it," he added inwardly, wincing at the thought of the rumors that must by now have reached the door of his wife's bedchamber. Would that strumpet Lylis let the messenger past the door? Would she, perhaps, spare Her Majesty the strain of hearing his report? Far more likely, Bruno thought glumly, Lylis would whisper it herself in Sophie's ear, with embellishments.

By this time a third casket had arrived in his lap. Again the seal dissolved at his touch and the lid came off, revealing a crystal fish caught on a thread of silver. The fish seemed to leap and flip, so lifelike was its shape; yet it also gave off patterns of multicolored light from its transparent depths. Another moment of tenderness came over the king -- his lips silently formed the name Vervain -- but then he set his jaw and looked up at Deneb Saltwell in a manner not likely to encourage his suit.

"Your petition?" he asked.

"My elders and betters have taken the words out of my mouth," said Deneb, also called Cardoon.

"Then let the next petitioner stand."

"Markab Elkhorn, your highness," said the brown faerie lord on rising from his chair, "familiarly known as Nettle. Please accept this bauble from the Lady Beryl, my mother."

The bauble, protected by a burlwood case ingeniously held shut by a spring, turned out to be a silver nose-ring Bruno had bought, out of his princely allowance, for a princess whose pale delicacy still, in memory, took his breath away. Looking up at the young lord before him, he saw his own coloring, firmness of limb, and even the features of his long-dead father and brothers.

"I know what you would ask," said the king. "Who else brings a request?"

The fifth petitioner was the youth of deep-red hair and livery. He identified himself as Procyon Rosewood, also known as Hip, and the trinket he bore was an ivory comb belonging to the lady Iora. After him spoke the last visitor, the white-blond stripling who, reckoning from the then-prince's youthful dalliance with his mother, must have been close to forty years old. His name was Sarin Hawk, or Hornet, and his mother the Lady Medlar had sent the king a a pair of earrings shaped like bees. The king actually blushed when he saw them.

While he was still holding these baubles in his hand, a messenger arrived out of breath and panted something into his ear. The king stood hastily. "Gentlemen, you are all welcome to every comfort of my house. Please to excuse me for the evening. I will give thought to your petitions until the morrow." And he left in a swirl of costly velvets, hardly daring to glance at their dismayed faces.

Now he approached the queen's apartments with dread. He knew very well that Sophie would never understand, never forgive him if he countenanced these putative sons. It did not matter even that he had not met her when he knew their mothers. He knew that she would never let him forget her years of trying, and her months of suffering, to bear him one son: only to learn, on the day of the heir's birth, that he had six already. Bruno arrived at Sophie's bedchamber braced for a storm. Even so, he was unprepared for the fury that broke upon him.

A messenger almost collided with Baldwin as he opened the bedroom door for the king. "It is time," the youth panted, before darting around a corner to be sick.

When the king went in, Queen Sophie was indeed in the very throes of delivery. A midwife hovered around the bed while the royal physician looked on from his perch in the corner. The queen's attendant looked pained as her mistress clutched her wrist. When Sophie saw Bruno at the foot of her bed, she slapped the waiting woman out of the way and began to curse for all she was worth.

"I spit on this child," she fumed. "I turn my back on it forever. I wish it may die. No! Rather, that it may be a monster whose deformities of figure, face, and character will ever dismay thee...."

Sophie was only half-faerie. Her workings were not up to faerie standards. But on this occasion, she truly felt everything she said. And she said it in the proper form, too.

The king covered his face with both hands and sank into a chair near the bed. The queen seized both of his hands in hers and squeezed so hard that he was unable to pick anything up for days afterward. Then, before either of them understood how far along things had come, a baby began to cry.

The midwife gasped. The physician darted forward and just prevented her from dropping the child. He took it out of the room to be washed and dried, then brought it back, wrapped in a warm blanket. He shook as he presented it to the king.

"Great wheels of war!" the king exclaimed when he saw the child. "What is that?"

"That," said the physician, "is His Majesty's son."

"But," Bruno faltered, "but... but it isn't human!"

The physician forced it into the king's hands anyway. "He won't know anything about that. Perhaps he will get better in time."

The king stared in horror at the swaddled deformity in his hands. Horror mixed, he realized slowly, with pity, and pity with guilt, and perhaps even a tiny spark of owner's pride. But not much pride. For he had never seen such an ugly creature.

It wasn't, he reassured himself one part at a time, missing anything essential. It had one nose (none too piggish) and two ears (not at all like those of an ass). It had all the requisite fingers and toes, and nor were they webbed. If its eyes had been open he might have been reassured to see they did not have cats' pupils; had its teeth grown in, he would not have been dismayed by any semblance of fangs. Everything was in the proper place and proportion.

The only trouble was the pigment of the boy-child's skin. Here and there were irregularly shaped blotches of flesh-colored flesh. Most of its body, however, was covered with a shade of purple verging on midnight black, varied only by occasional patches of dark red. Though the baby quieted in his father's arms, he had such a burned, maimed look that it pained King Bruno to look at him. In a sense he had been burned, seared by the curse of his mother who, even now, turned her face away from the child she had rejected.

"Take it away," the king said to no one in particular. "I have seen enough."

"Your Majesty?" the doctor queried vaguely, as he lifted the infant out of the king's hands.

Bruno shook his head wildly. "Find him a nurse. Send them... send them..." The king shook his head in despair. "Send them to Fitzwilliam Island. Let Bonnie Prince Arleigh have him." It was as close to a death sentence as the king had courage to order. "I hereby create him Baronet of the Manitoulin District, to be administered under Arleigh's regency until he comes of age. Now. Remove him from my sight."

And so it was done.

2. The Six Embassies

Queen Sophie was in her pains, and King Bruno was holding her hand, when a quaking messenger arrived at the door of the chamber with a word from the palace gate. The king's steward, or personal assistant, received it with consternation. Waving the messenger off, he sat down behind the king's chair and whispered in His Majesty's ear.

"A what?" said the king. "Fetch that fellow back in here and let me hear it from him."

The steward passed the word, and the messenger returned to deliver the word directly to Himself. Shortly thereafter he retreated again, more alarmed than ever. The king's irritability could not be helped. Her Majesty was writhing, sweating, and groaning, in spite of her faithful attendant's constant care. As soon as the bout passed, the king arose and said to his steward, "Come, Baldwin. We shall see what this is about."

They went and saw. A window on the fourth floor overlooked the palace's main portico, the front gates, and the open square beyond. There were actually two gates at this end of the palace. The outer gate admitted visitors to the wider royal complex, including parks, barracks, administrative buildings, and guest houses. Lord Thorn's selectmen kept this gate and challenged all who approached to be searched for weapons and to present their credentials. The inner gate, which surrounded the king's house and its garden merely, stood seventy yards within and was kept by a ceremonial doorwarden who had been in office since Bruno was a runny-nosed boy. Today, in the center of the wide vestibule between the two gates, a small but striking party of visitors had made camp.

"Strike me blue," the King said, gaping at his guests. His weren't the only staring eyes about. The courtyard between the gates was lined by a still but wary contingent of guards. The old doorwarden, Tynan by name, stood outside his gatehouse and gesticulated helplessly. He seemed to be trying to make the intransigent visitors understand what they ought to do. But they weren't doing it.

"Tell Tynan to shut up," said the king. Baldwin passed the word quickly. Both men watched as the messenger trotted up to the old man and took his elbow. Before the message had been read, Tynan threw up his hands in disgust, plunged into the gatehouse, and slammed the door.

The king clucked his tongue. Then he returned his eyes to the embassy that waited in the vestibule. Four men stood in a semicircle, cloaked in livery of a rich, dusky-orange hue. Their forms were tall, graceful, and alert. Their heads were covered with soft felt hats shaped like a sailing ship, keel up; the pointed bow-ends extended well beyond their foreheads, shading their faces from view. King Bruno did not need to see their all-black eyes or their long, back-swept ears to know what they were. Besides, seated in front of them was unmistakably a faerie lord: young, strong, straight and finely made, with an uncovered head of reddish-orange hair and a tunic of white linen belted over a knee-length robe of blue-and-gray brocaded silk. He sat on a one-legged stool, essentially two sections of a stout tree limb fitted together in a T shape, and showed no trouble balancing himself. They never do, the king thought ruefully. He was a magnificent specimen, right down to his turquoise hose and his soft leather, ankle-high riding boots. He was the first emissary from Faerie to come to Bruno's court. The king began to consider whether he should be afraid.

"What message, my lord?"

His Highness looked at Baldwin in amazement.

The royal steward squirmed slightly, then asked a clarifying question. "Would His Highness desire to send a message..."

"No message," said the King. "They will stand there, or sit as the fancy takes them, until this time tomorrow."

Baldwin blinked. "My lord?"

"It is their way," King Bruno added patiently. "Faerie court etiquette. One always waits in the vestibule for a night and a day, neither eating nor drinking nor saying a word. It's the Faerie way of saying they mean neither to impose on our hospitality, nor to insinuate themselves into our confidence. Clear?"

"Understood, my lord."

"Good. Send for Conon now. I'll have a word with him."

Conon was the king's chief of staff. His duties differed from Baldwin's in that the latter hardly left the king's side, serving as Bruno's eyes, ears, and mouthpiece in relation to the palace staff. Conon, on the other hand, ran the palace itself. Everyone on the king's personal payroll answered to him. He kept things organized, planned formal events, and saw that everything went according to protocol.

"A feast at this hour tomorrow," the king told him. "Our guests appear to be a young lord from Faerie and his entourage. Prepare one of the guesthouses. Be sure to remove anything made of iron. See to it that no one approaches them, speaks to them, or offers them food or drink until they complete their... er, greeting ritual."

"Anything else, my lord?"

"Fresh game, Conon. The Faerie are not fond of farm-raised meat."

"Very good, my lord."

The king returned to the queen's bedside. Her Majesty was having another contraction.

"Was it this bad before?" asked the king as Sophie crushed his hand in hers.

"Ah, your majesty!" cried the queen's attendant. "That were many years ago."

"Well, it ought to be over before our guests expect to be entertained," the king opined.

But the waiting woman shook her head. "This could go on for days," she said. "I've seen it happen."

Another messenger came. Baldwin, more shaken and bewildered than before, approached the king and whispered in his ear again.

"Befuddle," Bruno cursed, "beguile and bemuse them!" After a moment of panting fury, however, he relented and said: "Let's go and see."

The second embassy had set up its watch a few yards behind and to the left of the first. This one had only four men: three standing, one sitting. Those standing wore dark green livery and the same type of boat-shaped hats. The second seated man looked strikingly similar to the first, except that his tunic, robe, and hose were all different shades of green, and his hair was such a deep black that even its glossiness gave back little light. While the first faerie lord sat stoically, looking neither right nor left, the second envoy gazed around himself with interest.

"I like this not," breathed the king. "Send to Conon, saying we'll need another guesthouse and another chair at the feast. I do hope Sophie will pull through by tomorrow. I should not like to leave her for an evening while she still labors."

"Who is come?" Sophie asked her husband when he sat down by her bedside again.

"Two embassies from Faerie," he reported.

Her countenance darkened at this news. Before the king could ask her what this might mean, another message came.

"Don't say it," Bruno growled. "Let's see them."

The third embassy had encamped still farther to the left and rear of the first two. The three attendants stood in light green uniforms around a beautiful young man who could have been a twin to either of the other two, apart from his dirty blond hair and the attention he devoted to tuning a ten-stringed lyre.

The king was about to send word to Conon to add a third guesthouse and seat of honor when the guard at the outer gate came to attention for the arrival of another guest.

"Oy vay," the king groaned.

The fourth faerie lord and his two attendants handed the reins of their horses to the men at the gate and walked forward. Tynan came out to challenge them, then made a dismissive gesture and went back into his house. This party took up station behind and to the right of the first comer: two men in dark brown livery, flanking a brown-haired gentleman garbed in shades from cream to fawn-colored. Unlike the other three young lords, this one sat directly on the ground, crossed his arms and legs, and to all appearances went directly to sleep.

"Most peculiar," Baldwin murmured.

"What say you?" the king demanded, trying to control a new twitch in his right eye.

"Beg pardon, my lord."

The king paced up and down. "They're coming faster and faster. Next they'll be arriving one on top of the other. Where will it end?"

It ended, ten minutes later, with six embassies from faerie encamped in the vestibule before the palace gate. The fifth and sixth faerie lords arrived, indeed, at the same time, and camped together just within the outer gate with one liveried servant to each of them. The attendant clad in deep red guarded the flank of a lovely youth with flowing, red-brown hair and clothes of earthen shades. The guard in light blue attended a white-blond boy, who seemed scarcely to have grown to his full stature, and whose gangly limbs were clad in snug garments of pure black. While their boat-hatted men stared through the front of the palace as though it wasn't there, these two young lords began a game of ro-sham-bo with which they seemed prepared to amuse themselves all night.

"They could all be brothers," Baldwin breathed, risking another familiarity with his king.

"You haven't seen many faerie," Bruno snapped. "They probably all look the same to you." But secretly, the king agreed. And he had seen many faerie indeed.