Tears filled her eyes again as she looked up at him. “I don’t know how!” she insisted as despair threatened to crash over her. “It isn’t as easy as just commanding my body to release an egg! I have to want to have children with someone I don’t love.”
“And you don’t want my children.” The flames in his gaze began to cool, and the return of the ice in his eyes chilled her to the bone. “Or Orlann’s or Malac’s.”
Maari shook her head miserably. “I want to protect my people.” Even after they—after her brother—had abandoned her to their enemies. “But I don’t know how to make myself want to give birth to children that we both know your wife will try to kill.”
For one endless moment, Jude stared down at her, and she held her breath, watching a kaleidoscope of emotion churn behind his eyes. Disappointment. Anger. Frustration. And—for just a single instant—fear.
That one short glimpse of Jude’s fear set off an alarm deep inside her. She couldn’t imagine what the king of Loborough possibly had to be afraid of, but if it frightened him, it should no doubt terrify her.
“I see,” he said at last. “You’re saying that you can’t circumvent your own will. If you’re not in love, and you truly don’t want to conceive, you can’t make yourself ovulate.”
She nodded, and the tears standing in her eyes rolled silently down the sides of her face to pool in her hair. “Don’t take that out on my people, Jude. Please don’t kill more than a million souls because I can’t give you want you want.”
Jude leaned down and kissed her forehead, brushing hair back from her face. Then he stood and began pulling his clothes on. “I’m not going to have to do that, because you will give me what I want.” He left his shirt unbuttoned as he stepped into his shoes. “You and I… We just have to find a way to make you want it too.”
Maari sat up on the bed and flipped one corner of the comforter up to cover herself. “What does that mean?”
Jude turned back to her from the bedroom doorway. “I’ll have fresh bedclothes and a snack sent up immediately. Would you like to eat in the upstairs foyer, or at the table downstairs, looking out over the garden?”
“You’re not going to tell me to lie on my back for an hour?”
He left her sitting on the bed as he crossed the foyer toward the second-floor exit, and as he opened the door, he looked back at her over his shoulder. “Would there really be any point?”
Then he disappeared into the hall, and the deadbolt slid into place behind him.
Maari fell back onto the bed, her head swimming from too much wine and too much Jude. From the terrifying realization that she’d somehow found an all-new way to let down the people of Stead Delayne.
“Princess?”
She let her head roll to the side, where she found Annah standing in the doorway, having evidently heard Jude’s departure. And likely everything that had come before it.
“Are you okay?” her handmaid asked, and Maari burst into fresh tears. “May I draw you a bath? The facilities in this suite are quite nice.”
The princess nodded, swiping both hands over her wet cheeks, then she rolled over to cocoon herself in the comforter while her maid prepared for what had become their evening ritual.
A few minutes later, a hand landed softly on Maari’s hip, over the comforter. “The water’s ready, princess.”
Maari emerged from her cocoon to find her handmaid holding the shredded remains of the dress Malac had given her that morning.
“What a shame. This one was so pretty.”
“That’s what they do here.” Maari stood and padded, barefoot and nude, across the heated stone floor. “They destroy pretty things.”
“You’re much more than just a pretty thing, princess.” Annah wadded up the ruined material and dropped it into the small, round trash bin by the door, then she followed Maari into the bathroom, where the princess discovered that her new tub was a huge, slate-colored stone bowl standing on a pedestal in the center of the large bathroom.
“Careful,” Annah said. “The floor in here is slick.”
In fact, it was marble, instead of the soft, heated bathroom flooring she’d gotten used to in her previous room.
Annah helped her into the tub, where she scooped fragrant bubbles up to shield her nudity while the maid began to wash her back.
“He’s going to kill them.” Maari tucked her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, setting her chin on her knees. “Jude says he’ll lead an allied army across Bannon if I don’t give him a child. Soon.”
Annah’s hand stilled, the sponge warm against the princess’s back. “And you believe him?”
Maari nodded slowly, and the sponge resumed its comforting circles across her skin. “I do. There was something in his eyes, tonight. Something I don’t understand. This determination. This fear. Whatever it is, it’s made him willing to kill everyone you and I have ever known and loved, if he doesn’t get what he wants.”
“Kings are accustomed to getting their way,” Annah said. But there was a new tension in her voice, with the news that her mother—her entire family—might soon die. “What will you do?”
“What should I do?” Maari asked, as the maid repositioned herself and began to massage her shoulders and arms. “Even if I knew how to give him what he wants, I’d be saving Stead Delayne at the cost of my own children’s lives.”
“You really think the queen would carry out her threat?”
“Don’t you?” Maari twisted to look at her maid, suddenly hopeful that Annah might have a different perspective. Or at least some comforting words. “You were there. You saw her face. What do you think?”
Annah considered the question as she worked her way down the princess’s left arm, massaging tense muscles with her soapy hands. “I think she would try, certainly. But I also think the king would do everything in his power to prevent that. Your children could be his children, and he loves his children, princess. The whole staff knows that. He won’t let anything happen to them.”
“So, you think I should give them a child.” Of course Annah thought that. She would lose her entire family, if Maari refused to be bred. Maari would lose her own family as well, a terrifying thought that had never been far from her mind. “But I don’t know how! I don’t know how to make myself want that!”
“Maybe there’s another way.” Annah moved to the princess’s other arm, then she lowered her voice as they heard servants enter the bedroom to change the bedding. “Maybe you can change his mind. Convince him not to march across Bannon.”
“How could I possibly do that?”
“By humanizing the people of Stead Delayne. You have to talk about them. You have to make him think of our people as individuals. It’s too easy to dismiss the nameless, faceless idea of a person whose life will never touch yours. You have to make him see the faces. Make him hear the names.” She held Maari’s gaze with a clear, determined focus. “Show him that there are millions of innocent women and children in Bannon who don’t deserve his rage. Make him see the reality of what he’s threatening to do. And pray to the gods that the thought of all those children’s corpses is enough to thaw his cold, cold heart.”
When she’d been washed, dried, brushed, moisturized, and dressed, Maari insisted that Annah share the tray of fruit and chocolate that had been delivered while she was in the bath. So they sat together at the small dining table downstairs, staring out into the private garden surrounded by a high stone wall.
“Jude said I could put in a fountain, if I like.”
“Well, that would certainly be pretty.” Annah peered over the tray as she selected a chocolate filled with caramel and sprinkled with coarse-grain salt. “And I’ve always found the sound of running water to be soothing. You could make a nice life here for yourself. If you wanted to.”
Maari gave her a non-committal nod as she chewed a strawberry that had gone suddenly tasteless on her tongue. There was no more wine to wash it down with, so she drained a glass of ice water instead. “I
know you have your own room, Annah,” she said with a glance at the unassuming door on the far side of the small kitchen. “But will you stay with me tonight?” She hadn’t slept in an empty room in more than three months, and the thought of being alone in that huge bed made her feel oddly unsettled.
“Of course, princess.”
But several hours later, Maari found herself unable to fall asleep, in spite of the comfort of her handmaid’s company, so she got up to wander around her new quarters. To explore the place on her own, for the first time.
Instead, she found herself in the nursery, sitting on the floor next to that floppy gray elephant. Staring around the beautiful room, wondering how much of it Jude had actually planned himself.
And that was where she fell asleep, with her head resting on the elephant’s soft belly.
6
Jude
“Any news from Rhody?” Jude took a seat at his desk and propped his small com device against his coffee mug, scrolling through the live camera feeds until he found Maari asleep in her bed, a slight lump beneath the covers. “We’re just more than one month from the first mandatory report to the council on the state of our concubine.”
“Rhody’s useless.” Orlann sat at the long slab of onyx serving as a conference table in the king’s private office, reading through his cousin’s latest reports from Valemont, the neutral capital of the planet Syrus and the home of the planetary council.
“Well, you clipped his wings on purpose,” Jude reminded his middle brother. So that Rhody, as his temporary representative on the council, would have no authority to act on behalf of Stead Camden without Orlann’s direct supervision.
“Yes, but I wasn’t supposed to have to deal with him for so long. It’s been more than three months.”
“The first term is over next week, right?” Jude looked up from the camera feeds he’d been staring at. “Then there’s a one-month recess, and you won’t be missing anything. So calm the fuck down and help us focus on the problem at hand, so we’ll have something to report, after the recess.”
Orlann lifted one dark brow. “The problem at hand, being how to convince our little princess to make use of the copious amounts of seed we’ve been pumping into her?”
“Precisely.”
“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem for long.” Malac leaned forward on the couch to retrieve his mug from the coffee table. “Give me a couple of weeks to make her feel like a real princess again, and she’ll be dropping eggs like a hen in a chicken coop.” He took a long sip from his mug. “Soon after that, she’ll be round with my child.”
“You do know that’s not how this works, right?” Jude looked up from his com device to frown at his youngest brother. “Even if you manage to seduce her—”
“And that’s a big if,” Orlann interrupted.
“—there’s no guarantee that your swimmers will be the ones to break through.”
Malac shrugged. “I hear what you’re saying, but it seems logical to me that the man she falls in love with will be the one her body is most receptive to. So you can say whatever you want about the baby, but we all know that first one will be mine.”
Orlann rolled his eyes. “Okay, Malac’s delusion aside, we need a solid plan—”
“A backup plan,” Malac insisted.
“—because we cannot report to the council empty-handed next month.”
“I won’t lose her,” Jude growled.
“We’re not going to let that happen,” Malac assured him.
Jude nodded absently, still staring at the small screen, where he’d hardly seen Maari move all morning. “She said something last night that gave me an idea. She can choose to have a baby with someone she doesn’t love, if she truly wants one. So maybe the key isn’t making her fall for one of us; it’s making her want a baby.”
Orlann reached through the virtual screen projected by his com device and lifted Gareth Delayne’s severed, preserved head—the king’s grisly centerpiece—to move it out of his line of sight. “I still say we try harvesting her eggs for in vitro fertilization. Science, brothers. That’s the key.”
“Unless her body rejects the pregnancy.” Jude stood from his chair and sank onto the front edge of his massive desk. “I’m afraid that no amount of science can make this particular woman carry a child she doesn’t want. Even if we force her to conceive one.”
“Jude may be onto something.” Malac leaned forward on the couch, his elbows resting on his knees. “I’m not saying my efforts at seduction are going to fail, because they’re not. But you’re right that it never hurts to have a backup plan. So, what makes a woman want babies?”
“If I understood what makes a woman tick, I’d be king of the galaxy, not just of Stead Camden,” Jude said.
Orlann snorted at the familiar refrain, which his brother had used to lament the inscrutable mysteries of everything from crying toddlers and baying dogs to the infamously unpredictable schedule of the inter-Stead mag lev system. “Hormones,” he said. “Again, brothers, the answer is science. Hormones make a woman want to procreate. They make her arms ache to hold a baby just like they make her cunt ache to be filled by a man.”
Malac laughed. “You have neither a cunt nor female hormones, so what’s your excuse?”
Orlann arched one brow at him. “A real man wants what he wants; no excuses necessary.”
“A real man takes what he wants,” his younger brother said.
Orlann nodded. “That, too.”
“Yes, hormones,” Jude mused, ignoring them both. “But again, I’m worried that she’ll be less receptive to any needles and chemicals we shove into her than she’s been to our cocks.”
Malac sat straight up on the sofa. “Wait! Orlann just gave us the solution. Babies!”
“The solution to making her want babies is babies?” Jude frowned. “You do understand that if we already had a baby, we wouldn’t need to make another one, right?”
“Someone else’s baby,” Malac clarified. “My mother used to say that every time someone let her hold a baby, she wanted another one of her own.”
But their father had only allowed his concubine one child, out of respect for his wife, the queen. Jude and Orlann’s mother.
“Okay, that’s much less asinine than most of his suggestions,” Orlann admitted. “We saw the same thing with Lynna and Calla, when each of your brats were born, Jude. Our sisters weren’t even grown yet, but the moment they were handed an infant, they wanted one of their own. It’s like some kind of procreational envy.”
“So, we need to let Maari hold a small child?” Jude was fascinated by the idea. Could it be so simple?
“Yeah. If only we knew someone who had a couple of kids…” Malac stared pointedly at the desktop holograms of the king’s two daughters, constantly in motion as the girls ran toward their father, who’d taken the motion-capture himself.
“No,” Jude growled. “Maari is to have nothing to do with Geneva or her girls.”
“How long do you think you can keep that decree intact?” Malac asked. “Especially if Maari’s children will be growing up alongside yours?”
“The children will be raised together—like siblings or cousins—as we were.”
“That’s not exactly how I remember it,” Malac mumbled.
“But Maari has no business around Geneva’s children. She needs to remember her place.”
“She needs to understand her place,” Orlann said. “And she needs to be taught to accept it.” Then he turned to Malac. “Jude’s right. Your mother didn’t come to family dinners or birthday parties. She occupied a different wing of the palace—and a different sphere of our father’s life—than our mother did. And we were not a part of that sphere. We didn’t socialize with your mother. Hell, we rarely even saw her.”
“When we were little, anyway.” But Jude had seen quite a bit of his father’s concubine—Malac’s mother—once he was older. Not that he had any intention of telling his youngest brother that. “Maa
ri spending time with my children is out of the question. Even if I were amenable to that—and I’m not—Geneva’s already feeling threatened by Maari. I promised that my concubine wouldn’t intrude upon her life, and she needs to know that I’m going to keep my word.”
Orlann shrugged. “It sounds to me like she needs a good hard swat on the backside.”
“She’s pregnant.”
“I’m not suggesting punching her in the stomach, am I? A reasonable spanking won’t hurt the baby, and that woman needs a reminder that she doesn’t run Stead Camden, nor does she run this palace.”
“You manage your household, and I’ll manage mine,” Jude growled.
“I don’t have a household.”
“Exactly.” But Orlann was not wrong. The king’s wife had been happy to submit to her husband in all matters, until the council had given them Maari.
“There are plenty of other babies in the world,” Malac said, drawing his brothers back on-topic. “Why don’t you just throw a party for your girls, then sneak one of the children into Maari’s apartment and insist that she hold it.”
Jude eyed him skeptically. “You want me to steal a child away from its mother and shove it into my concubine’s arms?”
“Our concubine.”
“He isn’t one for subtlety,” Orlann observed. “But it’s not a bad idea, if you can come up with a reasonable excuse to put Maari and a couple of small children in the same room.”
Yet his brother’s improbable idea had given Jude a much better one.
“I know that look.” Malac set his empty mug on the coffee table. “What are you thinking?”
Jude stood and waved his brothers toward the door, signaling an end to the meeting. “I’ll fill you in after I’ve had time to make some arrangements.”
Orlann frowned as he picked up his com device, which automatically closed the virtual screen. “I don’t like surprises.”
But Jude knew that wasn’t entirely true. Orlann didn’t like to be on the receiving end of surprises. “Go on, now. I have other things to get done,” the king said.
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