Queen of the Unwanted

by Jenna Glass

  His councilors shifted uncomfortably, glances darting around the table. None would meet his eyes, which was not a good sign. Every man at the table should be feeling the same outrage that burned in their king’s breast, but one look at the sons of bitches was all he needed to see that they would rather accept the insult than take action.

  Grinding his teeth, he leaned his fists on the council table and glared at his lord chancellor, who had the seat directly to his right, forcing the man to meet his eyes.

  “We will discuss punitive measures to show our strong displeasure at this friendly gesture to our sworn enemy,” he said in a tone that left no room for argument.

  The chancellor had put on his most neutral expression—one Delnamal knew was meant to hide disagreement.

  “Your Majesty,” the chancellor began, with the exaggerated caution of a man who was picking his words too carefully, “Khalpar is our closest ally.”

  Delnamal shook his head and sneered. “They’re supposed to be, and yet they’ve given aid to our enemy while refusing to help us. We cannot merely roll over and show them our belly when they’ve shown such rampant disregard for our alliance.”

  The chancellor’s eyes held a hint of panic as he struggled to find a response, but the lord commander came to his rescue.

  “I don’t think King Khalvin meant any insult by the decision,” he said. “He is merely being practical. I’ll wager someone in the abbess’s entourage—if not the abbess herself—is a spy, and the jewels were merely a bribe to convince Alysoon to allow the Khalpari to cross her borders.”

  It was the same excuse Delnamal’s mother had given for her brother, but it was as unconvincing in Lord Aldnor’s voice as it had been in the dowager’s. “If that were the case, the least he could have done was send word to Aaltah that such was his intention. No. He is flexing his muscles, establishing his dominance. He does not show me the respect he showed my father, and if I don’t push back, he will have the measure of me.”

  “With all due respect, Your Majesty, I cannot imagine King Khalvin making a genuine overture toward Women’s Well,” Lord Aldnor argued. “He—”

  Delnamal cut his lord commander off with an abrupt hand gesture. “I didn’t say it was a genuine overture. I said he’s testing me. And I’m going to show him what I’m made of so he never does it again.”

  A flush of red was slowly creeping up Lord Aldnor’s neck, visible even beneath his sun-darkened skin. The lord commander was slow to anger, but as his subordinates at the Citadel knew well, he was a force to be reckoned with when sufficiently provoked. “If we take offense when none was meant,” he said, his voice level but his eyes flashing, “we could do irreparable damage to our relationship with Khalpar. I must urge Your Majesty—and this council—to consider the consequences before taking any rash measures.”

  “I will take your recommendation under advisement,” Delnamal snapped, making no attempt to play at sincerity. “And we will impose a new five percent tariff on all imports from Khalpar.”

  The faces of his councilors would have been funny if Delnamal didn’t know what those expressions presaged. The flush finished rising up the lord commander’s neck and flooded his face with red. The chancellor stared at him with openmouthed horror, and the lord high treasurer looked like he might be in need of smelling salts. Delnamal wondered if perhaps he should have tempered his anger just a bit, maybe imposing something more like a wrist-slap, perhaps only a one percent tariff. Something that communicated his displeasure without being quite so…outrageous. But it was too late now. Lord Aldnor’s insistence on being “reasonable” had had quite the opposite effect, and Delnamal figured it was his own council that most needed to be taught a lesson in paying proper respect to their king.

  “King Khalvin would never accept such a tariff,” the treasurer said, his face unnaturally pale.

  “He will have no choice,” Delnamal said.

  “Of course he will,” Lord Aldnor said. “He can choose to impose tariffs of his own and send his export goods elsewhere. Our treasury is already strained to the limit from our muster of troops. We cannot—”

  “Enough!” Delnamal bellowed, causing more than one council member to flinch.

  Why did everyone always have to oppose him like this? When his father had given an order, his advisers had scurried to obey, and yet Delnamal had to fight a battle for every little thing he requested. He understood why his own mother treated him like a child—from what he could see, all mothers did the same—but there was no excuse for his royal council behaving the same way.

  “I’ve given it a great deal of thought,” he said, trying to sound calm and reasonable even as he wanted to slap some sense into the cowardly eunuchs who sought to advise him. “The tariff is the best way to prove to King Khalvin that we mean business. It needn’t be a long-term measure—if Khalvin shows himself to have received the message.” The lord chancellor opened his mouth to speak, but Delnamal cut him off. “The matter is not up for debate. I have decided.”

  The chancellor’s mouth snapped shut for a half second; then he began stammering like an idiot.

  “I beg your pardon, Your Majesty,” the lord commander said, his face no longer flushed, but his expression stony, “but the council must vote on this proposed tariff before it can be imposed.”

  It was a fact of which Delnamal was well aware—and part of the reason why he had entered the council chamber angry in the first place. He’d known they would wring their hands and whimper like women. And like women, they would need to see that he was in charge. Whenever he raised his voice to his wife, she cringed and quickly backed down—just as Shelvon had done before her—and he hoped his womanish council would react the same way and he could thus avoid a long, drawn-out debate. He was not entirely surprised that Lord Aldnor was not so easily intimidated. The man was, after all, used to imposing his will on his military subordinates. But though he was a member of the higher council—the lord chancellor, the lord chamberlain, the lord high treasurer, and the lord commander—and his vote was weighted accordingly, he was only one man. Delnamal hoped he had effectively set the tone.

  “Very well. We vote.” He glared at the lord chancellor. “What say you?”

  The man visibly quailed as Delnamal stood and towered over him. Which made his barely whispered “Nay” all the more shocking.

  “What did you say?” Delnamal demanded, sure he must have heard wrong. The man looked about ready to piss his pants. Surely he would not dare to cast a vote in opposition to his king.

  “I’m sorry, Your Majesty,” the chancellor said, setting his jaw stubbornly, “but I cannot support a tariff on such slight provocation. Aaltah cannot afford to lose Khalpar’s support in the current political environment. So I must regretfully vote nay.”

  In the end, only the grand magus and the marshal—shameless toadies, both—voted to impose the tariff. Delnamal listened to the vote in dumbfounded silence. The rage that had coursed through his blood, that had fueled him through a long and sleepless night as he’d pondered how to respond to King Khalvin’s perfidy, drained out of him, leaving a bone-deep weariness behind.

  He was the king of one of the most powerful lands in all of Seven Wells. He had taken to wife the woman he had loved since childhood, and his heir was growing steadily in her belly. He had everything he had once yearned for. And yet, somehow, he found himself wishing for the simpler days when he’d been the crown prince and no one had expected anything from him. His marriage to Shelvon had been miserable, and the bitch had lost his heir. But she had never dared to look at him reproachfully as he sometimes caught Oona doing when his temper bubbled over. And no one had dared to defy him so openly as his council had just done.

  His head suddenly throbbing, he looked across the table at Lord Aldnor. It was all the lord commander’s fault! If the self-important ass hadn’t spoken against the tariff, the rest of the council n
ever would have dared to defy him.

  “Lord Aldnor,” he said in a flat, dead voice. “You are hereby relieved of duty. You may retire with honor, or you can be removed from office, but you will leave the council chamber immediately and your lieutenant will take your place for future meetings.”

  He was vaguely aware of the expressions of shock and dismay on the faces all around the council chamber, but his eyes remained fixed on Lord Aldnor, whose face might as well have turned to stone for all the expression on it.

  The former lord commander slowly pushed back his chair, his posture painfully stiff and proper. “As you wish, Your Majesty,” he said, bowing with crisp precision. Then without another word or backward glance, he left the council room.

  * * *

  —

  Chanlix’s stomach seized with dread at the soft knock on her back door, even though she’d been expecting it. She had, after all, sent Tynthanal a message asking him to come by during the night. No doubt he was assuming she’d summoned him for an assignation, putting into practice the new, more discreet method of seeing each other that they had concocted now that his wedding to Kailee was less than a week away. If only Chanlix thought he would receive her news with even a fraction of the joy she felt…

  Smoothing her damp palms against her skirts, Chanlix opened the door to find Tynthanal standing there, smiling at her. It was surely her nerves getting the best of her, but though the smile reached and warmed his eyes, she could have sworn it was dimmer and less confident than what she was accustomed to. A frown line quickly formed between his brows, and he stepped hastily over the threshold with an expression of concern.

  “What is it?” he asked, putting his hands gently on her shoulders. “What is wrong?”

  Chanlix swallowed the lump of anxiety in her throat and gave him the most reassuring smile she could muster. “Nothing’s wrong,” she assured him, though he might not agree with her assessment. “It’s just…I have something to tell you. I have some tea laid out in the sitting room.” She turned to lead the way, but Tynthanal caught her hand. No doubt he noticed the dampness of her palms despite her efforts to dry them.

  “Please, Chanlix,” he said, squeezing that damp hand. “There’s obviously something wrong. Don’t leave me wondering and worrying.”

  Sighing softly, she turned back toward him. She had spent nearly the entire day trying to figure out how best to tell him and had finally settled on a carefully rehearsed speech to be given over a soothing cup of tea before the comforting warmth of a crackling fire.

  It had been a silly plan, an attempt to control that which could not be controlled.

  Meeting his eyes, she searched for a semblance of inner peace to help her weather the storm she feared was on the horizon. “It seems one of the fertility potions Alys made for you had a delayed effect,” she said, for that was the only way she could explain what had happened.

  Tynthanal frowned with puzzlement. “I don’t understand. We already knew one of them worked. That’s why Kailee and I passed our bloodline test.” His voice came out ever so slightly tight, and Chanlix thought that whether he’d consciously acknowledged it or not, some part of him understood immediately what she meant.

  “When your bloodline test with Kailee showed you were cured, I assumed that meant the reason our last bloodline test failed was because I was barren,” she said, knowing he had made the same assumption. What other reason could there have been? Save one neither of them had considered. “But it turns out I am not barren, after all.”

  Chanlix put her hand to her belly, hardly able to believe that after she had finally convinced herself that she could never be a mother, a new life had miraculously kindled. Tynthanal stared at her, his mouth open and his eyes wide, but he seemed to find no words for her.

  “I wanted to confirm once and for all that our assumption was correct,” she said. “I wanted to kill the last stubborn hint of hope that would always have left me wondering if I could have had a child by another man.” Pain flickered in Tynthanal’s eyes, and Chanlix hastened to reassure him. “I was simply trying to reassure myself. I wasn’t planning to leave you.”

  Still, Tynthanal said nothing as he struggled to absorb what she was telling him.

  “I performed a fertility test on my own blood,” she said. It was the same test Tynthanal’s mother had long ago performed on him, although thanks to society’s insistence that childbearing was entirely the responsibility of women, men were almost never administered the same test. “The test showed me to be fertile.” She rubbed her belly. “And I realized my monthly was a little late, which I had dismissed as a symptom of stress…” She let her voice trail off.

  “But it wasn’t stress,” Tynthanal said, and she couldn’t read the emotions in his voice and his face.

  “No. It wasn’t.”

  “You’re pregnant,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. He cast his gaze around her small kitchen, locating a stool and promptly dropping down onto it as if his knees could no longer support him. His face had gone pale, his eyes haunted.

  Not at all the reaction Chanlix would have liked to receive to her declaration, although it was hardly surprising. They had planned to revisit the question of whether he would father a child if and when his inability was cured, but thanks to their assumption that the inability lay with her, the conversation had never happened. He had tacitly agreed to the proposition when he’d first started taking the potions, but never with any great pleasure.

  “I will make no demands on you,” she said, her voice going hoarse as she struggled not to cry. “You need not act as a father to this child if you do not wish.”

  “Of course I’ll act as a father to my child!” he protested with gratifying speed. “There was never any question of that!” He reached out suddenly and took her hands, squeezing tight as he looked up into her eyes. “I just…” He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment before catching her gaze once more. “No one will scorn me or talk about me behind my back because I have had a child out of wedlock. Such is almost expected from a man of my rank. But they will scorn you, at least a little, even here. And they will pity Kailee and whisper about her and speculate about what inadequacies would send me looking for companionship elsewhere. You know they will. You and she and our child will all suffer for this, and I will be held blameless, and…and I hate that.”

  Chanlix wished she could argue, but he was certainly right. She had little doubt that she could withstand the public censure—having been an abigail for more than half her life, she had learned to let the word “whore” slide harmlessly off her back—but her heart did ache a little for Kailee. Having a publicly unfaithful husband was a trial—if a very common one—for ladies of the court, but Kailee had the additional stigma of her blindness. The poor girl had spent her entire life feeling unwanted, and the child Chanlix would bear would be a tangible proof to everyone in Women’s Well that Kailee wasn’t really wanted here, either. Not in the way she deserved to be wanted, anyway. That melancholy realization sucked some of the joy from Chanlix’s heart. It had been easier to dismiss the effects her extramarital affair with Tynthanal would have on Kailee before she had met the girl and become so fond of her.

  “I’m sorry,” Tynthanal said, raising her hands to his lips and pressing a gentle kiss on her knuckles. “I did not mean to cast a pall on your happiness. I know how badly you want this child, and I know you will be a wonderful mother.”

  She blinked away the tears that had snuck into her eyes, her throat suddenly too tight for speech. Tynthanal smiled at her, and if there was a shadow of sadness in that smile, still there was the welcome warmth of his love.

  “We will get through this,” he declared. “All three of us.” His smile warmed a little more, chasing away the sadness. “All four of us, I should say.” He let go of her hands to touch her belly, though there was no tangible sign of the new life within her yet. “I’
m going to be a father,” he whispered as if he could hardly believe it. He sounded amazed and a little frightened, but maybe just a tiny bit glad, as well. Or maybe that was the result of Chanlix’s wishful thinking.

  “You are,” she said, her voice hoarse with the tears she continued to hold back. She cleared her throat. “Would you like me to tell Kailee? She certainly deserves to hear it from one of us before anyone else so much as guesses, and she and I talk every day anyway. We could wait until after the wedding just to be sure she doesn’t change her mind, but…”

  “But then when we told her, she’d be hurt by our lack of trust.”

  Chanlix nodded. “She’s too smart not to guess that we knew before the wedding.”

  “Yes,” Tynthanal agreed. “I’m confident she will still agree to marry me even when she knows. I will tell her.”

  Chanlix’s eyes widened. “You don’t have to do that, dearest. As I said, I see her every day.”

  One corner of his mouth tipped up. “So do I. It’s astounding how much time and effort go into the preparation of a wedding. Especially when the bride spends all her daylight hours at the Academy and the work has to be compressed into what little free time she has.”

  Somehow, in her intense concentration on the vital task of keeping Mairahsol under such close scrutiny, Chanlix had missed what else was going on in Women’s Well. She knew in an offhand way that the wedding preparations were well underway, and that Tynthanal would need to participate in some of them, but she had not realized he was spending so much time with Kailee.

  “But surely your time together is not private,” Chanlix protested, for while Lady Vondelmai had somehow been persuaded to allow Kailee to come to the Academy, Kailee had mentioned on more than one occasion how her stepmother overcompensated for that freedom by sticking aggressively to her side at all other times. “This is not a conversation to be had in public.” And, though Chanlix failed to voice the thought, it seemed a conversation that might be less uncomfortable between two women than between a bride and her groom.