Queen's Heart: An Arthurian Paranormal Romance (Arthurian Hearts Book 2) (22 page)

My heart cried bitter tears.

“Yseult!” Mark’s command was clear as he rose and extended his hand. “We have one more duty between us this night.”

Giggling again, on cue, my handmaids appeared at the table to pull me from my chair and escort me to Mark’s chamber, ahead of the king.

Mead-muddled, I had no time for more than a last panicked look at Tris and Des as I was trundled off.

“Wait!” I cried to no avail. The king’s word trumped mine and I was whisked away.

Not knowing whether Tris said yay or nay.

Once inside the king’s chamber, two of the handmaids stripped the shift from me as a third turned down the bedclothes.

“Have a pleasant night,” one giggled as they bowed their way out and Mark, already stripped of his surcoat and tunic, entered.

Like a drunken hare—frightened and naked—I stood before the king.
My husband
, I had to remind myself. The same smile that I’d seen on my father’s face when he’d just purchased a prized broodmare for his stables spread across Mark’s face on first sight of me. It didn’t take long, however, for that pride at new ownership to transform to lust as first his eyes then his hands appraised me. First, he weighed my breasts in each hand, testing their tips with his thumbs. Then he measured the girth of my hips between his palms.

“Take off my boots,” he commanded in the same voice he would use for a servant.

What choice did I have? I obeyed, working as efficiently as possible with him sitting on the edge of the bed watching the swing of my breasts as I removed first one then the other boot.

He pulled me into his lap and crushed his mead-soaked lips to mine. I shut my eyes so I didn’t have to see his leathered face creased so deeply with the cares and worries of kingship. When his tongue pushed against my lips demanding entrance I pretended ignorance and refused to admit him in.

Laughing, he drew back. “I will make a wench of you yet,” he told me.

Dropping me from his lap he stood and dropped his leggings. Roused already by anticipation, mead and my naked presence, his root—it could not be called a staff so short and thick it hung—quivered when my gaze fell upon it.

“You need have no fear, Yseult. I will not harm you.”

Not with
that
, I silently agreed. His was practically a child’s toy compared to the same weapons Tris and Des wielded. If he hadn’t been attempting to over-emphasize his virility I might have found his concern for me rather sweet.

It wavered.

“We must hurry,” he whispered.

I laid back on the samite sheets—far different from the rope bed, the sea cave floor and the garden wall I was used to. The smooth, wide bed and the dark night craved a long and slow seduction.

Clambering on top of me, Mark roughly kneed my legs apart. Panting the sickly sweet smell of mead into my face, he held himself above me with one arm and concentrated on finding then guiding himself into me with the other.

I waited for his long, slow thrusts. Instead I got a frantic push or two then he was shuddering from chest to calves and I felt the seed of our union that was to produce a Cornish heir dribbling out around his softening flesh.

He grabbed and kneaded a breast as he shriveled inside me.

“Ah, my fair and beautiful queen,” he said when his panting eased and he could speak again, “that was heaven itself. And since our duty first and foremost is to get an heir upon you, heaven will be revisited until we do so.”

I stifled my sigh of resignation, seeing endless nights roll out before me. “As you will, Your Grace,” I managed.

“Good. I will instruct your ladies to bring you here once a week until the midwives are certain you’re with child.”

I very nearly laughed my relief into his face. Once a
week
? “May God soon grant your heir,” I said, most generously.

Visibly tired, he rolled off me. “Your ladies wait for you without.” His flicked his thumb a last time over the peak of a breast as if to coax it to attention. His face fell in disappointment when it didn’t respond.

“Your Grace?”

“I’m tired and drunk and need to sleep. Go. Back to your own bed. I’ll have you called again next week.” He turned away with a drunken groan and was snoring by the time I reached my shift where one of the handmaids had draped in over the back of a chair.

“Are you feeling more like a queen now, Your Grace?” the motherly lady-in-waiting asked when I slipped out the king’s door.

To her amaze I smiled. “Between you and me, I never thought Mark would make me so happy.”

The next two months of being Mark’s queen were a mix of frustration, bliss when I was with Tris and regret that I would never be again with Des. Sober, Mark clearly knew his performance as husband and heir-sirer was a disappointment to all and a great embarrassment to him. But when he met me in bed he was never sober, and more times than not, no matter how much he urged and prodded, his root lay unresponsive between us, or else he spilled his royal seed on the bedclothes or in my curls.

In private, he blundered his way through what little time he spent with me, unable to face for long the censure and derision he knew must be in my heart. Shamefully, I felt all he thought I would. Had I loved him, I would have had patience with him, would have cradled him and stroked him and performed on him what tricks Tris and Des had taught. Instead, I lay as passive as his root, glad for him to give up as early as he did. Not caring that he sent me away not because he didn’t worship my youth and beauty but out of wounded pride.

It wasn’t that he lacked the courage to face me. It was that he couldn’t face himself.

In public he indulged in all the lustful thoughts about me he could never make reality in private. On holy days, I sat at his side at the feasts and he fed me from his trencher. Wherever he could under the eyes of his men he filled his hands with me, nuzzled me, and ran his lips over whatever bare skin he could find.

It wasn’t pretense. What began as duty turned quickly enough to lust and ended in a perverse and desperate love. Maybe he compensated in his heart for what he couldn’t accomplish in bed.

Mine would have been a pathetic life if I’d had to rely on Mark to fulfill it. As it was, Des, with no other duties as a guest of the castle save to train a squire or two, spent the days with me. We rode the cliffs and picnicked by the sea. Each day he shared a little more of himself with me, and I learned of Herne his father and of his great love, Brinn, who’d left him broken when she’d chosen another—or rather two others at first, it seemed—men of arms, who’d made her heart sing.

“Are you not afraid that by loving me, it will be as Brinn all over again?” I asked gently.

The loss and devastation so raw in Des’ face and voice would have undone me if not for the words he spoke. “I have no regret for loving her. Without her, I would never have known the utter joy I found with her, never known my own heart’s depths. She lessoned me in what love could mean and each lesson she taught I cherish to this day. Had I known in our beginning that we were doomed, I still would not have changed a moment of it.”

“I cannot lay with you again,” I told him, not wishing to become another Brinn for him.

“So you said before we found ourselves in our cave by the sea.
Never
is a very long time—and fae are very patient.”

“And if we were to remain chaste forever?” I persisted.

“I should love you still.” He shrugged in helplessness. “How could I not?”

“Do you still love Brinn?”

His wistful smile nearly broke my heart. “How could I not?”

In the evenings, I heard Des’ hound haunting the woods—Morois, as the Cornish named them—about Tintagel.

We touched still and kissed like brother and sister. Sometimes I would hold him in my lap, naked, his clothes piled neatly by, and he would shift in my arms. I never tired of that miracle, of the great trust he had in me to keep his secret safe.

Occasionally Tris joined us on our rides, but had duties to attend—disputes to settle, nobles to appease, and coffers to help fill. His nights, though—the ones I didn’t spend with Mark—were all for me. Pleasant summer nights we spent in the king’s courtyard. On nights when the weather turned, he came to my bower, making his way with all stealth to my bed.

Des alone knew of our trysts. As much as he trusted me to keep his secret so I trusted him to keep ours. I knew his rage and his jealousy, but I also knew his heart.

I had thought the spell of my mother’s potion might wear off and diminish with time. But each night Tris and I came together, the urgency and passion seemed to grow. We grew bold in our intimacies, abusing the bed, the garden wall, the garden benches in every imaginable delight possible.

Sometimes, I would think, Des watched.

“What if,” I asked into Tris’ mouth as I knelt over him on one of the benches on a moonless night, “we asked Des to join us?”

Not even sure whether I myself was jesting or not, I followed the play of emotions across Tris’ face—open shock that I would suggest it, a narrowing of his eyes as he questioned whether I meant it, wonderment as he peered deeper into my eyes considering the possibility of it.

I twitched a muscle around him and he gasped.

“Maybe,” he whispered, his breaths deepening. “Later. I’m not done with you myself yet.” Then he was proving it as I rode him through the starred sky.

Later would be soon enough.

~ ~ ~

“You and Tris have to be more careful,” Des told me on Lammas Day as we sat on a rocky shore. A sharp scent of brine pounded in with the surf. “Mark has another nephew, Andret—”

“—I’ve met him. Petty and ambitious. Tris knows he wants the throne, but Mark has little love for him.

“Maybe not now.” He clasped my hand between his. “But Andret is eager to curry Mark’s favor. And he may have discovered a way.” Des looked pointedly at me. I should have guessed the words to come but I was too blinded by bliss to even think our secret might be endangered. “A rumor was let fly yesterday that Tris is cuckolding the king.”

I went still, my hand cold between Des’ warmth. “Who would believe him? What proof—?”

“He only needs Mark to doubt. From a tiny crack a great rift may grow. All that either of you do—where you go, for how long, with whom—will be suspect at least for a time.”

“And what of us?” I cried in frustration. “Here, alone. We make no secret of it when we ride out.”

“Much as I desire to be, I’m not the one who
is
cuckolding the king. Besides,” his wry grin stilled my protests, “the court has little reason to think I have designs on any woman. I may have let spread my own rumor about the sex I prefer for the person whom I bed. We are safe, you and I. Not so you and Tris.”

Had he only been indulging this rumor, then, when he propositioned Tris on my wedding night?

“Andret is vigilant now and the courtyard walls are… accessible. He will have spies of the knights, of the staff, of your own handmaids, perhaps. Not everyone is so enamored of peace with Ireland as Mark nor of Tris as you.”

“Are you saying we shouldn’t even see one another?” My chest constricted in panic at the thought.

“For a week, yes. Two would be better. A month best of all. Let Andret grow bored with the waiting.”

“There has to be another way.”

“Short of slaying Andret and anyone else he’s wooed into his conspiracy, I can think of none. Go to the king for the next few nights. Prove your loyalty is to Cornwall.”

I shook my head. Panic ate at me, nor for anything Andret might do, but for being reft of Tris. “You don’t know what you ask!”

Des was all patience with me, unreasonable as even I knew myself to be. “That’s Isolde’s spell that preys upon you. Nothing more. Believe me, Yseult, I—”

“Believe you? The very air you breathe is tainted with deceit.” Some demon took hold of me then, spoke with my mouth and forced vile thoughts into my head. “You’re so adept at lies and rumors, perhaps it was
you
who whispered ‘betrayal’ into Andret’s ears.”

“Yseult—”

“You want us apart. Need us apart. Only when we’re apart will you have a chance at either of us. Who do you really want more—me or Tris? Or does it even matter, so long as you have one of us to slake yourself upon?”