The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince by Hobb Robin Read Free Book Online Page A

this pronouncement that she needed no man cut his love at the root. Or perhaps he had never loved her at all. Perhaps he was relieved she did not name him nor seek him out. If what he had done to her had become common knowledge, there would have been only one fate for him.
    I think perhaps Caution expected some sort of response from him. In the days that followed she seemed on edge, as if waiting for something. I would be about my tasks in her chambers and look up to find her staring at me, as if measuring my belly or comparing my form to hers to see why he might have wanted me. It was only later, when I looked back over that time, that I realized that she never doubted me. She never questioned me about my supposed tryst with her lover, never asked how many times I’d been with him or if he’d muttered fond words to me. She believed me. She trusted me.
    I have to believe, then, that she loved me. Loved me more than she loved him, that she had such faith in my word. To my knowledge, she never even gave him the chance to claim he had been faithful to her. My hasty words had cut him from her heart.
    Days turned to weeks turned to months. Time crawls and rushes with pregnancy. I was more aware of the Queen-in-Waiting’s pregnancy than my own. Caution did not retire from court life, but plunged into it, yet not to dance and gamble and listen to the minstrels as she once had. Instead she applied herself to learning its inner workings. She began to have a care for where the supplies came from for the seamstresses and spinners, for the cooks and the warriors. Some few times she visited the judgment chambers and listened to her father solve disputes, but chiefly she involved herself in the domestic aspects of Buckkeep, and I think that pleased her father very much.
    A few times I found her at her window, looking down on the courtyard and the stables beyond it. Lostler exercised the Spotted Stud daily, as he always had. I suspect he took great comfort in his beast companion, as those who have the Wit-magic do. She could not help but see him take the big stallion out. Once she caught me watching her and shrugged. “It is scarcely worth my while paying the keep for that beast now that I can no longer ride him. I should sell him at the next fair; I have read that it is good to change the stallions in a stable, to keep the breeding blood fresh.” And I nodded but did not think she could ever bring herself to do it. Even then, I believed that sooner or later she would go down to her lover, find a way to have words with him, and that my deceit might be discovered. I dreaded it and feared it, but mostly I treasured every moment that I had her to myself again.
    The winter turned to spring, and the babes in our bellies kicked and turned. The court seemed almost to have accepted the Queen-in-Waiting’s solo production of an heir. There was gossip still and speculation and rumor, but they seemed to hold back their judgment of her. Her father, I know, was pleased with her more subdued air and her attention to the business of the keep, and perhaps her nobles were as well. At least, there was no more talk of replacing her. No noble youths came to court her anymore, true, but it seemed to me that the more mature of her nobles now cast a considering eye on her, and I thought that, after the babe was born, she might find a different crop of suitors coming to call, despite her renunciation of any husband.
    She carried the final months of her pregnancy well, for the morning sickness left her. She even began to go out and about, though only within the keep. She took tea with her ladies, and visited again the weaving and sewing rooms, and sat by the great hearth in the evenings with her ladies to hear the minstrels sing.
    The Cattle and Horse Fair was always held in spring, and so it came that year. It scarcely seemed that it could have been a full two years since first she had beheld the Spotted Stud and his stuttering groom, and yet it was. It was