The Traitor's Heir

Chapter Twenty-Three

            "Yet the young king refused.  It was later said that he was in love with a kitchen maid, but records kept, in the private journal of the Za'Reekean envoy who was at court at the time, show that this was not true.  Lady Amerela, had only just come of age, and ruled over her small region of Hlant, with grace and kindness.  Her own parents had died when she was very young and she had been raised by an aunt, but had recently returned to take over the running and managing of her own small part of the kingdom soon after her sixteenth birthday."

            "It was written by the Za'Reekean envoy that the king loved her from the moment that he saw her when she was presented at court.  A whirlwind courtship followed.  The pressure from the royal council, who had been formed to advise the king, was intense, but he resisted, and in a quiet, secret ceremony, he married her.  The Lords were powerful though, and the young king was not quite as firmly upon his throne as he wished.  And so he did not immediately announce the engagement to the world, a mistake that those close to him said that he regretted until the day that he died. Although truly he could never know how much he should have regretted it, for all that followed after came from the choices he made during this twilight of happiness in the realm, but he did not live to see the worst of it.

If he had announced the marriage publicly, it wouldn't have been so easy for the lords of the kingdom to undo.  The people would have loved a Queen from their own land, even if it wouldn't have been as beneficial for the kingdom.  But he hesitated, in the face of intense pressure.  He began to realize that there were those with great power and influence in the aristocracy who would have liked to see a change in dynasties and who thought their own families might stand a chance of rising to the pinnacle of power in the kingdom if the little kinglet was knocked from his throne.

The king did not know that Amerela had been sent away until she was already gone.  It was only much, much later, long after he had taken the bargain to save her life by marrying the foreign princess, an alliance which richly lined the pockets of those who arranged it, that he found out the truth.  Lady Amerela was with child.  And somehow that child survived.

It's been said by many that this is where the story of the kitchen maid comes in.  In a small, drafty castle, in a corner of the world where the woman who would have been queen was more or less a prisoner, the child was born.  It is said that the Lady Amerela had been locked in a tower and only her lady was allowed in and out, and so it was easy enough for her to hide her expanding waistline.  And her maid was loyal to her to the end.

She was the one who managed to smuggle the boy out when he was quite small.  Still she knew that if she kept him herself too many suspicions would be aroused and so child was smuggled to the family of the cook in the land that Amerela had grown up in, for the fair queen had been quite close to the cook when she was a child and knew that she would care for the boy as her own.

The king was married and the boy grew and in time the Lady Amerela married a minor lord.  For many years she refused the offers for her hand, but with the king remarried she realized that the only way she would ever be allowed out of the tower was if she conceded to the repeated demands that she marry one of the suitors that those who held her captive felt was appropriate for a lady in her position, in other words, as a lady who would need to be carefully guarded all her days.

The boy was seven years old when his mother married, although she was never allowed to return to court.  He, however, was secured a position at the castle.  It is quite certain that however this feat was managed, those involved, beyond Amerela, her lady in waiting, and the cook who raised the boy, likely didn't know the boy's paternity.  The Za'Reekean envoy's journal, from which so much valuable information has been obtained, suggests that Lady Amerela's new husband secured the position as a favor to a woman that he believed had been kind to his wife during her long years away from polite society.