Sins & Virtues

Chapter Seven: A Quiet Life

Truett

Seasail, Seerfayre 

Queen Audrey, mother of the new King of Seerfayre and wife of the fallen King Caleb, died just two weeks after her husband.

The Healers would cite stress as the reason for her early labour and her weakened state for the haemorrhage that left her bleeding and dying on her birthing bed.

Timothee had forced Truett out of bed in the very early hours of the morning, when the sky was grey and the halls of the palace were already filled with concerned staff, drawn by whatever was going on around the upstairs corridor that housed the former Queen's chambers. Timothee told him Delilah was already inside, stopping him when he went to join his sister. The halls were lined with bed-ruffled servants, gathered to help and to be the forefront of the gossip. To see if the Queen would die.

Truett dismissed them all, ordering his guards to stand at either end of the corridor. It didn't matter. Everything that happened there that night, in the royal palace, would be public knowledge soon enough.

The two young men sat outside with Lady Trya, Timothee's mother, waiting, until the rays of sunlight danced across the Seer Port's blue waters, like sprites flying across the waves. Truett felt it, when the movement and tension that had filled the palace for soon long, suddenly broke and just as quickly everything fell still.

Timothee shook Truett's shoulder, pointing to the door with a shaking hand. They had stood but the doors to the suite opened before he could reach them. Nurses hurried out, running off with the bellowed orders from the Healers calling for more water and gauze.

The room was sweltering; the remaining nurses threw open the shutters to let in some air, and hung heavy with the metallic stench of blood that was permeating everywhere. Delilah stood beside the bed, clutching the red-faced baby swathed in a cotton blanket to her chest. She stared, horror clear on her pale face, at the bed where their mother lay.

Queen Audrey was still dressed in her white nightgown, now stained with red. The blood covered the sheets and the covers, dripping down to the floor and pooling in the cracks between the stones. The Healers' robes were drenched.

They worked and worked, but Truett looked at Delilah and knew it was too late. Their mother's eyes had closed and weren't opening again.

Once again the kingdom of Seerfayre was shrouded in black. The flags flew at half-mast and the ships docked in the harbour bloomed black sails from their masts. Queen Audrey's name was whispered in reverence and admiration, as if she had died with great victory and heroism, rather than the most common killer of women in history.

Princess Delilah moved into the nursery that King Truett had arranged in a spare suite a few doors down from his own, and wouldn't let anyone touch the new prince but the wet nurse, who arrived a mere hour after she was summoned from the city; a young woman whose own child was on the cusp of weaning, and the nursery nurse. The latter was an older slender woman, Inesa Allitt, she had worked in the kitchens before she left to tend to her family. The wet nurse was temporary but Delilah had already taken a liking to Inesa, and the kind, gentle woman was invited to remain at the royal palace of Stillsea Fort.

Truett attempted to manage the court without the help of his sister, but the lords and ladies preferred to speak to Delilah. He knew this; he had known it for years. He just didn't know how to communicate with them. And they certainly didn't know how to communicate with him.

He found Delilah where he expected to find her.

She was a vision. He supposed he was biassed for thinking it, but it was a fact that his sister was a vision of loveliness admired by all of Seerfayre. She had long ashy blonde hair, the same shade as his own, down to her waist and nowadays draped in a black headdress, and emerald green eyes, also like his own, embedded over high cheekbones and within supple pink skin.