standing beside my lord until God finds it fit to help us all shake off the law that has been so cruelly brought down upon us. I have received the blessing of our beloved church, but now I beg of you to share your own blessings of hearth and home with me. I come from a warm country far to the south. Let me now know the warmth that is Lanyarch!”
All the voices that had babbled in contempt now rise in a furor, raw welcoming cheers and stamping feet, tartaned men sending ear-shattering whistles to drive back the sound of rain. They swear fealty, one after the other, while Charles stands at Sandalia’s side, distant and polite. He doesn’t see the masses before him; his gaze is cast to the glorious stained glass windows that tell of Christ’s suffering. He thinks not of his country’s future, but of his own part in the King of Heaven’s tale.
Sandalia, her absent king at her side, rides the breadth and width of Lanyarch all through the winter, chapping her fine skin and accepting dark bread and ale as her nightly meals. She sleeps before the fire in common rooms and learns, poorly, to weave a tartan, but most of all she learns the laughter of the crude Lanyarchan people, and learns to share it.
In the springtime she retreats to the capital city of Agned, insisting she can hardly be expected to bear an heir when she and Charles spend their nights crowded into common rooms with little time to themselves. The people whistle and roar and share ribald winks, all of them more than half in love with the dusky princess from the south, and grant her privacy to tend to the serious business of making a child.
Fifteen months from their wedding date, Charles’s story ends in a phlegm-filled fit of coughing, leaving his wife without the rounded belly she’s promised her people. Rumour whispers Charles has gone to the grave as godly and pure as he came from the womb, no woman ever breached by his sword.
Sandalia, queen of Lanyarch, belovéd to her people and no longer protected by a husband whose claim to the throne is incontestable, gathers her skirts and flees her adopted northern land with the threat of the Titian Bitch at her back.
* * * *
SANDALIA, QUEEN OF LANYARCH
17 October 1563
Gallin, northeast of Essandia
She wears a sheepskin, not against biting wind, but to remind her deserted country that she has not forgotten it. The skin doesn’t suit a silver-shot gown encrusted with pearls, nor the mildness of the Gallic day; the sky lies against the horizon as pale and calm as it does directly overhead, autumn’s sunshine enough to make the day bright and delightful without blinding the youthful Lanyarchan queen.
She wears a sheepskin to remind the gathered throngs who call her name as she rides through Lutetian streets in a carriage behind six matched white horses that she does not come to their king merely a princess, but as a queen in her own right. A queen in exile, to be sure, but a queen loved by her people, and a queen whose faith supports her. She has forgone a crown; such an obvious symbol of power speaks of desperation, a crassness in announcing who she is. Sandalia needs not stoop so low.
But she wears the sheepskin, and no one who sees her on her wedding day will forget it.
She rides alone that day, and when the carriage stops before the cathedral entrance, it is her brother who steps forward to offer his hand. Rodrigo, who sent her north to Lanyarch as winter came on, and who made her a queen by doing so. He had not been there to see her crowned that day, and the softness in his eyes offered apology for that now, two years later, as she goes to make another match in the name of duty.
“A new fashion?” he murmurs as she steps down from the carriage. “Will you set Lutetia on its ear and have them wearing sheepskins before winter has set in?”
Sandalia’s laughter, easy and bright, rolls through the autumn air and reaches the cathedral ahead of her. Behind her and to all sides, voices soar in approval of the young queen’s mirth. It is a good sign, the people agree, that Sandalia goes happy to their king. That she’s a princess of Essandia and not one of their own Gallic-born high ladies is forgiven today, on her wedding day,