Chapter 1: 1.
Queen SageMother Storgie Agar reached out exhausted arms for her newborn baby. "Why is she not wrapped in great grandmother's receiving blanket," she asked.
"Your roy'l m'highness," the midwife stammered. "That blanket is green and this here child 'tis a boy."
"A boy? But no queen ever has a boy as her third born. It's unheard of."
Honored HighSage Endis piped up, leaning on the arm of a young assistant. "It's bound to mean something."
[More heed might have been paid to her if she hadn't spent the last fifty years making the same response to any event of note and many that were not. Just that morning when she had no eggs for breakfast Endis had remarked 'It's bound to mean something' when everyone knew it was just that Sagewife Mala was too soft-hearted to kill the old hens and replace them. So many in the flock were now too old to lay.]
"Another son," Storgie said wearingly.
She resisted the urge to check the truth of it. Midwife Prosie was hardly going to mistake an outie for an innie. Her care and caution in her craft was the very reason she had been scooped up from her distant village and brought to attend the birth. As Storgie's husband, the king, was wont to say: in matters of skill, practice counts for more than breeding.
The baby was chilled from whatever the seers did when they whisked a babe away at the moment of birth—even though they had him barely a handful of moments. The little boy did not complain, blinking up at her blearily. Their haste in returning him was reassuring. If the auguries were powerful, they took longer--as had been the case with both her prior sons.
"A third prince," Storgie muttered. "Well, he should be of no great consequence then." And although she was not overly proud of the fact, she knew she would love him a little more because of it. Her eldest trained to be king, her second his advisor, her first daughter would go to the church. But this one… this one would just live his life and be her son.
"My precious one. We shall call him Inri," she said.
"Inri?" Endie said sharply. "But what does that mean?"
"Nothing. Absolutely nothing," the queen replied. And smiled.
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