Free Cobweb Bride by Vera Nazarian Page A

he was grateful as any man would be and paid her handsomely as only a prince could. And yet, he had never forgotten the intense look of her dark eyes as she watched the mother and the child lying abed after the difficult birth. He remembered it because he did not understand it, was unsure what was underlying her expression. In that moment her eyes were so dark, so other , it seemed to him, despite her warm true smile. They roiled with deep shadows of the forest and old things lurking just underneath the surface. Later, when he considered what it was that he saw, he realized it was power , surging, barely contained.
    Power that should not have been.
    That was so many years ago. And now. . . .
    When Prince Roland and Princess Lucia entered the room, Grial rose hastily enough to be respectful, yet Roland thought he saw a shadow of mockery in her movements, in the very slant of her back as she bowed before them and the posture of her wiry tall frame as she stood up.
    Grial was not an old woman. Or, at least she appeared not to be. Despite having been around for as long as he could remember, she was ageless or stuck in the ripe middle years, with a rather supple figure and smooth albeit dirt-mottled skin of her face and throat. Her face could be called attractive (if he could forget the power surging behind the surface of those eyes). Her hair—he simply could not understand how it could be so frizzy, so unkempt, as though she knew nothing of a comb. Thank goodness she kept it covered, more or less.
    “Grial!” Princess Lucia exclaimed, jolting the Prince out of his unsavory ruminations. The Princess approached the townswoman with sincere joy and took her grimy thin hands in her bejeweled own. “My heart is gladdened to see you, Grial!”
    “And mine leaps in my chest, much like a wee baby deer, Your Highness,” Grial replied. Her voice was deep and sonorous. “And speaking of wee babies, how is the young Prince John-Meryl doing? What is he, seven years and ten months and four days now, Highness?”
    “Oh, he is a fine and sturdy young fellow, yes, but how did you remember?” Lucia smiled fondly and in amazement.
    “Indeed . . .” Prince Roland spoke for the first time.
    Grial turned to face him. “Now, how could I forget that child?”
    True enough, the Prince thought, slightly mollified. She would not forget assisting a royal birth.
    “A child with such squinty but fine pale blue eyes when you could see them open and with silvery specks, and cheeks with four dimples no less, and that ruddy newborn skin with just a smidgen of jaundice around the neck and forehead which cleared up fast, all things be praised!”
    Prince Roland felt a wave of cold fear wash over him, returning. . . .
    “But I carry on so, forgive me, a doddering magpie, Your Highnesses,” Grial said with a faint smile. “Your son’s a precious angel to dwell upon, but I know you have something else to discuss here, and that’s why you called me over, not to hear my pretty voice, eh? So, out with it!”
    No one else but Grial would have the crazed cheerful audacity to speak so to the liege Lord and Heir of the Kingdom. And no one else would get away with it.
    Princess Lucia looked at her husband, and joy once more slid off her face, replaced by chronic anxiety. It was as though she was wondering which one of them should begin.
    “It is Her Majesty, the Queen Andrelise,” he said, beginning to pace. “She is . . . my mother is dying.”
    “Ah  . . .” said Grial.
    “The point of the matter is,” Princess Lucia said, taking a few anxious steps also, “she has been the same for more than a day now, the same unchanging state of severe near-death. I’ve never in my life seen anyone like that—someone who was so ill, so far gone, and yet who is still  . . . here, in the world of the living.”
    “Last night,” the Prince said, “there was a man here. No—not a man. A being. He was dark, all dark. Empty, like a void. And he