Free The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince by Hobb Robin Page A

leave the boy to me, so I had his full care as well as my own son’s. The little prince was hearty and strong. His face was mottled and his body as well, but no other flaw did he have to him. His eyes were bright and he nursed with an appetite.
    Not so my own child. Born too soon, he was small and where some might have called him placid, I saw him as listless. The prince was pink and plump, but my child was sallow and sunken-eyed. Put to the breast, he dozed off too soon, and had to be pinched awake to nurse. He had not the spirit to cry loudly, but whimpered only. He slept well only when I put him down beside the prince, and so I did, for there was no one who cared enough to say that was not fitting.
    In the days after his grandson’s birth, the king was beside himself with grief. He had no thought to the grandson that remained to him, but only to the daughter he had lost. After four days, I named the boy Charger, for he needed a name, and it seemed a good name for a prince. But by then I was too late. The Piebald Prince was how the servants spoke of him. I went to the king himself with the infant, claiming that his mother had chosen that name and it was only proper that he be known by it. So he was entered as Charger Farseer on the rolls of Buckkeep. But since he was a bastard, no one bothered to seal that name to him, and few called him by it. And to the name Piebald he would answer to the end of his days.





To my natural son, I gave the name Redbird, for his hair was russet as a robin’s breast feathers. He was smaller than Prince Charger, and not a healthy child at first. His vision was weak, so he developed a peering expression, and this I think was the result of him being forced so soon into the outer world. I raised him beside the prince, just as I had been raised beside his mother, but to my boy I did not give the ill counsels my mother had bestowed on me.
    I requested a room on a higher floor than I had previously occupied, and the house steward was quick enough to find one for us. No one tried to take the bastard prince from me and if anyone even knew I had borne a child as well, no one cared. So it was that I lived on the floor above the royal family’s quarters, but on a level below that occupied by the common servants. My neighbors were those well born, but not royal, and visiting nobility. I lived quietly among them. The court was happy to forget us.
    I saw to the young prince’s needs as I once had to his mother’s, visiting the royal seamstresses when he needed new garments, and making sure that they were well made enough that they would serve my smaller son as well when he grew into Charger’s cast offs. As the months passed my son grew healthier, though he never matched his royal companion in size or appetite, and once he passed his sickly beginning, was an easy child, content to give way to the prince in all things. I mourned my lost princess and cherished her son for he was all I had left of her; but as the months passed, the razor of my pain dulled.
    At Buckkeep life and politics must continue, no matter whose wife or daughter dies. In less than a year King Virile had been bereaved of both wife and daughter. Many said that he would follow them swiftly to the grave, for grief and shame as heavy as that might kill any man. They began to look to his younger brother, wondering if Virile would not name him as King-in-Waiting now. But in truth, King Virile bore up under his sorrows. I do not mean that I was privy to the king’s private thoughts or doings, but only that I saw what everyone did. He still came to sit in judgment on the appointed days. The flesh of his face sagged with grief and his eyes were never clear, but he was clean and walked as tall and sat as straight as ever he had.
    He became a man both grave and thoughtful, seldom smiling and never laughing, but a better king all the same than he had been in the years before his grief. For the next two decades, he was to rule wisely and well.