Blood Ties

The child was born a bastard, and a boy to boot. The entire cottage – all four corners and one room—reeked of sweat and blood and birthing fluid, the straw tick under the new mother stained and unusable. They’d have to get a new one, or at least fresh straw to fill the soiled mattress. The grandmother looked at the midwife, her eyes tired. She pressed a pair of silver coins into the healer’s gnarled hands and said, “Tell no one of this.” The mother on the bed, cradling her bastard child, would be thirteen years old come February.

Before Keena went back to work at the castle – a maidservant to the King’s treasured ward – she and her mother, Fiona, came up with a plan. The bastard child would be passed off as Keena’s younger brother, and all the months she was away, she had been taking care of Fiona, who was prone to illness when with child.

The baby didn’t look a thing like Keena; he didn’t look like anyone in the family. He was blue-eyed, and the fuzz on the top of his head was a fair blonde. His skin was unblemished and pale, near translucent white. Keena may have been pale, but her hair was dark brown and her eyes clear and green. In the nights, when the baby was slumbering, she would lie beside him on their cot, and trace his tiny fingers, and tiny toes, counting them over and over. How could something that looked so different have come from her, she would wonder.

Three hours after the birth, Fiona levelled a cool stare at her wayward daughter, who did not look up from her porridge. “What will you call him?”

The reply was muffled as Keena slurped her meal. “Abel, I think. I like the sound of it.”

The bastard was baptized Abel Samuel Fitzpatrick, on August 27^th. No one commented on Keena’s slight weight gain, or how tired the new mother looked – Fiona didn’t have that glow that most new mother’s had, but she was a sickly thing. It was to be expected.

 Years slipped past, water in a creek, and Abel grew and flourished. He spent his days playing with the children, too young to work, but old enough to be left alone; like the other children whose parents worked in the castle. He was four when he turned to Keena and touched a jam-sticky hand to her cheek. It was dark outside, and warm, and they were on their way back from the castle for the night. She was always fond of him, he knew. She snuck him sweets when Mama told him no, and she never yelled at him – not like Max, who lived next door, who yelled and hit his little brothers with sticks. She didn’t act like a sister. He told her as much, and she just smiled.

“Can you keep a secret?” she asked. She told him then, that she was not a sibling but a mother. He had no reason to doubt the fact, because Fiona – white faced and tense – told him the same a few weeks later.

When Abel was nearly six years old, Keena – Mother—caught the eye of a visiting prince. She was seventeen then, and pretty. You wouldn’t be able to tell she’d been despoiled; she bore no sign of the childbirth anymore. The prince had been smitten, and didn’t seem to mind her lowly status. Things were different in his kingdom – they would be different when he was ruling, he said. He swept her away in a whirlwind of wealth and promises, lovely words and wedding plans. The only thing she asked of him was that she might take her brother with her, darling little Abel. He agreed, of course.

So both Keena and Abel were swept away by the prince, to a kingdom they had heard about in stories but never seen, and Keena was married the spring after she turned seventeen. Prince Michael was twenty-one, and it was June before the happy news was announced: there would be an heir for the king-to-be. The kingdom rejoiced, and Prince Michael spun his swollen bride around in his arms, laughing. Abel looked on, and wondered if anyone had been so happy when he was born. It was a strange, heavy thought for the child, but it lingered nonetheless.

Abel’s little brother was born December 7^th and they named him Cain Alexander, and as soon as he was old enough, he was grabbing at Abel’s clothing and shaggy blond hair. When he could speak, he called for his half-brother. Needless to say, whether Abel liked it or not, he found himself in Cain’s company a great deal over the next few years. He watched as the baby grew into a child, and then shucked his childish ways for the lanky, coltish maturity of a young teen.

The sun was golden, hanging low in the sky. Abel had not been born in this place, but he had spent a good few years within the castle walls, they were familiar and felt warm under his hands. Hands that were calloused and worn. He still looked nothing like his mother, the queen.

The crown prince looked up from the report he held with a careless sort of disregard – he was fourteen and slim, dark-haired as their mother, with his father’s warm brown eyes. He watched his servant— the one he trusted above everyone else – at the window, older than him by six years, tall and fair. The setting sun lit up his hair like the gold in the treasury. Cain smiled at the sight.

“Abel, do you know something?” he asked. It seemed so lovely, so wonderfully absurd, what came next: “We could be brothers, I think. I trust you enough for it.”

His servant smiled then, slowly, and it reminded the prince far too much of the smiles Adam and Eve must have shared, the apple juice running down their chins. There was knowledge in that smile, a secret  that Cain wasn’t sure he liked.

“Would you like to hear a story, my lord?”