“Belongs – to – you?”
“If nobody has told you, you might as well know the truth,” the woman retorted. “We have lived together as man and wife for the last twelve years. I would not give him up to the last Queen and you are certainly not having him now.”
Zorina could only stare at her, feeling that what she was saying could not be the truth.
“You can have his children, which is what they are all fussing about,” the woman went on. “I have given him three sons, so there is nothing wrong with him. Not like his son, Karl, who can produce only girls.”
The woman was spitting out the words contemptuously.
She paused to look down at the King and then slipped her hand inside his shirt to rub his heart.
In a voice that Zorina did not recognise as her own she then asked,
“Did you say – that the
