“No. Playing around in Paris as we have was crime enough, but I will not break the First Law while standing in my family’s ancestral nunnery.”

“Are you going to have Jehovah legitimated?” The question broke from Caesar like storm over a mountain peak.

The king marched with perfect posture toward the door.

MASON blocked the exit. “Are you going to Rome to get papal dispensation to marry a prostitute? Or are you going to legitimate your bastard?”

I could not see the king’s face, but I could see the tremor in his jaw. “I’m sorry. I know it’s against our arrangement.”

“I will not let you make Jehovah your heir.”

“Prince Leonor is dead.”

“There are others in line for your throne.”

“It has to be my child.”

“You have cousins.”

“I had cousins; death by Merion Kraye.”

A different, blacker anger joined the rage already rumbling through MASON. “Kraye killed your entire family?”

“I have a great-great-aunt who is one hundred and sixty-six years old and succumbing fast.” Isabel Carlos II turned back toward us, composed again and perfect as a marble bust. “You have your continuity in law, MASON.” He held his hand out. “Ours is this blood. It flowed through queens, saints, emperors, and it flows through my one surviving child. I cannot change this fact, not even if it means breaking my word to you.”

Even optimism sounded rough in Caesar’s throat. “You’re not too old to have another child.”

“True”—Spain nodded toward the Lady—“and we will try to have another child, Joyce has promised that, and if we succeed that could solve everything. But I could also be assassinated tomorrow. I’m holding the European Hive together with nothing but residual family trust. Neither Spain nor Europe can feel safe unless I have a successor.”

MASON’s stance solidified, his left foot’s imagined weakness eclipsed as danger eclipses pain. Martin’s grip solidified at the same time, his hand and arm supporting me as I slumped against him, bracing me—for what?

“I will not let you make Jehovah your heir,” MASON pronounced.

“They are my heir.”

“I will not let you make Jehovah take the Crown Prince’s oath of loyalty to you and the Spanish people.”