Good King Razz

King Razzasbel knew he was a good king. He had said so himself.

In full he was, Good King Razzas Bel, Builder of Walls and Menace to the Enemy of His People.

He wanted more. More titles. More land. More women. He was always wanting. 

And the people always wanted something from him too. He knew that whatever they said, what they wanted most from him was that he should complete them. 

His father, Sudinnabo, had among his titles King of the Known Universe. It was twenty five villages when he died. When Razzasbel was entering the age of puberty, his biological mother, Crisa, one of the King's concubines and the youngest daughter of King Sudinnabo's predecessor, took him up to the hills at the edge of their realm, when on a clear day the view extended to the other end of the realm. 

-Your father, she told the young future king, is King of the Known Universe. But we know more, she added, turning Razzasbel around to look at the view behind them. 

Razzasbel remembered even then considering how small his father's realm looked, when seen all together. There were fourteen of fifteen villages then. Small and unremarkable. Yet his father was never home, always traveling this way or that, settling disputes, judging competitions, suppressing rebellions, fathering more children. 

-This can all be yours, Crisa told the twelve year old Razzasbel. Because I gave you to your mother the Queen, whose own issue were weak and frail. 

It was true. Something had been wrong with Queen Nita. She had had three kids, each smaller than the last. Two tiny girls, who mercifully could be skipped in the line of succession, and then the ultimate humiliation, an infant boy who looked half finished. 

Crisa had had her own child a month earlier, he was heavy and long, the good stock she knew King Sudinnabo was capable of producing with the right vessel, like she had provided. She named her boy, telling his name only to him and to the gods to whom she dedicated him. 

The King had known the Queen was going to bear him a boy this time. His seer had told him so, but he'd also warned him that the boy would "never be a man." 

King Sudinnabo confided this to Crisa when he next shared his pillow with her, before either boy had been born. She tried to console him, telling him such prophesies can work in different ways. Perhaps the boy would die gloriously in battle before reaching the age of maturity. It would be an honorable thing, but it did not please King Sudinnabo.

Afterward Crisa watched carefully, and while her own belly swelled, Nita's did not, and were it not for the lack of bleeding it would be impossible to tell that the Queen were pregnant again. She was already a tiny woman, not like Crisa, who was tall with broad child bearing hips. And King Sudinnabo was even bigger. 

So Crisa got herself assigned to help the Queen's midwife for the birth of Queen Nita's third child, and snuck her own infant with the supplies brought in for the delivery. The boy with the secret name slept quietly in a side room but eventually felt the missing of his mother. He started to scream but before the midwife and the nurses could react so did Queen Nita.

Crisa grabbed the tiny ball of child as it plopped out of the Queen and wrapped it in a blanket to smother it while she went into the other room to retrieve her child and present it to the King as the newborn. 

When Crisa and the King returned with the baby, Queen Nita did not believe she could have carried something so big. It was not what had come out of her. But she didn't say anything. 

For months she didn't say anything and Crisa quietly hoped the Queen would die and she could take her place. But the Queen persisted in living and in her silence, and lived long enough to see the child that wasn't hers ascend to the throne. Even as the Queen Mother she said nothing.