Deathstalker 06 - Deathstalker Legacy

dress properly for the occasion.
    Tell me I haven't made a terrible mistake in stepping down in your favor, boy."
    "I'll get changed in a minute, Father," Douglas said steadily. "There's still time yet."
    "There's never enough time! First lesson you learn as King. The faster you deal with things, the more things they find for you to do. It's a hard job and a never-ending one, but that's how you know it's important. How you know that what you're doing matters."
    "You don't have to step down, Father," Douglas said carefully. "You still have years of service in you."
    "Don't flatter me, boy. I'm a hundred and fifty years old, and some days I feel every damned minute of it.
    I might have another twenty years in me, or I might not. Either way, I plan on enjoying what years are left to me in peaceful retirement. I've earned that much." His face softened, just a little, and he put a hand on Douglas's armored shoulder. "I held on as long as I could, for your sake, but it's time for me to go, Douglas. Well past time."
    He paused, his eyes suddenly far away. Douglas knew his father was thinking of his other son, James.
    His first son, trained from boyhood to be King, admired and adored by all. Everyone said he'd make a great King, the brightest and best of his line. Everything was set for him to take the Throne on his twenty-first birthday. Only he died, in a stupid traffic accident; that clever, charismatic brain smeared all over the front of a speeding vehicle that came out of nowhere. The other driver's fault. He was drunk.
    When he sobered up, later, and discovered what he'd done, he wept like a child and killed himself. Too late to do anyone any good.
    The King and Queen had only had the one son. Current medical technology, with widely available tissue cloning and regeneration, meant everyone had a good chance of living till a hundred and fifty. Some even made it to two hundred. As a result, population levels had been rising all over the Empire, filling up the civilized worlds at dizzying speed. Small families, of one or at most two children, were encouraged by everything short of actual legislation, and the King and Queen did their bit by example.
    Which was all well and good, until the Empire's only Prince lay dying m a gutter, and the regeneration machine couldn't get there in time.
    Everything stopped for James's funeral. Everyone mourned the loss of the best King they'd never have.
    They made a saint out of him, or the man he might have become, and even to this day a flame still burned over his grave. But still, the Empire needed a Prince, and so Douglas came along, very late in his mother and father's life. The Prince who wasn't perfect. These days people stayed in their physical prime right up till the end of their lives; but even so, Douglas knew his parents for only an unusually short time before the first inevitable signs of deterioration began. It was hard for him to remember a time when they hadn't seemed old.
    And James was such a hard act to follow.
    His mother, the Queen Niamh, died very suddenly. For no obvious reason, the life just went out of her, and in a few months she went from an aged but still vital woman to a wrinkled face in a hospital bed that Douglas barely recognized. She died while they were still trying to work out what it was that was killing her. Douglas could have told them. She was old, and felt old. It was her time, and she'd always been far too polite to outstay her welcome. King William hadn't seemed really old until his wife died; but when she left it seemed to Douglas that she took the best of her husband with her, leaving behind a broken old man looking forward to his own death.
    Though he still had enough spark in him to run his son ragged. William might be about to retire and devote what remained of his life to pottering about in the historical archives-following in the footsteps of his hero, the legendary Owen Deathstalker-but before he stepped down, William was determined to make Douglas every inch the King that William had always wanted him to be.
    "I'm sorry I can't be the King that James would have been," Douglas said, almost cruelly. "I'm sorry I can't be the son to you that he was."
    "I've never said that," said William.
    "You didn't have to."
    The King launched into another speech, but Douglas wasn't listening. He looked at his father and wished they could have been closer. Wished they'd had something in common. But the ghost of James had always been there, and Douglas