Roc And A Hard Place by Piers Anthony

simply been so sweet as to awaken in him all manner of notions that had never gotten close to him before.  He suffered himself to be brought to the bed and laid upon it, while his newly discovered fancies danced in circles all around his awareness.
    “Perhaps your clothing is too tight, your majesty,” she said, loosening his collar and then his shirt.
    “Oh, no, no need to—” he protested weakly.
    But she continued, and somehow he discovered himself under a sheet with her, and she had nothing more on than he did.  Then did the storks indeed take notice, for soon such a signal went out as no such bird could have ignored.  He had been made deliriously happy.
    In the morning, somewhat ashamed for his weakness of the night.  King Gromden got up, hastily dressed, and left the lovely girl sleeping in the bed.  He had never before done anything like this.  He hurried back to Castle Roogna and went about his business with utmost dispatch.  He tried to forget the affair.
    But such was the illicit appeal of what had happened that in the evening he found himself walking back to the station house, nominally to see how the girl was doing.  Love of her burdened his heart, and he simply could not stay away.  Yet when he came to the house, he discovered it empty, with nothing touched.  It was as if there had never been a woman there.  She was gone.
    Dispirited, he returned to the castle.  Every day for a month he went to the house, but it remained devastatingly empty.
    He realized that the girl had had whatever she had wanted of him that one night, and would never return.  So he resumed his dull kingly life, trying to forget that single dreamlike night of bliss.
    Unknown to him, a stork visited the mysterious damsel less than a year after their contact.  She had hidden herself, but the canny bird had located her regardless, and delivered its bundle.
    Then, when the King was at supper with the Queen and some prominent visitors, the woman appeared, carrying a bundle.  “Here is your bastard baby, 0 adulterous King!” she cried, and dumped the bundle in his lap.  “And know, 0 simpleton, with what you have sundered your marriage vow.” She flew into the air, dissolved into a cloud of laughing gas, and vanished as all shocked eyes turned to Gromden.
    The laughter echoed for a long time as they stared.
    Thus did the foul demoness befuddle, seduce, and humiliate the decent King.  The slow deterioration of his power swiftened, and before long Castle Roogna was like an empty shell.  The Queen, of course, would have nothing more to do with him, and he was a laughing-stock throughout Xanth.
    Yet such was his goodness that he made no excuses.  He recognized the baby as his own, and set out to raise her as a Princess.  Indeed, she became the apple of his eye, the one he loved best, and she loved him.  But the Queen, outraged by the situation, finally put a curse on the child:  If she remained in Castle Roogna, the castle would fall.  So the girl, now about ten years old and as dawningly pretty as her mother had been, fled the castle.  She refused to be the undoing of the castle as she had been of her beloved father.
    This broke King Gromden's heart.  He banished the Queen and lived alone thereafter, with only a maid to tend to the castle.  He searched constantly for his daughter, hoping somehow to get around the curse.  But she, being half demoness, readily eluded him, though she loved him.  Until, years later, she found love in an entirely different story, died, became a ghost, and was revived about four hundred years later to rejoin her lover.  Meanwhile poor King Gromden slowly declined into death, and Castle Roogna was deserted.
    All because of the wicked demoness.
    The reenactment ended.  “And I still want nothing to do with you.  Mother,” Threnody concluded.  “You destroyed my beloved father with the crudest of lies, and I can never forgive that.”
    Jordan was startled.  “Metria is your mother?