The Pretender_s Crown ic-2

by C. E. Murphy

  Ivanova, arrogant with youth, tossed her black hair and said, “But I will be imperatrix. I can take what I like.”

  When she returned to her room that afternoon, everything but a thin straw mattress was missing. Incensed, she flew to her mother, who looked bemused and told her to solve it herself. It took two days to realise Chekov had stolen her things, and when, insulted and haughty, she demanded them back, he said no.

  It took another full day to recover from the shock, and to think to demand why not.

  “Because I'm the commanding officer of the Khazarian army,” Chekov said. “I can take what I like.”

  Ivanova still remembers with uncomfortable clarity the rage she flew into. She also remembers the moment in which she understood Chekov's point, and the general's indulgent chuckle when he saw she'd learned the lesson.

  He never did return her things, and Irina, most unreasonably, refused to countermand his orders and have them returned. Half the summer passed while Ivanova plotted his downfall and stole back what bits of her belongings she could find, but she was seven and eventually lost interest in both recovery and revenge. That, too, was a lesson, because as she's aged, she's realised that she has lived a life of luxury, and could afford to forget about the dolls and pillows that were taken from her. Had it been her food, her fields, her only livelihood, she could not have forgiven or forgotten so easily, and this is what Chekov wanted her to understand. An army is a dangerous thing, but so, too, are the people it passes by. She has learned that when she is imperatrix her duty will be to be generous when it seems she can least afford it, for the price of stinginess is high.

  Chekov endured the ridicule of his fellow officers to sit on the floor with her, and when she was a little older, to lean over war tables with her, teaching battlefield manoeuvres and troop movements. She learned quickly, fascinated by the abstract while Chekov repeated the adage that no battle plan survives the first encounter with the enemy. Under his tutelage she learned recovery tactics, sneak attacks, direct strikes, and from his comrades understood that, as a woman, she would never be in a position to command men in the strategies she was taught. They indulged her studies only because she was still a girl, too young to be of any concern or danger.

  Irina and she decided, when she turned twelve, that she would lose all interest in battles and war preparations, and a sigh of relief went through the officers' ranks. But Chekov continued to teach her in private, and today he finds her leaning over a map of Khazar and Echon, studying mountain ranges and rivers as she amasses her army of toy soldiers outside Khazan's gates.

  “How many will we lose in the march?” She is a girl, she is not supposed to care, but she does care, intensely. She will marry someday, and the generals believe her husband will control all matters warlike, but Ivanova has no intention of marrying a man with that much ambition. Javier de Castille would have done, but that plan has been set askew by Akilina Pankejeff's recent good fortune. Ivanova is content with that; she would like to find someone with wits in his head so he might be a worthy companion, but if she must she'll marry a handsome fool and let him imagine he rules both imperatrix and empire.

  “Perhaps as many as six or ten thousand. It's a hard time of year to make a journey of fifteen hundred miles.”

  “There's no good time of year. High summer, maybe, but the war will be met by then. Winter gives the advantage of frozen rivers to travel on, but the mountain passes are too snowy. And spring means rotten snow, rotten ice, avalanches, no young crops to replenish supplies with…”

  “But it's in spring we'll travel.” There's approval in Chekov's voice; Ivanova has listened and learned, and he is rightfully proud. “The army marches within the week.”

  “If I were a boy, I would ride with them.” This is almost a question: Ivanova knows it's true, or that it would be, at least, if they did not march across western Khazar and the entirety of Echon to meet their war. Even a son might be kept in reserve on such a long tour of duty, and sent to skirmishes within Khazar for his blooding.

  “The imperatrix has never ridden to war. Don't count yourself a failure for not doing so yourself. You have as fine a grasp of battlefield tactics as any I've ever taught, and will be the better ruler for it,” Chekov says with such conviction she can't doubt him, but she does make one argument.

  “As any you've ever taught who hasn't seen battle.”

  Chekov tips his head, acknowledgment that her point is a valid one. Ivanova touches a fingertip to the head of one of her toy soldiers, and asks a serious question: “Do I need to?”

  The old general's silence is answer enough, though he fills it with words after a moment. “Not in this war. There will be enough battles closer to home for you to fight.”

  “And will you let me fight them?” Neither of them mean fight in the way of expecting the imperator's female heir to be on the battlefield with a sword and shield. Ivanova knows which end of a sword to hold, and has been taught the rudimentaries of defending herself with a knife, but she isn't a warrior and doesn't fancy herself to be.

  Chekov's silence once more says what words needn't, but again he does her the honour of honesty. “I would. My fellow officers will be more reluctant.” A smile ghosts over his grey-bearded face, and he adds, “But you'll be imperatrix someday, and they won't be able to refuse you.”

  “Because I'll be able to do as I like.” Ivanova grins back, then impulsively steps around the war table to give the old man a hug. “Live for me, General. You've guided me through childhood better than my father might have. I'll need your guidance when I'm grown, too.”

  Chekov folds a hand at her head and presses his mouth to her hair, the small gesture all she needs of a promise from him. And she, safe and warm in his arms, hopes that what she plans to do will not break the old general's heart.

  C.E. Murphy

  The Pretender's Crown

  LORRAINE, QUEEN OF AULUN

  1 June 1588 † Alunaer, capital of Aulun

  “You will go with the army, because we cannot.” There is an untruth in Lorraine's phrasing: “cannot” is a word she rarely applies to herself. But it's rather worth it for the expression on Belinda Primrose's pretty face: the girl looks as though she's been poleaxed, stupefied by a sentence.

  The expression vanishes so quickly that Lorraine might doubt she'd seen it, if she were other than who she is. Lorraine Walter does not often doubt herself; a monarch cannot, and there's a time when that word is well-suited.

  Primrose is good: Lorraine admires that, after the first moment of astonishment, she is unable to read Belinda's thoughts. There's no hint of greed, no hint of cunning, no hint of relief-and that, the queen thinks, is the most likely thing for her illegitimate daughter to feel. She's been cooped up in a convent for four months, and Lorraine doubts there's been a time in her entire life when she's been so constrained.

  For a breathtaking moment, envy sears the queen of Aulun so hotly that a blush burns her throat, her face, her ears. Her heart lurches with a sickness more suited to a woman a third her age, and a tremble comes into her hands. It is only a lifetime's worth of control that keeps those hands from clawing, that keeps her from a sudden surge of hatred toward the curtseying girl.

  Belinda gives no sign at all of seeing that flush of emotion, and perhaps she doesn't: the white paint that Lorraine wears as an affectation of youth is heavy, and may hide her colour. More likely wisdom stays both Belinda's tongue and her gaze, just as it has largely stayed her reaction to being sent with the army.

  Begrudgment still prickles, but Lorraine puts it aside as she always must. She has been a queen since she was twenty-six, and she has not known any real sort of freedom since she was seventeen and her sister Constance took the throne. The freedom of being a queen is far greater than the freedom of being an unwanted heir: Lorraine spent nine years imprisoned before Constance's death and her own subsequent crowning. Now she takes her long holidays and rides her horses, and in the end, those small freedoms in the name of holdin
g a throne are worth the price extracted. Because of that, blood-heating jealousy has no place in her life.

  Besides, there's truth in the thought that she doesn't wish to face the battle that is coming to her. She cannot make herself a showpiece on the front lines as she might have done when she was a youth: she has too much sense of her own mortality, now. Belinda is too young to carry that fatalism.

  “We have a question for you, girl.”

  “Majesty?” Belinda's voice and form are perfect: the willing servant, interested but not curious, confident in her monarch's commands. Robert is like that, but for some reason Lorraine finds it more delightful in the father than in the daughter, and so she says, irritably, “Stand up, girl. Let us see you.”

  Belinda manages to bob another curtsey as she stands, and then, as though Lorraine has given permission-and Lorraine supposes she has-she tilts her head and watches Lorraine with more open curiosity.

  “We have acted on your dream of Robert's warning and we have prepared for war. Cordula's army amasses across the straits, with ships ready to carry armed men to our shore. Essandia comes from the south in her armada, and those ships are newer than our own, faster and lighter in the water. Khazar marches across Echon to stand at the Cordulan army's back, and we, girl, have nothing more than our army and our aging navy to fight with.”

  This is a sore point with Lorraine. Reussland should have joined her; should, at the least, be making the Khazarian army's journey across the Kaiser's lands costly But the Kaiser's two sons are dead within days of each other, the elder by drowning and the younger in a duel over a young woman whose presence as the centre of such dealings suggests her honour's not worth the fight. All that is left to the Kaiser are three daughters, the oldest a girl of seventeen. He, then, with even more haste and less grace than Lorraine's own father, has set aside his aging wife and has buried himself to the balls in young women, intending on wedding the one who first gives birth to a son.

  When this war is done and Lorraine Walter is triumphant, she will send subtle support to the Kaiser's eldest daughter, and be the first among equals to offer both condolences at the old Kaiser's death, and congratulations on the crown by then settled on a pretty blonde head.

  But that's a plot for another day, only to be played out when she's certain of her own crown's security. Which is why she now turns a grim gaze on Belinda, and asks a question that neither the girl nor Robert would expect her to: “Or have we more?”

  BELINDA PRIMROSE

  Lorraine should not have asked that question.

  Not should not in the suggestion that she had no right, but should not in that she should not have been able to. Belinda was struck dumb by the queen's command that she join the army; now she felt a gape drop her jaw and couldn't gather her expression into anything less telling or more flattering. It took long seconds to croak so much as, “Majesty?”

  “We are not a fool.” Lorraine's voice, nearly inaudible, was also ruthlessly hard. “We have considered long and hard the warning Robert gave us through you, and we have considered its manner of arrival. We have also listened to the stories that have come out of Lutetia in the matter of Beatrice Irvine.”

  Silence filled the room, broken only by the shattering strength of Belinda's heartbeat. This was adversity, the very thing she had been raised to face, and when she needed them most all her wits had deserted her. There was a clever answer to give the queen, a quip or a droll comment that would dissuade her from the path her thoughts took. But witchpower roared in Belinda's mind, golden wall of noise, triumph, and anticipation screaming wordlessly in her skull. She thought she might burst from it, or that she might be tipped over and have it spill out as though she were nothing more than an emptying vessel.

  “And then,” Lorraine said, so, so softly, “and then there is the matter of you and me, Belinda Primrose.”

  Belinda fell to her knees, graceless, uncontained, unconstrained, with an image brilliant against the golden light in her mind: a woman with thin grey eyes, a high forehead, a proud chin. A woman with titian hair worn loose, bloody curls against translucent skin. The image, the single image, that Belinda had borne with her all her life, since the day she was birthed, and with it a handful of words that had defined her as long as she could remember: it cannot be found out. It cannot be found out.

  But Lorraine continued inexorably, giving lie to the boundary that had made up the edges of Belinda's life. “You knew me,” the queen whispered. “It is not in the least possible, and yet you knew me in court on the day we first met. Robert did not tell you.” The certainty and dismissal in Lorraine's voice would be laughable if she were not so terribly right. Robert Drake had not told his daughter the secret of her heritage; he had only come lately to learning she knew, and unlike Lorraine, he had been shocked that she did.

  Belinda stared at the floor, eyes wide and dry, and thought that if tears should fall they would be made of fire, gold splashes against the floor, and wondered why she thought they might. She, who had a damnably flawless memory, could not remember crying since she had been a child, not since she had begun the game of stillness. There was no reason to weep now.

  “I have put these things together, all of them,” Lorraine went on. “I have put them together, and I have come to wonder, Primrose, if the rumours out of Gallin are fact. If the daughter I bore is, in truth, a witch.”

  Belinda jerked her gaze up, magic in her mind suddenly flat and silent, as though the queen's words had stripped away all her power. Ambition had fled; for the first time since Javier had helped awaken her to the magic she held, Belinda felt no hint of underlying expectation, no whisper of curious exploration. Her insides were hollowed and plumbed with lead, an iron casing around her heart, crushing it each time it tried to beat. The distorted window that allowed her to look at a life that might have been went black, not clear in the way she might have imagined it would, had she ever gone so far as to dream Lorraine might use those words aloud: the daughter I bore. They had danced around this acknowledgment; putting it between them in open words stripped Belinda bare, and left her ready for shaping, as though she were once more a child.

  Lorraine breathed, “Such control,” and touched a fingertip to Belinda's chin, turning her head this way and that. “I see astonishment in your eyes, child. Fear, horror, disbelief. These are all the things I should see, but unless I miss my guess the word that has torn you asunder is not ‘witch.’ So I am right, and this is how it shall go, Primrose. Heed me well.”

  Belinda nodded, barely a movement under Lorraine's touch. Nodded, because the words the queen used were the same ones that Robert has always used in setting her a task, and because that small familiarity was a line to which she could tie herself and find her way back to the world she knew. A distant part of her wondered if Robert had learned the phrase from Lorraine, but she couldn't voice the curiosity, not now.

  “I do not care,” Lorraine said with gentle precision, “how this came to be, how it has shaped your life, whether it is a damnable talent or a heavenly one. I have no wish to see demonstrations nor any worry for explanations. I do not care. What I care for is its use. I have an army that is badly outnumbered, a navy that is smaller and weaker than its opponent. I intend on sending you into war, Primrose, because I think you are a thing that will tip the balances. Am I right?”

  “Yes.” Witchpower bloomed again, a kernel of confidence so steady and bright that Belinda's own voice seemed that of a stranger. She drew breath to speak again and Lorraine cut it off with a commanding gesture.

  “I do not care,” she repeated. “I will not know the details, for my sake as well as yours. I will promise you this: you will not burn, not so long as a Walter sits on the Aulunian throne. Be discreet if you can, but if needs must, then discretion be damned and I will make an answer for my people. They say Javier of Gallin is blessed by God. So, too, will you be, if anyone dares ask. But you are a secret warrior still, as you've always been. You won't ride with the generals and admirals, t
hough neither can you be a camp follower. Be clever, girl. Be wise.”

  “Majesty.” Belinda's voice sounded more her own, demure and willing as she cast her gaze downward. For all that she'd cast it away in these past months, the stillness wrapped around her now, habit protecting her from emotional blows. She had a task, and such things were how she lived her life: even shaping those thoughts gave her a flare of purposefulness, of relief and pleasure at understanding that she had a duty to perform. Time to think it through would come later, well away from the dangerous territory that was Lorraine Walter. Knowing herself to be dismissed, Belinda rose and for once permitted herself less than a proper obsequience; she only nodded to Lorraine as she passed her by.

  “Primrose.” Lorraine's voice followed her to the door and Belinda stopped, not looking back, but waiting.

  “Rid yourself of the babe. It's a complication I will not have.”

  Ice slid into Belinda's chest, sharp and cold as a dagger. She bobbed a curtsey, then left Lorraine in the secret chamber.

  No one, Lorraine least of all, should have seen what Belinda carried beneath her novice's habit. Even she, lying in her cot at night with her fingers pressed against her belly, was only certain of it because she had twice now missed her courses, rather than any broadly visible change in her form. This was a thing that would not have happened had she been outside the convent walls, where it was easy to find the herbs that would unroot a child from the womb.

  But until these past few weeks she'd left the convent daily, and might well have broken from Dmitri and found what she needed to loosen the unquickened babe from her body, and she had not done it. She met resistance from the witchpower when she considered it, a wall of determination that turned her thoughts from convenience to possibility. She was half of Robert's blood; the child within her was half of hers, and all of Dmitri's. There was more potential witchpower growing within her than she could command herself, and that was enough to stay her hand against steeping an abortifacient tea.