The Pretender's Crown

by C. E. Murphy

  Belinda Drake, Robert's adopted daughter, was known to have joined a convent at age thirteen: a decade later, Belinda Walter had emerged from one. It was a game so long in motion she could barely fathom the foresight it took to prepare for this day, for this move, unfolding so very many years after it was set in motion. The fraction of her that was still given over to calm stillness wanted to raise a toast in admiration of the woman who had birthed her, but she remained where she was, bent in a deep curtsey, and wondered a little at the chill in her hands and her shortness of breath.

  She rose at the queen's subtle command, took the steps toward the throne slowly, as much for effect as barely trusting her feet. Tumultuous emotion filled the room, disbelief and excitement, utter belief and near-worship, ambition thwarted and ambition honed, rage and delight, all of it pounding at Belinda like a living tide intent on bringing her down. It exhausted her, and she tightened her belly, not wanting to rely on witchpower but unwilling to flag under the onslaught. Lorraine's voice cut through it, giving Belinda something to focus on, and for the second time, though she'd been told how it would be, she hardly credited what she heard.

  “You all know that Sandalia, our lamented sister-queen in Lutetia, was for a brief time our own Lord Drake's host,” Lorraine said. A smirk ran through the court at her polite language, but the queen's cool expression brought ugly humour to stillness, and into the silence she said, “You will have heard stories of why our beloved Robert travelled to unfriendly lands unescorted. You will have heard he went to rescue a daughter, even that he was made to participate in a mockery of a trial where a young woman of comely aspect was put forth as his child.

  “That is nonsense.” Lorraine's voice cracked over the gathered courtiers and garnered flinches from even the most resolute. “The woman on trial was a Lanyarchan noble called Beatrice Irvine, though Sandalia's clever prosecutor named her Belinda Primrose as well, knowing that was the name Robert had once used for his own daughter.

  “They are both dead, Beatrice Irvine and Belinda Primrose.”

  A gasp ran through the court at Lorraine's cold claim, and despite her own heady connection to the story, Belinda felt a rush of horror as well. She was dead, very suddenly, with that statement: hearing it from Cortes had nothing like the strength of hearing it said in the queen's voice, and every new word that fell from Lorraine's lips further ended the life she'd known.

  “Beatrice died a traitor to our Aulunian crown,” Lorraine said softly. “Our spies now tell us she went to Lutetia to wed Javier de Castille and so to strengthen his claim on the Lanyarchan throne and on our own. But more, she incited rebellion against Sandalia herself, agitating for Javier to come to the Gallic throne, and so died for it. A traitor to one crown and a threat to another,” Lorraine murmured. “Few of us have such lofty things said when we have passed away.”

  In the silence, Belinda heard breath being drawn in and held: no one wanted to stir the queen from her melancholic thoughts, for fear she would cease telling tales when she awoke from them. The instant before time had stretched too far, Lorraine raised grey eyes to the gathered courtiers and continued as though she'd never paused: “Belinda Primrose, beloved adopted daughter of Robert, Lord Drake, is dead because Belinda Walter now stands in her place. Secrets and protective fallicies have been set aside now, that we might introduce to you our heir, and that we might hope you will embrace her as we have so often longed to do over the years we have been apart.”

  Tentative cheers rose up, but Lorraine hushed them again, with a gesture of begging indulgence. “There is one more tale we must share with you. You know now that our daughter has spent these past ten years in the sanctuary of a convent, giving herself to God until the secular world sounded its call. What we have not yet told you is what came to pass three days ago, when the Essandian fleet sailed toward our shores.”

  Anticipation lashed the courtiers, whispers again: they had all heard talk of the holy Mother on the cliffs; they all, like the soldiers and sailors, believed God had intervened on Aulun's behalf, and if they didn't believe it, they had no better explanation. Now they leaned in hungrily, waiting on Lorraine's words, their gazes hot and heavy on Belinda herself They knew: to a man they had dreams of what the queen would say, the shape of it if not the particular words, and their desire for their dreams confirmed was enough to stir well-dampened witchpower to waking. Knowing she shouldn't, Belinda reached out with tendrils of magic, seeking thoughts and tasting emotion.

  Hope: so much hope it took her breath, and disbelief just as powerful, but begging to be given the lie. Stymied ambition, still, but in the moment there was more of a wish for God's hand gracing Aulun than there was of hatred focused on the young woman who had dashed many aspirations. Even that hatred waited in some to become love. Belinda held her breath and waited, too, to see whether Lorraine Walter could turn the tide.

  “They had three ships to our one, five men to our one, for their ships were newer, larger, faster. We feared for our navy, sailing into the stormy straits, and so in the days before battle we called Belinda to our side, that we might pray together for God's mercy on our brave soldiers. I am a queen,” Lorraine said, and her voice throbbed with sorrow as she slipped, all too deliberately, Belinda thought, into the singular. “I was unable to spend each waking moment on my knees, as I might have wished to do, but Belinda's steadfast faith never wavered. Never came I to my chambers but to find her in prayer, her head lowered, her hands clasped, entreating God to give our men safe passage. I was with her when the battle met.”

  Lorraine was on her feet suddenly, a creature of theatrics. The courtiers caught their breath and swayed back, then leaned forward, eager for her story, and the queen of Aulun reached out her hands and gathered them in. “‘There are so many!’ she cried, and my heart tore to hear it, watching my tender child struggle under the weight of knowledge God granted her. ‘So many! Mother—Mother, I must—’

  “—and then she was silent,” Lorraine whispered into a courtroom so quiet it might have been empty. “She fell in a swoon, and when I laid her on the bed I saw her eyes were golden with the light of God's power. For hours she thrashed, not awake and yet not sleeping, with sweat on her brow and terrible wracking sobs in her throat. Not until the storm broke did she quiet and my heart beat more easily.”

  The queen fell silent, turning a gentle gaze to, it seemed, each and every face in her audience. Even Belinda waited nervously on the story's end, no less taken by it than were the courtiers. “She lay insensible for two days,” Lorraine finally breathed, “and when she wakened, it was with confusion in her eyes. ‘Mother,’ she said. ‘How came I here? I am certain I stood on the cliffs, with God guiding me to protect our fleet.’

  “‘Our fleet,’ I said back to her, and said it with humour. ‘Your fleet, child, for with His guidance you have brought them safely home, and devastated the armada Cordula brought against us. They are yours, and you are their banner of hope, of light, of life, my child. I am only a vessel made to bring you into this world, so in the hour of our greatest need you might stand atop those cliffs and save us all.’”

  It was as well a roar came up from the courtiers, hailing Belinda, hailing Lorraine, hailing God, for without it Belinda thought she might have lost all sense and laughed aloud at Lorraine's maternal modesty. Witchpower told her what the shouts and cheers would have anyway: the people believed. They'd heard stories of the Madonna on the cliff-tops, how she had appeared and disappeared; they'd embraced her as their saviour, and now were willing to embrace Belinda, raised as godly as a woman could be, as the embodiment of that saviour. It didn't matter whether it was true, not even to the cynical: it was wondrous, and that was better than truth.

  Smug satisfaction bubbled beneath Lorraine's white-painted facade. She turned to Belinda and offered an embrace, shocking in its warmth. Twice, Belinda thought: twice before her royal mother had touched her, and now they held each other in a mockery of family compassion. It was not where she had ever imagi
ned her road would end, the day she'd looked on Lorraine Walter and known herself for the queen's bastard.

  “Where is the priest?” Branson's voice grated through the cheering, asking a question that should have been expected. Witchpower warned Belinda of Lorraine's alarm, though none of it showed on her mother's face as she looked at the earl. Looked down at him, perhaps with a hint of impatience, as though he were a bit of unpleasantness likely to stain her dress.

  “Are you in need of one, Lord Branson? Have you sins to repent? A sin of greed, perhaps? A sin of pride?”

  Mockery failed her: Branson's face twisted, but he refused to let it alone. “The same name witnessed wedding and birth. I think it not outside the realm of reason to ask that he come forward so we might hear these pages confirmed by the man who wrote them. Or is he conveniently dead, majesty? Dead, like your pretender daughter, so usefully murdered by a rival queen.”

  Before Lorraine could speak again, before she might give in to the anger and alarm Belinda felt boiling in her, another voice interrupted, soft and sorrowful: “He is dead, my lord. He died when I was seventeen.”

  Long moments passed before she realised, with surprise, that the voice was her own.

  She extended the witchpower, unfurling it toward Branson with all the gentleness of a lover's touch. Doing so heightened her awareness of the rest of the court's high-running emotion, of their breath-holding anticipation that there would be war made here today, the Aulunian palace a new sort of battleground. What Belinda and Lorraine faced now would only be the first skirmish of many. The people and the army of Aulun would love the mythic story Lorraine had concocted out of half-truths, but there would always be men like Branson, hungry for a crown and unwilling to believe the word of a queen.

  Defiance flowed from the man, prickly and determined. Robert remained a rock, steady and calm, but surprise piqued in both Dmitri and Lorraine, the latter tinged with relief. Lorraine had no easy explanation as to the priest, casting more of Belinda's doubt on the legitimacy of the papers her mother had produced.

  Balance hung in the silence as Belinda took a few steps down toward Branson. She had never looked for the burden and gift she was being given; this was the moment in which she might make a lie of it all and free herself from its weight. A part of her wanted to: she had been raised in shadow, and even now her heart flew out of time, unregulated, terrified at being under the weight of so many eyes. Beatrice Irvine had been this exposed, and Beatrice Irvine was dead. It would be easy to draw the extended witchpower around herself and disappear, to avoid the life being thrust on her and become no more than she had been.

  Duty, sharp and agonising, cut into her, and then witchpower ambition, and Belinda knew she would never retreat.

  “His name was Christopher, after the patron saint of lost children,” she murmured, “and he was the closest thing to a father I knew in my sequestered years. I would see him of a Sunday, when he was allowed to visit the abbey chapel and bend an ear to hearing the labours of my studies each week. In the summer and on fine winter days we would walk and argue doctrine, both religious and political.” She wove the fiction from the life she had known, growing up under Robert's fond and distant tutelage, and from a dream of what might have been. That dream, laced with witchpower, drifted toward Branson, wrapping around him gently so it might settle against his skin and become comfortable before Belinda exerted her will behind it. It reminded her of Javier's casual expectation of obedience. She'd never imagined she might one day command the same influence.

  And it was a different thing than she had done to Marius or Viktor; then, she had relied on the sexual link she shared with each man, able to control through it and it alone. But she was stronger now, much stronger, and breaking Branson would be too obvious, especially in front of so many witnesses. He required seduction; they all did. They required the vulnerability of a young woman raised away from the world, telling a story about death: about the death of the only person she'd thought loved her. They needed to believe it would never occur to her to lie—and they needed to trust that despite honesty, despite vulnerability, that she was not an easy target, ready for crushing and throwing away. Impatience swam over her, a sudden disdain for politics and an impulse to simply dominate, force them all to her will. Too much danger lay in that desire; despite Lorraine's promises, witchcraft would see Belinda burnt, and such a demonstration of power would be seen as witchcraft, not the Madonna's generous influence.

  “He was tall,” she said, and felt her own gaze grow distant, as though she looked back through memory. Indeed, she felt as though she did, while Lorraine's concern still spiked at the corners of her mind, and Dmitri's curiosity washed over her. “Tall, at least, to a child,” Belinda added with a brief smile, then passed a hand over her eyes. “No, tall in fact: as a girl I often had to run to keep pace with him, and even when I reached my growth I looked up to him. Sharp-featured, with black hair, and he told me of the monastery where he'd studied.”

  Belinda had no doubt that, by the time Branson got a man there, there would be records of her imaginary priest, brothers who remembered him, a story of how he enjoyed gardening, their regret at his passing; all the things that made up a life, real or not. The world seemed a cruel place, that a man who had never been could take on more permanence than many who had been born, lived, and died without regard.

  Lorraine, who had in all the brief times Belinda had enjoyed her presence, been a master of control, emotionless to Belinda's witch-breed senses, was now, beneath her painted face, full of disbelief; full of a growing concern that bordered on terror. It rattled Belinda, distracting her from the spell she tried to weave, and in a moment of inquisitiveness, she turned a few degrees back toward the throne.

  “He told me of my mother, not of the queen, but of the woman. She who had wed and created life in secret, knowing herself to be the most valuable piece she had to broker, yet knowing she couldn't risk leaving her throne empty after years of playing suitors against one another. He called her bold and clever, and”—Belinda smiled quickly—“and apologised for it, for who was he, a humble priest, to pass such comment on a queen? But he gave me what he could of the mother who had to hide me.”

  Belinda reached out, trusting, sweet, hopeful, toward that mother, and wondered if there might have been a time when she would have done so and have it be less than the act of showmanship it was now.

  Lorraine, even knotted with fear, was a consummate actress: when the daughter she had long been separated from reached for her, it was instinctive to take her hand, creating a line of compassion, of family, and of new beginnings between them.

  Creating the link of touch that had always made stealing thoughts easy for Belinda Primrose, ever since she had awakened to her witchpower under Javier de Castille's guidance.

  The girl knows was the underlying thought in Lorraine's touch, half incoherent with confusion. A flinch ran under Belinda's skin, an unexpected wound opening at how Lorraine thought of her: the girl. She had no name in her mother's mind, and that cut unfairly deep. Only in the past few days had Belinda often allowed herself the luxury of thinking of Lorraine as her mother; those were thoughts too dangerous to be reflected, even in her own mind. She was Lorraine, or the queen, and despite her skill in weaving stories, Belinda could hardly imagine a day might come when she would call the queen Mother. It ought not hurt that Lorraine thought of her similarly, rather than by dangerous words like daughter, or by her name.

  Ought not, and yet it did. Belinda put the hurt away: there would be time to nurse it later, and she had only a few brief seconds in which to steal Lorraine's thoughts and find the source of her consternation.

  Words came clear again within the constraints of Lorraine's mind: the queen was disciplined, her mouth curved in a gentle smile as she looked on Belinda, her gaze tender, with no hint of the rushing, bewildered thoughts behind her eyes. How can she know, but then how could she know that I was her mother, and she knew that as well. Knew herself for the qu
een's bastard and made nothing of it, so perhaps she'll make nothing of this, either, that the priest who oversaw her birth—

  An image came into sharp focus: a hawk-faced man with black hair and deep-set eyes, with a sensual mouth and long hands. The kind of man Lorraine might have considered for a lover when she was young and not yet a queen. By the time she took the throne she knew better than to dally with the church. She was head and heart of her religion, and would allow no churchman above her.

  All of that, all of it and more came with the picture of Dmitri Leontyev in Belinda's mind. For all her control, for all the life she'd spent honing discipline, when Belinda smiled shyly and turned from Lorraine to once more address Branson, her gaze went first to the disguised witchlord in the courtroom.

  There was nothing of concern in Dmitri's eyes, nothing of the amusement she could feel beneath his surface. He knew himself a stranger here, an envoy of Irina Durova's court, there for no other reason than to make polite of the failed attempt to build an alliance between Aulun and Khazar. Lorraine couldn't recognise him; the witchpower saw to that, misdirected both her eyes with the changes it had worked on his countenance and her memory, so that even if a hint of suspicion came into her mind, it would fade away again. As ever, Belinda had no words from Dmitri, only smug satisfaction that allowed her to understand the direction of his thoughts.

  He'd been there at her birth, and Lorraine thought him dead.

  “I can't speak to his age,” Belinda said to Branson. She trusted the life she'd led to give her voice the right timbre, to show youthful uncertainty and sorrow even when she herself barely attended the words she spoke. “His hair was dark, but not all men lose their colour as they age, and he seemed old to me. That winter a cough took him, and he grew frail.” Tears filled her eyes and she glanced to the side so she might brush them away in a semblance of privacy; a semblance watched by all the court. She would believe her, if she were they; such performance was what she was made for. “When he died I was alone.”