The Pretender's Crown

by C. E. Murphy

  A single thread of her attention was taken up by awareness of rising sympathy: the courtiers were half in love with her, in love with a romantic idea of a lonely girl destined for a throne; in love with the thought that they might now warm her and make her welcome. Mothers with marriageable sons plotted how a convent-raised princess might be best seduced; mothers with daughters considered how a crowned novice might need friends and guidance within the court. Younger women sighed in melodramatic compassion, imagining if only they had been the secret heir, and so it went, all through the court, all making a place for Belinda within their hearts. The romance would fade soon enough, leaving politics and manoeuvrings behind, but now, as she stood on the throne dais beside Lorraine, they warmed to her.

  And she all but ignored them, her gaze on Branson but her thoughts on the two witchlords and the Aulunian queen. An energy crackled between them, nearly a quarter century of secrets kept. Belinda had no need to look over her shoulder at Robert to feel that he, too, was remembering the day of her birth, and the priest who had overseen it.

  Bloody curls over translucent skin: that was the easiest memory for Belinda herself to draw up. The warmth of Robert's hands enveloping her, and the command: it cannot be found out. Robert's voice replying, promising that it would not be found out. And another command: attend her. Another response, a man's voice agreeing, and in the present, in the courtroom, hairs rippled on Belinda's arms, bringing a chill.

  Dmitri, agreeing. Dmitri, promising to attend the queen who had just birthed Belinda, whose memories stretched all the way back to the moment of her birth. He had, so often in her life, awakened witchpower magic; she wondered now if his presence all those years earlier had helped shape the strength of her recollection, even before she could form coherent thoughts.

  Lorraine, outside the weight of memory that burdened Belinda, but carrying her own fears, still performed the show they'd set in motion. Belinda had reached toward her once; now the queen reversed the offer, putting a hand out toward Belinda, and Belinda, as much the actor as her mother, took it.

  “Not alone,” Lorraine murmured. “Though it may have seemed you were for all those years after Christopher's death, you remained in our hearts. Our greatest regret is that we have been unable to know you, and we hope that God will grace us with at least a few more years in which we might become family.”

  For the second time, she drew Belinda into an embrace, and while courtiers shouted cheers and threw their hats into the air, clear memory, stolen from the queen's touch, thundered into Belinda's mind.

  Afterbirth still rippling her belly: that, Belinda remembered herself, in the moments before Robert turned away and took her from the first and last glimpse of her mother for over a decade. But what Lorraine remembered and Belinda did not, that Robert did not, was the unexpected pain of another labour contraction, more violent than she thought to expect with passing the afterbirth. She had gasped with it, and the priest, rightfully concerned, came to her side.

  It was he who delivered the second child almost an hour later. A boy, noisier in his entrance to the world than Belinda had been, and a source of appalled horror to the woman who'd birthed him. Robert was gone with the girl; with the bastard heir upon whom Lorraine had decided to risk everything. Lorraine had been pleased the child was female; she, after all, had done well enough as a woman alone, and fancied the idea of a daughter coming after her.

  A son threatened everything, on every level. One bastard child was risk enough; a bastard son, should he learn his parentage, would consider himself rightful heir to a throne Lorraine intended on being Belinda's, if it should come to that. And the people would support him: no matter how fond they were of their virgin queen, a woman on the throne sat badly with many of them, and they would raise a banner to her son.

  It was maternal instinct, oh yes, but not the instinct so lauded by men, which made Lorraine Walter thrust the squalling babe into her priest's arms and say, flatly, “Drown him, stone him, leave him to die in the forest, but do not let him see the dawn, priest. It cannot be found out. More than the girl, this cannot be found out.”

  In memory, Dmitri took the child and silenced his cries with a rag dribbled in water so the boy had something to suckle, and left the queen of Aulun to attend to herself.

  Minutes later, pale, regal, trembling, she came barefoot to her guardsmen's door, and from there commanded them ride after the priest in secret until the ninth hour, and then to put him to death. They, without question, saluted agreement and left Lorraine alone again for the second time.

  Alone, exhausted, but confident it would not be found out, she returned to her chambers, and with the ninth bell of the morning murmured a prayer for the priest's soul and for that of the dead boy then emerged from the shadow of her father's death to take up her crown and sceptre again as an uncontested queen.

  Lorraine released Belinda from their embrace and smiled; Belinda returned the expression without hesitation, and heard nothing of what Lorraine said next. The queen was wise to be afraid: should it be known she sent a son to his death, her people would never forgive her.

  A curious spot of emptiness grew in Belinda's belly at the thought of a brother she hadn't known, chilling her in a way the stillness never had. She knew regret well enough to recognise it, but this was something else, a calmer and steadier aspect to that emotion, if such a thing was to be had. Not sorrow that needed regret, and she had too little attachment to a befuddling idea to regret it as of yet. Disbelief, maybe; a simple thing, that she might not have been so alone as she'd always been, had the world been just a little different. Yes: there, she knew it now. The coolness inside her was that same thick wavering glass through which she'd always seen the other side of her life, the one where she'd been born legitimate heir to the Aulunian throne. It was a curiosity, barely worth considering in one part for its unattainability and in the other, for the rage she might have felt if she permitted herself to dwell on it. That was the shape of her dead brother inside her, and all wisdom said it should be left that way, impossible to touch.

  Instead she sent an unfelt smile over the courtiers, catching gazes for an instant here and a moment there, until with witchpowered precision, her eyes met Dmitri's.

  She had stolen only snatches of emotion from him, no clear thoughts or memories the way she could from one who wasn't witchbred himself. But the satisfaction beneath his changed demeanour lay in parallel to Lorraine's thoughts: they shared a source, one that inspired fear in the titian queen and smugness in Dmitri. His mind was guarded against hers, too familiar already with Belinda's ability to subsume his will and demand his power be used to her satisfaction. But she'd changed yet again, not only in holding the power of the storm, but in riding the high emotion that now lashed the court. If it could affect her, she could draw it in and make a needle point of it.

  Suddenly impatient with half-answers and untruths, Belinda gathered her will, gathered the overwhelming support of the courtiers, and slammed through the feeble walls of darkness that Dmitri threw in her path.

  DMITRI LEONTYEV

  15 March 1565 † Brittany, north of Gallin

  Dmitri Leontyev does not want to be here.

  Oh, in the day that it happened, he was happy enough to be there. More than happy: delighted, smug, crafty. But it's not his will that makes him linger in memory now, and so his thoughts are tainted: he does not want to be here. This is anathema to his people: one does not rape the memories of another, and rage boils in him below Belinda's inexorable examination. She has no right, and he'll teach her the lesson of that when he's broken free. A creature vicious enough to tear apart his thoughts and invade old and quiet memories is not one worthy of veneration or of teaching, but should only be ruthlessly destroyed.

  Belinda dismisses his rising fury with casual strength, holding him apart from the power that would allow him to fight back. He acquiesces suddenly: this is not the time or place for challenges. Struggle abated, his thoughts splash down a rarely-travelled p
ath, and Belinda's satisfaction rises with Dmitri's clear and vivid recollection.

  He left Lorraine barely an hour after the boy's birth, trusting the Aulunian queen to gather and garb herself appropriately. She's no longer his concern, although the horsemen coming behind him to take his life are. He approves: Lorraine should have sent them. He cannot be suffered to live, not with what he knows. Not with a sullen, hungry baby boy tucked under his cloak in the small hours of a greying morning.

  The child should be dead by now, its brains dashed out against a rock somewhere, but if Lorraine wanted the child dead, she ought to have given him to someone else. Not to Dmitri, and not to Robert, either, for he'd no more sacrifice a child of their blood than Dmitri would. Lorraine, of course, doesn't know this, and doesn't need to.

  A glade comes up along the path he travels, and Dmitri turns his horse loose to graze a little while as he and the baby wait for the men who are coming to kill them. In a moment of unusual precaution, Dmitri draws a veil around himself, making him hard to see: it will keep them from using arrows, if they're of a mind to do murder from a distance. The baby's muttering might slow and confuse them, but they'll see nothing until Dmitri wants them to.

  Dramatics insist he kill them before they kill him, but practicality stays his hand. Lorraine will expect them back with word of his death, and to leave them dead on the roadside gives too much credence to the idea that Dmitri himself is still alive. He has no wish for the Aulunian queen to think he, or the boy, lives, and so when her men come on the glade he merely convinces them that they've done their duty, and left his body to rot in a shallow grave well away from the edge of the path. Even stubborn human minds are easy to deceive, and these two are used to being told what to do without comprehension.

  Very shortly thereafter, Dmitri Leontyev mounts his horse again and rides hard for Lutetia, five long days away. There he slips into another queen's night chambers and presents to her a son to replace the one she lost in early pregnancy, as he was bidden to do so many months ago.

  BELINDA WALTER

  7 June 1588 † Alunaer, the queen's court

  Ice cascaded through Belinda, wiping away even the stillness and running so deep that witchpower was quelled beneath it. Nothing in Dmitri's expression had changed, no shudder of repulsion or twitch of horror that told him he understood as clearly as she did what his memories had spelled out for her.

  She had known, had known for months, that Javier de Castille was not his father's son. Never once had she dreamed he was also not his mother's. Had known that Robert knew nothing of Javier's parentage, for all that he, too, was witchbreed, but had not, could not have, put those pieces together and come up with the answer that lay before her now.

  Lorraine was still speaking. Belinda heard none of it, heard nothing at all. She was accustomed to controlling her body, but shivers wracked her, sickness roiling in her belly until sweat stood cold on chilled skin. Her hands were blanched, and she could well imagine that her face had turned ghostly, too.

  Amusement curled the corner of Dmitri's mouth, and bile rose to burn Belinda's belly and throat. He had known, and had failed to warn Robert; had let her father send her to Lutetia. Sent her to seduce the one young man in Echon so much like herself.

  Had let her, by doing so, fall in love with her brother.

  A remnant of dignity, of hard-won stillness, kept her upright and sober, though her eyes burnt with unshed tears and her stomach heaved so violently she thought it must be visible even under the corsets. Her hands remained quiet at her sides, trembling with the effort of not scraping at her own skin, as though she might be able to escape herself if she did so. She, who had done murder innumerable times without remorse, felt the need to confess as a bladder bursting inside her. Words, like tears, choked in her throat, every last fraction of control working to both protect her and, she thought, destroy her. She could not live thus burdened, couldn't face the morning, much less herself; the idea of what she had done, what she had been tricked into doing, would tear her apart before the night hours began to toll.

  Witch, harlot, slut! rang in her thoughts: names she'd been called many times without them ever taking root. Never before had it been her own voice hissing the recriminations, inescapable in the confines of her mind. Javier's face swam in her vision, blurred by water she couldn't allow to fall. Slim face, long features, thin grey eyes under ginger hair, all so much like Lorraine, now that Belinda knew to look for it. She should have seen it, must have seen it—

  Could not have seen it, had no reason to see it, would never have seen it had witchpower strength not stolen the truth from Dmitri's memory. For an instant Belinda hated the power, rage burning away her revulsion.

  In the brief freedom from horror, a thought kindled, then winked away again, too quick to be grasped. Disgust swamped her again, drowning fury and leaving her shuddering. She would kill, she would plot, she would bring down a throne, all without care, but to lie with a man who was her brother, to find love where she ought to have shied away; there, it seemed, lay the line Belinda Primrose's conscience could not cross.

  Clarity flickered again, tiny splash of comprehension through body-wracking abhorrence. This was a thing she would not have done. It was a thing done to her, if not by Robert's will, then by Dmitri's uncaring hand.

  It was a thing done to them. To Javier de Castille and to Belinda Primrose, all unknowing and all as part of a plot to serve a foreign queen so far beyond Belinda's understanding she'd allowed herself not to think on it, to not try and comprehend. A queen of whom Javier knew nothing, and yet whom he was expected to serve, as she was, both diligently and well.

  An answer was to be had within those thoughts, but Belinda put them away, forcing a lifetime of training to bend to her call. Lorraine had been speaking; Belinda searched her memory for echoes of what the queen had said, and found it in herself to curtsey with some small degree of grace before lifting her own quavering voice. “I would beg a boon, majesty.”

  “We can deny our daughter, the saviour of Aulun, nothing.” Lorraine's smile was beatific, her confidence supreme, and only Belinda was close enough to see how both the smile and her eyes went flat as Belinda whispered her request.

  “I have been raised in a convent, and am unaccustomed to the world, much less the grandeur of what I am now gifted with.” She made a tiny motion, smoothing her hand over her gown in example. “I would beg that I might retreat to the convent until the Yule celebration, so I might gather myself and become more fully prepared for this role I'm soon to fill.” Belinda gauged her hesitation, giving the courtiers time enough to hear her request but Lorraine too little to respond. “From there I might more fully pray to God to support our army and navy as they make war on wretched Gallin, and perhaps from there He will hear me with the clarity He chose to three days ago when the armada fell. I beg this of you, majesty. Let me retreat a little while to consider my new place, and to entreat God to keep our soldiers safe.”

  She could not have been refused, not then, not like that. The audience had concluded more rapidly than the spectators might have wished, and Belinda, no longer on display and in need of playing a role, had lost herself in icy tremors as she and the queen were escorted to private chambers.

  Private indeed: Lorraine caught her arm and thrust her toward the secret room, forgoing her own rituals of greeting to snap, “You've not done as you were told, girl,” and make a sharp gesture toward Belinda's torso.

  Belinda flinched with the gesture, as though Lorraine had flung a knife and driven it home in her belly. She ought not have flinched; she ought not have shown such emotion, especially when her thoughts were white with noise, as though the sea had rushed in between her ears. Grey washed over her vision, turning the world to fog and leaving her blind and deaf. It took what little control she had to not fold her hands over her belly; to not sag against illness that churned her belly and weakened her legs. She had never sought to capture a king by way of a child, but it was the easiest route any w
oman might take in trying to better her position. Had they not had the witchpower in common…

  The child was not Javier de Castille's. Belinda swallowed, feeling cords stand out in her throat and knowing herself helpless to mitigate such signs of strain. The child could not be Javier's: her courses had come without fail once after Dmitri had come to her bed, and for all the months before that. Clinging to the thought, she answered without hearing herself; without much care for Lorraine Walter's exalted position. “There's been no time.”

  “How long can it take?” Lorraine sniffed, and Belinda pulled herself from a stupor to stare at the queen without mercy.

  “To brew and sip a tea? Little enough. To wait for the child to become unrooted? Tell me, when your blood still came, did it do so gently, or were you bent with pain as some women are? Aborting a babe can be like the worst of those days, and I think, majesty, that you would rather I stood strong and steady against the storm than fell to my knees bleeding while Aulun died on the seas.”

  Lorraine's eyebrows lifted. “My little witch has grown a wicked tongue.”

  Belinda, through her teeth, said, “It has been a trying day.”

  “And you did well, Primrose.” Robert entered on the end of her words, bowing to Lorraine and offering Belinda herself a rare smile. She nodded in return, too aware that such a smile would have once thrilled her in its assurance of her place in her beloved papa's eyes. Now it barely cut through the cold in her, cold that was the only thing preventing outrage from erupting in witchbreed fire.