The Pretender's Crown

by C. E. Murphy

  She gathered her skirts and with them her will, and with both of those things in firm grasp, executed a curtsey of grace and beauty; a curtsey that made her malleable, the good daughter, the well-shaped weapon. “Thank you, your highness.”

  Surprise shattered off Robert, and offence off Lorraine, though the former turned his to a booming laugh. “Highness, am I? It's been a day for elevations all around.”

  “I should think it the proper term,” Belinda said to the floor, and, with care, awakened a note of humour in her voice. “Her majesty has not confirmed her lord husband as king, but surely as her majesty's consort you might aspire to such a worthy title as ‘highness.’”

  She shouldn't allow herself to be so sharp, she knew that, and still allowed herself the luxury. Better to offend a queen—and what had she come to, that upsetting royalty was the best of her options—than to dwell on the appalling truth that wanted to pull her down. Javier's thin face, his slim body, insisted on appearing before her eyes. For months his image had been an indulgence of wistfulness; now it seemed to mock her with what she hadn't known, and could all too clearly recognise now that she'd been granted the eyes to see it. She didn't want those eyes, nor the burden of knowledge that came with them, but neither could be erased. If she found even the slightest release in pointed words, in playing herself as almost an equal to the two she shared a room with, then she would take it, and for once trust herself too valuable to be thrown away.

  Robert turned to Lorraine, full of good nature and wide eyes. “Primrose has a point, majesty.” He took in Lorraine's tight mouth and stiff carriage, and softened both his words and his mood. “I have not sought a crown or title, Lorraine, not even in the staging of this particular play for these especial ends. Surely you know this, after all these years.” He knelt, and to Belinda's eyes, to her cold witchpower senses, there was nothing but honesty in the action. “I am honoured to be named the queen's husband, and need no pretty titles. If you will call me Robert, and the rest of them Lord Drake as they have always done, then I'll count myself a favoured man.”

  Lorraine sniffed, a sound denoting pleasure, but her gaze was still hard as she looked toward Belinda. “And you, I suppose, will want the title of princess, as is your due.”

  “All I covet is a place as a novice again, my queen, that I might adjust to the awe of my new position under God's watchful eye, and amongst women who will not be impressed by my change of status.” Belinda rarely indulged in sarcasm, and never with her superiors, but her tongue and tone had minds of their own today, and she could not control them.

  Lorraine's expression went flat, but Robert, climbing to his feet, chuckled again. “She reminds me of you, Lorraine. Come now,” he said to the look she gave him. “It's no secret you're known for your quick tongue and ginger temperament, majesty.”

  Another sniff said Robert had diffused Lorraine's pique for the second time. “The girl has not the hair for it.”

  Neither does her majesty, anymore. For a horrifying instant Belinda thought she'd spoken aloud, and bit her tongue against the inclination to do so. Newly made heir or not, stomach-sick with knowledge or not, there were boundaries she shouldn't even dream of crossing, and mocking Lorraine's physical aspect was unquestionably one of them.

  “There's no need for her to enter the convent again,” Robert was saying with a casual wave of his hand. “She can stay in the palace and study—”

  “No.” Inexorable cold, the same chill Belinda felt within herself, cut through Robert's easy plans. He stopped and looked at her with genuine astonishment, and she tried to remember when, if ever, she'd refused his intentions so flatly. “Unless I stay in this chamber, I can't go unnoticed in the palace, and even here there will need to be food brought, and drink, and chamber pots emptied. Unless her majesty wishes to field rumours on how she has begun eating and eliminating twice as much, it seems a bad idea. Besides, the courtiers are enamoured of my seclusion. We want them to love me, not think me a sneak.”

  Robert, drily, said, “You are a sneak.”

  “All the more reason to not let them see it.”

  “You enjoyed your time at the convent so much that you hasten now to return there?” Lorraine was as dry as Robert, and for a moment Belinda admired them as she might a set of horses. One might be bay and the other brown, but they were a matched pair for all of that, a lifetime of working together making them excellent complements to each other.

  “It was your majesty's idea that I should be so pious as to gain God's support in our sea battle against Gallin.” The coldness was dropping away leaving strips of anger where it fell. “I can emerge from the convent more and more regularly as the months go by becoming part of society without leaving behind the impression of purity Your majesty knows the value of such illusions. At Yule I can finally be bold enough to take my place, and by then, majesty, we should have some clear idea of who are our enemies within the court and who will support us.”

  Lorraine's painted eyebrows shot up. “‘We,’ girl?”

  “Your majesty, his highness, and myself,” Belinda said shortly. “I do not put myself so high as to use a royal plural. This life is still on the wrong side of a looking glass to me, Mother, but I do have some skill in making a place for myself where I was once unknown.” The barb hit home, Lorraine tensing satisfactorily at Belinda's use of the familial honorific, tensing in a way Robert had never done when she had called him “father.” She might never earn that reaction from Robert, not now, but to cut it from Lorraine was worth sacrificing it from Robert. “I would never presume to tell your majesty what to do, but it might be wise to permit me to do what I do best.”

  “Murder?” Lorraine asked archly, and for one exasperated moment, Belinda found herself tempted.

  Robert intervened, his palms turned down as though he quieted a room full of squabbling old men. “Primrose has a point,” he said a second time. “One I hadn't entirely considered. Perhaps she should be permitted to arrange the details of her coming out. She has both experience and reason to make it work, and …”

  And, Belinda concluded, if she failed in endearing herself to the people with her slow exposure, then that, too, would be something of use for Lorraine and Robert to know. They bickered a little longer, but the answer was foregone. Lorraine eventually drew herself up and turned a hard look on Belinda. “Whether the public do or not, we will see you in a week's time, girl, and the matter of which we spoke had best be resolved.”

  Robert shared a look of open curiosity between the women as Belinda tightened her jaw and curtsied to the queen. “Majesty.”

  There was no other word she trusted herself with, no other response that could both satisfy and forbid bone-deep horror from spewing across the floor. Lorraine nodded, content, and together the three left her private chambers.

  Belinda Walter emerged from the queen's apartments in a novice's grey robes and with her hair pulled back tightly, making nothing glamorous of who or what she was. Lorraine went with her to the palace doors, there to embrace her for the third time, and Robert, clearly amused at his role, kissed her cheek with great solemnity. Belinda curtsied to them both, and a procession delighted by her humility came together around her and made an escort of itself as she was returned to the abbey.

  The eager young sister greeted her almost before the abbess, and a shy touch to the girl's cheek washed away any lingering memories of nights spent together. The girl, awed and delighted by Belinda's status and by the grace of her touch, turned pink and ran off to make a confession of pride so happily Belinda nearly laughed, the first time such humour had risen in her since the courtroom.

  She could not, in this place, make confession. Not to the abbess or anyone else; the girl they'd taken in was an innocent, not one who knew any man's touch, much less one who had all unknowing spread her legs for her brother.

  The thought brought another flinch, awakened the witch, harlot, whore singsong in her mind again. Belinda set her teeth and whispered a request to the
convent's holy mother, and that brisk old woman led her to the chapel where she could kneel and fold her hands in prayer. To the world around her she was a penitent overwhelmed by her new standing, thanking God for it and asking that she be guided in His light for all her days. That was what they wanted to see, and Belinda was happy to let them see it. A part of her did, indeed, pray for the souls and bodies of the soldiers who were going to war, though she had little faith that prayers would protect any of them.

  But mostly she knelt in silence, head bowed and, if not empty of thought, at least as unfocused as she could make it. The song of recrimination swam through her mind time and again, dismay and disgust turning her body to ice even when heat rose inside her as though she might sick up. She had made a lifetime of using people and things and had not loathed herself for it; now, having been used in a way inconceivable to untwisted minds, she thought there was a cleanliness to using people in begetting death. Death left scars on the survivors, but those scars healed: dying was part of life, not a sin, but what she and Javier had done was, and Dmitri had allowed them to enter it. Ill winds ride in Gallin, he'd said to her a year past, in the Khazarian northlands. He had known where Belinda would go and had known what her mission there would be, and he had warned neither herself nor Robert that a wickedness beyond comprehension lay in her path. No, there was no honesty to Dmitri's machinations, the way there was honesty in death. Belinda had no doubt that keeping such secrets furthered some end of Dmitri's own; he and Robert were at odds, though perhaps only one of them knew that.

  Only one of them, and Belinda herself.

  Slowly, slowly, through the chaos of thoughtlessness, a plan made a shape in her mind. She had knowledge and she had power: all she lacked were allies. Robert was not an ally, not in this, and Dmitri never would be. Whatever his plans, she would thwart them, and destroy him if she could. If that furthered Robert's goals, it was a price worth paying. But a cruel knot of surety held a place in Belinda's thoughts. Robert hadn't known, still didn't know, whose child Javier was, because he had been surprised at the Gallic prince's witchpower.

  And yet cold, dreadful certainty whispered that if he had known, he still would have sent Belinda to seduce and murder, with no care for their consanguinity or the cost against their souls for brother and sister becoming lovers. That his loyalty to his foreign queen was far greater than any worry for an ungodly union between two witchbreed children. From Dmitri's words about siring heirs to continue their world-changing plans, Robert might in fact have welcomed another child born to the witchpower, even if that child was issue of an affair no human morality would condone.

  That, though it was all but beyond her comprehension, there was something alien enough in her father as to make him into a singular concept that she could grasp.

  An enemy.

  With the calm of horror cloaking her, Belinda drew stillness around herself, then rose and left the chapel, left the convent, left the country, and went in search of Javier de Castille.

  JAVIER DE CASTILLE

  8 June 1588 † Gallin's northern shore

  The messenger came through a sleeping camp long before dawn, riding a horse for all that the distance between the camp's centre and the nearby ocean channel was barely a mile. The gondola boy who rarely seemed to sleep, but who was unwakeable when he did, roused Javier bare seconds before the rider arrived. Eliza dragged a robe over her own shoulders and belted Javier's sword around his waist before he staggered, bleary with sleep, to meet the agitated courier.

  The man all but fell off his horse and dropped to one knee, shoulders heaving with breathlessness. “My lord, there's an Aulunian heir.”

  For an eternity the words made no sense. Javier stared at the top of the man's head—he was balding, with sweat rolling through thin hairs—and then transferred his gaze to the island nation invisible with distance and predawn light. “An heir?”

  He was king of Gallin; he should be wittier than that. Shock, even coupled with a half-sleeping mind, should clear more quickly and leave him more able to accept and ask clever questions. “Lorraine of Aulun has declared an heir?”

  “One of her body,” the messenger gasped, and dared look up. Javier gaped at him, too thick-headed to even echo the man. Either emboldened by his king's silence or sympathetic to it, the messenger continued. “She has produced writs of marriage and of birth, my lord king. Marriage twenty-five years ago to Robert, Lord Drake, long since known as her paramour, and the birth two years later of her daughter. The girl was raised as an adopted niece by Robert until her thirteenth year, when she entered a convent. Yesterday in the queen's court she was presented, your majesty Her name is Belinda Walter, and she is the Aulunian heir.”

  That had been seven days ago.

  Too many points had made a line that morning: Beatrice Irvine, who was also Belinda Primrose, had given the truth to her bloodline when Robert Drake's witchpower had stood against Javier's in the Lutetian court. The Aulunian heir, it was said, stood on the cliffs of Aulun and called God's light to her, and in so doing destroyed the Essandian armada. Beatrice Irvine, spy, whore, witch, and traitor, was Belinda Walter, daughter of the Titian Bitch.

  Javier de Castille had bedded, and nearly wedded, the heir to the Aulunian throne. Even now, in the midst of battle, when that thought came to him it came with a tang of bitter irony. How Sandalia would have adored that coup: she, who had stood against his marriage to Beatrice, might have handed Javier her rival's throne without a drop of blood spilled if she had only encouraged their union.

  He had been poor company this past week, had Sandalia's son. Rocked between betrayal and a twisted admiration, he had drawn the lines for his friends, for Rodrigo and Akilina, and most of all for himself, struggling to see if he might have understood the truth before it had fallen from a messenger's lips.

  He could not have. The wiser part of him knew it, but the knowledge had emptied him, and then it had filled him with rage. She had played him for a fool since the beginning, and that was a game she would pay for.

  Blood tasted of metal. His nose was full of thick scents: more metal, more blood, viscera, and once in a while the startling clear salt and fish smell of water off the straits. When that faded the sun-rotted stench of everything else seemed all the worse, and Javier heard others around him coughing and gagging in the same way he did.

  He was the king of Gallin, and he was not meant to be in the midst of a battlefield, spitting blood and blinking sweat away.

  Aulun had come to Gallin at the southern jut, in the northern Gallic province of Brittany; the very place Javier had argued to Rodrigo they would not try for. The two countries' proximity there had made the province a contested stretch of land for centuries; Aulun claimed it and Gallin refused to give it up. Lorraine even had holiday retreats in one or two of the area's more beautiful low valleys, and as Javier knocked away an Aulunian sword and skewered the man carrying it, he had the brief vicious wish that someone had simply slipped into one of those rarely used manors and done away with Lorraine on one of her visits. He would not now be numb with exhaustion from the ears down, had someone been so foresightful, and would be enjoying a blazing summer afternoon instead of desperately wishing for water and a lull in the fighting.

  They had the numbers to defeat the Aulunians, some forty thousand Cordulan soldiers and Khazar's massive contingency of seventy thousand troops soon to join them. Rodrigo had sent the larger part of the Cordulan force to Brittany, convinced Lorraine's army would take the longer march in an attempt to surprise Lutetia by coming up on its southwestern side instead of from the north and east. It was the harder journey all around, not just for distance but because the Sacrauna protected the city on its southern border, but Rodrigo had been certain, and Javier had taken his uncle's lead and thirty thousand men to Brittany.

  Aulun had not been marching on Lutetia as expected. Lorraine's army had been nowhere in sight, not marking the land and not distant on the sea. Javier, cursing, had posted a rear guard and retreate
d to ground that would give him the advantage when they came. If they came; he couldn't help but think of Rodrigo and the smaller part of their army to the north, perhaps taking the brunt of Aulun's attack.

  They waited for three exhausting days for pigeons to wing back and forth, bearing messages of battle. Rodrigo, to the north, was at war, while Javier waited in boredom for an army that had turned its attentions elsewhere.

  The fourth morning, they broke camp, and that was when the Aulunians came.

  There were too many to have hidden, and sentries had been posted each night. Whispers of witchcraft followed the first battle, and witchcraft it had to be. Not even Javier had realised his eyes were fogged to the ships that suddenly appeared off shore, or his ears to the sounds of an army edging itself into place around his own. He had the high ground, and yet the Aulunian army swept around them, a collapsing wedge that drove his men into a narrower and narrower line of defence. He had never intended to fight amongst his men, thinking it wiser to wield magic from a distance so he wouldn't terrorise his own soldiers.

  Caught in the midst of the Aulunian attack, he found himself with no choice, and then found his men to be happy to have a witch—or God—on their side, too.

  Since then he had fought with them, revelling in the first gut-wrenching moments of panic and in how that fear faded into a noisy drive for survival. He had fought innumerable fencing matches, learning his skill with a sword, but had never known the moment that went beyond exhaustion, where his weapon's weight became as nothing, and he himself became a warrior who could fight forever. He had learned to rally men with a cry, and when they fell, to whisper a prayer over a dozen bodies without his own ever stopping its endless slash and stab and cut. He had learned, too, to be agonisingly grateful for the times when a retreat was called or an advance succeeded; times when he, like those ordinary men around him, could sink down, gasping for air, and take a moment to be astonished that he was still alive.