The Pretender's Crown

by C. E. Murphy

Witchlight, seductive, warmed her as she held to that thought, then cooled again as she whispered, “To Lorraine.”

  There were wars on the battlefield, and wars inside her. Loyalty to Lorraine meant destroying the young witchlord who stood miles away, drawing on his own power to protect his men.

  But Javier de Castille—against all odds, against all reason—was not her enemy. Dmitri was. Robert was. Their unknowable queen, too; they made up a triumvirate of power stretching beyond the obvious, beyond the sensible and beyond the practical. Loyalty, bred into Belinda's bones, lay stretched between two needs, and that she had come this far should have made her path a clear one.

  Serving Aulun had to mean betraying Lorraine.

  Belinda slammed her hands into fists and pulled her power back, leaving the blended Aulunian and Khazarian armies unprotected, and leaving, she hoped, the thinnest of bridges on which she could cross the distance between herself and Javier.

  He would very likely kill her on sight.

  Belinda lowered her head, tucked herself in stillness until she was all but impossible to see, and amended her thought:

  He would very likely try.

  Rodrigo's arm of the Cordulan forces, eight thousand strong, rode into the back of the Khazarian army at sunset. Belinda watched, holding her magic in until it cramped her belly and made her hands sweat with the need to act. It was little more than a salvo on Rodrigo's part, an announcement of his arrival: the day had gone on too long already, and no one had the heart to fight. A few men died on both sides before falling back from the battle, exhaustion driving them to rest.

  A hundred and fifty thousand soldiers would come to battle in the morning. Two-thirds of them were the allied Khazarian and Aulunian armies; they should, by rights, defeat Cordula's troops through numbers. But her army was wedged between two forces of almost-equal size now, and retreating to present a unified front would only give Javier's men a chance at their backs. No, it would have to be done through numbers; watching campfires light up, Belinda was glad she wasn't a general, obliged to move men like chess pieces and watch plans fall awry.

  She had left crossing into Javier's camp until nightfall: witch-power or no, walking through a battlefield invited more trouble than she wanted to risk. They weren't so very far apart, the Gallic king's camp and her own watching-place in the woods. But Belinda left her safe place with more trepidation than she'd felt since childhood, since Robert had come for her in the middle of the night and set her on the road to murder. Then, as now, all that she was hinged on a few critical moments at the end of her journey, and then, as now, she was uncertain of how that ending would play out. This is how it shall go, Primrose. The memory of Robert's voice echoed in her ears so clearly she thought, for an instant, that he'd spoken in her mind in the same manner as a few months earlier. But the echo came again, rising from within her, not from an external source. This is how it shall go, and with that promise came her own confidence. The words this time were hers, as was the plot. “Heed me well,” she whispered to herself. “For this is how it will go.”

  ROBERT, LORD DRAKE

  22 June 1588 † Alunaer, the queen's private chambers

  Of all the things that should not be dancing through Robert Drake's mind, Irina Durova's beautiful face is high on the list. But the imperatrix's image is there, bringing with it a humour that Lorraine, queen of all Aulun, would not appreciate at all, which is why Robert is biting his tongue in an attempt to keep laughter at bay.

  It is, as he's observed before, easier to be angry at a plain woman than a beautiful one, but Lorraine's wrath makes it quite clear that a woman of failing beauty is still very capable of being angry at a man. Any man, but most particularly himself in this time and place, and if he were asked, Robert would admit Lorraine has the right of him.

  He, after all, taught Belinda Primrose to be a sneak.

  Another girl has been wimpled and put on display for the moment, an event she should revel in as the most exciting of her brief life, because it will almost certainly be the culmination of it. Lorraine's brother, who died little more than a child, was so ruined by the disease that had wracked him that another pretty blond boy took his place as the funereal body, while the young king himself was buried in a shallow grave in the middens. A family of such pragmaticism is unlikely to allow Belinda's double to live long after Belinda's safe return.

  A return, Robert hears, which he is expected to expedite. He brings his attention back to Lorraine, and against all wisdom smiles at her. “Forgive me,” he says, and though he's cheerful, there's honesty in the request. “I should say I expected this, but I didn't. Belinda's been a well-directed tool all her life, unaccustomed to taking her own rein. I didn't think she would.”

  “My experiences with the girl say she's impetuous and—” Lorraine breaks off with a muttered curse. “And clever. But I thought her loyal, Robert. I thought her loyal beyond question.”

  “She is.” Robert says that with easy confidence, and rises out of his kneel to emphasise it. “You set her a task, Lorraine.” He's made much freer with the queen's name since her revelation of their long-ago marriage, a stunt so well-considered and oft-discussed that even Robert barely remembers whether it happened in truth or in fiction. “You told her to keep her people safe. I've never, not since she was a child, given her the how of accomplishing her duties, only said they must be done. You may be her queen—”

  “And her mother,” Lorraine snaps, but Robert shrugs dismissively.

  “That, too, but the one holds more weight than the other, and it should, given how we chose to raise her. Either way, I think she's chosen her own path to fulfilling the job set to her.”

  “We did not grant her permission—”

  “How often,” Robert interrupts, greatly daring, “have you waited on permission, my queen?”

  Lorraine stares at him, and stares hard. Robert smothers another smile, far too pleased with the girl-child he raised and feeling a little sorry for her mother. Belinda's presence in Gallin isn't something he counted on, but it, and her stormy relationship with Javier de Castille, will drive the war in dramatic waves. This is what Robert wants: the more passion and the less reason, the longer it will last, and the more room he'll have to push forward leaps in technology. These people have guns, they have metal workers, but they have no automation, and he requires a level of automation beyond what they can currently imagine. He admires their blue jewel of a planet, but he'll turn its skies grey and let its people forget the colour of the sun, if it will help to arm his own people for their long nights between the stars, and for the battles they find there.

  “Are you suggesting,” Lorraine finally says, icily, “that your Primrose is…” She can't, it seems, finish the evidently appalling thought: Belinda may be her daughter, but Lorraine is unaccustomed to thinking of anyone as being like herself.

  “You're a force unto yourself, my queen,” Robert says both smoothly and truthfully, but then he allows that smile to encroach. “And she's admired you her entire life, Lorraine. She will do anything for you and for this country. Don't worry. I'll go to Gallin and bring her back, but don't worry for her safety or her methods. If she's bold, she comes by it naturally.”

  “For me,” Lorraine says, still coolly. “For me, for Aulun, and for you, Robert. Her loyalties don't begin and end with me.”

  “But mine are yours to command.” A wash of foolishness heats Robert's jaw and creeps up his cheeks at the simple truth of those words. His other queen may wait beyond this world's moon, preparing for the time when humans break far enough away from their small planet to shuttle ore and minerals and fuel to her ships, but in the here and now, a very large part of Robert Drake is given over entirely to the red-haired queen of Aulun. Still flushed, he bows deeply and takes himself to the door, trying to shape his thoughts to a journey across the straits, and to finding a wayward daughter.

  “Robert.” Lorraine waits until he's turned back, then says, “Take the Khazarian ambassador with you
. I want one of Irina's chosen men on the front lines, as much to oversee her troops and report to her as to be seen and reported on. We are unified, Aulun and Khazar, and the world will see it in my lord consort and Irina's ambassador standing arm in arm.”

  “Your will, my queen.” Robert, more than satisfied, bows again and leaves the chambers with a lightness in his step.

  JAVIER DE CASTILLE, KING OF GALLIN

  22 June 1588 † The Brittanic battlefields

  Javier had hardly believed Rodrigo would arrive in time. In time, as though the Essandian prince's fragment of an army could break the Khazarians' backs, as though there was some terrible and wonderful difference another eight thousand men could make to their cause. Javier had let almost all of his magic go when Rodrigo's troops did finally come over the hill, not because they deserved less of his protection, but because he was only barely on his feet, and permitting someone else to take the brunt of the allied attack was the only way to retain consciousness for the night's remainder.

  Rodrigo himself rode up the hill with the last rays of sunset behind him, making a tall beautiful slim line of masculinity against golden shadows. Javier saw Belinda's power in that colour, then bared his teeth and shoved the thought away: she was out there, but not to make Rodrigo of Essandia look heroic as he gave the Cor-dulan armies a modicum of hope.

  Akilina rode with him, evidently free, until Rodrigo dismounted and strode to his wife, lifting her from her horse. There was stiffness in his movements, speaking of an injury, but he was gentle with Akilina, and as he set her on the ground Javier saw the ropes that bound her wrists. Red scrapes said she'd been wearing them a while now.

  “Surely,” Javier said with all the steadiness at his command, “this is unnecessary, uncle.”

  Anger flashed in Rodrigo's eyes, and with it Javier's intuition leapt: the anger was for binding his wife, not for Javier's question. “The generals will have it no other way. It seems they doubt an army's ability to keep one single woman under watch without subjecting her to such indignities.” He put an arm around Akilina's waist, steadying her as they went into Javier's tent, where more of those generals waited to argue strategy and tactics and to make accusations of betrayal and perfidy. Javier stood where he was, swaying with the wind as it wrapped him, and gave half an ear to the arguments already rising in the tent.

  There was nothing new to them—there would be nothing new. They were old women gnawing at old bones, trying to find marrow that had long since been sucked away. Blame was flung about as though it were a cannonball itself, its weight crushing where it couldn't be deflected. Low anger, tainted with silver, rumbled in Javier's belly, and he stood waiting for the inevitable phrase that would push him into action. He would wait until then, would wait until emotion ran so high that the witchpower could simply seize it and direct it as he wished, and if that was a sin against God, so be it.

  Javier closed his eyes and listened to the mounting debate in the tent, and repeated those words to himself: so be it. He was king, he was God's chosen, he was blessed—or cursed; it no longer mattered which—with the witchpower, and between Tomas's faith and his own need, Javier de Castille no longer gave much concern to whether God approved of his decisions. Better to be damned trying to save souls than in not acting.

  A bitter laugh coughed up from his chest, a thick wet sound. Sacha would be proud. Finally, Sacha would get the ambitious liege-lord he had always wanted.

  Someone inside the tent snapped, “Rumour from Lutetia is that Akilina herself poisoned Sandalia's cup.”

  Javier lifted his chin, opened his eyes to watch the fading horizon, and waited a little longer. Not much longer now. Anticipation strengthened and excited the witchpower, though it seemed that all such emotion belonged to the magic, not to himself. There was only the nausea of dreaded necessity in his own thoughts, the discomfort of determination. It would be better to revel in the witch-power's enthusiasm, and perhaps later he could. Too much lay at stake now to enjoy his choices.

  Rodrigo, so softly, said, “I would not say such things if I were you,” to the offending general, but another voice took up the first officer's cry.

  “First Sandalia dead and now the Khazarian army our betrayers, and Akilina Pankejeff a very common link, your majesty.” The honorific was a tag weighted with sarcasm, questioning Rodrigo's worthiness to bear it. Javier closed one hand into a slow fist, waiting, still waiting. Witchpower anger began seeping through him, heating resolution into passion.

  A third took up the call. All of them were voices Javier knew, men he could put names to without seeing their faces. Men who ought to have been more unquestioningly loyal, and who ought not dream of saying what this one did: “The woman's well-known in Khazar as a witch, Rodrigo, and she's naught but bad luck to all of us here. There's a sure answer to this problem in the sharp of my sword.”

  There: there were the words Javier had waited on. He heard breath catch in every throat in the cloth-walled room, and demanded, without speaking himself, that no word be said. Half a beat later he threw open the tent doors and stalked inside, all of it so quick he might not have needed witchpower to stay their voices. Might not have, and yet he flexed it, uncaring of the right or wrong in using magic to silence objections. “We will hear no threats of a queen's neck on a cutting block. We have lost enough royal blood already and are not eager to lose more. Akilina is not the problem here.”

  Emotion so strong it might have been his own rose up in all the men and the solitary woman in the room. It was sweltering inside the canvas walls, torches thickening the air as they offered light, and the night was already warm. Coupled with outrage, with disbelief, with insult, and with a soprano relief over all that masculine fury, the heat poured sickness into Javier. It sprang out as cold sweat on his lip and clogged his throat. For a terrible moment he thought he would lose all control and become a fool in front of half-rebellious generals. He could not let that happen.

  Witchpower answered that need, all of its anger turning cool and soothing. It coated his insides and spilled outward, lending him strength and a confidence bordering on eroticism. He would have his way, and the thought gave him the same comfort and delight he'd felt in raining blood on his enemies.

  “Akilina is a charm, nothing more, a thing dangled in front of Essandia in order to give the Khazarian alliance a pretty face. She hasn't the power to reforge that alliance, and if you made use of your minds instead of retreating into childish fears of witches you would know that. Only Irina could have made the decision to ally Khazar with Aulun at this late hour. Our navy is crushed and now Khazar stands with Aulun on Echon's western border. Irina could not have foreseen the armada's defeat.” That much, at least, Javier was certain of: none of them had foreseen it, and even if he'd known Belinda's powers were increasing, he'd never have fathomed they'd grown to such devastating effect. Irina Durova couldn't have known the Cordulan navy would suffer such a loss.

  He left a silence, both to gather his thoughts and to lend weight to what he'd said, and no one broke it. Silver magic told him no one could, that witchpower held the generals' tongues even as they fought for speech. Hands planted on the map table, Javier levelled his gaze toward men resentful but unable to stop listening. “She couldn't foresee it, but I think we face a tactician more talented than any of us had realised. There was always a chance, however small, that the navy might fall. Irina didn't send a man to strike a bargain with Aulun after the armada. He would have been there, waiting for word to offer the Red Bitch the alliance she's always wanted.

  “Sixty thousand of Irina's army are already here, and as many again remain in Khazar. She has Echon in the palm of her clawed hand, and Aulun at her side. These two queens need only break our back here in Brittany and then they'll move across Echon in their own names and for their own heathen gods. Gentlemen, we have been outplayed by women, and I will not have it.

  “In the morning we will bring our army back together, regardless of the cost. God has offered me a bless
ing and I'll turn what small talent I have toward easing our reunion pangs, but it will be your skill, generals, that will win the day. The combined Cordulan armies are a formidable force, even in the face of the Khazarian alliance. Reuniting our men will give them heart, which I deem more valuable than any flanking tactics we might manage to manoeuvre out of our current positions. Our armies will be one, and then with our strength united and God's mandate driving us on, we will defeat Aulun and drive Khazar back to her frozen northlands, and Echon will for once and all bend knee to Cordula's church!”

  The uproarious agreement came so quickly and with such pleasure that it might have been born of honest emotion, rather than relief at finally being able to speak, rather than Javier's implacable willpower directing them toward cooperation. This was an easier battle than with Tomas, if it was a battle at all: these were men who wanted a fight, though they might not have chosen it in the manner Javier did. There were objections, but they came in the form of how best to implement his plans, not inherent opposition to what he demanded. Javier sat down, fingers steepled, and watched old men bicker over strategy as they rushed to do his will.

  Out of them, Rodrigo remained silent, watching Javier. His opinion was a note in the crowd, a sentiment that stood out more clearly than the others. There was pride in the Essandian prince, but more, there was curiosity, and Javier didn't need clearer thoughts to know his uncle wondered if the generals acted of their own accord or his. In time Javier met his eyes and shrugged a shoulder; it didn't, in the end, matter, and Rodrigo pursed his lips before giving an acknowledging shrug. Only then did he get to his feet and go to Akilina, taking a blade to cut apart the ropes that bound her wrists.

  Though her hands must have been numb, she gathered her skirts as she stood and made a curtsey toward Javier: thanks, he knew, for distracting the generals and sparing her life—as much thanks as he was likely to get from a woman unaccustomed to subservience. He tipped his head toward the door. The Essandian queen was better off out of sight, and Rodrigo quietly offered her an elbow. They left together under the cover of arguments, a royal pair too unimportant to notice.