The Pretender's Crown

by C. E. Murphy

  “You should have been,” Javier said again, and this time wasn't sure if he meant to repeat his first sentiment, or if he was in agreement with Sacha's fear. “Go away, Sacha. I'm telling myself Marius would want us to drink to his memory together, that he'd consider what has happened to be nothing more than a terrible, forgivable mistake, but I am not Marius. I am not that good. Go away, fight in this war, and when I have the stomach for it I'll see you again. You are forbidden to die valiantly,” he added in a whisper. “You will live, Sacha Asselin. You will survive, because death is too easy a path for you.”

  “Javier—”

  “Do you think it makes it better?” Javier thundered, all too sure of what protest his oldest friend would make. “Is it all right that you meant that knife for Tomas and not for me? That Marius died to save my faith rather than my life? You attempted one murder and accomplished another, Sacha, and do you think that's acceptable? You live, and live free, because you are my oldest friend, and for no other reason. Any other man would be arrested, would be hanged or beheaded as fitted his rank, for what you have done. Do not test me with your explanations and your excuses. I'll have Madame Poulin to answer to,” he finished in a whisper. “Give me no reason, no reason at all, Sacha, to hand her the vengeance she'll rightfully demand.”

  Sacha bowed, the deepest and most honest genuflection Javier had ever seen from him, then spun and ran, rough long steps taking him toward the battlefields. Eliza, silent, came to Javier's side to put her hand in his, and he flinched. “Don't. Don't tell me I was too harsh, Liz, don't—”

  “No.” She tightened her fingers around his until they both trembled from her grip. “I wouldn't even if you were, not with Marius d—” A gasp swallowed her last word and she began again elsewhere, rather than give voice and therefore a kind of acceptance to the matter. “If he was anyone else I'd have seen him dead before dawn. But because it's Sacha it would only make it all the worse. We'll find no justice in this.”

  “Did I …” Javier swallowed, wanting to unask the question before it had more than begun. But it was too late: giving it any voice at all had let it form fully in his mind, and it would gnaw at him if it went unspoken. “Did I do this, Eliza? Is this my fault?”

  He wanted her no to come quickly enough to absolve him. Instead she stood quiet, looking at Marius's grave, and finally sighed. “Part of me wants to say yes, Jav To lay the blame somewhere. But I'm not sure you did. We've been together so long that it's not easy for any of us to watch you need another. You must know that. I only bore Beatrice out of love for you and at your explicit request. Marius … felt displaced by Tomas, but he was kinder than I am. Than Sacha is. He saw, perhaps, that Tomas offered you something that we secular three couldn't, and I think he didn't…”

  “Hate me for it?” Javier asked thickly.

  Eliza nodded. “He understood. His loyalty to you was unshakable.”

  “I thought Sacha's was, too.”

  “Sacha's always been more jealous.” Eliza's fingers were cold in Javier's. “Jealous of me, jealous of your crown, jealous of Marius's money, for all that he's noble-born.”

  “I'd think you'd have been jealous of Marius's wealth, if any of us were,” Javier whispered, more to keep his mind from burgeoning guilt than conviction of his words' truth.

  Eliza chuckled, soft sound made mostly of sorrow. “I had so little that there was no room for envy when you gave me so much. If anything haunted me, it was the fear it would prove as my father thought it would, too good and with too high a price. I had nothing to lose. Sacha saw himself as having everything to lose. Sees himself, perhaps, and so seeing a fifth come into our friendship … Beatrice was easier. She was only a woman. But Tomas is a man, and worse, awakened the ambition, or the will, in you, to do the things that Sacha's long since agitated for. No,” she finally said, quietly. “I don't think you did this, Javier. You might have been able to stop it, but …”

  “But?”

  Eliza straightened her shoulders, lifted her chin, small signs that told Javier he would have been better pleased had he not asked, because she would answer with a truth he wouldn't like. And she did, after taking a measured breath. “You have blindnesses, Jav Maybe born of your rank, maybe born of your power, I don't know. There's an arrogance about you, an assumption of your infallibility, and a—”

  “I am not perfect, Eliza.” Javier's voice cracked in horror. “I've spent a lifetime afraid of my fallibility—”

  “You've spent a lifetime afraid the witchpower was the devil's gift, and afraid that giving in to it was the path to damnation. I'm talking about something else. You're self-centered, my love, and it makes you bad at reading the hearts of those around you. You asked,” she added even more gently, then shook her head. “Maybe you could have seen this thing being shaped, maybe you could have stopped it, but maybe any of us could have and none of us did. I wouldn't lay the blame at your feet, but at Sacha's, if it must be laid. I think you would come back to us,” Eliza whispered. “I believe that in the end you will always come back to us, because we know you better than anyone else. Sacha's jealousies and fears took that belief away from him, until Tomas's death seemed the only possible course. We've all paid.” She closed her eyes and put her temple against Javier's shoulder as she drew a tired breath. “We've all paid. There's no use salting the wounds.”

  “Aren't you angry Liz?”

  “Of course I am.” She turned her face into his shoulder. “But I'm more afraid of what becomes of us if we let the anger eat us whole. I don't want to become what Sacha's become.”

  “You're good for me, Liz.” Javier put his arm around her and buried his nose in her hair, willing tears not to fall at the familiar scent of her. “It took me too long to see it, but you're good for me.”

  “I know.” Eliza tipped her chin up to give him a watery smile, then wrapped her fingers at his elbow and gave him a heartless tug. “Come away for a little while. You promised one other the chance to say good-bye.”

  BELINDA WALTER

  Given that she was in essence a prisoner of war, Belinda spent the night in surprising comfort. Better by far than the last time she'd been a guest of the Castille family: then she'd huddled in the darkness of an oubliette, stripped naked and awaiting a dawn that would surely see her dead. By comparison the small guarded tent and bedroll she'd been given were luxury, and she made no attempt to escape or slip away from her tent to listen and learn what she could of the Cordulan camps. War rarely offered the chance for uninterrupted rest, and yet she slept soundly as a child while in the heart of an enemy camp.

  She awakened to the sunrise cutting through a gap in the tent walls. Cannon roared in the distance: her army was wasting none of the long summer day in making war. A boyish voice, familiar but displaced, spoke outside the tent, his Gallic broken yet full of confidence. A moment later the tent door flew open and a child walked in, slim and strong and haloed by the sunrise, making him unearthly and beautiful.

  Then her jaw dropped and her eyes goggled, an expression Belinda felt mirrored on his own face as the boy blurted “Fine lady?” in Parnan, and then repeated the words in a gleeful crow: “Fine lady! You have come all the way from the city of canals to see me! See how brave and handsome I am, and my banner that I carry for Cordula!”

  He whipped a length of fabric from his waist, unmaking a belt and turning it into a long flag marked with Cordula's red cross of war. He draped it across his shoulders and struck a pose, chin lifted and gaze distant with pride before excitement caught him again. “The king tells me to fetch the woman to visit the grave, but he has never said the woman is my friend! I told the man nothing,” he said, eyes still wide but now serious. “The blade-faced man who came to look for you, lady; I told him nothing of you. I am very brave, no? And you will walk with me now so all of this strange dry country can see that I have the love of a fine lady for my handsomeness and my bravery.”

  “But what are you doing here?” Belinda asked beneath his rush of words,
and despite everything, despite the deaths, despite the lies, despite the truths she'd learned, despite all of it, she laughed, and sat up from her bedroll to haul the gondola boy into a rough hug. Oh, she didn't know herself, didn't know the woman who would let herself do such a thing, but for a moment within the madness of the world she clung to a momentary gift of joy. “You shouldn't be here,” she whispered into his hair. “There's a war on, and a boy so handsome and brave as yourself should be far away, safe in his boat on the canals. Your father will be missing you, my friend. Or will your eight brothers and sisters be enough to keep him from noticing you're gone?”

  “Fourteen,” the boy said into her bosom, happily.

  Belinda laughed as she set him back, countering with, “Twelve,” and he shrugged with all the good nature in the world.

  “What is one boy out of so many? He will miss the coin I bring in, but there is one less mouth to feed, and when I go home I will have tales of making friends with the king of Gallin, and many other beautiful people, too.” Some of his mirth fell away, leaving brown eyes large and sad. “But one of them is dead, fine lady. Marius, who was kind to me, is dead.”

  “Yes.” Tightness caught Belinda's throat and she coughed, trying to clear it. “Yes. He was kind to me, too. Javi—the pri—the king …” She trailed off, the boy's tumble of words finally coming home to her. “The blade-faced man?”

  Worry spasmed across the child's face. “He came in the coldest month, just after the new year. He looked for you, told me your face and your dress and your manner, but I said nothing to him except lies, fine lady.” He faltered, then looked away, guilt as clear as the worry of seconds earlier.

  “What did he want?” Belinda's heart had become a hammer in her chest, determined to break through bone and fall to the floor a betraying, beating thing.

  “To know who paid me to meet you,” the boy whispered. “To know the name you went by, and to know who you met when in my beautiful city. I lied to him, fine lady. I told him nothing.”

  Just after the new year. Belinda closed her eyes, thoughts flying ahead of words, making leaps that had little to do with what the child had said and everything to do with what he kept from her.

  Secrets learned in Aria Magli just after the new year could come by pigeon within a week to Lutetia. A pigeon could carry word of Belinda Primrose, called Rosa, and of Robert Drake, who had paid this boy to find Belinda and ferry her through the canals. A bird could carry all those stories and more to Akilina Pankejeff, who had stripped Beatrice Irvine away and left Belinda Primrose naked on the Lutetian palace's courtroom floor eleven days after the new year began.

  She had thought herself betrayed by a kiss shared with a courtesan, but heartbreak had not moved Ana di Meo against her. No, the cards had fallen another way, and now, unasked for, she learned the truth of the pattern they'd made. It shouldn't take her so hard; the how hardly mattered now. Yet she couldn't help but look through the glass that warped the life she knew from the one that might have been. Had she silenced the boy when she left his gondola, the world she now walked through might have been a very different one.

  “He came back,” Belinda said quietly. All her delight had drained away, leaving her to feel untethered, as though she floated on a slow and inexorable river of fate. “This blade-faced man came back, and because you are brave, very brave, but not stupid, when he came back you told him what he wanted to know. I'm surprised he let you live.” She shouldn't let him live: should wrap her slim fingers around his throat and crush the life from him, rectifying a mistake made months ago.

  “My friend was there,” the boy said miserably. “He is a gypsy man and clever and quick, and the blade-faced man looked at him and decided no, that I was too small a thing to matter. I'm sorry, fine lady. I'm sorry.”

  Belinda touched the boy's hair, numb with a grief that came from somewhere deeper even than Marius's death. “So am I.”

  “Will you kill me now?” He straightened his shoulders, made himself look unafraid and accepting, and an ache took Belinda's breath from her.

  “No.” Once she would have: perhaps even so recently as a day earlier, she would have. But she could see no reason for it now; the boy had owed her nothing, and had done more to protect her than reason dictated. In the end, he'd done what he'd had to survive, and she was too familiar with the weight of such decisions. “No,” she said again, and swallowed against a tight throat. “You've answered questions for me, told me how the blade-faced man's mistress found me so she could work against me. I'm to be queen of Aulun someday, did you know that?”

  The boy's jaw dropped again and he shook his head, making what Belinda had thought of as rhetoric into a weighty confession of its own. “Queens and kings,” he whispered. “And I only a gondola boy. How did I come to this place, fine lady? How am I part of it all? How can that be?”

  Belinda laughed again, a tiny fractured sound. “So you can be impressed after all. I thought such a fine brave handsome boy as yourself thought all of this only natural. I don't know,” she added far more quietly. “I don't know, only that this world is smaller than it once was, and perhaps even queens and kings need a forthright and sensible gondola boy to see the world with. I'll be queen,” she breathed, “and a queen can grant a pardon. Please.” She got up and put her hand out to the boy, calling witchpower to hide them both from prying eyes. She had hidden an army: to shield one small boy took almost no more thought than secreting herself in the stillness and silence. “Take me to Marius's grave,” she whispered into the quiet that surrounded them. “Take me there, and all will be forgiven.”

  He left her there, kneeling in fresh dirt with the sound of cannons shattering in the distance. Men screamed and died, faint distractions under the warming morning sun. Belinda curled her hand in the earth, wondering at the emptiness inside her. An innocent boy had broken open the secrets that had led to Beatrice's destruction, that had led to Marius's death. The boy wasn't at fault: this was a chain of events that stretched back to before his birth, one that came, perhaps, to this inevitable end, with Belinda bowing her head over a lover's grave and questioning whether she had any tears to shed. She doubted it: tears were an indulgence that only left her weaker, and she had had enough of weakness.

  Nothing more esoteric than Javier's footsteps told her of his eventual arrival. Ordinary humanity, and nothing else: it seemed a lifetime since she'd relied on something so simple. It made her spine itch, made her aware of the small dagger she wore there as she was rarely aware of it anymore. Moreover, it whispered of her vulnerability, and that woke witchpower inside her. She knotted it down, and gave herself over to trust.

  The king of Gallin stayed behind her a long while, weight of his regard heavy enough to make her want to squirm. Stillness wrapped her out of habit, tamping the urge to twist around and meet his gaze, proving herself, as always, to be stronger than the things around her. She thought he waited on her use of witch-power, waiting, hoping, that her fear or discomfort would shatter and make her reach for him in some manner. It would be all the excuse he needed; if she stood where he did now, it would be the weakness she would seize on. But there was no magic in the stillness, and she could wait forever in its grasp.

  In time—a long time; the sun marked a noticeable distance in the sky as they waited on each other's resolve—in time, Javier came to stand on the grave's far side, putting the sun behind him so a thin streak of shadow fell across where Marius lay and splashed on Belinda's kneeling form. “For Eliza's life,” he said very softly. “For Eliza's life I'll listen.”

  Belinda inclined her head, one more moment of solitude and gathering herself before saying, “This is not a frivolous question, and I don't ask it to test your patience. Do you remember your birth, Javier?”

  Even without witchpower senses extended, she felt his anger flare, and heard his sharp inhalation before his teeth snapped together. “No one remembers their birth.”

  “I do.” Silence, more silence; this was harder than she thou
ght it would be, and she hadn't imagined it might be easy. “I had a glimpse of Lorraine, just one, before my father took me away. It didn't mean anything to me until I met her just before my twelfth birthday. I recognised her, knew her, and I've known since then that I was the queen's bastard.”

  “The marriage wasn't legitimate?” Javier seized on that, as she knew he would, but Belinda shook her head, pushing it away.

  “I didn't know about the marriage until a few weeks ago. I've always thought of myself as a bastard.”

  Javier, against all likelihood, lifted his gaze and shot her a look so dry she almost smiled. But humour faded even more quickly than it was born, and she took another steadying breath. Bad enough to speak those words aloud, admit to anyone that she was Lorraine's daughter, when she'd kept that secret so close for so long. But she'd managed that; it was the next part that made her mouth dry and her hands icy cold. “The same day Lorraine announced she and Robert were wed and I was her heir, I learnt she'd borne a second child that night. A boy, whom the attending priest was told to drown.”

  Shocked anticipation flooded her, Javier's emotion riding too high to be ignored, even with her magic tied down. “He wasn't drowned? There's a male heir to the Aulunian throne? That—”

  “Changes everything? Gives you a worthy rival to make war against, instead of simple and infuriating women?” Belinda caught herself, bit her tongue and reined in her temper. “Did you know I was born here? In Brittany? At one of my grandfather Henry's estates, where Lorraine had retired to mourn the anniversary of his death. And her priest, when he took the boy, had only to ride a week to the east to bring the child to Lutetia, and to a queen who'd lost her babe when word came of her husband's death in the Reussland border skirmishes.”

  She waited then, waited for the inevitable incomprehension, then the necessary leap of Javier's thoughts, and then for the response she knew he'd make, his voice sharp: “You lie.”