The Pretender's Crown

by C. E. Murphy

  It opened astonishment in the witchlord; astonishment and disbelief, too fresh to yet turn to anger. Belinda released the water-wheel rush that had once captured her magic and had more than once stymied Dmitri's, and then his amazement did turn to rage. You are not my match, Belinda whispered, uncertain of whether she spoke aloud, but certain that he heard her. You aren't Robert's match, much less mine, and you will bend until you break beneath my will. You—

  Cold iron slammed into Dmitri's power, and black crumbled to dust with nothing more than a gasp of bewildered pain.

  Belinda flinched back with a cry, sickened to meet a terrible nothingness where Dmitri's presence had been; afraid of the silence that took his place. Witchpower faded and cleared into morning sunlight, and Belinda, icy and confused, jolted to her feet so she might see and understand.

  A girl stood where Dmitri had been, his body at her feet. Her head, crowned with thick black hair, was lowered, and her breath came in short hard gasps as she worked her fingers once, then again, as though they were alien to her and needed exploration. They were red with blood, and a knife wound opened Dmitri's throat, blood beginning to slow now, with no heartbeat to pump it forth. His power was as nothing, all the potential and all the possibility, all his promises and all his lies turned to sable dust that scattered across the surface of Belinda's power, and faded away.

  Skated, too, across the girl's witchpower, which sheeted off her, a cold iron magic of unexpected familiarity. Not Javier, after all: that iron will had belonged to another, and all of Belinda's begrudgment fell away as the girl lifted her gaze.

  She would have her mother's beauty: that, even more than the magic, struck Belinda. A strong square face and large eyes with crackling hair framing them; a sharpness to her nose that would come from her father, from the man who lay dead at her feet, but which only served to heighten how extraordinary her features were. It would be years yet before the pieces came together in a stunning whole, but even now, those who had the eyes to see it would know Ivanova Durova would become extraordinary.

  She could be no one else: not with those features; not with the power that fitted her like a cloak, comfortable and certain of its place. She had the slenderness of youth, as she should: she wasn't yet fifteen, and at a cursory glance her slim form, clad in soldier's garb, might have been taken for a boy. With her hair tucked up, the illusion might have lasted a few seconds longer, but looking her in the face, Belinda couldn't imagine that Ivanova could ever be mistaken for other than what she was: the imperator's only heir, a girl, and a beautiful one at that.

  The witchpower, then, had kept her safe from curious eyes; kept her safe for months as she travelled across Khazar and Echon with her army. Belinda stifled the impulse to throw her head back and crow with delight: this child didn't belong here, and yet she had taken a life with the ruthless efficiency of a trained soldier; with nearly the same cool calculation that Belinda herself might have shown.

  Voices were beginning to buzz around them as Dmitri was recognised; as fear and anger began to set in over what seemed a coup in the heart of the Aulunian camp. Ivanova stepped forward, fully comfortable in drawing attention as an unfriendly gathering turned their eyes to her in preparation for forgiveness or mutiny, and even Belinda knew not which.

  “This man who has been the ambassador from Khazar has come here to strip the heart of our alliance.” Ivanova spoke Khazarian in a sweet voice, a soprano that Belinda thought would deepen with age, but it suited her now, fresh and young and light, and it won the attention of all the soldiers around her. Caught in the moment, Belinda translated Ivanova's words, the girl breaking often to let Belinda's speech echo her own. “I have suspected him a danger, and I have come with my mother's army to watch over you all. You saw the evil that swarmed from him; he had made a bargain with the devil, and now that dark contract has cost him his life. I only regret that he was not made to stand trial and burn, but time was short and I could not risk this—”

  Her gaze fell on Belinda, who shook her head a fractional amount, not wanting to be exposed as the Aulunian heir. Almost without pause, Ivanova continued, “This dearly held alliance's failure by allowing a man like that to murder a fellow woman who has come to war. We are expected to stay at home and pray for our men,” she whispered, and Belinda recognised something of true frustration in the girl's voice before Ivanova lifted it again and cried out, “But we are as made for war as you are! I have come to show you that the imperator's heir is not afraid of battle, and to command and know my brother soldiers in the fields! Now,” she said more conversationally, beneath the roar that answered her rally, “now I think we had best retire, you and I, and speak of what's come to pass.”

  What a spy the imperator's heir would have made; what a spy! Belinda had known few enough instances in her life when she'd been given over to veneration; there was her childhood with Robert, and her esteem for Lorraine the queen. Beyond that, though, she could think of no other time when she'd sat in open admiration, fighting the smile that crept over her face.

  For the moment Ivanova's power lay tucked so quietly within her that Belinda had no sense of it: the girl sitting across from her might have been any ordinary child. Any ordinary child, at least, who had secretly worked her way across fifteen hundred miles to be where she now was. Belinda knew with a touch of envy that her own magic was not nearly so well hidden.

  “It's a discipline of thought,” Ivanova said in her light voice. She seemed unimpressed with herself, unconcerned with the blood recently washed from her hands. “Father Dmitri was my tutor since childhood. He'd taught me the rules of logic that give the power a channel.”

  “Father?” Belinda's surprise broke the word as though she were a boy whose voice was changing.

  “He was my mother's priest,” Ivanova said, and an untoward relief snapped in Belinda's chest. The girl didn't know that Dmitri was her father in fact, and it wasn't a burden Belinda would lay on her. Sentiment, again; such sentiment, but she was a little enamoured of Ivanova's cool containment, and had no wish to risk shattering the girl's calm. Murdering a mentor was one thing; patricide something else, even if in the moment it was unknown.

  That thought spiralled too near her own sins. Belinda deliberately opened her hands, smoothed her skirts as if they were emotions, and exacted control.

  “I think he never knew the magic was awake in me. I think he was waiting for it, to train me in it, but the talent's been there since I was—”

  “Eight or nine?” Belinda guessed, and Ivanova nodded. Memory scoured Belinda: how Robert had quieted the power in her when she was that age, rather than offer training in the discipline of thought that would master the witchpower. Perhaps if he had, she might have been the precocious witchlord Ivanova was now.

  “I thought at first he'd realise it, but time went on and he didn't seem to, and I grew more talented.” Ivanova smiled suddenly, bringing all her youth to the fore. “I would sneak after the boys and watch them at bathing, or listen to councils my mother hadn't invited me to. And I came to war,” she said more seriously, “because my father loved it more than his wife or daughter, and I would not be refused the chance to see what had drawn him from us. I didn't know then that there were others like me, with the magic.”

  “Witchpower,” Belinda murmured. “Javier calls it the witch-power. You held me back when I would cross the Gallic lines. I thought it was Javier's power turned colder, but yours is iron and his silver.” And her own gold: soft metals, compared to iron, which seemed more telling than she wanted to consider.

  “I couldn't risk that you were going to kill him.” Ivanova spread her hands, expression that of utmost reason. “I couldn't risk either of you dying before I even had a chance to meet you and see the magic that we share. I watched, when you went to him. I listened to it all.” Her eyebrows drew down over dark eyes, a frown marring her forehead as though the expression could give her the talent to see through Belinda's soul. “You believe the stories you told the Gallic kin
g. That the magic we're born to is… foreign.”

  “I do.” Hairs stood up on Belinda's arms, tiny thing she couldn't control. “You listened to it all? Then you—”

  “Know that my father was in all likelihood not Feodor?” Ivanova shrugged, the first stiff movement Belinda had seen her indulge in. “And yet I'm still his heir, as you are Lorraine's and Javier is Sandalia's. These witchlords of yours have woven a complicated game toward a nightmare ending.”

  “A nightmare that's all the worse if we don't arm ourselves to fight it.” Belinda knelt forward, reaching for Ivanova's hands. The girl didn't accept, leaving Belinda in a position of pleading subservience. “Javier is my ally in this, but reluctantly, and only because I can give him—”

  “Yes,” Ivanova said impatiently. “I was there. He's a coward, your br—”

  Belinda, already close to the younger woman, already with her hands extended, clapped a hand across Ivanova's mouth so sharply it might have been a slap. “Never say those words aloud.”

  Ivanova's eyes widened over Belinda's hand, outrage coupled with astonishment, and iron witchpower shot out, not quite an attack, but unquestionably a rebuff.

  It crashed into Belinda's own golden magic and was absorbed without a ripple.

  “You're clever,” Belinda whispered. “You're talented, and you're skilled, and I like you. But you had the advantage of surprise against Dmitri, and you will never be able to surprise me. I may not be your superior, but I am your elder, and my life has been made of treachery and deceit. I believe you're right. I believe Javier de Castille is a coward, but the rest of it, little girl, the rest of it will go unspoken.”

  She loosened her fingers and Ivanova wet her lips to protest, “You can't. You can't … !”

  “Of course I can.” All the whispers of envy had slipped away in a tidal pull of golden power. Someday, someday this young woman might challenge Belinda's authority, and that, an ancient instinct told her, was as it should be: every queen, in time, gave way to another. But not while in their prime, and not to a youth, even one whose talents were manifest.

  A more ordinary part of herself insisted that she needed Ivanova, needed her power and perhaps the diplomatic bridge she provided, and that part, by slow degrees, reeled her back so she sat across from Ivanova once more, both of them flushed with passion. “Some things are too dangerous to be spoken aloud,” Belinda said as softly and with as much cajoling as she could. Witchpower tendrils encouraged Ivanova's anger to relent. This was something Belinda could no longer do with Javier, but Ivanova, for all her youthful strength, was still a stranger to Belinda and her magic. “We're not seeking to topple thrones, for all that that's my father's will.”

  Ivanova had a fine rage on her, all the insulted fury of childhood not quite left behind. But she was impressed, too; impressed and perhaps a little frightened, having never faced another woman with her talents. Ambition was temporarily quenched, and with it a degree of her certainty, though a slow bloom of confidence crawled up to salvage what was left of her pride. “You still need me as an ally to keep your father distracted. You shouldn't treat a needed asset so.”

  Amused, Belinda inclined her head in a show of apology. “You're right. I shouldn't, and I apologise. Panic struck me, and panic often asserts itself as domination. I do need you,” she said, humour fleeing. “I'd like to have your belief, but your agreement will do.”

  “I'm not a coward.” Ivanova lifted her chin as though she'd been insulted. “I can see the truth of what you've shown Javier, and can look on it unafraid. There are men from beyond the mountains and beyond the oceans who look different from me. Perhaps it's no surprise they might come from beyond the stars, too, and look even more strange to my eyes. I have met women they call witches,” she added far more quietly and sounded suddenly like a child. “They are women who know herb lore or who are unattainable, but with whom men still fall in love. They're old crones or great beauties, and none of them at all have a hint of the witchpower. This magic of mine isn't like anything anyone has ever known, and if it comes from a foreign, far-off place, then at least what I am makes sense.”

  “Is it so easy?” Belinda knew she shouldn't ask, but the question spilled out regardless. “You accept it that easily? I've—” She laughed with resignation. “I've struggled and fought for the past half-year, and can still barely grasp what we are, but you can turn it to sense in your mind so quickly?” Perhaps it was the malleability of youth; perhaps Belinda was too much the thing she'd been raised to be, but another sting of envy ran through her at Ivanova's shrugging nod.

  “Our people—Khazarian or Aulunian, Gallic or Essandian—don't have witchpower. Either we are impossible, or we are blessed or damned by our gods, or the figments stolen from Robert Drake and Dmitri Leontyev's thoughts are true, and we're children of… foreign queens,” Ivanova finished in a whisper. “That we exist negates our impossibility, and that our fathers wield this same power and attribute it to foreign masters rather than gods or demons gives credence to the third possibility.”

  “Dmitri did teach you clear thought,” Belinda murmured, though a supposition she hadn't considered came on her as she spoke: perhaps Dmitri and Robert were simply mad, the stories they'd concocted were ravings of deranged minds, and their children were heirs to nothing more than insanity.

  “The trouble is,” Ivanova said, “that if we ignore these bits of dreaming and they're true, then we are wholly and terribly unprepared for what the future brings. If we listen and they aren't true, then we're ready for a war that may never come … but it's better to be ready than caught off-guard.” She looked up, her eyebrows lifted. “Dmitri is dead. Robert Drake will rely on you. Tell me what we do now, and I'll go to share your intrigues with Javier de Castille.”

  “Primrose?” Robert Drake threw back the tent flap with enough force to set the room shuddering. He looked wilder than she could remember ever seeing him, eyes round with alarm and hair crackling as if alight from within. He had been a long distance across the camp to have taken so long to come to her side, even if he'd known instantly that Dmitri was dead, and she had no way of knowing if he had. If not, a runner would have gone for him, and even still, he'd not been quick in coming. No need to be, perhaps, when it had been his plan as much as hers to remove the dark witchlord from their plots.

  She sat in a huddle on the ground, Ivanova wrapped in her arms. They had washed the blood from Ivanova's hands, but stained cloth lay at their feet, and tears welled and spilled from Ivanova's wide staring eyes. “She saved me,” Belinda whispered. “In the heat of battle, she leapt on him and cut his throat, that the Khazarian-Aulunian alliance might not be broken. This is Irina's daughter, Robert. This is Ivanova Durova, and she has pledged herself to us in blood.”

  Heed me well, she had whispered into Ivanova's hair. Heed me well, for this is how it shall go. Had Ivanova not announced herself so dramatically—and, Belinda admitted, to such good end; the men who'd been caught up watching her fight with Dmitri had needed an explanation, and the imperator's heir suddenly amongst them was a thing of legend—but had she not done that, Belinda might have secreted her away, might have found her a hiding place or sent her to Javier, and made use of a soldier as the man who'd taken Dmitri's life while paying for the audacity with his own. She had faith in her ability to tweak memories just enough to let that be the dominant perception, even without the sexual link that made altering minds so much easier. That had been before: she was stronger, now.

  But Ivanova had been announced, and to change memories that much seemed like too great a risk, especially when Robert Drake would see a malleable child in Ivanova's frightened eyes. He'd shunted Belinda's power into quiescence when she was younger than Ivanova; he would never imagine that Dmitri's daughter had already come into her own. Dmitri's loss would be more than made up for by the chance to shape Ivanova with his own hands.

  All they had to do, Belinda whispered, was let him believe himself the mentor, the guide, the saviour of a g
irl shocked and horrified by the actions she'd taken.

  Robert knelt, a show of both sympathy and honour due to the imperator's heir, and extended a fatherly hand toward her.

  Ivanova gave a choked sob and flung herself from Belinda into Robert's arms: into the protective circle only a man could offer, and into an assumption of safety created by the world they knew. Robert gathered her close and murmured an assurance, then lifted his eyes to Belinda and smiled with obvious triumph.

  Belinda returned the smile, returned pleasure, and kept all her own triumph hidden away where her father would never see it. “She should rest,” she murmured after a little time had passed. “She was very bold in the face of fighting, but it drained her. Let me put her to rest a while, Robert, and then we'll speak on what her being here means.”

  “It means my friend is dead,” Robert said after Ivanova was tucked into a warm corner and Belinda had breathed a command to sleep, or at least pretend to sleep, over her. “Was there no other way, Primrose?”

  “Not to Ivanova's mind.” Belinda poured wine and offered Robert a glass, aware that she had once more fallen into the position of servant. Better to keep to old and safe roles than to upset a balance she now needed. “How could she know I had the ability to defeat him, to bend him to my will and make him your subservient again? I saw a little of our battle from the soldiers' eyes, Robert, and even I would have thought it Heaven fighting Hell. Ivanov must have seen the Khazarian ambassador doing his best to murder the Aulunian heir. What could she do but try to stop him, and salvage her mother's alliance?”

  “How,” Robert said, “did she know who you were?”