The Pretender's Crown

by C. E. Murphy

  “Sacha Asselin's, I should think,” he said. “It was he whom I paid to liberate Akilina from prison. You may have done me a favour today, in cutting down my nephew's oldest friend.”

  Belinda's heart beat once with the speaking of Sacha's name and hung endlessly in her chest, a pain that struck her breath and did not cease for long seconds after Rodrigo had finished speaking. Witchpower, bright and gold, flooded her mind, her body, and squeezed her heart, setting it to beating again. Then she was across the room, not kneeling at Rodrigo's feet; she, or the witchpower, had too much pride for that. Too much ambition, as well: those things were what drove her hand to touch Rodrigo's hair, drove desire coupled strongly with revenge, and drove a wicked delight that brought many paths in Belinda's life to a full circle. “One throne,” she murmured, “might see fit to do another a second boon, my lord prince.”

  He caught her wrist and moved her hand from his hair, opening a shock of thought that ran counter to anything she'd stolen from a man since her gifts had developed. Oh, she was pretty enough, in his eyes, all bright with moonlight and intense with golden power that was in every way Javier's opposite. He might desire her in an abstract way, in the same fashion a painting or a landscape might be desired, but lying with the wife he'd chosen had not awakened in Rodrigo a particular enthusiasm for earthly vices. He would take Belinda from a sense of duty, but only if he were certain of getting a child, and thereby Aulun, for his troubles.

  For a heady and amusing instant, he was easily the most desirable man Belinda had ever known. Habit kept laughter from breaking out loud, but it danced on her lips, and witchpower swirled through her, more than ready to break a prince's will. She shut it away, more pleased with his ruthless pragmaticism than she could ever be with bedding him. She was trained to turn practicality into need, so she might seduce when and where she must. She'd never imagined finding the same remorseless lack of romanticism in a man.

  “What,” he said aloud, “favours might we exchange, Belinda Walter?”

  “Do not marry again. Permit Javier to be your heir. He and Eliza will have a child within the year; your succession, and Gallin's, will be assured.” Belinda's heartbeat ran rabbit-quick with the excitement of setting plots in motion. These were not the plans Robert had, nor even the ones she'd shared with Javier. These were her own, and not even the witchpower struggled against her ambitions.

  “Do not marry again,” Rodrigo said, with just enough emphasis on the final word, and a glint of interest in his eyes. “My faith only permits me one marriage at a time, till death do us part, Lady Belinda, and my wife is young and healthy. How ever do you imagine I might marry again?”

  “Get what sleep you may, prince of Essandia,” Belinda suggested. “The next days will be difficult, and you'll need all your wits about you in your time of sorrow.” She stepped back, and he rose, pausing to study her with a curious expression.

  Whatever he found in her gaze seemed to satisfy him; after a moment he went to the tent's door and there stopped to look back and murmur, “Belinda.”

  And Belinda, who rarely permitted herself the intimacy of a name, said, “Rodrigo,” in return, and watched him go.

  RODRIGO, PRINCE OF ESSANDIA

  What is most violently clear in Rodrigo's mind is that he has just walked away from the woman who murdered his sister. There's room in his thoughts to wonder if it's worse that he has turned that same woman on the perfidious creature who is his wife, or if allowing Sandalia's murderer to walk free is the greater crime. Either way, she's Javier's prisoner of war and his nephew is wise to keep her alive, so whatever ends Rodrigo might pursue in revenge would be ill-advised, and yet …

  She ought not be allowed free rein of these camps, much less tacit permission to murder his wife, but Rodrigo watched her appear and disappear from his sight, which tells him there's likely no way to prevent her from doing precisely as she wishes. And the worst of it is she would indeed be doing him a favour, and that's a topic he doesn't dare broach with Javier or even breathe to the new priest who will have to take his confession. He can't go to God burdened with this particular plot, but there's time a-plenty to repent, and perhaps in later years he'll be able to face a confessor.

  He's unpleasantly surprised, come morning, when Akilina joins him for breakfast. A flush creeps up his face, making him feel the fool, and when the Khazarian dvoryanin enquires after his health, he is forced to leave the fire, claiming a sickness of the belly that is entirely true. Akilina, astonished, drinks the watered wine that's been all she can stomach in the mornings, and lets him go.

  It's that afternoon that she complains of cramps, and she is bleeding by evening. The worried doctor feeds her more wine to keep her blood up, and Rodrigo, watching now, begins to feel a slow horror that is worse even than having allowed Belinda to survive. He can't be certain that this isn't nature rejecting a faulty child, and that, he's sure, is the brilliance of the Aulunian queen's bastard daughter at work.

  It takes three days, in the end. The child is lost by the morning, but the bleeding will not stop. Not until the second evening is Akilina weak enough to slip into unconsciousness, and Rodrigo keeps vigil during the night, from duty and an uncomfortable conscience. It would have been one thing to awaken to a murdered wife. It is another entirely to stand by and watch her die by pieces, and to know that he didn't stop it happening. That he commanded it happen, in any way that matters.

  It's during that long night that he wonders why Belinda Walter is so cruel, though the answer comes to him easily enough. Her father was captured, tortured, and thrown at Sandalia's feet all on Akilina's word; Belinda herself was stripped bare of both possessions and the lies that had insinuated her in Sandalia's court, all at Akilina's bidding. It is a precise vengeance, this death, a repayment for humiliation, and it is deeply telling. It is also profoundly natural, for women die of childbirth and difficult pregnancies all the time. The man in Rodrigo loathes Belinda and the prince admires her; she is a honed weapon, and will be a dangerous, worthy opponent when she sits on the Aulunian throne.

  He opens the tent flaps at dawn, wanting, oddly enough, for Akilina to die in the light. Her faith is not his own, but last rites were given in the last minutes of her consciousness, and it seems better, somehow, to take the final journey with the first rays of sunshine touching her skin.

  When the flaps are pulled open, he looks at his dying wife, and a glitter of gold catches his eye. There's an amber rose on her breast, a beautifully carved thing that wasn't there when he left her side.

  Rodrigo snatches it up and races the few steps to the door, looking frantically through the camp with no clear idea of what he searches for. No, no real belief that he'll see it, though he knows well enough what he imagines is there.

  And there she is, slipping out of shadows cast by soldiers' tents, illuminated by the same new sun that guides Akilina into death. Belinda Walter stands in the middle of his camp, her hair alight with morning colour and the oval of her face darkened by the light behind her. She nods, once, as he did when he left her three nights ago, and then sunlight and shadows fold around her and she is gone.

  So, when he turns back, is Akilina Pankejeff.

  JAVIER DE CASTILLE, KING OF GALLIN

  7 July 1588 † Brittany; the Gallic camp

  The past three days ought to have been a triumph, and instead they'd been a particular and new bleak hell. Rodrigo hadn't slept in two nights, sitting watch over Akilina; the only time he'd left her side was to attend first Sacha's, then Tomas's funeral services. The great guns still fought on, holding the Aulunian line; their enemy had lost both heart with Belinda's capture, and an impossible number of lives to the hideous weapons. Javier had overseen the guns' deployment, had stood and watched numbly as men fell before their fire, and had accepted the cheers and accolades of his own troops as they beat down the Red Bitch's army.

  They didn't know, and Javier didn't want to tell them, that they had bullets enough for one more day of slaughter, and then
the war would return to the footing they had known: man against man, swords gutting one another, blood in the eyes, bile held back between clenched teeth, feet slipping in mud and muck as they all struggled to survive. Rodrigo had men pouring new bullets into moulds as quickly as they could, but it would be days, even weeks, before they had enough of a stockpile to continue the onslaught at its present rate.

  The old man's guns had evened the battlefield. Aulun and Khazar still had more men than the combined Ecumenic armies, but not nearly as many more, now. They could no longer count on sheer numbers to defeat Javier's troops, and that, he hoped, would take their heart from them, too. But then, it ought to have lent him confidence, and somehow it hadn't; it seemed he had nothing left to give, not certainty, not grief, not magic: Aulun had not gotten near enough to his men in the past three days to bother with the shielding, and his own witchpower attacks had been half-hearted. Ghosts sat on his shoulders, Tomas on one and Sacha on the other, urging him to different ends.

  “You could finish it.” Eliza spoke from behind him, an unexpected interruption to his thoughts. The words so closely echoed what he thought Sacha might say that Javier wondered if she, too, heard voices whispering from their past. She sat at his feet, an odd mix of awkwardness and grace born from the false pregnancy she carried. “We only have enough bullets for another day, and you've got the Aulunian heir locked up in a tent on our side of the lines. She can't, or won't, fight you. What makes you hesitate, love?” She put a hand up to catch Javier's fingers and draw him down to sit beside her. “Sacha would've had you act three days ago. Even Tomas wouldn't want it drawn out. What makes you hesitate?” Her voice was worn thin and dried out, and the new dawn's light aged her. No light was unkind to Eliza, but war, war was kind to no one.

  Javier folded his fingers in hers and sat, staring silently at the horizon and the fields of men below it before bringing her knuckles to his lips and pressing them there. “What if I told you I'd had a vision of the future?” he asked softly. “If it seemed this war's continuation was necessary to prepare us for what's to come?”

  “A witchpower vision?”

  Javier closed his eyes against the memory of Belinda's magic invading his own, showing him what she'd learned, and nodded. Eliza took a breath and held it long enough that a slight smile curved his mouth and he glanced her way. Her cheeks were puffed, gaze distant, and she let the air out in a sudden rush. “I wouldn't care, Javier. Marius and Sacha are dead, and Tomas, and now Akilina and her child. War has its price, and I know it must be paid, but they died in a fight that had a purpose. They died in a battle to reclaim Aulun for the Ecumenic church, not as part of some fight for a witchpower future. It's wrong to change the goals without giving us a chance to understand our new purpose. We can accomplish what you stood in Cordula and said you would do, my love. Between the guns and the magic, you have the power to end this war, and I would see it done. A child is coming,” she said more softly. “I would like us to live long enough to see its birth, much less its life.”

  “And the future I've seen? Do I let it come to pass with us unprepared?”

  Eliza turned to sit on one foot, the other knee drawn up against her chest. She'd taken to wearing gowns since their marriage, and her short hair blew in her eyes and fell away again, making her soft in the morning light. Soft, but for her gaze, which might have been chipped of brown marble. “You're witchbreed, blessed by the Pap-pas and by God. If there's a future this war is meant to lead to, or prevent, you have the magic and the vision to lead us where we're meant to go. If you need another war to follow this one, so be it. I'll stand by your side through it all, but give me one war at a time. Give me a victory before you change our direction.”

  Javier thinned his lips and looked toward the horizon again, a quietness coming on him from within. “How long have you been waiting to tell me this?”

  “Three days,” Eliza said steadily. “I was waiting to see if you would act on your own before we ran out of bullets. Sacha wasn't wrong, you know. You've always been too shy of exerting power, whether it's the magic or your crown. I understand why,” she added swiftly. “I do, Javier. I would have been hesitant, too, but you can no longer afford to be. We need who and what you are, king of Gallin. End this, and after you're crowned king in Aulun we can look to other wars and far-off futures.” She twisted her hand in his and brought his knuckles to her lips in turn, then stood and walked away, a dark-haired wraith in the breaking light.

  Javier watched her go and wondered at the women in his life, from his mother the queen to the Aulunian heir and back again to a queen, this one the pauper he'd crowned. They were the fairer sex, weaker in physique but more bloody of mind than he'd ever realised. Ambition, wit, wisdom; the men of his court should be so blessed with talents as the women, and he wondered if more history than he knew had been shaped by women such as these; if kings throughout time were pushed and prodded where their queens and lovers would have them go. He would have to ask Rodrigo, whose expertise with women might be limited, but whose studies of the past were extensive.

  Javier rubbed his hands on his thighs and stood, gaze bleak on the sunrise-bloody countryside below. He would ask Rodrigo, if they all survived the day.

  ROBERT, LORD DRAKE

  Javier will have to run out of bullets sooner or later. Sooner is more likely: even aided by witchpower, even given years or decades in which to work, Seolfor could only have made so many without some form of automation. Robert has been blindsided repeatedly these past few months, but he doubts he could have missed a factory in the Alanian mountains. So when the Ecumenic machine guns are rolled forward on the distant hills, Robert feels a surge of satisfaction: Javier is squandering his advantage, and Robert will soon be able to ride men of equal numbers into Javier's front lines.

  What's unexpected is that for the first time in days, Javier calls witchpower at a level Robert hasn't felt since Aria Magli. The first volleys of power are so quick and so strong it takes Robert a few seconds to recover, and to throw up the same kind of shields that Belinda and Ivanova both kept in place during some of the war.

  Ivanova: there's a distraction, and one Robert doesn't need now. The girl retreated to the heart of the Khazarian camp after Belinda's capture, suddenly afraid for her own life. It's preposterous: if Ivanova Durova is afraid of anything, Robert has yet to put a name to it. He would dearly love to know the truth of what sent her back to her big-bearded generals, and at the same time is boyishly glad he doesn't. He ought not take glee in being played and out-played, manoeuvred, and out-thought, but this isn't an aspect of conquering that's mentioned in his people's history. Certainly other worlds must have brought cleverness to the fore and done battle against their manipulators, but Robert's people care only for the end result, not the details of arriving there. Other races' ingenuity has been lost, as human ingenuity will be, but discovering and facing it makes for a far more interesting mission than Robert expected to participate in.

  Even as he pulls his thoughts back in line, the tone of the witch-power volleys changes. Javier gathers himself and turns his magic against Robert himself. Silver smashes down, searching for weaknesses, searching for a way in; searching, in essence, for paths that will let him into Robert's mind, where he can tear his power apart from the inside out. Robert doubts Javier knows quite what he's trying to do; there's no finesse to his attack, no sense of understanding how he might capture and command another witchlord's magic.

  Robert, grinning, lets the boy try.

  JAVIER DE CASTILLE

  Half a year past, Robert Drake threw up a wall of witchpower that stopped Javier's magic dead, and proved beyond question that Bea trice Irvine was in truth Belinda Primrose, and heir to Drake's witchpower. The world has changed since then; changed in so many ways Javier wouldn't know where to begin cataloguing it if he wanted to, and he does not want to. Still, today, now, armed with the things he's learned, he should be able to stand before the witchlord's power. Ought to be able to turn his atta
ck from the Aulunian lines to the Aulunian consort, and devastate Drake with his will.

  The one he can do easily enough: witchpower magic turns from troops to a single man, bearing down with a lifetime's expectation of being accommodated; with the expectation that, like any other man, Robert Drake will bow his head and his will to Javier de Castille, and that the day will roll on in the same way it began.

  But Robert's power has the strength of the tide, pulling relentlessly, bending and washing over Javier's own, subsuming it rather than being subsumed. Every volley Javier throws out is absorbed, and when Robert lashes back it's as though an ocean crashes down on him, staggering with its weight. Too little sluices away from Robert's own magic, and with the third driving blow Javier drops to his knees, hands buried in the earth as though he could draw strength from it. Robert is the source of the Aulunian alliance's strength; if he can be defeated the serpent's back is broken and Cor-dula might triumph.

  Cordula must triumph, for anything less risks not only Javier's neck, but Eliza's, and that's a price too dear to be paid. Too many high costs have been cut from his heart already, and he'll die here on the battlefield before he'll risk losing Eliza Beaulieu as well.

  A crack appears in his shields, Robert's power worming its way inside his mind, and Javier thinks he may well do just that, and lose Eliza after all.

  BELINDA PRIMROSE

  Javier's voice is a clarion call, crisper than Robert's the single time he touched her mind with words. Help me, Javier says silently across the distance. Help me, or I am lost.

  Belinda Primrose comes to the door of her tent and steps through without the guards noticing her; walks a little distance down green grassy hills to look at the front lines, where Javier de Castille is on his knees, silver magic pouring off him so thickly that it can only be a matter of time, and not much at that, before everything that he is burns out in his battle against another witchlord.