The Pretender's Crown

LORRAINE, QUEEN OF AULUN

1 June 1588 † Alunaer, capital of Aulun

“You will go with the army, because we cannot.” There is an untruth in Lorraine's phrasing: “cannot” is a word she rarely applies to herself. But it's rather worth it for the expression on Belinda Primrose's pretty face: the girl looks as though she's been poleaxed, stupefied by a sentence.

The expression vanishes so quickly that Lorraine might doubt she'd seen it, if she were other than who she is. Lorraine Walter does not often doubt herself; a monarch cannot, and there's a time when that word is well-suited.

Primrose is good: Lorraine admires that, after the first moment of astonishment, she is unable to read Belinda's thoughts. There's no hint of greed, no hint of cunning, no hint of relief-and that, the queen thinks, is the most likely thing for her illegitimate daughter to feel. She's been cooped up in a convent for four months, and Lorraine doubts there's been a time in her entire life when she's been so constrained.

For a breathtaking moment, envy sears the queen of Aulun so hotly that a blush burns her throat, her face, her ears. Her heart lurches with a sickness more suited to a woman a third her age, and a tremble comes into her hands. It is only a lifetime's worth of control that keeps those hands from clawing, that keeps her from a sudden surge of hatred toward the curtseying girl.

Belinda gives no sign at all of seeing that flush of emotion, and perhaps she doesn't: the white paint that Lorraine wears as an affectation of youth is heavy, and may hide her colour. More likely wisdom stays both Belinda's tongue and her gaze, just as it has largely stayed her reaction to being sent with the army.

Begrudgment still prickles, but Lorraine puts it aside as she always must. She has been a queen since she was twenty-six, and she has not known any real sort of freedom since she was seventeen and her sister Constance took the throne. The freedom of being a queen is far greater than the freedom of being an unwanted heir: Lorraine spent nine years imprisoned before Constance's death and her own subsequent crowning. Now she takes her long holidays and rides her horses, and in the end, those small freedoms in the name of holding a throne are worth the price extracted. Because of that, blood-heating jealousy has no place in her life.

Besides, there's truth in the thought that she doesn't wish to face the battle that is coming to her. She cannot make herself a showpiece on the front lines as she might have done when she was a youth: she has too much sense of her own mortality, now. Belinda is too young to carry that fatalism.

“We have a question for you, girl.”

“Majesty?” Belinda's voice and form are perfect: the willing servant, interested but not curious, confident in her monarch's commands. Robert is like that, but for some reason Lorraine finds it more delightful in the father than in the daughter, and so she says, irritably, “Stand up, girl. Let us see you.”

Belinda manages to bob another curtsey as she stands, and then, as though Lorraine has given permission-and Lorraine supposes she has-she tilts her head and watches Lorraine with more open curiosity.

“We have acted on your dream of Robert's warning and we have prepared for war. Cordula's army amasses across the straits, with ships ready to carry armed men to our shore. Essandia comes from the south in her armada, and those ships are newer than our own, faster and lighter in the water. Khazar marches across Echon to stand at the Cordulan army's back, and we, girl, have nothing more than our army and our aging navy to fight with.”

This is a sore point with Lorraine. Reussland should have joined her; should, at the least, be making the Khazarian army's journey across the Kaiser's lands costly But the Kaiser's two sons are dead within days of each other, the elder by drowning and the younger in a duel over a young woman whose presence as the centre of such dealings suggests her honour's not worth the fight. All that is left to the Kaiser are three daughters, the oldest a girl of seventeen. He, then, with even more haste and less grace than Lorraine's own father, has set aside his aging wife and has buried himself to the balls in young women, intending on wedding the one who first gives birth to a son.

When this war is done and Lorraine Walter is triumphant, she will send subtle support to the Kaiser's eldest daughter, and be the first among equals to offer both condolences at the old Kaiser's death, and congratulations on the crown by then settled on a pretty blonde head.

But that's a plot for another day, only to be played out when she's certain of her own crown's security. Which is why she now turns a grim gaze on Belinda, and asks a question that neither the girl nor Robert would expect her to: “Or have we more?”