The Pretender's Crown

BELINDA WALTER

7 June 1588 † Alunaer, the queen's court

Ice cascaded through Belinda, wiping away even the stillness and running so deep that witchpower was quelled beneath it. Nothing in Dmitri's expression had changed, no shudder of repulsion or twitch of horror that told him he understood as clearly as she did what his memories had spelled out for her.

She had known, had known for months, that Javier de Castille was not his father's son. Never once had she dreamed he was also not his mother's. Had known that Robert knew nothing of Javier's parentage, for all that he, too, was witchbreed, but had not, could not have, put those pieces together and come up with the answer that lay before her now.

Lorraine was still speaking. Belinda heard none of it, heard nothing at all. She was accustomed to controlling her body, but shivers wracked her, sickness roiling in her belly until sweat stood cold on chilled skin. Her hands were blanched, and she could well imagine that her face had turned ghostly, too.

Amusement curled the corner of Dmitri's mouth, and bile rose to burn Belinda's belly and throat. He had known, and had failed to warn Robert; had let her father send her to Lutetia. Sent her to seduce the one young man in Echon so much like herself.

Had let her, by doing so, fall in love with her brother.

A remnant of dignity, of hard-won stillness, kept her upright and sober, though her eyes burnt with unshed tears and her stomach heaved so violently she thought it must be visible even under the corsets. Her hands remained quiet at her sides, trembling with the effort of not scraping at her own skin, as though she might be able to escape herself if she did so. She, who had done murder innumerable times without remorse, felt the need to confess as a bladder bursting inside her. Words, like tears, choked in her throat, every last fraction of control working to both protect her and, she thought, destroy her. She could not live thus burdened, couldn't face the morning, much less herself; the idea of what she had done, what she had been tricked into doing, would tear her apart before the night hours began to toll.

Witch, harlot, slut! rang in her thoughts: names she'd been called many times without them ever taking root. Never before had it been her own voice hissing the recriminations, inescapable in the confines of her mind. Javier's face swam in her vision, blurred by water she couldn't allow to fall. Slim face, long features, thin grey eyes under ginger hair, all so much like Lorraine, now that Belinda knew to look for it. She should have seen it, must have seen it-

Could not have seen it, had no reason to see it, would never have seen it had witchpower strength not stolen the truth from Dmitri's memory. For an instant Belinda hated the power, rage burning away her revulsion.

In the brief freedom from horror, a thought kindled, then winked away again, too quick to be grasped. Disgust swamped her again, drowning fury and leaving her shuddering. She would kill, she would plot, she would bring down a throne, all without care, but to lie with a man who was her brother, to find love where she ought to have shied away; there, it seemed, lay the line Belinda Primrose's conscience could not cross.

Clarity flickered again, tiny splash of comprehension through body-wracking abhorrence. This was a thing she would not have done. It was a thing done to her, if not by Robert's will, then by Dmitri's uncaring hand.

It was a thing done to them. To Javier de Castille and to Belinda Primrose, all unknowing and all as part of a plot to serve a foreign queen so far beyond Belinda's understanding she'd allowed herself not to think on it, to not try and comprehend. A queen of whom Javier knew nothing, and yet whom he was expected to serve, as she was, both diligently and well.

An answer was to be had within those thoughts, but Belinda put them away, forcing a lifetime of training to bend to her call. Lorraine had been speaking; Belinda searched her memory for echoes of what the queen had said, and found it in herself to curtsey with some small degree of grace before lifting her own quavering voice. “I would beg a boon, majesty.”

“We can deny our daughter, the saviour of Aulun, nothing.” Lorraine's smile was beatific, her confidence supreme, and only Belinda was close enough to see how both the smile and her eyes went flat as Belinda whispered her request.

“I have been raised in a convent, and am unaccustomed to the world, much less the grandeur of what I am now gifted with.” She made a tiny motion, smoothing her hand over her gown in example. “I would beg that I might retreat to the convent until the Yule celebration, so I might gather myself and become more fully prepared for this role I'm soon to fill.” Belinda gauged her hesitation, giving the courtiers time enough to hear her request but Lorraine too little to respond. “From there I might more fully pray to God to support our army and navy as they make war on wretched Gallin, and perhaps from there He will hear me with the clarity He chose to three days ago when the armada fell. I beg this of you, majesty. Let me retreat a little while to consider my new place, and to entreat God to keep our soldiers safe.”

She could not have been refused, not then, not like that. The audience had concluded more rapidly than the spectators might have wished, and Belinda, no longer on display and in need of playing a role, had lost herself in icy tremors as she and the queen were escorted to private chambers.

Private indeed: Lorraine caught her arm and thrust her toward the secret room, forgoing her own rituals of greeting to snap, “You've not done as you were told, girl,” and make a sharp gesture toward Belinda's torso.

Belinda flinched with the gesture, as though Lorraine had flung a knife and driven it home in her belly. She ought not have flinched; she ought not have shown such emotion, especially when her thoughts were white with noise, as though the sea had rushed in between her ears. Grey washed over her vision, turning the world to fog and leaving her blind and deaf. It took what little control she had to not fold her hands over her belly; to not sag against illness that churned her belly and weakened her legs. She had never sought to capture a king by way of a child, but it was the easiest route any woman might take in trying to better her position. Had they not had the witchpower in common…

The child was not Javier de Castille's. Belinda swallowed, feeling cords stand out in her throat and knowing herself helpless to mitigate such signs of strain. The child could not be Javier's: her courses had come without fail once after Dmitri had come to her bed, and for all the months before that. Clinging to the thought, she answered without hearing herself; without much care for Lorraine Walter's exalted position. “There's been no time.”

“How long can it take?” Lorraine sniffed, and Belinda pulled herself from a stupor to stare at the queen without mercy.

“To brew and sip a tea? Little enough. To wait for the child to become unrooted? Tell me, when your blood still came, did it do so gently, or were you bent with pain as some women are? Aborting a babe can be like the worst of those days, and I think, majesty, that you would rather I stood strong and steady against the storm than fell to my knees bleeding while Aulun died on the seas.”

Lorraine's eyebrows lifted. “My little witch has grown a wicked tongue.”

Belinda, through her teeth, said, “It has been a trying day.”

“And you did well, Primrose.” Robert entered on the end of her words, bowing to Lorraine and offering Belinda herself a rare smile. She nodded in return, too aware that such a smile would have once thrilled her in its assurance of her place in her beloved papa's eyes. Now it barely cut through the cold in her, cold that was the only thing preventing outrage from erupting in witchbreed fire.

She gathered her skirts and with them her will, and with both of those things in firm grasp, executed a curtsey of grace and beauty; a curtsey that made her malleable, the good daughter, the well-shaped weapon. “Thank you, your highness.”

Surprise shattered off Robert, and offence off Lorraine, though the former turned his to a booming laugh. “Highness, am I? It's been a day for elevations all around.”

“I should think it the proper term,” Belinda said to the floor, and, with care, awakened a note of humour in her voice. “Her majesty has not confirmed her lord husband as king, but surely as her majesty's consort you might aspire to such a worthy title as ‘highness.’”

She shouldn't allow herself to be so sharp, she knew that, and still allowed herself the luxury. Better to offend a queen-and what had she come to, that upsetting royalty was the best of her options-than to dwell on the appalling truth that wanted to pull her down. Javier's thin face, his slim body, insisted on appearing before her eyes. For months his image had been an indulgence of wistfulness; now it seemed to mock her with what she hadn't known, and could all too clearly recognise now that she'd been granted the eyes to see it. She didn't want those eyes, nor the burden of knowledge that came with them, but neither could be erased. If she found even the slightest release in pointed words, in playing herself as almost an equal to the two she shared a room with, then she would take it, and for once trust herself too valuable to be thrown away.

Robert turned to Lorraine, full of good nature and wide eyes. “Primrose has a point, majesty.” He took in Lorraine's tight mouth and stiff carriage, and softened both his words and his mood. “I have not sought a crown or title, Lorraine, not even in the staging of this particular play for these especial ends. Surely you know this, after all these years.” He knelt, and to Belinda's eyes, to her cold witchpower senses, there was nothing but honesty in the action. “I am honoured to be named the queen's husband, and need no pretty titles. If you will call me Robert, and the rest of them Lord Drake as they have always done, then I'll count myself a favoured man.”

Lorraine sniffed, a sound denoting pleasure, but her gaze was still hard as she looked toward Belinda. “And you, I suppose, will want the title of princess, as is your due.”

“All I covet is a place as a novice again, my queen, that I might adjust to the awe of my new position under God's watchful eye, and amongst women who will not be impressed by my change of status.” Belinda rarely indulged in sarcasm, and never with her superiors, but her tongue and tone had minds of their own today, and she could not control them.

Lorraine's expression went flat, but Robert, climbing to his feet, chuckled again. “She reminds me of you, Lorraine. Come now,” he said to the look she gave him. “It's no secret you're known for your quick tongue and ginger temperament, majesty.”

Another sniff said Robert had diffused Lorraine's pique for the second time. “The girl has not the hair for it.”

Neither does her majesty, anymore. For a horrifying instant Belinda thought she'd spoken aloud, and bit her tongue against the inclination to do so. Newly made heir or not, stomach-sick with knowledge or not, there were boundaries she shouldn't even dream of crossing, and mocking Lorraine's physical aspect was unquestionably one of them.

“There's no need for her to enter the convent again,” Robert was saying with a casual wave of his hand. “She can stay in the palace and study-”

“No.” Inexorable cold, the same chill Belinda felt within herself, cut through Robert's easy plans. He stopped and looked at her with genuine astonishment, and she tried to remember when, if ever, she'd refused his intentions so flatly. “Unless I stay in this chamber, I can't go unnoticed in the palace, and even here there will need to be food brought, and drink, and chamber pots emptied. Unless her majesty wishes to field rumours on how she has begun eating and eliminating twice as much, it seems a bad idea. Besides, the courtiers are enamoured of my seclusion. We want them to love me, not think me a sneak.”

Robert, drily, said, “You are a sneak.”

“All the more reason to not let them see it.”

“You enjoyed your time at the convent so much that you hasten now to return there?” Lorraine was as dry as Robert, and for a moment Belinda admired them as she might a set of horses. One might be bay and the other brown, but they were a matched pair for all of that, a lifetime of working together making them excellent complements to each other.

“It was your majesty's idea that I should be so pious as to gain God's support in our sea battle against Gallin.” The coldness was dropping away leaving strips of anger where it fell. “I can emerge from the convent more and more regularly as the months go by becoming part of society without leaving behind the impression of purity Your majesty knows the value of such illusions. At Yule I can finally be bold enough to take my place, and by then, majesty, we should have some clear idea of who are our enemies within the court and who will support us.”

Lorraine's painted eyebrows shot up. “‘We,’ girl?”

“Your majesty, his highness, and myself,” Belinda said shortly. “I do not put myself so high as to use a royal plural. This life is still on the wrong side of a looking glass to me, Mother, but I do have some skill in making a place for myself where I was once unknown.” The barb hit home, Lorraine tensing satisfactorily at Belinda's use of the familial honorific, tensing in a way Robert had never done when she had called him “father.” She might never earn that reaction from Robert, not now, but to cut it from Lorraine was worth sacrificing it from Robert. “I would never presume to tell your majesty what to do, but it might be wise to permit me to do what I do best.”

“Murder?” Lorraine asked archly, and for one exasperated moment, Belinda found herself tempted.

Robert intervened, his palms turned down as though he quieted a room full of squabbling old men. “Primrose has a point,” he said a second time. “One I hadn't entirely considered. Perhaps she should be permitted to arrange the details of her coming out. She has both experience and reason to make it work, and…”

And, Belinda concluded, if she failed in endearing herself to the people with her slow exposure, then that, too, would be something of use for Lorraine and Robert to know. They bickered a little longer, but the answer was foregone. Lorraine eventually drew herself up and turned a hard look on Belinda. “Whether the public do or not, we will see you in a week's time, girl, and the matter of which we spoke had best be resolved.”

Robert shared a look of open curiosity between the women as Belinda tightened her jaw and curtsied to the queen. “Majesty.”

There was no other word she trusted herself with, no other response that could both satisfy and forbid bone-deep horror from spewing across the floor. Lorraine nodded, content, and together the three left her private chambers.

Belinda Walter emerged from the queen's apartments in a novice's grey robes and with her hair pulled back tightly, making nothing glamorous of who or what she was. Lorraine went with her to the palace doors, there to embrace her for the third time, and Robert, clearly amused at his role, kissed her cheek with great solemnity. Belinda curtsied to them both, and a procession delighted by her humility came together around her and made an escort of itself as she was returned to the abbey.

The eager young sister greeted her almost before the abbess, and a shy touch to the girl's cheek washed away any lingering memories of nights spent together. The girl, awed and delighted by Belinda's status and by the grace of her touch, turned pink and ran off to make a confession of pride so happily Belinda nearly laughed, the first time such humour had risen in her since the courtroom.

She could not, in this place, make confession. Not to the abbess or anyone else; the girl they'd taken in was an innocent, not one who knew any man's touch, much less one who had all unknowing spread her legs for her brother.

The thought brought another flinch, awakened the witch, harlot, whore singsong in her mind again. Belinda set her teeth and whispered a request to the convent's holy mother, and that brisk old woman led her to the chapel where she could kneel and fold her hands in prayer. To the world around her she was a penitent overwhelmed by her new standing, thanking God for it and asking that she be guided in His light for all her days. That was what they wanted to see, and Belinda was happy to let them see it. A part of her did, indeed, pray for the souls and bodies of the soldiers who were going to war, though she had little faith that prayers would protect any of them.

But mostly she knelt in silence, head bowed and, if not empty of thought, at least as unfocused as she could make it. The song of recrimination swam through her mind time and again, dismay and disgust turning her body to ice even when heat rose inside her as though she might sick up. She had made a lifetime of using people and things and had not loathed herself for it; now, having been used in a way inconceivable to untwisted minds, she thought there was a cleanliness to using people in begetting death. Death left scars on the survivors, but those scars healed: dying was part of life, not a sin, but what she and Javier had done was, and Dmitri had allowed them to enter it. Ill winds ride in Gallin, he'd said to her a year past, in the Khazarian northlands. He had known where Belinda would go and had known what her mission there would be, and he had warned neither herself nor Robert that a wickedness beyond comprehension lay in her path. No, there was no honesty to Dmitri's machinations, the way there was honesty in death. Belinda had no doubt that keeping such secrets furthered some end of Dmitri's own; he and Robert were at odds, though perhaps only one of them knew that.

Only one of them, and Belinda herself.

Slowly, slowly, through the chaos of thoughtlessness, a plan made a shape in her mind. She had knowledge and she had power: all she lacked were allies. Robert was not an ally, not in this, and Dmitri never would be. Whatever his plans, she would thwart them, and destroy him if she could. If that furthered Robert's goals, it was a price worth paying. But a cruel knot of surety held a place in Belinda's thoughts. Robert hadn't known, still didn't know, whose child Javier was, because he had been surprised at the Gallic prince's witchpower.

And yet cold, dreadful certainty whispered that if he had known, he still would have sent Belinda to seduce and murder, with no care for their consanguinity or the cost against their souls for brother and sister becoming lovers. That his loyalty to his foreign queen was far greater than any worry for an ungodly union between two witchbreed children. From Dmitri's words about siring heirs to continue their world-changing plans, Robert might in fact have welcomed another child born to the witchpower, even if that child was issue of an affair no human morality would condone.

That, though it was all but beyond her comprehension, there was something alien enough in her father as to make him into a singular concept that she could grasp.

An enemy.

With the calm of horror cloaking her, Belinda drew stillness around herself, then rose and left the chapel, left the convent, left the country, and went in search of Javier de Castille.