The Pretender's Crown

JAVIER DE CASTILLE, THE QUEEN'S BASTARD

Fire rained from the sky.

It seemed a brief eternity before he realised that no, fire rose into the sky, streaky smoke trailing behind vast blasts of heat as incomprehensible machines flew toward the stars. They strove for the moon, for ships made of metal that hung in the void between heavenly bodies. Men piloted the vessels that left streaks across the sky, working to serve an overlord they knew nothing about.

His vision reversed, turning from the sky to the earth, where terrible pits, deeper and broader than any salt mine, scored the surface, and where men rode in monstrous metal contraptions that hauled ore and dirt toward the wide crater edges.

Distant from the mining sites lay cities, great square buildings with uniform windows and tall smokestacks that belched black muck into the sky. The men and women who worked them looked weary, ill-fed, grey with smoke as they guided ugly chunks of precious metal down rattletrap belts that led to processing centres a thousand times larger than any forge Javier had ever dreamt of. Heat boiled out of them, turning the sky to hazy waves and bringing the very depths of Hell to life.

His voice cracked, pushing aside the pictures: “If this is what they want, they must be stopped-”

“Wait.”

Another ship sliced through the sky, and this time fire did rain from it, huge slabs of light slamming into the ground, into buildings, into the mines, and killing men by their hundreds. Belinda whispered, “I've seen inside their ships, Javier…”

With the whisper came the image of a man, though that simple word fell away into nothingness as the creature came clearer. It was man-shaped in the way a peddler's monkey might be, with a misshapen head atop a central column, but nothing else in its makeup said man in any way. The face was a snarl of rage, eyes set wide apart and swiveling independently of each other, and too many brutish limbs manoeuvred the controls of its ship. It had half again the bulk of any man Javier had ever seen, so thick and fearsome it might forgo its radical weaponry entirely and simply pull its enemies apart. Even as nothing more than a picture in his mind, it stank of something that made his bowels turn to water, as though it could crawl inside his head and trigger a primitive terror that undid any rational thought and strength of character he might cobble together.

“What…?” Horror lay somewhere in the depths of his question, but bewilderment was what coloured it.

“Invaders from a foreign land,” Belinda whispered. Her voice and her magic were both laden with uncertainty, not in what she shared but in how it could be. “They come for our… our salt and our metal and our land. These ones are Robert's enemy, the enemies of his queen. They fear them in particular because the witch-power has so little effect on them.”

“In particular?” Now horror did break through, Javier shaking off the images to stare at Belinda. “There are others?”

“Dozens. Dozens of races, all in need of the same resources, as we need what we take from the Columbias. Some are more easily defeated.” Belinda put her hands along her temples as though she tried to hold her thoughts together. “Some fall before the witch-power easily. Those ones pursue other paths of exploration, staying away from Robert's kind. The space between the stars is almost infinite, and they rarely meet anymore. But those who can fight the witchpower will come on Robert's heels, will come to strip this world of its iron and water and greenery. Robert means for us to feed those resources to his queen, to advance us so far as to deliver them what they need while they never soil their… hands.”

Another picture rode with the last word, a great silvery scaled monster with no more hands than an insect might have. It cried of dragon to Javier's mind, though only because no mortal creature he knew had such size or such sheen: it looked less like a great wyrm or terrible lizard than a giant, segmented insect, oddly fragile for all its enormity. “My father's people consider themselves delicate invaders,” Belinda whispered. “They make slaves to do their bidding rather than destroy populations and take what they desire. The ones who come after them would simply wipe us from our homes as if we were rats.”

“But what are they? Where are they from?” Not why -the why of what the things Belinda told him of made sense, in a remote and unemotional way. His people raided the Columbian continent for goods and raw materials; the idea that someone else might invade them for the same seemed only reasonable. But those who might come for Echonian resources should be Khazarian, or Aferican, not monsters encased in ships that cut through sky instead of water. Cold crawled over Javier's skin and inched its way to the bone, carrying disbelief beginning to border on refusal.

Belinda laughed, soft sound of near panic. “I don't know. Alien. Inhuman. Things I never dreamt existed. God hasn't peopled only our world, Javier, even though your church or mine would burn me for the heresy of saying so. But what I've taken from their mind is real. No one could imagine it.”

“But he's-” Javier choked, unable to put voice to the idea that Robert could be other than a man.

Belinda swallowed, so strained he felt it through the witchpower. “The soul leaves the body at death, transcending to Heaven or Hell. They have a way of capturing it, giving it a new body and a new life.” Her uncertainty rose through the witchpower, not in doubting that something like what she described happened, but unable to comprehend how. “It has to do with the witchpower, with their ability to make magic with their minds. It defines them, more than it defines us. We see our talents as powerful, but they consider what they can do here to be weak. But it's strong enough to slip into a few places and to shape our countries and our continents so that we'll be raised up to serve them. And if we don't allow this shaping we'll have no defence when their enemies come. We'll have no way to fight back against any of them.”

“So you would play both sides against the middle,” Javier said slowly. “You would hide from Robert Drake the fact that we move against him even as we embrace the changes he brings?”

“We don't dare turn to him for help. He'll use his witchpower against us and bend us to his will.” Belinda's argument rang with unshakable surety. “You said I'd hidden my power behind walls of womanly fear, but it was Robert who locked it away. I was too young, my power developing faster than he was prepared for, so he placed that wall in my mind. I remember him doing it, though I didn't understand all that it meant until I met you. And he stopped your power in Lutetia, stopped it without effort. He could well be able to do it again.”

“We're stronger now, both of us.” Javier spoke without knowing whether he was truly entertaining Belinda's madness or simply drawing it to its inevitable conclusions. “We might be less easily taken now.”

“And if we defeat him only to learn he reports to his foreign queen? We can't know what she might expect of him.” Belinda sank back, face pinched. “I know a thing or two about living in the shadows, Javier. About shaping events from there, and the wisdom of moving subtly.”

Javier bared his teeth, anger coming to sudden light inside of him. “If we can do nothing about Drake, then-”

“Dmitri,” Belinda said in a low vicious voice. “He's under Robert's command, a servant to the general, and he has in more ways than Robert used us badly. He has strength, but I know his secrets now, and with him removed Robert will rely on me all the more, giving us a place of power inside his plans.”

“Us. The day when we were us has long passed. Why are you here, telling me this?” Muscle tightened in Javier's jaw, anger fanning higher. “What good am I to you in this power play?”

“I need allies. This battle is larger than Gallin or Aulun, larger than Reformation or Ecumenic law. I might succeed in the shaping of one country, but to stand against what's coming we need a continent of a single mind. A world, if we can make it.”

“No.” Anger burst over Javier's skin, driving away the cold and leaving him staring down the Aulunian heir with fresh loathing. “This madness is of your own making. This war is of your making, in the shape of my mother's death.” He threw those words at her, claiming Sandalia as family; the ties there were far stronger than the story Belinda had spun, no matter how much truth he felt in its core. “These plots are yours to unmake, not mine. You don't need allies, not to fulfill your ambitions, not to murder this Dmitri or trick your Robert. You want friends, people to salvage whatever desperate fraction of yourself still has a conscience. I owe you nothing, least of all that. You say we've been used, but I've been used, and by you. Your nasty truths, the things you've learned, they change nothing. I'll delight in crowning myself the Aulunian king, knowing in my gut that it's no pretender's crown, and you, my enemy, will die on a hangman's tree, nothing more than a fast-fading memory.”

Honest astonishment filled Belinda's eyes, and she was silent a few seconds before saying, “But the things I've shown you-”

“Are madness. Even if they're true, they're madness, and lie so far beyond my grasp that I cannot even pretend to believe we could face them.”

“What if you're wrong? What if we can?” Belinda leaned forward as though she'd catch his hand again.

Javier pulled back, denial and rage filling his motions as he spat, “Then Belinda Primrose can save us all. You can give me nothing that makes entertaining your games worthwhile.” He climbed to his feet, all but stumbling over Marius's grave in his anger and his haste to be away.

Belinda's voice followed him, hard with desperation: “I can give you a child.”