The Pretender's Crown

LORRAINE WALTER, QUEEN OF AULUN

The girl is not what she expected.

She has been dismissed, has left the private chamber in a flurry of ridiculous pink skirts and soft feminine foolishness, and has left Lorraine more alone than usual in a room meant for secrets. More alone than usual: that, for a queen, is a thought of some weight. Were she to give in to it, it might be a thought of some despair.

Lorraine Walter, queen of all Aulun, is fifty-five years old, and that frothy child is the only heir she will ever have.

When Belinda is well and truly gone, not just from the window-less chamber but has left Lorraine's rooms through other secret passageways, Lorraine exits her cold tower room and enters her own apartments again. They're warm, which she's glad of, though she would no more admit to cold than she might admit to loneliness or fear. Those are things to be acknowledged only in the deepest and most private part of her: to the world, she must be untouchable, unaffected: the virgin queen.

Belinda, Lorraine fancies, has a hint of that same cool core to her. Women require it, if they are to succeed in a world shaped by men. Women must become masculine, and yet make eyes at their men, play both sides and hold a place in the middle. Lorraine has worked at that game for a lifetime. So, too, she thinks, has Belinda Primrose.

There is wine, set well away from the fire that it might retain its coolness. Lorraine, not wishing to be disturbed by servants, pours a glass herself, and takes a box of sweets to the fire with her. She believes chewing them improves her breath, but for the moment they're merely an indulgence. No more than two: even at fifty-five, she has her figure to maintain, especially if she intends to continue the endless rounds of marriage negotiations with Essandia's Rodrigo.

A brief smile curves her lips as she taps a marzipan treat against them. Neither she nor Rodrigo has any interest in marriage. How much easier it might have been for both of them if they could have set that absurd dance aside decades ago and instead turned their might and ambition toward other lands. But that is not, has never been, the way of Echonian countries, and it is not the way of the Ecumenic church. It is, and always has been, everything or nothing: Cordula will reclaim Aulun at any cost; Aulun will retain its Reformation church at any price. They cannot, it seems, find another path.

Faith, Lorraine thinks, is a dangerous business, and one that men should resist fiddling with. But not even her own father was immune to that particular folly. Indeed, had he been, the legacy he'd left might have played out very differently.

And that future, had it come to pass, might well have seen Lorraine married, or not queen, or both, and with heirs born to pomp and circumstance rather than silence and secrecy. That, as Belinda said, was a world seen through ancient glass, too warped and misshapen to truly consider.

The wine is warming in her hand. Lorraine sips at it and sets her second sweet aside, less hungry for delicacies than answers. Robert should be here; Robert has always been here, offering advice when it was sought and silence as full of commentary as his words when it was not. Of all her courtiers, of all her advisers, indeed, of all her lovers, Robert Drake has been the most faithful and least likely to pressure her. Men accept that she is queen and do her bidding because they can do nothing else. Robert does it because he believes in her, and if that's a caprice a queen ought not indulge in, well, on this one topic she permits herself to do so regardless.

If he ever betrays her, she will be destroyed. Oh, so, too, will he, more visibly and quickly than Lorraine, but the handsome bearded lord's devotion is the one thing she truly believes she cannot do without.

Then again, as lines work their way into her face and take heavier paint to fill, it begins to seem there may be one other thing she cannot do without, and that is a legitimate heir. Lorraine has always understood, in a way her half-sister Constance did not, that their father Henry's desperation for a son drove him to the extraordinary ends that begot half a dozen marriages and a new church in Aulun. It's easier, perhaps, for Lorraine to be forgiving, for she's the daughter of the second marriage, and Constance was born of the first. Of course, Constance's mother survived, and Lorraine's did not; maybe Lorraine should be less understanding than Constance was.

But this is an old cycle of thought, as useless now as it was when she was a girl. Then, she'd understood well enough; now, as an adult, as a woman, as a queen without an heir, Henry's concern is no longer a thing to be imagined. Lorraine lives it every day, hiding panic behind a regal aspect. It's easy enough to do when she is looked on as God's vessel on earth; she is not expected to have weaknesses, and so she simply does not allow them to show. An impassive face, white makeup, elaborate gowns, all go far in disguising a knot of sick worry that disturbs the heartbeat with its intensity. Without an heir Aulun faces the all-too-real possibility of civil war on Lorraine's death, and though she is so very loathe to admit it, Lorraine is not a young woman any longer. She is, in fact, old, and it's God's grace that has kept her in health and wits these many years. God, however, has not granted the miracle necessary for her to bear a child should she wed at this late hour, and Lorraine's own disposition does not incline her to do that anyway.

Even if she should, who she might wed is a difficulty. Rodrigo has no children of his own, which means marrying him does not solve the problem of an heir. Or rather, it does, in the most bitter way possible: it sets the crown toward Javier de Castille, Sandalia's redheaded son, and Lorraine will be damned before she hands her kingdom to that family. Sandalia held the Lanyarchan throne in Northern Aulun for two short years and thinks it makes her heir to Aulun's; Lorraine has no intention at all of making a pretender's crown legitimate.

That leaves, then, in any practical sense, Ruessland or the Prussian confederation, which is made up of principalities headed by young bucks whose ultimate allegiance slips between sprawling Prussia and smaller westerly Ruessland as quickly as the wind changes. In their favour, they've begun to embrace the Reformation church; that, at least, helps to reduce the chance of war within Aulun.

But it also means, should she wed a young man, that when she dies her young king will marry again and make children for his throne who have no tie at all to Aulun, which is hardly an appealing thought. No: the time to marry was twenty years ago, and she had no more desire to do so then than she does now.

And so she is brought back, again, to Belinda.

Twice. Twice in twenty-three years she's laid eyes on her daughter. Lorraine remembers the first time clearly: the child was pretty, self-contained, with wide hazel eyes bending toward green and thick brown hair. She looked nothing like Lorraine, a blessing to them all. She curtsied, then lifted her gaze, and even now, more than a decade later, Lorraine recalls the shock of meeting the girl's eyes, whose fathomless depths said, without apology or explanation, that Belinda Primrose knew.

How, Lorraine has no idea. Robert had not told her; of that, Lorraine was, and is, certain. It was as though the girl recognised her, and more, recognised that neither of them could ever admit the truth. There was acceptance so forthright it was challenge in the twelve-year-old's eyes, and Lorraine had been well-pleased, though she trusted herself not to have shown it.

Exactly the same expression had been in Belinda's eyes today. So bold, so calm, that Lorraine tread on topics she has rarely had occasion or desire to voice. Had thrown Belinda's brief engagement to Javier de Castille at the girl, and under that cover demanded to know if the daughter she had borne had any ambition toward the throne she has more than half a claim to.

Unless Lorraine is a fool, and she is not, Belinda meant it when she'd said her aspirations didn't reach so high. Unless Lorraine is drowning in sentiment and fear, Belinda spoke truth, and while Lorraine admits to herself-and only to herself-that fear exists, it does not rule her. No one can retain a throne for thirty years and by ruled by fear; no woman can retain a throne for thirty minutes if fear holds the upper hand. And sentiment is something the queen of Aulun excised from her life long ago, except, perhaps, in the matter of Robert Drake. But if he is her weakness, so be it: Lorraine may be God's vessel on earth, but only the Heavenly Father himself is without flaw, and Lorraine might have done far worse than to find her own vulnerability in Robert. He has, after all, held the most dangerous piece of knowledge about her close to his heart, utterly secret, for nearly a quarter of a century.

She recalls clearly what her thoughts were, when she realised her pregnancy. She had been thirty-two, queen for a handful of years and already determined never to marry. Wisdom dictated ending the pregnancy, and it was not sentiment that had stopped her. It was this far-off day that she'd known she must eventually face: a day when she was old, and her country in danger of being left without a sovereign. The risk had been tremendous, but she had been young, and already in the habit of taking a long holiday every year or two. For many months corsets and heavy gowns and the fact that it was a first child helped to keep her body to the slender tall lines she was known for. The maidservants who saw to her were allowed to on pain of death, and when they disappeared, one by one, Lorraine had allowed herself to look the other way and ask no questions.

The last few months of her pregnancy coincided with the fifteenth anniversary of her father's death. Lorraine, deeply affected by his memory, retreated from the public eye for a time, and when she emerged a little heavier, a little paler, her people loved her for it. They loved her even more dearly when she discovered Robert Drake had dallied with another woman while she had been in mourning, and blasted him for it. She sent him from her side for almost a year, and they loved her best of all when she relented and began to be seen with him again.

Politics, Lorraine thinks now as she thought then, is showmanship and misdirection, and a child born and bred under those two stars, a child whose ambitions are to serve loyally and whose heart is undisturbed by being unknown, is a child who might, at the end of it all, serve as a suitable heir.

For the first time since her courses stopped, giving lie to the story she might one day wed and bear children for Aulun, the knot in Lorraine Walter's stomach loosens a little, and, alone with her wine and sweets, she smiles at the fire.

C.E. Murphy

The Pretender's Crown