The Pretender's Crown

BELINDA PRIMROSE

Lorraine should not have asked that question.

Not should not in the suggestion that she had no right, but should not in that she should not have been able to. Belinda was struck dumb by the queen's command that she join the army; now she felt a gape drop her jaw and couldn't gather her expression into anything less telling or more flattering. It took long seconds to croak so much as, “Majesty?”

“We are not a fool.” Lorraine's voice, nearly inaudible, was also ruthlessly hard. “We have considered long and hard the warning Robert gave us through you, and we have considered its manner of arrival. We have also listened to the stories that have come out of Lutetia in the matter of Beatrice Irvine.”

Silence filled the room, broken only by the shattering strength of Belinda's heartbeat. This was adversity, the very thing she had been raised to face, and when she needed them most all her wits had deserted her. There was a clever answer to give the queen, a quip or a droll comment that would dissuade her from the path her thoughts took. But witchpower roared in Belinda's mind, golden wall of noise, triumph, and anticipation screaming wordlessly in her skull. She thought she might burst from it, or that she might be tipped over and have it spill out as though she were nothing more than an emptying vessel.

“And then,” Lorraine said, so, so softly, “and then there is the matter of you and me, Belinda Primrose.”

Belinda fell to her knees, graceless, uncontained, unconstrained, with an image brilliant against the golden light in her mind: a woman with thin grey eyes, a high forehead, a proud chin. A woman with titian hair worn loose, bloody curls against translucent skin. The image, the single image, that Belinda had borne with her all her life, since the day she was birthed, and with it a handful of words that had defined her as long as she could remember: it cannot be found out. It cannot be found out.

But Lorraine continued inexorably, giving lie to the boundary that had made up the edges of Belinda's life. “You knew me,” the queen whispered. “It is not in the least possible, and yet you knew me in court on the day we first met. Robert did not tell you.” The certainty and dismissal in Lorraine's voice would be laughable if she were not so terribly right. Robert Drake had not told his daughter the secret of her heritage; he had only come lately to learning she knew, and unlike Lorraine, he had been shocked that she did.

Belinda stared at the floor, eyes wide and dry, and thought that if tears should fall they would be made of fire, gold splashes against the floor, and wondered why she thought they might. She, who had a damnably flawless memory, could not remember crying since she had been a child, not since she had begun the game of stillness. There was no reason to weep now.

“I have put these things together, all of them,” Lorraine went on. “I have put them together, and I have come to wonder, Primrose, if the rumours out of Gallin are fact. If the daughter I bore is, in truth, a witch.”

Belinda jerked her gaze up, magic in her mind suddenly flat and silent, as though the queen's words had stripped away all her power. Ambition had fled; for the first time since Javier had helped awaken her to the magic she held, Belinda felt no hint of underlying expectation, no whisper of curious exploration. Her insides were hollowed and plumbed with lead, an iron casing around her heart, crushing it each time it tried to beat. The distorted window that allowed her to look at a life that might have been went black, not clear in the way she might have imagined it would, had she ever gone so far as to dream Lorraine might use those words aloud: the daughter I bore. They had danced around this acknowledgment; putting it between them in open words stripped Belinda bare, and left her ready for shaping, as though she were once more a child.

Lorraine breathed, “Such control,” and touched a fingertip to Belinda's chin, turning her head this way and that. “I see astonishment in your eyes, child. Fear, horror, disbelief. These are all the things I should see, but unless I miss my guess the word that has torn you asunder is not ‘witch.’ So I am right, and this is how it shall go, Primrose. Heed me well.”

Belinda nodded, barely a movement under Lorraine's touch. Nodded, because the words the queen used were the same ones that Robert has always used in setting her a task, and because that small familiarity was a line to which she could tie herself and find her way back to the world she knew. A distant part of her wondered if Robert had learned the phrase from Lorraine, but she couldn't voice the curiosity, not now.

“I do not care,” Lorraine said with gentle precision, “how this came to be, how it has shaped your life, whether it is a damnable talent or a heavenly one. I have no wish to see demonstrations nor any worry for explanations. I do not care. What I care for is its use. I have an army that is badly outnumbered, a navy that is smaller and weaker than its opponent. I intend on sending you into war, Primrose, because I think you are a thing that will tip the balances. Am I right?”

“Yes.” Witchpower bloomed again, a kernel of confidence so steady and bright that Belinda's own voice seemed that of a stranger. She drew breath to speak again and Lorraine cut it off with a commanding gesture.

“I do not care,” she repeated. “I will not know the details, for my sake as well as yours. I will promise you this: you will not burn, not so long as a Walter sits on the Aulunian throne. Be discreet if you can, but if needs must, then discretion be damned and I will make an answer for my people. They say Javier of Gallin is blessed by God. So, too, will you be, if anyone dares ask. But you are a secret warrior still, as you've always been. You won't ride with the generals and admirals, though neither can you be a camp follower. Be clever, girl. Be wise.”

“Majesty.” Belinda's voice sounded more her own, demure and willing as she cast her gaze downward. For all that she'd cast it away in these past months, the stillness wrapped around her now, habit protecting her from emotional blows. She had a task, and such things were how she lived her life: even shaping those thoughts gave her a flare of purposefulness, of relief and pleasure at understanding that she had a duty to perform. Time to think it through would come later, well away from the dangerous territory that was Lorraine Walter. Knowing herself to be dismissed, Belinda rose and for once permitted herself less than a proper obsequience; she only nodded to Lorraine as she passed her by.

“Primrose.” Lorraine's voice followed her to the door and Belinda stopped, not looking back, but waiting.

“Rid yourself of the babe. It's a complication I will not have.”

Ice slid into Belinda's chest, sharp and cold as a dagger. She bobbed a curtsey, then left Lorraine in the secret chamber.

No one, Lorraine least of all, should have seen what Belinda carried beneath her novice's habit. Even she, lying in her cot at night with her fingers pressed against her belly, was only certain of it because she had twice now missed her courses, rather than any broadly visible change in her form. This was a thing that would not have happened had she been outside the convent walls, where it was easy to find the herbs that would unroot a child from the womb.

But until these past few weeks she'd left the convent daily, and might well have broken from Dmitri and found what she needed to loosen the unquickened babe from her body, and she had not done it. She met resistance from the witchpower when she considered it, a wall of determination that turned her thoughts from convenience to possibility. She was half of Robert's blood; the child within her was half of hers, and all of Dmitri's. There was more potential witchpower growing within her than she could command herself, and that was enough to stay her hand against steeping an abortifacient tea.

Dmitri did not yet know, unless her swelling bustline had informed him. She'd kept the knowledge wrapped close in her mind, walled it off with golden power as her own magic had once been tucked away. He would leap on a child as a way to bind himself closer to Belinda and pull her further from Robert, making the babe a wedge between them with plans to guide it toward his own ends.

Belinda intended that shaping for herself.

She paused where she was, letting a blind gaze come into focus. She had climbed the guard stairs along the palace's outer edge, and Alunaer spread out before her in the fresh new green of early summer. It had been winter the last time she'd stood on these steps, with blue smoke rising in straight lines toward grey clouds, and with snow making white patches over black rooftops. Rodney du Roz had lain twitching, and then all too still, on the flagstones many feet beneath her while she'd admired the view, and now she glanced toward the distant ground, half wondering if some other unfortunate might lie there in homage to the first man whose life she'd taken.

There was not, but a hand of guards trotted across the courtyard and turned sharply to come up the stairs. Not until they were almost upon her did Belinda realise that they hadn't seen her, that her own desire to remain hidden from Lorraine's too-sharp gaze had drawn the witchpower stillness in all its strength around her. She gathered her skirts and ran up the stairs, pressing herself against parapet walls with a gasp that bordered on laughter, though not of joy. Her power was growing, if she could gather near-invisibility without a conscious thought. Dmitri's teachings had stood her well.

The guards trotted by, leaving behind the sour rich scent of men, far more noticeable with pregnancy changing her body.

Drops of witchlight fell around that thought, golden and bright and illuminating. Belinda spread her hand across her belly, gaze gone sightless again as she stared over the city. Her sense of smell was more sensitive, her awareness of touch more exquisite, her witch magic more powerful.

Two were tales she'd heard spoken of pregnant women; the third was not an experience others might share. But if the two and the one were born of the same changes in her body, then the serenely confident answer she'd given Lorraine might depend on the strength lent to her in having fallen pregnant.

A bark of laughter gave away her presence to anyone near enough to hear it. It was a triumphant excuse, one Lorraine would accept; an inconvenient grandchild paled in comparison to a country lost. Besides, she was queen, and Belinda had no doubt she could and would find a doctor willing to say Belinda's child hadn't quickened, and could be ridden of in much later months without endangering anyone's immortal soul. It might, in fact, do very well to find a way to let Lorraine think the babe lost; then Belinda would have free rein in raising it.

It was a desperately large command to pit herself against, as the one she chose not to obey. Indeed, it shouldn't have taken Lorraine's orders; a lifetime's service should have sent Belinda to a wise woman weeks ago, removing complications before they were well begun. This, perhaps, was what the first sip of freedom was flavoured with: not defiance, but calm. Unrooting the babe had never been an option worth considering, and that, above all, was a thing in which Robert, and no doubt Lorraine, would find cause for alarm.

But a war was coming, one outside of Belinda's capability to grasp. Weapons for that war would be necessary, and if she had been bred to shape and guide her world, then the child she carried was also a weapon. No wise general facing battle threw away a potential weapon without first considering all the ways in which it might be used. Even the most dangerous-an unknown assassin, for example, in the form of an ordinary young woman-would rarely be discarded. Dismissed, perhaps; detained, yes, but not discarded; there was too much value in dangerous things, and the future always held a need for them.

The war season was only now beginning. Lorraine wouldn't expect to see Belinda again for weeks, even months if the weather held well into autumn. Seven months: if she could remain on the battlefields, a secret weapon herself, for that long, then the orders she'd been given could be disguised. If not, she could use witch-power to protect herself and the child. Belinda disliked the idea of tampering with Lorraine's memories; the woman was, after all, a queen, and not merely a parlour maid. But one brief thought to turn aside might not be too much to manage, in the name of protecting an unborn weapon.

Satisfied, Belinda crossed the parapets and left the view of Alunaer behind, going in search of an army and a choppy sea.