The Pretender's Crown

DMITRI LEONTYEV

15 March 1565 † Brittany, north of Gallin

Dmitri Leontyev does not want to be here.

Oh, in the day that it happened, he was happy enough to be there. More than happy: delighted, smug, crafty. But it's not his will that makes him linger in memory now, and so his thoughts are tainted: he does not want to be here. This is anathema to his people: one does not rape the memories of another, and rage boils in him below Belinda's inexorable examination. She has no right, and he'll teach her the lesson of that when he's broken free. A creature vicious enough to tear apart his thoughts and invade old and quiet memories is not one worthy of veneration or of teaching, but should only be ruthlessly destroyed.

Belinda dismisses his rising fury with casual strength, holding him apart from the power that would allow him to fight back. He acquiesces suddenly: this is not the time or place for challenges. Struggle abated, his thoughts splash down a rarely-travelled path, and Belinda's satisfaction rises with Dmitri's clear and vivid recollection.

He left Lorraine barely an hour after the boy's birth, trusting the Aulunian queen to gather and garb herself appropriately. She's no longer his concern, although the horsemen coming behind him to take his life are. He approves: Lorraine should have sent them. He cannot be suffered to live, not with what he knows. Not with a sullen, hungry baby boy tucked under his cloak in the small hours of a greying morning.

The child should be dead by now, its brains dashed out against a rock somewhere, but if Lorraine wanted the child dead, she ought to have given him to someone else. Not to Dmitri, and not to Robert, either, for he'd no more sacrifice a child of their blood than Dmitri would. Lorraine, of course, doesn't know this, and doesn't need to.

A glade comes up along the path he travels, and Dmitri turns his horse loose to graze a little while as he and the baby wait for the men who are coming to kill them. In a moment of unusual precaution, Dmitri draws a veil around himself, making him hard to see: it will keep them from using arrows, if they're of a mind to do murder from a distance. The baby's muttering might slow and confuse them, but they'll see nothing until Dmitri wants them to.

Dramatics insist he kill them before they kill him, but practicality stays his hand. Lorraine will expect them back with word of his death, and to leave them dead on the roadside gives too much credence to the idea that Dmitri himself is still alive. He has no wish for the Aulunian queen to think he, or the boy, lives, and so when her men come on the glade he merely convinces them that they've done their duty, and left his body to rot in a shallow grave well away from the edge of the path. Even stubborn human minds are easy to deceive, and these two are used to being told what to do without comprehension.

Very shortly thereafter, Dmitri Leontyev mounts his horse again and rides hard for Lutetia, five long days away. There he slips into another queen's night chambers and presents to her a son to replace the one she lost in early pregnancy, as he was bidden to do so many months ago.

C.E. Murphy

The Pretender's Crown