The Pretender's Crown

JAVIER DE CASTILLE

8 June 1588 † Gallin's northern shore

The messenger came through a sleeping camp long before dawn, riding a horse for all that the distance between the camp's centre and the nearby ocean channel was barely a mile. The gondola boy who rarely seemed to sleep, but who was unwakeable when he did, roused Javier bare seconds before the rider arrived. Eliza dragged a robe over her own shoulders and belted Javier's sword around his waist before he staggered, bleary with sleep, to meet the agitated courier.

The man all but fell off his horse and dropped to one knee, shoulders heaving with breathlessness. “My lord, there's an Aulunian heir.”

For an eternity the words made no sense. Javier stared at the top of the man's head-he was balding, with sweat rolling through thin hairs-and then transferred his gaze to the island nation invisible with distance and predawn light. “An heir?”

He was king of Gallin; he should be wittier than that. Shock, even coupled with a half-sleeping mind, should clear more quickly and leave him more able to accept and ask clever questions. “Lorraine of Aulun has declared an heir?”

“One of her body,” the messenger gasped, and dared look up. Javier gaped at him, too thick-headed to even echo the man. Either emboldened by his king's silence or sympathetic to it, the messenger continued. “She has produced writs of marriage and of birth, my lord king. Marriage twenty-five years ago to Robert, Lord Drake, long since known as her paramour, and the birth two years later of her daughter. The girl was raised as an adopted niece by Robert until her thirteenth year, when she entered a convent. Yesterday in the queen's court she was presented, your majesty Her name is Belinda Walter, and she is the Aulunian heir.”

That had been seven days ago.

Too many points had made a line that morning: Beatrice Irvine, who was also Belinda Primrose, had given the truth to her bloodline when Robert Drake's witchpower had stood against Javier's in the Lutetian court. The Aulunian heir, it was said, stood on the cliffs of Aulun and called God's light to her, and in so doing destroyed the Essandian armada. Beatrice Irvine, spy, whore, witch, and traitor, was Belinda Walter, daughter of the Titian Bitch.

Javier de Castille had bedded, and nearly wedded, the heir to the Aulunian throne. Even now, in the midst of battle, when that thought came to him it came with a tang of bitter irony. How Sandalia would have adored that coup: she, who had stood against his marriage to Beatrice, might have handed Javier her rival's throne without a drop of blood spilled if she had only encouraged their union.

He had been poor company this past week, had Sandalia's son. Rocked between betrayal and a twisted admiration, he had drawn the lines for his friends, for Rodrigo and Akilina, and most of all for himself, struggling to see if he might have understood the truth before it had fallen from a messenger's lips.

He could not have. The wiser part of him knew it, but the knowledge had emptied him, and then it had filled him with rage. She had played him for a fool since the beginning, and that was a game she would pay for.

Blood tasted of metal. His nose was full of thick scents: more metal, more blood, viscera, and once in a while the startling clear salt and fish smell of water off the straits. When that faded the sun-rotted stench of everything else seemed all the worse, and Javier heard others around him coughing and gagging in the same way he did.

He was the king of Gallin, and he was not meant to be in the midst of a battlefield, spitting blood and blinking sweat away.

Aulun had come to Gallin at the southern jut, in the northern Gallic province of Brittany; the very place Javier had argued to Rodrigo they would not try for. The two countries' proximity there had made the province a contested stretch of land for centuries; Aulun claimed it and Gallin refused to give it up. Lorraine even had holiday retreats in one or two of the area's more beautiful low valleys, and as Javier knocked away an Aulunian sword and skewered the man carrying it, he had the brief vicious wish that someone had simply slipped into one of those rarely used manors and done away with Lorraine on one of her visits. He would not now be numb with exhaustion from the ears down, had someone been so foresightful, and would be enjoying a blazing summer afternoon instead of desperately wishing for water and a lull in the fighting.

They had the numbers to defeat the Aulunians, some forty thousand Cordulan soldiers and Khazar's massive contingency of seventy thousand troops soon to join them. Rodrigo had sent the larger part of the Cordulan force to Brittany, convinced Lorraine's army would take the longer march in an attempt to surprise Lutetia by coming up on its southwestern side instead of from the north and east. It was the harder journey all around, not just for distance but because the Sacrauna protected the city on its southern border, but Rodrigo had been certain, and Javier had taken his uncle's lead and thirty thousand men to Brittany.

Aulun had not been marching on Lutetia as expected. Lorraine's army had been nowhere in sight, not marking the land and not distant on the sea. Javier, cursing, had posted a rear guard and retreated to ground that would give him the advantage when they came. If they came; he couldn't help but think of Rodrigo and the smaller part of their army to the north, perhaps taking the brunt of Aulun's attack.

They waited for three exhausting days for pigeons to wing back and forth, bearing messages of battle. Rodrigo, to the north, was at war, while Javier waited in boredom for an army that had turned its attentions elsewhere.

The fourth morning, they broke camp, and that was when the Aulunians came.

There were too many to have hidden, and sentries had been posted each night. Whispers of witchcraft followed the first battle, and witchcraft it had to be. Not even Javier had realised his eyes were fogged to the ships that suddenly appeared off shore, or his ears to the sounds of an army edging itself into place around his own. He had the high ground, and yet the Aulunian army swept around them, a collapsing wedge that drove his men into a narrower and narrower line of defence. He had never intended to fight amongst his men, thinking it wiser to wield magic from a distance so he wouldn't terrorise his own soldiers.

Caught in the midst of the Aulunian attack, he found himself with no choice, and then found his men to be happy to have a witch-or God-on their side, too.

Since then he had fought with them, revelling in the first gut-wrenching moments of panic and in how that fear faded into a noisy drive for survival. He had fought innumerable fencing matches, learning his skill with a sword, but had never known the moment that went beyond exhaustion, where his weapon's weight became as nothing, and he himself became a warrior who could fight forever. He had learned to rally men with a cry, and when they fell, to whisper a prayer over a dozen bodies without his own ever stopping its endless slash and stab and cut. He had learned, too, to be agonisingly grateful for the times when a retreat was called or an advance succeeded; times when he, like those ordinary men around him, could sink down, gasping for air, and take a moment to be astonished that he was still alive.

Such a moment had not come in some time, and wouldn't until one side or the other took a significant loss. They had fought since the morning, and with sunset's late arrival in the middle of June, it was all too possible they might continue on until twilight turned to darkness. They fought over a bit of land that meant nothing in absolute terms, but should Javier's army fall beyond it, they would no longer be able to see the straits. Aulun would have pushed them back from the water's edge, and that would strike a scar against his men's hearts.

“'Ware, Javier!” Sacha's bellow cut through the cacophony somehow: they fought only a few feet apart, but voices were nothing more than part of the indistinguishable noise of war. When one came clear it was as startling as the cold breeze off the distant water.

Instinct responded to the warning more than thought: witch-power flared, almost invisible in the brilliant afternoon sunlight. Flared not just around him, but around dozens of men close by, and when a cannonball smashed into the shielding, it sent Javier staggering, but it sent the men to cheering even as they ran from its explosive finale. That, too, Javier contained, and in doing so saved not only his own men's lives, but innumerable Aulunians as well.

That had not been a sought-after effect, and it had less sway on Aulunian morale than Javier might have hoped. They did not, and had not any of the half-dozen times he'd made such a rescue, suddenly flock to him, proclaiming him God's chosen one and the right and true king for whom they should fight.

Instead they jeered, unimpressed with even the safety of their own lives: all he could do was stop a cannonball or two, where the newly revealed heir to Aulun's throne could beg God's will in directing the weather to favour Aulun and her navy.

Storms, it seemed, were more impressive than cannonballs.

Not for the first time, Javier unleashed a volley of power as devastating as the cannonball itself, but vastly more selective: those men of a different army whom he'd just saved crashed backward, breaking against one another, collapsing in heaps that no longer had much in common with bodies.

He had learned very quickly that his own men would accept injury, would even accept death, when he dealt it to the enemy with his power, so long as it was clean. Broken bones, broken necks: these were acceptable, and if he could lance men with silver witchpower the way he might with a sword or arrow, that, too, was a show of power his army would rally behind. But the uglier aspect of war, the damage done by cannonballs ripping limbs away, caving in chests, smashing faces-all easily replicable with an unfocused burst of magic-were not things his people would rally behind. There was too much to fear in an ugly kill, and within the first minutes of their first battle Javier had felt that fear growing in the soldiers around him, and had changed his tactics. They wanted the devastation he could wreak, but only in the deepest bloodlust could they drop their worry about what it meant that a man could do what Javier did. Battle was the heart of bloodlust, it was true, but even now, even in its midst, Javier feared the witchpower's strength, and preferred to protect his men from its worst horrors.

Belinda, if she was out there in the battlefield, and she had to be, still seemed inclined to use her magic less visibly. The thought twisted a smile across Javier's face: less visibly, indeed. He didn't believe she could cloak the Aulunian navy, much less its army as they crept through Brittany to prepare traps for Cordula's combined might, from the distance of Alunaer. She would be amongst the army somewhere, very likely unbeknownst even to their generals. They might give thanks to their feeble Reformation God, but it was the witchbreed woman creeping around their edges who gave them the stealth they needed to have counted coup against the Ecumenic forces.

Cordula's army was not losing. Javier reminded himself of that with a ferocity bordering on desperation. They had the numbers and now that his army knew the Aulunians were there, they were easier to see, even when touches of witchpower magic helped to hide them. Belinda made no effort to disguise them during the day: there was little need, when the armies were met on battlefields, everything about them raw and direct and bloody. It was only at night when scouts came searching that Javier could feel whispers of magic, and even that never came close to him. If he were of another mind, that would be pleasing: his ability to reach beyond himself and sense other emotion, other use of power, was growing. In time he might seek Belinda out without ever leaving his post as king and soldier.

Seek her out, and end her in his mother's name.

For a time that ambition drove him: pushed him forward, in fact, and though he didn't see it, those around him did, a fiery-haired young king filled with silver rage. Aulunian soldiers fell back and his men advanced, all of them in a resounding mess of cannon-fire and swordplay and witchlight. Javier noticed Sacha in a moment of clarity, the sandy-haired lord grimacing with battle joy as he slammed his way into a formation of Aulunians. Then, very suddenly, there were no more, and the view to the sea was open. A cheer rose up around them and Javier put a hand out so that a banner might be thrust into it. He drove its pole into the earth, and witchpower gave him the voice to shout “Hold this ground!” so that all his people, and aye, all the Aulunian army, too, might hear the claim he made, and the challenge inherent in it.

A guard, more pragmatic than passionate, put himself between the Gallic king and the retreating Aulunian army, and took an arrow in the chest before Javier could give thanks or motion him away Javier's hands went cold, youthful surety of survival collapsing with the guard, and while a roaring, insulted contingent of his men surged forward to take vengeance, Javier himself was pulled back to safety.

Eliza did not, quite, slap him for his bravado. Not quite: a slap, a proper slap, the kind she clearly wanted to deliver, would have stained a handprint across his cheek; instead she only hit him alongside the head, sending drops of sweat flying from his hair. Then she kissed him, and then she hit him again and stormed away, leaving Javier staring after her in befuddlement. “I knew there were dangers in bringing women to war, but I never realised I might lose my head to Eliza's ministrations rather than the Aulunians'.”

Sacha growled, “You should have left her behind,” from a few feet away, no farther than he'd been all day. Now, though, he was bent over a tub, sandy curls dark brown with water as he washed grime out. He'd stripped to the waist against the heat, and a handful of minor cuts scored his stocky body. The gondola boy, forever in the way but lithe enough to avoid being booted, washed away dirt and muck, then stuck bits of plaster against the small cuts. Sacha growled again and the boy scampered away, dragging his washing cloth through the cleanest water he could find before attacking Javier's own unimportant injuries with it.

Javier lifted an arm, letting the boy do his job, and hissed a sharp breath before exhaling it with a shrug. “Then I should've left her in Aria Magli. I don't know how else I might have kept her from coming to war. Throw her in the dungeon?”

“At least she'd have stayed safe.” Anger boiled off Sacha, a different flavour of it than drove him on the battlefield. There was glee in that rage, a revelling in battle lust with no room left for anything else. Out of fighting's heat, though, it was tainted with something else.

Javier waved the gondola boy off and got to his feet, brow furrowed until the pinch of it made his head ache. The witchpower had done this to all of them, damnable stuff that it was. Useful, perhaps, but damnable, and not worth the price of friendship. “Sacha…”

Sacha snapped his head up at the difference in Javier's tone, spraying water across the open tent they shared. Wet curls fell in his eyes, making him look the part of a youth. Javier smiled, suddenly hopeful, and felt that hope die at a spike of bitterness from his oldest friend. “Is it the crown or the witchpower?” he asked very softly. “Which of them has changed what we had?”

“Neither.” Sacha snatched up a towel and rubbed his hair into a tangle, cutting off conversation, but Javier waited on him, bringing surprise and consternation to his face when he lowered the towel again. “Neither, Jav,” he repeated, then threw the towel away. “Neither, or both, or all of it. You woo Eliza,” he said abruptly, as though the words surprised him, and then in a smaller voice, an even tighter voice, added, “You'd have never done that, before.”

“Because I was a fool. I've learned a little, perhaps. Someone was going to,” he said more softly. “Woo her, or wed you, or me, or Marius. We may have all denied it, but we were never going to go into our age unchanged.”

“You must know she's barren.” Sacha's gaze sharpened on Javier, judging to see whether he did know, and when Javier inclined his head, angry triumph blazed in Asselin's eyes. “So she can be nothing more than a means to your ends. She deserves better, Javier.”

“I have a little hope,” Javier whispered. “A little hope that the witchpower may heal what the fever took. One's no less God's will than the other, no? And you need heirs, too, Sacha, making her no more an easy choice for you than myself. Of all of us, Marius might have most logically gone to her, but I think he was the least likely.”

“Clearly,” Sacha spat. “And she's only ever had use for me when she was drunk. Sober, she's never looked beyond you.”

“Then be happy for us,” Javier said, still softly. Asked: to his own ears it was a plea, hardly given voice at all.

Sacha lowered his eyes, murmuring “Yes, my lord” with such meaningless subservience as to light rage in Javier's breast. There was nowhere he could turn without engaging Sacha's anger, and his own temper lashed out, words low and harsh: “I could command you to be. I could shape your will to mine, so your heart was as happy as mine has been.”

“And what a hollow victory that would be, my king.” Sacha lifted his eyes, hazel gaze cool with anger. “Because I might not know the difference, but there's no one to bend your memory to suit. You know I've always wanted you to pursue your birthright. Now you have, and these are the prices we all pay.”

He turned without being dismissed and walked away, stopping at the tent's far edge to snarl a handful of words over his shoulder: “I'll send you your priest. He should ease your pain.”

C.E. Murphy

The Pretender's Crown