The Queen's Bastard

by C. E. Murphy

  Robert inclined his head so far it was nearly a bow. “The lands so graciously provided by Your Majesty.”

  “What pretty courtesy you always remember to pay us, Robert.” Faint mockery coloured Lorraine’s voice. Belinda heard in the derision all lies of her heritage, and in her own mind, gave words to the truth: she was Belinda Primrose, natural daughter of Robert Drake and Lorraine Walter.

  The queen’s bastard.

  She straightened as Lorraine spoke her name, stepped forward as the queen beckoned to her. Cool fingers took her chin, turning her face to the left and right. Belinda kept her eyes lowered, but satisfaction in Lorraine’s voice made her dare to glance up. The queen’s grey eyes showed no sign of recognition, no subtle acknowledgment, but neither, Belinda remembered with a shock, had Robert’s, the night he looked through concealing shadow to see her. For an instant, Belinda held Lorraine’s eyes, willing the stillness inside of her to betray nothing. Inside that moment of no exchange, certainty settled around Belinda’s heart. Lorraine could never, and Belinda must never, confess. Belinda lowered her eyes again, lowered them so far that she sank into another deep curtsey, the only acknowledgment she could make. Lorraine clucked her tongue and once more drew Belinda to her feet.

  “We are well pleased you have finally allowed us to see your adopted daughter, Robert. She is an attractive child and we are sure great use will be had of her.” Lorraine’s hand brushed down the bodice of Belinda’s dress, and moved up again, touching the partlet that covered the girl’s throat.

  “We suggest you continue with this until the summer months,” she murmured, bringing her mouth close to Belinda’s ear. “We have a rash, and the lace irritates it, and so today we have chosen to go without modest coverings. Tomorrow the ladies of the court will be most distressed when having followed our lead makes them both chilled and unseemly. But in the spring, we think we shall flaunt our assets.”

  Lorraine flicked a brief, mischievous smile at Belinda, and sat back again. “Heed our words come May Day, girl.” She made a dismissive gesture with one long-fingered hand, and Belinda murmured thanks as she backed away from the throne.

  “My lady Primrose.”

  Belinda’s spine stiffened, the tiny dagger making itself felt for a moment. She turned; Rodney du Roz stood a few feet away, head inclined politely, though his gaze was fixed on her through dark eyelashes, calculating and interested. “Forgive me.” His words were marked with a Gallic accent, but carefully spoken. “Forgive me, my lady, but I overheard your introduction to Her Majesty, and thought I might make so bold as to present myself to you. Baron Rodney du Roz.” He executed a small bow, arms folded to the front and back of him.

  Belinda allowed herself a smile and dipped a curtsey exactly as deep as du Roz’s bow. “My lord Baron. I am honoured.”

  “I think the honour is mine, my lady. For an Ecumenic at the Aulunian court, a friendly smile is beyond price, and yours does me gladness. I am forward, I know, but it is the way of Gallic men.” Self-deprecating humour lit his eyes and curved his mouth for a moment. Belinda had been right: with passion, his thin features could be handsome. “Would you walk with me, lady?”

  “You are forward,” Belinda agreed, amused, but when he offered his arm, she took it. “Outside, perhaps?” she suggested. “The courtroom…I am unaccustomed to so many people, pressing so close.” Du Roz nodded, escorting her through the crowd to a side door.

  “You’ve never been to court before, then?” he asked as they slipped out of the courtroom and down a hall. Arrow-slit windows allowed patches of soft grey winter light to blotch the floor and change the aquamarine shade of Belinda’s overdress. She shook her head as they approached the end of the hall, du Roz pushing open the iron-bound wooden door for her. “Then you must see Alunaer from the palace walls,” he announced. “There are a dozen times in a day when it’s most perfect to be seen, dawn and noon and darkest night.”

  Belinda laughed, carefully gathering up her skirts to avoid slush and half-frozen mud. “But it’s none of those times, Baron. It’s mid-morning.”

  “Ah! But it has snowed lately, and the city is quiet under snowfall, and so that is perfect too. Have you a fear of heights, my lady?”

  “No, my lord.”

  “Bold and beautiful,” du Roz murmured. “This way, then: think you to risk the guard stairs?” He gestured extravagantly as he led her around a corner. Icy, steep stairs shot upward, a short wall of calf-height the only barrier between the stairs and a long fall. Belinda blanched, then nodded with determination. She took the first step, and felt du Roz’s hands on her hips. “Fear not, my lady. I won’t let you fall.”

  Belinda laughed again, breathless. “I trust you will not, my lord Baron.” She climbed, placing her feet carefully. Du Roz took his hands from her hips in order to better balance himself. Nearly three-quarters of the way up, she paused, her hand pressed against her chest as she turned to lean against the high wall, looking out over the low. “Forgive me,” she pleaded, taking in quick, shallow breaths. “I’m unaccustomed to climbing so many stairs, and the corsets are tight.”

  “Not at all. Even from here, the view is remarkable.” He took a step past her, gesturing over the palace walls at the city beyond.

  “It is.” Belinda studied his shoulders, falsely broadened by his doublet, rather than the view, and her father’s voice echoed in her flawless memory.

  “And this is how it shall go, my Primrose. Heed me well. Du Roz visits Aulun for one purpose and one purpose only: he is sent by the Essandia court, by Rodrigo the prince, to bring down our beloved queen and instate an Ecumenical pretender on the Aulunian throne. He is too minor a noble to be suspected, too hungry for land and wealth. Should he be found out, Rodrigo can easily claim no knowledge; du Roz will be called an opportunist, working alone to impress a foreign prince.”

  Belinda touched a hand to du Roz’s shoulder. He turned, avarice filling his eyes. She smiled, and he stepped closer.

  “The man you believe I mean you to marry,” Robert’s voice murmured in her mind, “is the man Aulun needs you to kill.”

  Stillness filled her, a calm centre. Belinda smiled again, putting her fingertips gently against du Roz’s chest. He made a pleased sound in his throat, edging closer on the icy steps.

  Belinda straightened her arm, full force of her body weight behind the shove. Astonishment filled du Roz’s eyes, then panic as he fell, silent, hands clutching uselessly at thin winter air. It took a surprisingly long time for him to crunch against the flagstones below. Belinda stepped forward cautiously, looking down. The body, small, puppetlike, convulsed twice, then was still.

  She edged back against the wall, lifting her gaze to the snow-covered city. In the far distance, chimney smoke rose up, blue against grey clouds; the scent of wood smoke, rich and sharp, intruded on her senses, now that the task put to her was finished. Closer, black-branched trees with snow-dusted caps littered the parks that surrounded the palace. There were distant voices, lifted in argument and in laughter and carried on the wind. “You were right,” Belinda murmured. “It’s beautiful.”

  Only then did she begin to scream.

  Ten years later

  Belinda came awake with a start, the lurch more emotional than physical: stillness was inscribed so deeply in her soul now that she sometimes had to remind herself to react in ordinary company. At times she even thought she might have to tell herself to breathe, the silence in her so complete. But not now: her heartbeat was too fast, breath shallow from sleep. Dreaming of du Roz was never a good sign.

  Nor was waking to the scratchy beard and bad breath of a Khazarian lover. Belinda exhaled, and carefully slid her shoulder out from under his head. He grunted, burrowing further into blankets in lieu of the pillow she’d made. She sat up, rubbing away stinging prickles left by his beard, and drew a discarded sleeping gown around her shoulders. Linen, silk-soft from age, hissed as she slid it from beneath the Khazarian’s weight.

  Belinda frowned at h
im, trying to remember his name. Vlad? Vasilly? Valentine? No, it had been shorter than Valentine. Sharper. She had spent weeks in his bed. She ought to know his name with some certainty. But then, there were reasons not to. It was Viktor, she thought. It hadn’t been he, attentive but unimaginative in bed, who had inspired dreams of du Roz. No, there was more. Something coming awake in the belly of the little palace, its stirrings pressing into Belinda’s mind and making her sleep restless. That was unusual; she often slept lightly, but the prickling awareness of things arriving harkened back to her childhood and the night her father had ridden so hard to his estates to make his daughter an assassin. Something had driven her out of bed that night; something now did the same. She could not recall that itch coming over her once in the intervening decade.

  She slipped out the door without bothering to fasten her sleeping gown with more than a ribbon. The sky, pale with summer twilight, told her it was still early, perhaps three in the morning. Without winter’s chill to ward off, no other servants were likely to be up, not within the house itself: no fires needed building, no breads to set baking, not for another hour or two. Belinda had the narrow servants’ halls to herself.

  They ran as shortcuts from one part of the little palace to another. The count, a stark man with grey at his temples and an eye for beauty that led to tales of sexual prowess, would not stand for delay. Not with his women, not with his wine, certainly not with the wealth of which he enjoyed showing unsubtle flashes. The ancient buildings that had stood his family for generations had been torn down, stone by stone, and rebuilt again to his pleasure. He was master and architect here, and now, with the back halls well-laid and well-lit, it took a maid, running at full bore, no more than two minutes to fetch any hot tea or cold drink from the kitchen back to her master in his study. Belinda had made the deliveries herself, all too aware that downcast eyes and a heaving breast were as much a part of what Gregori delighted in showing off to guests as the astonishingly rapid service. Her gowns were cut accordingly, square necklines a nearly imperceptible fraction lower than decorum permitted, breasts shelved high and mounded against the stiff bodice fabric. The line of propriety was so narrowly skirted that it was a rare man indeed who noticed Belinda’s face. Gazes locked on the sharp line of fabric pressing into pale flesh instead, searching for a blush of pink. Other women used rouge to suggest that colour, but Belinda left nature alone, trusting men’s imaginations over cosmetics.

  The deliberate heavy bindings of daily wear made traversing the halls in little more than a shift against her skin all the more delicious. From kitchen to bedroom, library to dining hall, it was the same. Delicate bells with half a dozen tones strung the upper walls of the servants’ halls: the deepest tone signaled a runner from the kitchen, and the highest, purest of them bespoke the bedrooms. Belinda had learned within a day which halls ran where, and to stand well back from the crossroads when a bell rang. Causing a wreck in the servants’ halls earned even the most beloved servitors a beating. Rumour had it that more than one maid had left the count’s service after such a beating, bellies rounded with disgrace. Many men blurred the line between violence and passion, and there was no one to press Gregori Kapnist to a gentler hand.

  Belinda had made neither the error of clumsiness nor wanton sensuality; her position in Gregori’s household was one of unobtrusiveness. When she was gone, no one should remember her face, only generous breasts and dark hair tucked away under a tidy white cap that emulated the rich snoods of the wealthy.

  It was unfortunate for Viktor, snoring away in Belinda’s bed, that her need for him had passed once she was ensconced in Gregori’s household. The nights she’d spent with him since were necessary payment to keep a lustful man happy; most of all, to keep him from naming her a whore to his lord and master. No one believed the legendary chastity of the serving classes, but neither would anyone employ a maid denounced as a slut. A rough man like Viktor, in his lord’s employ as an armsman, could and would destroy her, unless she turned him away by means of finding a lover of more power within the household hierarchy. To do so was beyond Belinda’s needs, and meant a sad end to Viktor’s days.

  A breeze caught her gown, cool and unexpected. Belinda curled her fingers into the fabric at her throat, feeling her body react to the brief chill. She stepped back against the wall, lowering her head while shifting her gaze left and right. She’d come from the servants’ quarters behind the kitchen, small and uncomfortable but private. The halls opened to the outside in two places: the east wall, the servants’ entrance around the corner from the main southern entrance, and the north wall, where the stables lay. The breeze lifted her hem again, and she turned her head to the right.

  To the north, the stables. Someone’s assignation, likely, no more legal than her own. Belinda loosened her hand from the throat of her gown, pushing the fabric open to bare her collarbones. She folded one arm beneath her breasts, lifting them, and judged the effect from above before twisting her hair over her shoulder in dark, artless curls. She clutched the skirt of her gown in one hand, letting her stance and body language claim she was afraid of being caught.

  But stillness washed over her as she lowered her head and gaze. Sometimes it seemed that the childhood memory came real again, and that men and women looked through her as if shadow had swallowed her whole, even when no shadows were to be seen. The sense of certainty that had accompanied that one frozen moment had never reasserted itself, and so each time now she was made to wait, and to see if she would be seen.

  A man’s footsteps, taking long, sure strides. Belinda watched the floor through her eyelashes, marking the swiftness of steps. Her breath barely stirred her bosom as she inhaled, and with the exhalation, the man strode by. Expensive boots, black and well-made, the stitching impossible to see at a glance; well-shaped legs. A scent of the outdoors, of horses, of perfume made with an exotic spice: a rich man’s scent. Perhaps Gregori, returning from a visit with Akilina Pankejeff, whose grand duchy put her out of line for the throne, but far above what a count might call his own. There were a few who whispered that Gregori eyed the widowed imperatrix, and laughed in their sleeves at the idea. She was born too high, and he too low, though no one could fault him for his taste in women, and some admired the long reach of his ambition.

  A hand closed in Belinda’s hair, knotting in the curls she’d pulled over her shoulder. Her coquettish downward gaze had lost her the chance to watch, and there had been no change in his pace to warn her the man had turned back. She forbore to flinch or squeal as he pulled her head back, forcing her chin up to make her meet his eyes. Hazel eyes, dark with patchy light from well-spaced torches, and a well-shaped mouth thinned with anger. “Better, I suppose, to have it here than wake whatever cock you’ve got roosting in your nest.”

  Dmitri! Belinda knew this man, the expressive mouth and low voice a match to the one she’d heard as a little girl, in her father’s own home. Surprise dilated her pupils, one of the few reactions she couldn’t control. For a few seconds the halls seemed brighter, as if early-morning sunshine had somehow spilled through stone and around corners to light the place where they stood. Her pulse betrayed her by bumping higher in her throat, just one beat before she swallowed it down. “My lord?” A soft voice, properly cultivated as benefited a servant of a wealthy house, but with country vowels. Her Khazarian could be high- or low-born, less learned than absorbed in infancy, as had been her native Aulunian tongue. Gallic she spoke like an Aulunian, but that was artifice; she could swallow her accent and make herself sound a native if she had to.

  But a country-born serving girl in a Khazarian palace would have no speech but her own, and Dmitri had spoken Aulunian. “My lord?” she asked again, eyes wide with uncertainty that was only partly feigned.

  “Do not play me for a fool,” he growled, fist tightening in her hair. “I’ve travelled long and late to meet you, and morning comes on harder than I’d hoped. Time is running out.” Belinda’s chin came up with the weight of his hand, exposi
ng her throat. His gaze flickered to her pulse, and pleasure she couldn’t allow on her face warmed her belly. She had him: the tiniest signs of vulnerability were the ones men could resist the least. The slightest signs of a man noticing weakness were the ones she could exploit the most.

  “My lord,” she whispered a third time. “I don’t understand.” He couldn’t recognize her; he’d only seen her sleeping, and that more than ten years ago. He’d changed very little, only the style of his hair, cut shorter now than Belinda remembered. His beard was still thin and trimmed to the line of his jaw, his cheekbones and figure as sharp as they had been a decade earlier. She recognized in him now what she’d been too young to see before: he was, if not handsome, at least deeply compelling. His features might never grace the classic busts of ancient Cordulan emperors, but they would damn a woman’s heart to break. He had, even in repose, what du Roz had lacked: passion.

  And he was not now in repose. Irritation turned his eyes from hazel to murky black as he slid his hand behind her neck, pulling her head back another degree or two. His hands were unexpectedly soft, though the touch was not; the hands of a man who had never done heavy work or held a sword. Belinda’s stomach tightened and she pressed her back against the wall, feeling her dagger dig against her skin.

  “I think you do,” Dmitri breathed, still in Aulunian. His accent, which had marked him as Khazarian in Belinda’s childhood, was gone, words untainted by any other language. He pressed his mouth against the pulse in her throat, leaning his body into hers. His clothes were still cold from the outdoors. Belinda’s flesh went to goose bumps against the chilly fabric. There was no extra padding to the man, not in body nor in garment; his thighs, slender and muscular, trapped one of Belinda’s between them, his sex hard against her hip bone. Belinda ghosted her fingers at his hip, rather than reach for her dagger. A man’s own weapons were the best ones to use against him.