by C. E. Murphy
No, Irina Durova will be beautiful when they lay her down in her grave. Time will not be able to take the elegant square bones of her face away, and her skin is of the quality to hold wrinkles tight around the corner of large dark eyes. She is in her forties now, and her hair is silvering. She lets it do so naturally, taking gravitas from aging; she does not believe youth is the only potent drug there is. Then again, she has true beauty to see her through the years.
It is more difficult to be angry at a beautiful woman than a plain one, but Robert is trying.
“I do not understand, Your Majesty.” It was a falsehood; he understood perfectly, as did Irina. “What does Essandia offer that Aulun can’t? Our fleet is better-trained, and a treaty with my queen is unique in its advantages. There can be no backdoor pressure to marry.” He stresses the last sentence, making it a clear reminder to those who know—in the audience chamber, that means himself and Irina—how much trouble Irina has faced on the marriage front lately, and how Aulunian resources slipped into Khazar to divest her of that problem.
“Aulun stands alone against Cordula,” Irina says, full of genuine-sounding sympathy. Her voice is as rich as her face and body: deep, for a woman, and warm. The imperatrix’s laughter is said to melt snow from the eaves, a gift of some renown in icy Khazar. Robert has never heard her laugh, nor seen snow melt through force of personality, but he likes the story. “We do not share Cordula’s faith, but we are cognizant of the dangers of rejecting it blatantly. My father recalled the Heretics’ Trials, Lord Drake. We are reluctant to draw attention to our own borders by making hasty treaties with Cordula’s enemy.”
Robert bows, a light and almost teasing action, to hide the grinding of his teeth. “Aulun is certain Khazar never makes hasty decisions, Your Majesty. Aulun would also like to remind you that while much of southern Echon is held in Ecumenic sway, the northerly states, like Aulun, have found their own spiritual paths to follow. An alliance with Aulun is not an alliance against Cordula.”
“We are certain that is a point worth remembering,” Irina says, and now there’s a tint of humour in her large eyes. “We are, after all, only a woman, and must heed the advice of the men around us.”
Robert nearly chokes: he knows this trick. It’s one of Lorraine’s favourites, and it makes him mad with exasperation.
And then suddenly, abruptly, he sees what he should have seen before: that Irina’s gown is the one Lorraine sent her twelve years earlier, in congratulations on Ivanova’s birth. It has been modified, made more fashionable, of course, but the jewel-encrusted fabric is the same, the cut still subtly Aulunian rather than the broader lines of Khazarian fashion.
He is too masterful a player to let his eyes widen, though irritation spills through him. He, of all people, should know that words spoken in political debate mean little, and Irina has given him answers in her dress and in her phrasing that few others would know to read. That he nearly missed them himself is an embarrassment, and he bows again now, in part to cover that embarrassment and in part because Irina has effectively dismissed him. “Aulun trusts your counselors will guide you well, Your Majesty. I hope we’ll speak again before I leave Khazan.”
Irina flickers her fingers, neither agreement nor disagreement, and Robert catches a smirk on a courtier’s face as he turns away. He allows thunderous frustration to darken his own features, playing to that smirk; playing to Aulun being stymied by Khazar, and he narrowly avoids stomping as he leaves the audience hall.
His mockery of temper is thrown off by the time he leaves the palace, though there’s a hint of true anger simmering inside him. Irina took him by surprise, and he hates being off-balance.
“Dmitri!” Robert finds the hawk-nosed man in the stables, the scent of straw and manure rising up. The horses snort as he stalks by to catch Dmitri’s arm. Robert is a big man, his hands powerful, and Dmitri flinches. “Irina is making treaties with the Essandian prince, Dmitri. Don’t tell me you didn’t know.” He digs his fingers into the tender flesh of Dmitri’s inner arm, as if leaving a mark will earn him the answer he wants.
Dmitri’s mouth thins and he drops his gaze to the offending grip, then stares at Robert until Robert releases him. There is a note of grace, of chagrin, in the way Robert averts his eyes and offers apology. Dmitri, satisfied, takes a deliberate moment to straighten his sleeve, fussing like a man more fastidious than he normally is. Robert, still irritated, remains silent, waiting.
“A queen doesn’t always heed her advisers,” Dmitri finally says, as close to an admission of failure as Robert’s ever heard from him. “Her strength will be divided,” he adds in a grumble. “Her army will be split between Khazar, Essandia, and Aulun.”
“Or she’ll have Essandian and Aulunian ships alike and her own troops here to put on them and send where she wants. Dammit, Dmitri, you should have told me. You should have stopped it. She hints at favouring Aulun, but I want her to have no choice. Warp the missives from Essandia. Make it seem as though Rodrigo seeks her hand along with her troops.”
“A dangerous game,” Dmitri murmurs. “What if she accepts?”
“She wouldn’t have come to Aulun about Gregori if she were of a mind to marry. These three queens hold a unique place in Echon’s history. So many women have never held such power simultaneously, Dmitri. None of them are willing to cede it. She’ll reject a marriage offer, or dance around it like Rodrigo and Lorraine have done for twenty years.” He exhales, explosive sound, and the line of horses down the stables responds in kind, shaking themselves, stomping feet, huffing and puffing. “Do you know where Seolfor is?”
“I don’t” is Dmitri’s eventual answer. “Are you losing control, Robert?” There’s interest in his eyes, flashing, bordering on avarice. Robert nearly allows himself to seize Dmitri’s arm again, more intentionally threatening.
The truth is there are moments when Robert loses sight of his goal. Moments when the politics of Echon and Khazar overwhelm the end game. Moments when it’s difficult to remember his queen’s face, her image replaced by an aging redhead whose power is blunt and worldly and the centre of his everyday existence. He has spent thirty years guiding Aulun and her regent, coaxing reluctant love and desire out of a woman determined to stand alone. He has never threatened her, never shown interest in stealing her power for his own, and this is why she trusts him. It’s as well she has no need to understand that her power is transitory and unappealing to him. She is a vessel, and she has long since done her part in ensuring the downfall of her world.
There may yet be one thing left for her to do, though, and until that thing is done, he will love, honour, and manipulate her, and regret none of it. When it’s done, he knows he might find that frail human emotion has gotten the better of him, and that he might love the Titian Queen until the end of her days.
Robert has no objections to that. She’s a formidable opponent, all the more so for being a female regent to a society that believes women to be weak and inferior. How they can stand before Lorraine, before Sandalia, before Irina, and retain that conviction is beyond him, though he’s heard it said many times that all of those women are unnaturally masculine. The idea that they are wholly feminine and wholly capable doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone, or if it has, they’ve found it such an appalling and frightening thought as to put it away again and never let it see the light of day. There are moments when Robert has wanted to smack courtiers alongside the skull, not to defend Lorraine, but out of simple exasperation at their determined thick-headedness.
He wonders, briefly, if Dmitri might suffer the same loss of focus if the invasion were his to conduct.
“No,” he says, and makes it light, refusing to allow himself the luxury of physically threatening the slighter man. It’s a closer match than it might look, anyway: Robert has bulk, but Dmitri’s slenderness holds wiry strength. They were always well-matched, even before. It’s why they were selected.
Seolfor, though…Seolfor is their third, waiting, and Robert has n
o doubts of his loyalty. No one would: breaking faith with the queen is a concept that has only slowly become even conceivable, and that only through long years of watching human betrayals. The idea turns Robert’s stomach, makes him physically sick, and Seolfor is no less staunchly the queen’s own than he. But Seolfor is a renegade, if any of them are; Robert believes, though he’d never ask, that this is why the queen sent him on this one-way journey. Because of that, Robert has preferred to keep him off the playing field until his participation is critical. “But with kings and queens playing at pieces as if their lives were their own to direct, it may be time to activate him. Seolfor can be a charming bastard when he wants to be, and there’ll be no taint of foreign courts to him.”
Curiosity darts across Dmitri’s angular face. “Is that why you’ve kept him out for so long? Where will you send him?”
“Essandia,” Robert says drily, “to plant a woman on Rodrigo’s cock long enough to make the child she bears seem reasonably his. I’ll never understand the hold Cordula has on these men. The women are more pragmatic. I only wish Sandalia’d given in to you soon enough to make her son seem Charles’s, instead of catching by that foppish Louis.”
“So does she.” Dmitri lowers his eyes, oddly womanish in his apology, then looks up again, all sharp hazel eyes and hawklike features. “But Gallin is under control, isn’t it? I thought your girl was there.”
“She is, and Sandalia will be there soon. My Primrose will have slipped in quietly, made herself a part of the court, and be waiting to gain the queen’s confidence.” Of all the tasks he’s set Belinda to, this one is both simplest and most difficult. Murder is easy to achieve; sedition much harder, particularly spoken from royal lips. But they need so little, and Belinda is so very good at her winsome ways. It’s why Robert sent her, and not someone of lesser import: even he finds himself inclined to trust his daughter; and that’s why he sent Ana de Meo to watch over her, in turn. Trust is a weakness that hides flaws; better to set a second pair of eyes over that which he dares trust. “One wrong word from Sandalia spoken in Primrose’s ear, and we’ll have our war.”
“And then it will be properly begun.”
Robert nods and claps his hand on Dmitri’s shoulder. They stand like that a moment, Dmitri covering Robert’s hand with his own. Then they break ways, no more words needed between them, and go about their separate duties.
There is a rapping, not at his door, but from within a wall. He knows, though he should not, that the passage there leads to three different bedrooms. None of them is Irina’s, which is a shame: even Robert isn’t above the secret thrill of a queen coming to him in the night.
He’s at the hidden door before the tapping comes a second time, his head tilted against it, listening, scenting, seeking. The first two garner nothing; the door is too thick for subtleties to slip through. The third encounters a woman’s mind, not agitated, but calm and focused. Again, not Irina: she, like Lorraine, is all but impossible to read, her throne granting and demanding an indomitable will. The woman who has come to him is not thinking of who she is but of what she wants: a high-born lover to replace the one she had.
Robert will take no pains to remind her of his own lowly beginnings.
He finds the mechanism that opens the door, slides it open, and looks down at Akilina Pankejeff, a grand duchess within Irina’s court. She, like Lorraine, is not beautiful, but in her age she will be terrifying. Black hair sweeps back from a violent widow’s peak, one that rumour says grows sharper with every lover who dies. Akilina Pankejeff has outlived two husbands and three well-placed lovers, the last of whom was Count Gregori Kapnist, and she is only thirty-two. The superstitious and fearful—nearly everyone in this stars-forsaken place—call her Yaga Baba behind her back, and make the sign of God to ward off witches. She has a golden cast to her skin, and eyes as black as her hair; there is nothing soft about her, not even when she comes to him dressed in loose sleeping gowns. They only play up her narrow shoulders, her small breasts, and the length of her limbs.
The door hisses shut behind her and Robert kneels without speaking, putting his hands on her hips. Her eyes can’t darken any further, but surprise colours them and she touches his hair as he gathers her nightgown, one palmful at a time, toward her waist. He is attentive and delighted to please; Akilina is lusty and ready to be pleased. Minutes later she stands slumped against the wall, fingers still knotted in Robert’s brown hair, gasps chuckling from her. “Not what I came for,” she breathes, “but well worth coming for. No wonder the Titian Bitch keeps you at her side.” She pushes Robert’s hands away, not unkindly, and lets her sleeping gown fall again. Robert wipes his beard without a hint of discretion and climbs to his feet still licking his lips.
“Then why are you here?” He’s surprised for the second time in a day; that doesn’t often happen. Akilina smiles, unexpectedly predatory, and walks her fingers up his chest. He, too, is dressed for sleeping, and her touch is warm through the soft linen of his shirt. He does not catch her hand and pull her back to the bed to roost above him; that decision is hers.
“I require an escort, my lord Drake.” She offers another smile, as pointed as the first, and leads with her hips as she steps into him. “I’ll pay you in whatever coin you prefer.”
He kisses her fingertips, politeness, not ardor. “An escort, my lady?”
Playfulness falls out of her gaze, leaving it flat. “Our winters are long and cold, and my lover’s five months in his grave. I’d intended to retreat to my estate for the winter, but if I can go farther afield that’s much to be preferred. A woman might travel safely in your party, Lord Drake.”
“I travel light, my lady.” Robert isn’t trying to dissuade her. More likely to convince a snake not to bite, he thinks, though he’s far too diplomatic to let the thought anywhere near his expression. “Myself and a handful of men, and with winter coming on we’ll set a hard pace. Can you keep up?”
The challenge glints in her eyes. “I won’t travel as light or as fast as you’d prefer, my lord. Wherever I winter, I can have new gowns made, but a woman of my stature can’t arrive in a new city with nothing but what’s on her back. Give me an extra day for every three you travel in speed, though, and I’ll keep your pace.”
“Where will you go?”
Akilina smiles. “I’ve always wanted to see Aria Magli.”
BELINDA PRIMROSE
15 October 1587 Lutetia, Gallin
My Dearest Jayne;
The letters were etched into parchment, retraced so many times they might have been inked onto the table beneath it. In the deepest of the grooves, ink sat in shallow puddles, the parchment’s ability to absorb it lost. Belinda picked up her quill for the dozenth time, scraping it over the shapes of the letters. She had thought too much; she must simply write, and when the words had spilled out of her she could choose and decide what she ought and ought not say in a letter to the Aulunian spymaster.
My Dearest Jayne;
Lutetia agrees with me more than I might have dreamed, and I have been remiss in writing to tell you of it. The weather is temperate—a blessing after stormy Lanyarchan nights!—and the people are kind. I have made friends both high and low, from a woman whose beauty is so extraordinary I would scarcely believe it real had I not met her myself, to a man of the greatest power. I would tell you his name, though I think you will not believe me: he is Javier, prince of Gallin and heir to that throne and another: Essandia, should Rodrigo fail to marry as seems so likely now that he is in his fifties. And la: listen to me, calculating out the heirship as if I might someday bear children into it. A good Lanyarchan woman would not cast her gaze so high—and yet there are moments, dear sister, when I wish it were otherwise. He is handsome, and commands power. Any woman might dream of such a husband, even a woman widowed with no sons to prove her fertility.
He is very kind, the prince, and has taken me into his group of friends—
All but on cue, Nina knocked on the door and opened it, ducking h
er head in a brief curtsey. “Marius is here, my lady.” She smiled, full of bright hope and cheer; in the weeks that had passed since the opera, Marius had given no sign of being daunted by Belinda’s friendship with the prince, and called as often as his duties would allow. The merchant’s son was a good match, bordering on excellent, and Nina was determined that her mistress should not miss it. Belinda felt a brief unaccustomed pang of guilt through her belly, wondering how long the young man would continue courting her.
“Thank you, Nina. Tell him I’ll be down momentarily.” Belinda set the quill aside with more care than was necessary and scooped a palmful of sand over the paper, shaking it to take away excess ink. Tilting the paper sent fine grains sliding back into their cup, though several stuck in the deep-scratched lines of the salutation, glittering as the light caught them. Her father would be amused by the emotion wrought in those deep lines. Belinda scowled at them, determining to rewrite the letter even if the words came out flawlessly. She stood up, exasperated, to discover Nina still hesitating in the door. “Well? What is it?”
“Do you not like him, my lady?” the servant asked timidly. “He is a fine match, and, forgive me, my lady, but—”
“But royalty is beyond my grasp, no?”
Nina blushed and dropped her gaze. Belinda put her hands on the desk and leaned heavily on it for a few moments, letting the weight of her head stretch an ache into her spine. “I like him well enough. Are you too polite to tell me that my chance is slipping away?” She looked up. Nina’s eyes remained fixed on the floor, but she nodded, a minute gesture that spoke more by daring to be made than the sentiment expressed. “And how do you know that, Nina?”
Guilt rolled off the girl in waves, thick enough to flavour the air. Belinda took a deep breath of it, closing her eyes and savoring it. It was her secret, her one secret from the prince in the matters of witchcraft. For six weeks, through summer’s end and into autumn, they had stolen as many hours as they dared, pressing the borders of the longer nights to study together. Study, and more. Even with the mixed blessing of too-clear memory, Belinda could only hazily remember a time when she felt as if she’d had enough sleep.