by C. E. Murphy
“Louis was taller than I” was Sandalia’s reply, after a frosty silence that brought them both out of the courtroom and toward Sandalia’s more private meeting chambers. Surprise curdled in Belinda’s stomach as she realised the queen had dropped formality; whether it was a sign of liking Belinda despite her unfortunate tendency to speak her mind, or whether she intended to appear soft until bitter hardness was necessary, Belinda was unsure. “As you so rudely implied, however, most people are. Perhaps Javier’s length is from his uncle; Rodrigo, whom you have not met, is quite tall.”
“And dark,” Belinda said. “I’ve seen a portrait. He’s extremely handsome.”
Sandalia smiled unexpectedly. “He is. I would that he had wed and had children of his own. But there’s always Lorraine,” she added, dryness returning to her tone again. “Do you understand the political situation there, Beatrice? You give lip service to Lanyarch’s freedom, but do you understand?”
For a moment Belinda imagined herself flanked by Sandalia on one side and her father on the other. It took effort to not glance to the side, looking for Robert, and she schooled her voice to show no amusement as she replied. “Henry of Aulun’s first wife was sister to your father. There is no surviving Walter heir from that union; Constance, their one daughter, is dead these thirty-some years. Lorraine’s a bastard child begotten through desperation that severed Aulun from Cordula and birthed the Reformation Church, and she, too, is without an heir.” Belinda drew a breath. “She’s run Lanyarch’s royal blood into the earth, leaving you the wedded queen to the throne, but without a child of Lanyarchan blood. Rodrigo woos Lorraine still, more in Cordula’s name than his own, though if he should succeed, such a marriage might legitimize Javier’s claim to any throne on the islands. In her eyes you and Javier, who are not of Aulunian blood, but who can trace line of descent to her throne, are pretenders to her crown, and dangerous.”
“And it is your opinion…?” Sandalia’s voice was so steady she might have respected the opinion Belinda offered, though in contrast to her vocal quality, humour sparked around her to Belinda’s witchpower senses.
“That with no legitimate Walter heirs, Aulun should be ruled by the royal family closest to it. There are those in Aulun who would make themselves kings,” Belinda admitted with a shrug, “but the de Costas already bear God’s seal of approval, and through Catherine you and Rodrigo are…” Too late, far, far too late, she recognized the injudiciousness of being so free with her opinions. She had, for a terrible moment, shared Beatrice’s naive beliefs, that faith and rightness and God’s will would protect her. That as a woman engaged to a prince, she might speak frankly to that prince’s mother and have her opinions respected and considered. That Javier would protect her, even when she spoke sedition to a queen.
Her stomach knotted, knocking upward so hard as to make her teeth set with the impact; it took sudden and frantic control to not let that reaction complete itself. She spoke without swallowing down sickness, forcing herself to remain untouched visibly by raging alarm, and finished, “possibilities.” If it was a trap, it was neatly set, and she was all the more a fool for stepping into it. If it was a trap, she richly deserved its jaws closing around her.
“You are a fool,” Sandalia said. “Either a fool or so trusting as to be one, and I can afford neither. You’re a political tool, Beatrice.” The tiny queen turned to face Belinda, eyes large and dark and utterly without mercy in her heart-shaped face. “You’ll help us to see if Lorraine can be shaken loose from her throne, but you will not marry my son, even if he should insist on it.”
“Your Majesty—” It took appallingly little effort to put the quaver in her voice, Belinda’s hands cold with dismay. She knew better, had been trained better, and had still let herself be led. Witchpower danced golden and warm through her mind, uncaring of the danger she danced with. “Yes, Your Majesty, of course, but how—”
Sandalia offered a smile that laid her open to the bone. “You’ll find a way to make him hate you, my dear.”
“Oh…oh, no, I couldn’t, I…I lo—” The words stuck in her throat, bringing warmth to her cheeks. Belinda clenched her hands in her skirts, allowing Beatrice’s distress to override the coldness pounding within her. Denying the desperation with which she wished to wrap herself in stillness and forbid anything to touch her. The words that finished her protest were the emotions of a silly noblewoman, not of Belinda Primrose. Her heart fluttered and beat against her ribs, a wild thing trying to escape the sickness inside her. She was Belinda Primrose, the queen’s bastard, an assassin and a spy, and she could not love a prince.
Sandalia’s smile turned positively radiant, bringing a beautiful glow of youth and good health to the pretty queen. “You will,” she said implacably. “You will, Lady Irvine, because our solution would be far less pleasant than that. We are finished with this discussion.” She flickered her fingers, shared language of the body from queen to gutter rat, and said, pleasantly, “You’re dismissed.”
Belinda, uncaring of her dignity, of her lifetime of trained untouchability, uncaring of anything but the bewildering, consuming ache that rattled her bones and took her breath, gathered her skirts, dipped a clumsy curtsey, and fled.
SANDALIA, QUEEN AND REGENT
5 December 1587 Lutetia
“That’s her. That’s the witch who did Lord Gregori to death.” The girl standing in Sandalia’s private chambers might be pretty, did hate not so contort her features. She is young, perhaps nineteen, with blond hair so thick and heavy she could be dangled from it. Her hands are clenched in her skirts, making wrinkles of plain working fabric, and she’s terribly afraid of her surroundings. “I don’t care that she’s all tarted up and dressed as a lady. That’s Rosa.”
She speaks Khazarian, a tongue that Sandalia has only in smatterings. Sandalia looks to her translator, who repeats the girl’s words back in Gallic. Sandalia nods slowly, and doesn’t laugh: the wretched creature is using hate to push away fear, and Sandalia is not one inclined to believe accusations of witchcraft from the frightened. “Why do you think she’s a witch?” She lets the translator do her work and keeps her focus on the girl whose face tightens with rage and, unless Sandalia is greatly mistaken, envy.
“Lord Gregori was strong and fit, my lady. A fever came on him too fast to be natural, not in the summer. Winter’s the time for sicknesses like that. It came on him when she came—”
Sandalia lifts a hand as the translator speaks, and the girl breaks off. “When—Rosa—arrived in Gregori’s household? That was when he became ill?”
The servant curls her lip reluctantly. “No, not till she went to his bed.”
Sandalia once more refuses a smile, and nods for the girl to continue. “She went at him without stopping for three days, and on the fourth he was dead. Then she ran, like the craven devil’s creature that she is. Why would she run, if she hadn’t done him to death?”
Sandalia knows enough not to argue that question with the girl, either. Instead, she murmurs, “Why, indeed,” which is translated to the serving girl’s obvious delight. “You’re certain it’s the same woman,” Sandalia says one final time, and the girl tosses her head with a sniff.
“Sure as the sky is blue.” There’s such a sparkle of laughter in the translator’s voice that Sandalia suspects the servant said something far more crude, and that diplomacy has won out over accuracy.
“Thank you, Ilana. We shall—”
“Ilyana.” The girl doesn’t seem to realise she’s correcting a queen, and Sandalia’s elevated eyebrow has no effect. After a moment she amends herself, mostly because there’s no sense in antagonizing the unpleasant young woman, and goes on: “Ilyana. We shall call on you again when we require your testimony, and in the interim you’ll be expected to remain within the walls of the cottage we have provided for you.”
Ilyana doesn’t understand enough to know she’s being placed under arrest. Her expression lights up as the translation is made, and she ducks a curtsey. T
he cottage is no doubt a far finer home than she’s ever known, and as a guest, involuntary or not, of a queen, she will be waited on as if she were the lady and not the servant. It will be a rude shock to her to return to the life she once had, if she’s lucky enough to be allowed to do so. She’s allowed to go to the door unescorted, and beyond it, two guards, one Khazarian and one Gallic, will bring her to Sandalia’s cottage. Only when the girl is gone does Sandalia turn to the translator, eyebrow lifted again in curiosity.
“Do you believe her, Lady Akilina?”
Akilina stands with animal grace, lithe even beneath the weight of petticoats. She wears a shade of coppery gold that should look terrible on her, but somehow enhances the angles of her beauty. “I believe she’s a nasty little girl who wanted Gregori’s bed for herself, but she’s as certain as my guardsman that Your Majesty’s Beatrice and their Rosa are one and the same. Viktor,” and the heaviness of a Khazarian accent weights the name, though her Gallic is usually exquisite, “tells me that Rosa wore a blade beneath her chemise, under her corsets. A small knife.” She holds up a hand, giving the knife its length in demonstration. “Your Majesty could ask Javier…”
“No.” Sandalia’s reply is slow, thoughtful. “Better to see where his heart lies in the heat of the moment, I think. We’ll discover the blade in another way. How,” she adds absently, “did you get that little wretch here so quickly? It’s a month’s journey to Khazan even in summer.”
“Viktor told me about her when he told me he was certain Beatrice and Rosa were the same woman. I sent a pigeon,” Akilina says carelessly, “and the journey is a month if you travel in comfort. It can be made more quickly if you truly desire it to be done.” She shrugs, coquettish thing, and throws a smile toward Sandalia. “And Ilyana’s comfort wasn’t my concern.” Her smile fades, leaving her features beautiful but sharp; this is a woman honed to a blade, Sandalia thinks. “Did anyone come to you asking for Gregori’s death?”
Sandalia finds caution stirring in her belly, cool and slow, at the question. She knows Akilina was Gregori’s lover—that much gossip has spread to Gallic ears, especially with Akilina leading this Khazarian envoy into Lutetia. “Did you believe his death to be unnatural?” she asks slowly, not avoiding the question, but feeling it relevant. Akilina shakes her head in the negative and Sandalia nods, unsurprised. “No one that I know of asked Gallin for a Khazarian count’s death. I’ll ask my men,” she says, meaning her spies and assassins, and Akilina nods her understanding as Sandalia finishes, “but I think I might have been told, if we were to play that particular sort of diplomacy. You knew him,” she says delicately, playing on a different kind of diplomacy. “Who might have wanted him dead?”
Akilina laughs, not the sound of genuine cheer Sandalia’s come to expect from her, but a bitter thing, edged. “Haven’t you heard the stories about Baba Yaga, Your Majesty? Almost anyone would point to me first. Akilina Pankejeff, the witch who eats lives. But Gregori’s death would only have served me if he’d married me first, and he was no more likely to do that than marry the imperatrix.”
She jerks her eyes to Sandalia’s as the words come down heavily between them, their portent unexpected and undeniable. Astonishment curls one corner of Sandalia’s mouth. “Irina?”
“Widowed this past decade,” Akilina gives back, thinking it out as she speaks. “Only a girl for an heir, but the child is strong and intelligent. Irina is as canny as Your Majesty or the Titian Bitch; she wouldn’t have a suitor murdered unless…”
“Unless he thought he could pressure her into taking his hand,” Sandalia murmurs. “Which he would only do…”
“If she had a secret.” Sandalia speaks the final words as certainty; as only a woman with secrets of her own could do. She is a queen, and to speak so is not indiscreet; all men, and all women, too, have secret things hidden in their hearts. Akilina’s gaze is forthright and almost sympathetic to that truth, and for a moment they are not queen and countess, but simply women standing against the tide of a world made by men, struggling with more difficulties because of their gender than even the men who try to tear them down could know. “Can you learn it?”
“Does it matter?” Akilina is aware, as Ilyana was not, when she takes a stance contrary to a regent’s, but she doesn’t back down from it. “Gregori’s dead and Irina’s secrets are a thousand miles away, but Beatrice Irvine’s are here, under ou—Your Majesty’s nose. Set me on her, your majesty, and we may find the answers to the Khazarian questions as well.”
The coachman remembers Rosa, certainly, all lust and long legs and an eye for when to leave a bad situation. He rode her all the way to Khazan, Khazar’s capital city, and he’d have done her longer if Gregori’s son hadn’t called him back to work. His eyes grow wary, though, and he lifts his hands in protest: if the whore’s had a child, there’ll be no pinning it on him; he was one of three he can guess in a matter of days.
An information-gatherer smiles and waves off the coachman’s concerns. Wonders, casually, if Rosa said where she’d be going next, and the coachman snorts. He wouldn’t know, but he pointed her toward a stagecoach business that a friend of his owns. That’s his goal, he confides, to go into business himself and see more of Khazar, maybe leave it entirely and have a look at Echon. His friend has been as far as Gallin, and works with men from far-off Essandia. He’s got more mundane routes, too, and where would somebody like Rosa go but back to her village? Ask his friend, maybe he’ll know.
His friend took her south, all the way to Reussland, and of course he’s sure it’s the same woman. He was sure before he saw a drawing, and he’s twice as sure now. What happened to her then, he’s got no idea, nor any care, but a bit more gold might help him to remember.
It doesn’t, which is a shame, and he’s left coughing on his own blood and staring at his tongue, already stiffening from cold as it lies bright and red against the snow.
A pigeon makes its way to Hammabarg faster than a man can, three of them sent against the risk of hawks and frozen nights. A fat man who knows the countess’s seal and trusts her for the money—he has ways of assuring that trust is met—begins to look for a woman who passed through half a year ago. He knows where she came from, what she looks like, and makes no suppositions about what direction she took. He knows she spreads her legs to pay for passage in preference to paying coin, but that she carried enough cash to travel from Khazan to Reussland when dour, now-tongueless Yuliy snorted at her sexual offerings.
It takes him seven days to find her. It should take fewer, but on the third day he finds a different woman, one no one is looking for, and takes his time with her, so that when he’s finished, there’s nothing left for anyone to find.
Three women meeting Rosa’s description left Hammabarg alone in the right time frame. Two went west, ultimately toward Gallin; the third went south, riding on the back of a stagecoach with her skirts showing her ankles. That, the fat man wagers, is the one Akilina wants, and she’s paying for his opinion as much as his tracking skills.
Akilina sets men on all three trails. The one who’s forced to go through Swiss mountains in the dead of winter, following a trail seven months old, is bitter indeed, and all the more so when a pretty girl he met on a summer journey through the pass greets him on a village edge with a round belly and a fist for his nose. He finds himself in a church exchanging vows before his horse has cooled from its ride, and finds the horse sold to build another room on his bride’s father’s home for the new family to live in before the sun breaks noon.
He finds himself on foot in a mountain passage in the midst of a winter storm before the night is over, and his wife finds herself a widow when the morning comes.
Akilina finds herself beginning again when the fat man proves right and the other women are unquestionably not Beatrice Irvine. She is patient, and wealthy, and neither Gallin nor Irvine are going anywhere. She hires a man reputed to have no earthly vices, which means only that his vices are too dark to be shared, to send through the
mountains this time, and he follows a trail now eight months old toward Parna.
He pauses conscientiously to report that the young widow gave birth to a girl, who has been christened in the church, thanks be to God that her parents were wed, and may God bless her father’s lost and frozen soul. Akilina stares at that missive for a long time, finally laughing, even if a pigeon was wasted to tell her the news.
Perhaps because he is without vice, but more likely because Akilina is paying him very well, this hired tracker does not stop at the border of his own country. He follows Rosa’s trail, travelling quickly and efficiently; Akilina’s treasury will feel the weight of his haste. He comes, in time, to Aria Magli, and there comes to the very doorstep from which Rosa alighted on her afternoon of freedom in the canal-ridden city.
The man without vices is a narrow blade of a man, his cheeks pocked with scars and his eyes deep-set and dark. The gondola boy who looks at him weighs his own small life, and the lives of his twelve, or eight, or fourteen brothers and sisters, and thinks of the pretty woman in blue who gave him coin for the day and a chicken to bring home to his family, and tells the man without vices the wrong bridge and the wrong time and nothing at all of the man who paid him to wait on Belinda Primrose outside her home.
It slows the tracker by a few hours, and when he realises the urchin lied to him, it brings a rare slash of a smile to his face. He returns to find the child, and because a gypsy man with a kind of calm readiness is watching, the boy’s father still has nine, or fifteen, or thirteen children to his name when the man is done. He has what he needs now: the description of a man, and that of an unusually striking courtesan. His name, the tracker does not learn, but hers he buys off another courtesan, a woman with large breasts and little of the brains her kind are supposedly vaunted for.