by C. E. Murphy
“Drake has confirmed this?” Javier scraped the words out, earning Akilina’s laugh.
“Not yet, my lord prince, but he will. Or perhaps Belinda could spare him the pain, and tell us all the truth.”
“My name is Beatrice Irvine!” Belinda cried her reply with all the passion she could muster, frustration bringing tears to her eyes. Emotion leapt in Robert, sharp spike of pride that all but undid her, making tears more real than they had reason to be. “I do not know this man or this woman! They mean nothing to me, and I have no way to prove myself to you!”
“You do,” Akilina said, full of liquid delight. Beatrice turned to her, hands spread beseechingly, and Akilina offered a razor smile. “Perhaps his highness would lend you an already-bloodied sword, and you might end Robert Drake’s life to show your loyalty to your affianced and his kingdom.”
Honest astonishment dropped Belinda’s jaw, though it was Beatrice’s horror that whispered, “You want me to…kill a man?”
“You’re eager to bring down the Red Bitch’s throne, aren’t you?” Akilina asked gleefully. “Kill her favourite, prove your loyalty to Javier, and force Lorraine to overextend herself into an attack on Gallin in one smooth blow.”
Sandalia stepped forward, exchanging a brief glance with Javier as Belinda turned to them, heartbeat high in her throat. “My lord, my lady, I…I can’t—”
“It’s a dangerous game you play, Akilina.” Sandalia spoke thoughtfully, watching Drake and the Khazarian woman in equal parts. “You stand in our court and suggest a ploy that would have our country invaded by another. You must be very confident indeed of your resources.”
Akilina, with wonderful precision, said, “As confident of the breath I draw, Your Majesty. There is no need to fear it will not come.”
Sandalia turned her head, minute movement, to examine the raven-haired countess. “We are pleased to hear your sureness. We extend to you an invitation to remain safely within these walls until your confidence is borne out.”
Muscle tightened in Akilina’s jaw, the tension vanishing into a smile an instant later. “I’m honoured by your concern for my safety, Your Majesty, and delighted to accept.”
“Very well.” Sandalia turned her attention to Belinda with a familiar flickering of her fingers. “Proceed.”
Thickness seized Belinda’s throat, making her suddenly, itchingly aware of the gold-threaded lace scratching against the silk wrap. “What?” Her bluntness had charmed the queen in the past, but it was simple disbelief, not artifice, that forced the question.
“Marius’s sword will serve,” Sandalia said. “We do not care for the idea of Drake’s blood staining our son’s weapon.”
“Your…Majesty…cannot expect me to…” Beatrice’s faintness was Belinda’s own, though the reasons were different. Sandalia arched an eyebrow sharply.
“Our Majesty can and does. Prove yourself, Irvine, or we will have you stripped and searched as threatened. Are you ours, or are you his?”
“Your Majesty, I cannot…I cannot…kill a man—”
“Do it!” Sandalia’s command lashed out with a strength bordering on the witchpower’s.
Golden rage swept Belinda’s vision and she lurched forward a step, the “No!” that tore from her throat a memory before she heard herself speak it. Sandalia, only inches away, drew herself taut with fury—better fury than fear; so much as that, Belinda could still sense even in the midst of pounding, hungry power growing in her—and lifted a hand.
Belinda screamed, aborted sound of terror as guards closed around her, reaching for the torn places on her dress and shredding the fabric from her body even as she writhed and fought against them. A roaring cheer filled her ears, ugly thrills and delight from the courtiers, and she felt a dagger split the laces of her corset, bindings springing wide.
She caught it as it fell forward, clutching it to her chest and gasping for air, half astounded at the ease of breathing. Another pair of hands caught her underskirt, tearing its seam, and it fell away to expose her backside. A gasp of disappointment ran through those closest to her as it became clear no betraying knife pressed against her skin. She lifted her eyes as the guards parted, searching for Javier and trusting her fear and pathos to soften his heart.
There was kindness in his eyes. “You ought to have acted, Beatrice, but perhaps a woman’s weakness is too much to overcome. Let me do it for you. You will respond, sir,” Javier said with simple arrogance. “Confirm the duchess’s accusations or refute them, but you will share with us your answers.” He extended a hand, princely gesture, and with it Belinda felt inexorable willpower come forth from him.
She lifted her head, turning it toward Robert: a mistake, for it warned those eyes that knew to look that she had an expectation of what would happen. Only Javier himself might have those eyes, but of everyone in the courtroom, his were the ones she could least afford to betray herself to.
And his power bludgeoned into Robert’s like a toy knight playing at siege against Lutetia’s great walls. The scent of chypre filled Belinda’s nose again, stinging her eyes to unplanned tears. Javier made no audible sound, but surprise lanced through him like a weapon itself, and he redoubled the effort, pouring a lifetime of easy command into the expectation that Robert would fold beneath his will.
Drake chuckled beneath his breath, the softest surprise in the sound, so muted that only one who knew him might recognize it. Agony lanced Belinda’s heart, tearing her breath away as she saw, too clearly, the houses that would fall with her father’s response. Deception upon deception, so tangled and twisted together she could no longer determine where to begin or end. Who, who, who was the Gallic prince’s father, if not Dmitri, whose look was not at all stamped on him; if not Robert, whose surprise answered any doubt that might have lingered within Belinda. There had been secrets hidden in Javier’s parentage, secrets revealed by his use of power; and now, unstoppable, came the last act of treachery that would undo her in his eyes forever.
Because her father had put a binding on her mind, and whispered it is too soon, it cannot be found out, and today, here, in this place, he had no idea that his daughter had come into her power, and that Javier de Castille had trained her in it, and that to fight the prince in the battleground of the mind was to condemn Belinda to death.
Knowing none of this, Robert lifted his gaze to Javier’s, thin bloody smile cracking a mustache and beard that had grown too long under Akilina’s tender care. He shook his head, clucked his tongue in disapproval, and pushed back, such a flexing of strength that it seemed the whole room moved beneath it. Javier staggered, his hand dropping, and then rage came into his face as he turned toward Belinda. Every aspect of his emotions were threaded with betrayal, truth brought to light by Robert’s easy hand with the witchpower. Belinda knotted her hands in her corset, holding it against herself as if it made a shield, and wrapped stillness hard as iron around herself.
Javier’s anger came down on her with the weight of anvils, fury lending its silver sheen more power than she’d ever felt in him before. It wasn’t the playful jousts with witchlight; there was nothing visible in this attack, only wordless, silent will bearing down against Belinda’s shields. Javier searched for weaknesses, believing her, as a woman, to inevitably have them. To her pride, he found none, his power rebuffed.
Pride lasted barely an instant. She might be his equal in raw strength, but the Gallic prince had a decade of training with his gifts that she did not share. A fresh onslaught rushed her, no longer searching for weakness, but simply crushing: that Belinda’s power had been locked behind a wall in her mind was something not only she remembered, and with inexorable force, he squashed and contained that power again, pushing it back to where it had once been.
Belinda held a pinprick of light against him, struggling to keep it alive within her mind. They had practised shields and throwing blasts of power, but her gift was an internal one, safety from the outside world making an impenetrable cloak around her. It was not mad
e to defend against a comer that pressed against it relentlessly from all sides; its instinct was to make itself smaller, hide in the shadows, go unseen.
Silence came, and the light winked into blackness.
Peculiarly, it was the gown’s destruction that stung her first upon awakening.
A chill had already set in, making her aware of her bones in a distant, aching way long before consciousness was reached. It was dull discomfort, the sort of thing she had so long held herself against that it barely seemed worth considering; certainly it was unworthy of disturbing her rest. Later, when some of the blackness had retreated, she became equally aware of the temperature of her flesh: not so cold as to freeze, but far below what it should normally be, as though she’d kicked off covers as she slept and left a shoulder bared to the night air. She reached for the duvet and found nothing, its lack too removed to be meaningful to her. She drew in on herself, making herself a small curled thing against her hard bed without reaching awareness.
In time, sensibility began to creep back into her: the vague realization that her bed was made of stone; nothing else was so hard, nor pulled the heat from her body even when it felt warmer than the floor around her. Neither words nor clear thought conveyed that to her, merely a recognition of fact as deep as the cold in her bones. Sound encroached even more slowly: the drip of water broken by an occasional spill of the same, splashing against rock. Droplets spattered her body when that happened, bringing a shiver that she felt in her jaw and stomach but not on her skin’s surface. A dank scent came with the water, too-old straw grown soft with mold, and the stench of human offal gone uncleaned.
She knew where she was before consciousness came, and when she opened her eyes to darkness, all that was visible was a remembrance of Pierre’s exquisite creation, shredded and torn and trampled beneath guards’ feet. Courtiers would have surged forward to snatch up scraps, using a shimmer of gold or green to prove that they had been there the day Beatrice Irvine fell beneath the look of angry betrayal in Prince Javier’s eyes.
Belinda sat up slowly, stiffness in every joint. Her hair fell around her shoulders, shockingly warm against the coldness of her skin, and brought a rash of gooseflesh to her. The dichotomy in temperature made her nipples tighten, absurd erotic thrill that activated genuine desire. She closed her eyes against the darkness, wet her lips, and whispered, “Javier,” on that wash of longing, then folded her arms over her breasts, clutching her shoulders to contain what little heat her body had left.
She had not been left so much as her petticoats, all those things ripped away from her on the courtroom floor and left there when they took her away. That she had been given nothing at all to cover herself with suggested the remainder of her life could be counted in hours, not days: no queen would be fool enough to allow such a prize as Belinda was to die of exposure before she could be hanged in a public square, and the oubliette would ensure her death by cold within a few days.
Belinda found she was not at all afraid to die, and wondered if that was fatalistic acceptance or blind denial.
She got up because it was better to move than sit and wait for her fate to come. Better to force blood to flow through her body in hopes that doing so might warm her than to remain seated against the cold and feel life drain out of her one slow minute at a time. She found the walls of her prison: there was enough room, just, to open her arms and turn in a circle; stone brushed her fingertips when she did so. A few pieces of straw had enough strength to prickle her soles, barely felt through numbness, and the faintest crack of light came down from above. She stretched her arms up, searching for a ceiling, and found nothing. For an instant the darkness pressed on her, weighty, before she let go a raw laugh and cupped her hands together, calling witchlight.
A soft glow lit her palms and the confines of her prison. Above her, out of reach for even a tall man, a square of stone made most of the dungeon’s ceiling. An oubliette, yes: simply a roofed pit to be dropped in and forgotten about, too wide to somehow scramble up its sides, too deep to reach its lip even if it were not closed up. There would be other cells elsewhere, but she—and Robert, she warranted—had earned special attention, a private dungeon such as this to prevent any other prisoners from falling on them and risking Sandalia’s sport.
Her fingertips seemed warmer, the witchlight bathing them. Belinda spun it out, expanding the golden ball and stretching it until she literally wrapped herself in it as she so often imagined herself wrapped in stillness. Some of the ache faded from her bones, whether from actual warmth or an illusion of it she neither knew nor cared. It was a way to pass the time, building gowns of light from her power. When the warmth that spread over her body came from a different source, urging an exploration of her sex with her fingers, laughter broke through, unexpected in the cold stone prison. She’d learned to ward herself to some degree against the raging passion that built when she extended power to influence others; to find it equally demanding when she turned her magic on herself was disproportionately amusing. For a time she hoped with active enthusiasm that a guard might be sent to check on her; the prospect of being discovered locked in a black hole in the ground, writhing with passion, struck her as tremendously funny, an emotion Belinda was completely unaccustomed to experiencing or giving in to.
When stone finally scraped against stone and external light flooded her little prison, though, she had long since left witchpower desire behind, and instead lay shivering against the cold stone floor in darkness. Less stagnant air flooded her cell, bringing new chill with it, and she squinted toward the light.
Javier crouched above her prison at its lip, torchlight behind him to hide his face in shadow, though shadow did nothing to disguise the cold anger that rolled off him. He stretched out a hand, opening it; a dagger, no more than palm-length, fell to Belinda’s floor with a clatter. “This was found in your bedclothes.”
Belinda uncurled herself and reached for the blade, tucking it against her chest. She could thwart Sandalia’s execution with that small knife, testing its sharpness in her own heart rather than Sacha Asselin’s, as she’d once dreamed. “Perhaps the countess hid it there,” she whispered. “Javier, I am so cold.” She risked, as she had never risked before, a thread of power stretching toward the prince, seeking any hint of sympathy he might have for her.
“Not for long,” he said implacably. “You die at dawn tomorrow. You and Robert Drake, for intent to kill a queen. Lorraine will have to deny you both to keep her throne, but it should go a long way toward destabilizing Aulun.”
Fear, it seemed, had a place in her after all. Belinda’s muscles contracted all over, urging a soft squeak of terror from her throat. “How can you believe the Khazarians over me?” The tremble in her voice was real, Belinda no longer able to tell her own emotions from Beatrice’s. “I’m like you, Javier. Witchbreed,” she breathed.
The slightest sense of hesitation broke Javier’s surety. Belinda, waiting for the chance, whispered encouragement to that hesitation, sitting up on the dirty stone floor to lift her gaze toward the prince’s. She made a pretty and pathetic picture, she knew, all wide eyes and tangled hair, dirt smeared across her naked body from lying on the ground. She kept her arms folded over her chest, a woman’s frail modesty, and sent her own concept of her helplessness toward the man crouched above.
“Witchbreed like Robert Drake. Your father.” Javier’s words were relentlessly certain, but doubt fogged his emotions, hope sparking through in pulses he tried to quash. “I felt the power in him.”
Belinda shook her head, sending curls over her shoulders. “If it’s there, perhaps that explains how the Red Bitch has kept her throne so long. I don’t doubt you, my lord.” She shivered, half artifice and half genuine. “I don’t doubt that he has the power, but your mother doesn’t. Did your father? My mother died when I was born, and my father herded cattle. The power we share belongs to us alone, not our parents, Javier.” The wish to be free of the oubliette was beginning to pound heavily in her veins, witc
hpower content to ride quietly until the possibility of escape was at hand. Now, with the stone ceiling removed, the urge to blast through delicacy and demand Javier bend to her will grew harder to fight, for all that Belinda knew it would be folly. She lacked the strength to stand against him with brute force; that had already been proven. She must be subtle, convince him from within of her innocence and of the rightness of her freedom. “I do not know him, Javier.”
He made a fist of his right hand. “Then why did you spare his life?”
Incredulous, frightened laughter broke free. “My lord? Kill a man? Me? Perhaps it’s easier for a man.” Belinda’s voice shivered with respect and not a little fear. “I am only a woman. I have no stomach for such things. That…that girl, the Khazarian girl…I had never seen a violent death so closely, my lord.” She shuddered again, casting her eyes down as much to hide truth as to play at horror and a woman’s gentleness. “I couldn’t do that to any man. Forgive me for my weakness, please, my lord. I did not mean to betray you with it.” She tightened her fingers around her dagger, against her chest, letting the action look like another shiver as she willed her captor to believe her. It was a reasonable argument, she whispered into the witchpower. A woman’s flaw; Javier knew well she was a flawed creature, but she could never be the two-faced creature Akilina had made her out to be.
“Even if I believed you,” Javier said slowly, “my mother never will. Robert Drake is a prize beyond imagining, and to take him from Lorraine far too great an opportunity to pass up. Innocent or not, your death is as much part of the pageantry as his will be.”
“But he is the prize,” Belinda echoed. “I might—” She caught her breath and cut the words away, letting Javier’s hope and curiosity spike again. Making him ask, rather than putting the words into place for him.
“You might what, Beatrice?” He kept his voice low, as if someone might be close enough to overhear. Belinda shook her head, trembling.