The Pretender_s Crown ic-2

by C. E. Murphy

  “Did the Son have a choice in the gardens the night of his betrayal?” Quiet confidence imbued Tomas's question, cadence of a lecture spoken from the heart, lowering Javier's eyelids as he rocked with the words, trying to embrace them. “Knowing that his friend went to betray him, might he not have walked away and lived? But he did not, and that was an act of free will, God's greatest gift to us, his weak mortal children. No matter how dark the path may look, no matter how easily it leads to Hell, we may step off it at any time, and find ourselves in God's grace and bosom. I believe you wish to reject this power you carry within yourself. God will welcome you when you do. God does welcome you, Javier. He forgives us all our sins. You've told me you've spent a lifetime struggling against this power. Perhaps God's grace has allowed you to succeed for so long.”

  “And now?” Javier's voice shot up with despair. “Now has He abandoned me?”

  “The world around you has grown harsh, my son. Your mother's death, the new crown you'll soon wear, your friends scattered and a lover, traitorous as she may have proven, lost. These are none of them easy things to face, and to confront so many so quickly… we all stumble, Javier. We stumble so we may rise again and trust God with each of our days.”

  Javier gave another laugh, as broken as the first. “I want to believe you. I want you to be right. Who made you so wise, priest? You're no older than I, but you speak my fears and offer answers with more clarity than I can imagine.”

  “You've been given a heavy burden, one that has perhaps clouded your sight. The weight I carry is lighter,” Tomas murmured. “Do not fault yourself, but rejoice that God has put us together so I might ease your way.”

  Javier blurted, “Will you come with me?” and cringed at the childish hope in the question. He was a king; he ought to command, not plead. He was a king, and that was something he shouldn't have to remind himself of with every breath.

  “Come with you,” Tomas echoed, clearly surprised. “To Lutetia?”

  “To Aria Magli, to seek a friend. To Cordula, to seek the Pappas's blessing. To Gallin, to seek an army, and finally to Aulun, to seek-” Audacity caught his breath, but he finished with all the confidence he could muster: “To seek a throne.”

  “You would return Aulun to the Ecumenic fold,” Tomas breathed.

  “I would.” Saying such things to Marius or Rodrigo carried less import than whispering them to a priest. Rodrigo had Aulunian plans of his own, and Marius would never betray him.

  Uncertainty sharpened that thought, making it stand out. The Marius he'd known would never betray him, but that man seemed gone now, reforged by bitterness. Javier shook away the idea, denying it. Marius would forgive him; Marius always did. He would find a way to make friends again. A few months of strain, a disagreement or two, did not undo a lifetime's brotherhood. Satisfied with his promise to himself, Javier tightened his hand on the window and waited on Tomas's answer.

  Only when the priest's silence lingered too long did Javier become aware of the sick fast beat of his own heart, of the way each breath was cold and heavy in his chest. His fingers, too, had chilled, and wanted to tremble, though they were denied that pleasure by his grip on the windowsill. Always pale, they were bloodless now, and a growing certainty rose in him. If Tomas demurred, he would have to make the beautiful young Cordulan see that Javier required his presence, and could not accept a refusal. He had only to meet Tomas's eyes and hold them long enough, and the priest would buckle under his desire.

  “Persuade your uncle to wed,” Tomas said abruptly. “Persuade him, and I will join you.”

  DMITRI LEONTYEV, THE KHAZARIAN AMBASSADOR

  22 February 1588 † Alunaer, the queen's court

  Dmitri Leontyev hasn't seen Lorraine of Aulun in nearly a quarter century. He's been in Aulun, even in Alunaer, many times in those intervening years, but he's never crossed paths with the Titian queen, and would not now do so except he's under orders from his imperatrix, Irina of Khazar.

  Twenty-five years ago, or near enough to count, Dmitri played the part of priest to more than one Echonian queen. Lorraine had a fortitude Sandalia did not, or perhaps she simply already had a lover; she'd certainly been sharing her bed with Robert Drake even then. That was as well with Dmitri; he'd preferred Sandalia's curves to Lorraine's narrower form, and had been in no hurry to hitch up his cassock and use the Aulunian queen.

  Still, she is a queen, and has reason to remember the events and people of twenty-five years past. Consequently, Dmitri has taken some trouble to disguise himself. His beard, the easiest way a man might change his appearance, has grown out, and it itches ferociously; he has never, and never will, become accustomed to that. But it's the least of his changes, and the rest are witchpower -born. He is thicker and shorter and altogether less elegant than his priestly shape; than the tall narrow form that's his more or less naturally. He moves differently, with less grace, and everything about him is a little coarser, for all that he's meant to be Irina's so-civilised ambassador. That's the price of being Khazarian, he thinks, though Khazarians are no more brutish or loutish than any other race of men on this planet. Still, their cold northern country and their tendency toward heavy beards and heavy bodies hidden under thick coats and enormous furry hats makes it easy to think of them as more animalistic.

  He has, at least, forgone the hat; Alunaer is warmer, and the black of his coat with its brightly-coloured epaulettes is enough to mark him as the ambassador. Lorraine's court is crowded, and the curious are giving Dmitri and his contingent enough berth that they've become an island of their own in the busy hall. No one wishes to be seen fraternising with them until Lorraine's actions make it clear how they're to be treated, and so instead they're made a spectacle of.

  That's all right; he'll do his duty here, and then return to his warm house and Belinda Primrose, who is far more interesting to him than the intrigues of Lorraine's court.

  Lorraine makes her entrance before he can pursue that happy consideration much further, and for a brief while the court is in chaos, everyone milling and moving to situate themselves as rank and need demand. It's not hard to move through them: they make way for fear that either taking offence or lingering will associate them with him, and no one wants to risk seeming either ally or enemy to the Khazarian ambassador. Within a few minutes, Dmitri is at the base of the throne dais, on one knee as he murmurs, “Dmitri Leontyev, majesty, ambassador from the imperatrix Irina-”

  “Yes.” Lorraine interrupts, looking him up and down. Dmitri, who cannot allow himself the luxury of a smile, finds one struggling to crack his beard. Irina is beautiful, but Lorraine has all the disdain in the world at her command, and with that single word, with the flat cutting glance that accompanies it, she tells her court precisely how Dmitri and the other Khazarians are to be treated. “Yes,” she says again, and it's as cold as a Khazarian night. “So we see. We are sure we shall have time to discuss your concerns in the near future, sir.” She looks away, and it's as if Dmitri and all the men with him have simply disappeared, not just from her interest, but the entire court's. He could command their attention with the witchpower, no doubt, but even the most ostentatious display might fail to garner a reaction from Lorraine: she is, he thinks, that good, and besides, if she did react it would be to have him burned.

  Still refusing himself a grin, Dmitri bows very low and backs out of the queen's presence before turning and leaving the court, all the better to pursue Belinda Primrose.

  BELINDA PRIMROSE

  22 February 1588 † Alunaer, capital of Aulun

  It was said change came slowly, but that, Belinda thought, was only at the highest levels of the world. Revolution came slowly; the killing of a queen came slowly. Those were vast changes, needing preparation and forethought, but in the moment, death was quick; in the moment, revolution became inevitable.

  All the changes in Belinda's life were changes of the moment. Robert's impetuous midnight arrival at his estates, setting her on the path to assassination; her world
had changed with the swing of a carriage lantern. Recognising Lorraine and her own status as the queen's bastard; du Roz's death; denying Javier's will and drawing his attention; the name Belinda Primrose being called in Sandalia's audience hall, where she should only have been known as Beatrice Irvine-all the work of a moment.

  Dmitri's presence, and what it awakened in her, what it made her feel, both in sensuality and power-those, too, were moments, and each of them sparked with change, taking her from what she had been and thrusting her toward what she might be.

  He had come for her five days out of seven, with only a single day's delay between their late-night assignation and his securing her exit from the convent during the day. They had gone not to public places, nor grand manors, but to a humble warm home an hour's walk from the abbey. An hour there, and an hour back again: in late February, that gave her eight hours of day-lit freedom in which to study.

  The first day had been full of questions: where is Robert Drake, how did you know to come for me, what am I, what is happening, and of those, Dmitri had ignored the last two and not known or cared the answer to the first. He will come, he'd said, he'll come when he's done with whatever task he's set himself.

  The second, though, the second he looked down at her, took her chin in his fingers in a touch too possessive for Belinda's liking-and that was a thought she'd have never afforded herself less than a year earlier-and said, “I knew. I've been waiting to come to you all of your life.”

  When he released her the memory of his touch lingered on her skin, soft and warm and laden with either threat or promise; even with her witchpower senses stretched to their fullest, Belinda couldn't decide which intent was the greater.

  He had not touched her again the first day, had only tested what skills she had and, if he mocked them, did so without words. Accustomed to reading men well, his internalised reactions unnerved Belinda until she recognised in them her own stillness. Then she drew her own centre of untouchability around her, and for the first time, Dmitri smiled.

  Robert had smiled in just such a way once, the Yuletide after she had begun her game of stillness, a few months before Dmitri's presence had awakened the witchpower enough to hide her in plain sight. There was approval in that expression, appraisal and perhaps surprise, but most of all approval. For her nine-year-old self, Robert's approval had meant the world; now, at nearly twenty-three, Dmitri's suggested that she could yet learn to hold her own amongst the strangely powered men around her.

  She returned to the convent that night flushed with excitement and nagging desire. Not uncontrolled: she had learned in Lutetia the extraordinary price of allowing her magic to rule her, and had not yet let it undo her again. Witchpower was hers to command, not the other way around. Anger could fuel it as well as passion, and that passion was so difficult to control angered her: the cycle worked for a few days, at least.

  The third night, a bold young sister came to her, drawn, her captured thoughts whispered, by what she saw as the light of faith burning in Belinda. Belinda, thinking of Nina, sent her away, but when she returned two nights later, had no will left to deny her. Witchpower blocked the door against the nosy abbess, and a hand over the young sister's mouth quieted her gasps. The girl gave back as good as she was given, and if Belinda whitewashed her thoughts so the night seemed nothing untoward, at least she had not terrorised her, nor taken the raw, ruthless advantage she had of Nina. Perhaps it was only a modicum of control, but it was control.

  The next morning Dmitri laughed at her. “You think sex is power,” he said while she gaped, caught between insult and astonishment. “I suppose for what you are, what's been made of you, and what this place expects, you're right. But it doesn't feed your witchpower, Belinda. It doesn't revitalise it.”

  “Don't,” she said, startling herself with the word. His eyebrows flashed up and she curled a lip, already cursing herself for giving something away. “No one calls me Belinda. Not since I was a child.”

  “You haven't been Belinda since you were a child,” he replied mildly. “You've been Robert's Primrose, his thorned and lovely assassin, and you've been every name she's taken to make herself a success. But there's a core of you that owns the name, and who are you if you don't claim it?”

  She had not slept at all, after that. Oh, Dmitri had worn her down, training her in the witchmagic in ways she'd never dreamt. She had taught herself not to flinch at pain: he taught her to draw heat away from a burn or blood from a cut, and how to make damaged flesh heal. Her power stuttered and stumbled, injuries filling with rough-seeming witchlight, as though it was nothing more than unpolished amber. It would do, Dmitri finally said in disgust, so long as she had only herself to treat.

  When he tired of her faltering ability to heal, he turned her toward the alteration of wind and clouds, and that came more easily: witchpower and wind alike billowed, pushing at the world, searching for places it had never been. Clouds only marked its passage, making the invisible possible to see. Dmitri made a sound of approval, but his acid comment from the morning lingered, following Belinda back to the convent and settling around her with a weight of its own. When the young sister came to her cell again, Belinda sent her away, too caught up in thought to indulge in base desires.

  She knew herself; she knew her place. Witchpower fought with that knowledge, pushed her beyond the space she had been carved for. That had been a discomfort, one she'd struggled against, citing loyalty and duty. Not just citing it, but feeling it so deeply that denying it was physically revolting, even when her heart might have guided her elsewhere.

  In the cold dark of her convent cell, she allowed herself one low laugh. Her heart had never been a guide; until Javier she wouldn't have imagined it could be.

  But with a few biting words Dmitri had thrown a lifetime's focus into question, far more sharply than Belinda would have ever permitted herself to do. It was almost intriguing when voiced by someone else, as though hearing her own uncertain thoughts spoken aloud by another gave them a legitimacy she wouldn't have dared assign them.

  The hawk-faced witchlord was right: Belinda Primrose was almost no more than a creation, an idea that barely existed, and yet it was all she had. Robert called her Primrose in honour of a memory that had never been: Rosemary his sister, Belinda's supposed mother. If she were to give herself a proper name, it might be Belinda Drake, or if she dared reach all the way, even Belinda Walter, for Lorraine held the higher rank in that assignation, and should it ever be legitimised, it would be Robert whose name would be subsumed.

  She had always known what she was. That who she was might not be the same question had never struck her. She rose after a sleepless night, offered devotions that meant nothing to her, and clad herself in modest clothing so that she might go, for the seventh morning in a row, into Alunaer with the man who played the part of her father.

  “How can who I am and what I am be different?” she asked when they reached his house. Other mornings they'd spoken quietly, but these were the only words she'd said beyond the show of pleasant greetings that they had, without discussion, settled on as the right show of emotion for the abbess.

  Curiosity lifted Dmitri's eyebrows and he took her wrappings like a gentleman's servant might, hanging them so the spread fabric might dry in the heat while they studied. Belinda nodded her thanks and took herself to a padded chair by the fire, sitting to frown into the flames. Frowning: she had, it seemed, given up on all pretence of stillness. Instead emotion rode her raw, after nearly fifteen years of bending to her exacting control. Perhaps that was how, who, and what she was could differ: they had once been flawlessly intertwined, but that bond was crumbling.

  She kept her gaze on the fire, finding it safer than Dmitri's slim body and hazel eyes. Aware that she broke a week's ritual in studies, but more interested in the discussion of who she might be than what she could do, she said, “Belinda Primrose is the only name that has ever belonged to me, and I don't care for you using it because it is mine. I have little that is
.”

  “Ah.” Dmitri came to crouch beside her chair, fire lighting his eyes and making craggy shadows of his face. “Shall I call you Primrose, then, or Rosa, or Beatrice, or any of the other masks you've worn?”

  “How can they be masks if they're all I've ever known? There's nothing below them, only duty, only loyalty.”

  “And the witchpower.” Dmitri rested his hand on her knee, then straightened again. “When I saw you in Khazar there were only the first two, but the third is born in you now, Belinda. Does it not change who you are? Does it not change what you desire, and what you find yourself willing to risk to have it?”

  “But I have no…” Words failed her, turning her hands to a strangling gesture. “I do not exist, Dmitri. I'm not my mother's child, my father's daughter. I'm not a prince's bride. Whether I have desires or not, there's no path upon which I can follow them. I'm a servant, and-”

  “You are a queen,” Dmitri interrupted, voice sonorous. “A queen in the making, even if you must do the making yourself.”

  Witchpower awakened in her, a warm wash of light that spilled through her mind, heightened her heartbeat, tingled her fingers. Gentle warmth, not the compulsive hunger that it so often manifested as, and that seduction was more erotic than the burn. It stung, but sweetly, an ache of promise in her breasts and between her thighs. She had never in her life stoked ambition. To hear it offered heated the centre of her, deepened her voice to throatiness that no man could mistake for anything other than an appetite for pleasure. “Dangerous words, dark prince.”

  Her hand crept toward his; touched it, then passed it to touch his hip as she turned her gaze up toward him. “Dangerous words,” she whispered again, and then let truth damn her, damn it all: “I would hear more.”