The Pretender_s Crown ic-2

by C. E. Murphy

  “It's just light,” Javier whispered. Didn't dare lift his voice louder, as though soft tones might keep her from bolting. “This part of it, it's just light. Perhaps a little warmth. Touch it, you'll see.”

  “Touch it?” Their eyes met, and a memory rose in Javier's mind, a day not very long after they'd met. His arm was still broken, and a toad of preposterous ugliness had made its way into the garden pond. He wanted it, and Eliza's hands were the only ones he could rely on to catch the monster. She had said the same thing then, in much the same tone, and after a few seconds of horrified staring at him, she broke into laughter.

  “Dammit, now I'm ten years old and you're a toad, Jav This will never do.” Cautiously-more cautiously than she'd approached the toad some fifteen years earlier-she leaned forward, watching the dancing witchpower warily. Javier reined in the impulse to let it wash over her, afraid he'd send her skittering again, and eventually she put a hand toward the light and it rose from the floor to greet her. Barely audible, she muttered, “How like a man,” then twisted her hand to see if she could swirl it, too.

  Light wrapped around her wrist; fathomless caress that brought unexpected heat to Javier's loins. Belinda had never stroked his power so, and he had no expectation of its response or how it brought sensation back to him. “It's warm,” Eliza murmured. “Alive.”

  “It is my will,” Javier said. “I have… done things with it that I'm not proud of, Liz. It's why the priest travels with us, to help guide me. But I need you even more. You are honest and blunt and beautiful, and you are the Gallic people. You've stood beside me all my life and I've never seen that. I can only hope I haven't come to it too late.”

  Eliza lifted her hands, wreathed in silver power. It trickled down her arms, shaping her sleeves beneath the weight of careful intent. There was no colour in her hair to bring out; silver simply reflected there, reflected in her eyes, and made her skin moon-pale. “You were too late years ago, Jav, when the fever took me. I've told you I can't bear children, and you can't have a barren queen. I would make a fine rich man's mistress,” she said for the second time that Javier knew of, but this time, curled in light, there was no bitterness or false levity in her voice. It was merely a fact, spoken as gently as she could.

  “These last few months I've learned that this power doesn't begin and end with the witchlight, Liz. I can shield. I can fight. I can bend men to my will, if I must, though I believe it's wrong and I am trying so hard not to fall on that path. Perhaps I can do more.” Tendrils crept up her arms to follow the exposed line of her throat, to push her shirt's collar open and trace her collarbones: the things he wished to do, made manifest with the witchlight.

  Eliza's eyes were smoky in the magical light, humour and desire and curiosity roughening her voice. “Are you bending my will now, my prince?”

  Javier whispered, “Never,” and she smiled, then tilted her head under the witchlight's caress. The laces were open at her collar, showing him a spill of breast; with witchpower alone he found a nipple and played it, moving closer himself as Eliza gasped and arched under the power's touch. Then she laughed, trembling sound, and breathed, “This is, yes, more, Javier.”

  “But not what I was thinking. If I can destroy with this gift, perhaps I can heal as well.” He was close enough to reach for the heavy belt that cinched her waist, to unfasten its buckles and let it fall away. Her breathing deepened, eyes unfocused as she put a hand out toward him, but he moved back, smiling, to loosen her boots and put them aside. She watched, amused, and pointed her toes daintily as he exposed her feet, then reached toward him again. Javier shook his head and stepped back again, as enamoured of exploration with his magic as he was of the woman reclining on the bed.

  Once it was loosened from the belt, it was easy to edge her shirt out of the way with power; easy to strip her trousers and discover she wore nothing under them. She became shy then, closing her thighs, twisting away from him and tossing a coquettish glance over her shoulder. Bathed in witchlight, glowing with it, even her short hair looked feminine, soft and touchable. Magic tousled it, then ran down her spine, sending her into another arch that exposed more of her body to him.

  He knew that she was beautifully formed, had always known it, but knowing and seeing, knowing and feeling, with the intimacy of his magic, were different things entirely. He clung to the bedpost, dizzy with his own want and delighted with Eliza's: witchpower teased her nipples and parted her lips like a lover's tongue might, spilled down her belly and nestled in the dark curls between her thighs, then secreted itself in hidden places closed too tightly for fingers to go. Witchpower gave him the shape of her, as clear to his mind as if he could see her, and guided by his own excitement and her growing need he stroked and circled increasingly desperate flesh until desire overcame shyness and her legs parted again, wanton and hungry.

  Javier's low rough laugh was for himself, was for the strength of will it took to keep from diving forward into offered sweetness. He ached, cock swollen as though he'd stroked and teased himself, not Eliza, but one thought clawed its way to coherency and remained with him: he could do damage so easily with his powers; to give pleasure with them, and them alone, surely made a weight against the horror of what he could too easily become.

  And if there was another gift to himself in giving Eliza all she could desire without ever touching her, it was in seeing her body so clearly as she gasped and shuddered under his magic's touch. Her knees were spread wide, hips rising to meet magic and falling again when he eased off, unwilling to bring her to a final climax so soon. Her stomach clenched and trembled with little deaths, and her hands fisted in the covers as she flung her head back, making her throat long and beautiful. Witchpower traced the delicate hollow there, plucked at her nipples and found the tender spots behind her ears. Kissed her thighs and licked her mound, and spread her with finger's-width touches, all at once. There was beauty in that, in the overwhelming sensation he could offer with the touch of his witchpower, and the high flushed colour in Eliza's cheeks, the unexpected whimpers and soft keens that she kept clenched behind her teeth, told him that there was wonder in being so inundated.

  When he finally took her it was with magic still, her body softening and accepting him as though he lay above her. Heat washed back to him, surrounded him as it rode the witchpower, and filled him with the same base pleasure that drew a groan from between Eliza's teeth. She drove herself toward the power he filled her with, and gave over to an incredulous cry as, heaving for concentration, he turned the magic to all the same sweet points of bliss he'd learned on her already.

  The wave that swept her took him along with her, no surprise but for his inability, in its wake, to retain any grip at all on the witchpower. Eliza let go a tiny sound of dismay while Javier fell at the bed's foot, silent laughter of chagrin shaking his body. “Forgive me, Liz,” he finally mumbled from his lowly place. “I had no idea it would all fall apart at the end.”

  She appeared above him, flushed and bright-eyed, and put out a hand to him for the third time. Finally, he accepted it, and let her draw him into the bed, the better to explore possibility and passion as one.

  ROBERT, LORD DRAKE

  2 April 1588 † Aria Magli

  Power has burned through Aria Magli since the afternoon, so strong, so flavoured, that Robert Drake could follow it to its source with his eyes closed. He has chosen not to, for two reasons. One, he has tasted this particular talent before, and knows, even if rumour were not aswirl in the island-built city, that it belongs to Javier de Castille, young king of Gallin and unexpected heir to a skill not of this world.

  Two, to follow it would be to show himself, and there are better things to do than give his hand away. Javier plays his own hand loudly, all unknowing: if he can pour magic into the air the way he has done today, then he is fully grown in confidence, and there is only one end to be expected now.

  Aria Magli is rarely a silent city, with traffic on its canals at all hours, voices lifted in song and
praise and anger echoing off the water and the homes that line it. Rather than hunt down Javier de Castille, Robert has sought and paid for a room with no windows overlooking the canals, paid a dear price, for tonight he has need of what quietude he can get.

  There are so many things that can be done with what Belinda calls the witchpower. It's as good a name as any; his people would call it no more than language or physicality its presence so integral a part of them that words failed it. But here, bound by humanity, it's an unnatural thing, separate and apart from what ordinary people might do. So it is the witchpower, and there are so many things that can be done with it that he almost no longer remembers them all. It has been a mortal lifetime and more since he's given up the boundless power and ease of use that came with his other form. Then, he might have reached halfway around a world with no more effort than the thought; might have touched his queen's mind and sought her direction. But that was long ago, and the body into which he has been born anew is so much weaker in its capabilities. To do what once would have been of no import he now needs silence and hours of preparation.

  The room is warm, a fire built higher than most people would find comfortable. That, too, is expensive in this city: there is little enough to burn here, and what there is must be brought in from Parna's mainland. But heat helps to remind him of what he was, and to loosen his muscles, loosen his mind, so that he can gather his focus over the long hours.

  He imagines it as a stream of sunlight punching through the clouds, one brilliant streak of gold against grey and black and white. The clouds are the distance of minds on this blue planet, murky and thick and roiling with solitude even as each one brushes up against another in physical form; sunlight is the power that can separate them and illuminate the relevant, if only briefly. It's a pretty picture in his mind, and he wonders if once upon a time he would have been so poetic, or if that's the human nature that's become so fundamental to him.

  In time, that thought, like all others, drifts away. Robert Drake is not like the daughter he fathered: calling witchlight is not especially natural to him, or indeed of any importance at all, but in the silence he's created in this room, in his mind, the sunlight he imagines manifests in his hands, a warm glow that steadily builds in strength. His eyes are closed and he does not see it, and fortunately for him, very few people are awake at this hour to study the brightness that leaks from beneath his door, or to note how its brilliance becomes too much to look upon.

  To Robert, it is a weight in his mind, gathering the critical mass to slam through clouds. It's closer to dawn than he might like when it has finally grown strong enough, and to his way of thinking it becomes an arrow, shooting across a continent in search of the rare mind capable of receiving it.

  To the handful who are awake in Aria Magli, it is a falling star that flies in reverse, one brilliant streak that races away to the west and fades so quickly it might never have been there at all. They will speak of it, and wonder at it, but as for Robert Drake, weary from his efforts and unaware of the spectacle he has created, he will sleep where he sits, in front of a fire finally ebbing with the dawn.

  BELINDA PRIMROSE

  2 April 1588 † Alunaer

  Her father's voice awakened her, so loud and unexpectedly clear that she jolted to her elbows, staring around her cell in heart-racing anticipation.

  It was empty, as it had to be, nothing more than herself and a sliver of moonlight to occupy it. But Robert's voice lingered, reverberating from the walls. She could smell chypre, the cologne he always wore, and slowly she realised that the scent lit flares of witchpower in her mind. Chypre had haunted her when Javier had helped to waken her witchpower, too, its familiar scent part of the barrier that had been erected to keep her magic caged.

  She whispered “Robert,” but by then she knew he wasn't there, and that his voice had only spoken within her mind.

  Prepare, the echoes said again. Prepare, my Primrose. Prepare for war.

  C.E. Murphy

  The Pretender's Crown

  It wasn't done for a bastard daughter to demand to see her mother. The audacity would have driven Belinda from comfortable thoughts, had her thoughts not already been so badly disrupted by Robert's missive. She had left the convent with Dmitri, meek and pious as always, and between a corner and a straight place had called the stillness to her, wrapping herself in it more swiftly than she'd ever done before. Shadows had flooded from sunlit places, drawn to her, and though Dmitri, attuned to her use of power, had whirled, it had been too late.

  She had run full speed through Alunaer, had stolen quill and paper from a scribe within the palace, and, too frantic to waste time trying to explain to Cortes how she'd come by her information, had left an imperious note on his desk: there was word from dearest Jayne, and it must be imparted to the queen at once. Her majesty would know the meeting place.

  And now she waited, heartbeat high but chin held higher yet, for Lorraine's arrival in the secret chamber. Illogical certainties surged through Belinda's mind, upsetting the calm she could normally call at a whim. Lorraine would know what to do in the face of war; Lorraine had to know, for she was the queen. She must be warned, as early as possible, and then she would take Belinda from her hours of study and give her a task of toothy import. Belinda longed for that, longed for the action she had been raised to. Weeks of studying had broadened and deepened her skills, yes, but weeks of Dmitri's guidance had taught her little more of his plans. Like Robert, he wanted a pawn most of all, intending to play her and sacrifice her when need be. But Belinda was the daughter of a queen, and if she played the pawn, it was now only a part, a learning place until she was ready to remake the board.

  With war on the horizon, that time might well be soon.

  The silent door opened, bringing the same warmth it had last time. Belinda whirled on her mother, ignoring all protocol to blurt, “There will be war.”

  Lorraine lifted a finely painted eyebrow and said, drily, “We are unobserved, yes, and we are honoured by your obsequience.”

  Teeth grinding, Belinda sank into a curtsey that scratched plain grey wool over her skin, and remained there until Lorraine said, “You are meant to be in a convent, girl, not running about Alunaer wearing garb that places you as missing from one.”

  Belinda muttered, “No one saw me, your majesty.”

  Lorraine sniffed. “Not even Cortes, who claims a note appeared on his desk from nowhere, though he was looking at it at the time. We are curious as to how you arranged that.”

  “A lady never tells, majesty.” The ground-out words brought her back to Aria Magli, where Robert had teased her with that very phrase; to her surprise, Lorraine echoed it now.

  “A lady never does, girl. A gentleman never tells.”

  Edgy to the point of daring, Belinda lifted her eyes to meet Lorraine's. “As a lady who's never done, loved by a gentleman who never tells, will you tell me, majesty, if it is never done nor told, what matters how it might be done?”

  Astonishment too fresh to be offence flooded Lorraine's face. For the briefest of moments Belinda allowed herself a feeling of solidarity with the queen: perhaps it was only with each other they might both strip away certain masks and allow true emotion to come through, for she doubted Lorraine would have permitted herself such an expression in a courtroom.

  Then again, rare indeed was the courtier who would dare the rudeness Belinda had just put to a reigning queen. She set those thoughts aside, making her words into knives. “There is war coming. I have it from Robert's voice. Aulun must prepare.”

  She knew as soon as she spoke that she had chosen her words poorly, and yet she'd picked them with as much deliberation as she could. Still, anticipation lit Lorraine's aging features. “Robert has returned?”

  “No, majesty. It was-” Belinda clenched her hand in the shapeless convent robe. “His voice came to me as if in a dream, majesty, but I was awake. It sounds a fool's lark, and I know it, but this is not a thing to make light of.”

 
“We will decide what is and what is not to be made light of.” Lorraine's voice was ice, pure and hard. “What else did he say?”

  “Only to prepare. Majesty, I know I am rude and uncouth and young and not supposed to be here-”

  Lorraine humphed, but Belinda bowled on, as much determined as she was any of the other things she named herself. “-but I am also your majesty's-”

  There was no break in Belinda's speech, no silence she could hear, and yet words unspoken fell after that phrase, words so clearly unspoken that Lorraine stiffened even as Belinda continued what she had never broken in saying: “-loyal servant, and have been all my life. You do not know me well, but you know Robert. He would not have sent me here with things to say to you if I were flighty or unreliable, and he would not have given me this warning, no matter how esoteric the manner, if it was not something that Aulun should act on.”

  “And if we do,” Lorraine said, still wonderfully cool, “what will your role be, girl?”

  Startled out of her passion, Belinda opened one hand. “As it has always been, majesty. Whatever you command it to be.”

  “Remember that,” Lorraine said. “Remember that, in the days to come.” She turned and stalked from the round chamber, leaving Belinda bent in a curtsey and bewildered to her core.

  She stole a pastie from a street merchant on her way back to Dmitri's home, savouring the hot gravy that dripped over her fingers and the fatty, tough meat that required long and careful chewing. The convent's food was plainer, and Dmitri's much finer; this simple fare harkened to the innumerable roles she'd played as a servant girl, and gave her comfort. Grease ran to her elbows and stained her clothes, and she cared not at all, licking her fingers clean as she pushed Dmitri's front door open and, content, breathed in warm scented air.

  Blinding pain shattered across her face, white at first and then fading to throbbing red. She staggered, catching herself on the wall, and lifted a tear-blurred gaze to see Dmitri's hand coming down toward her again. Choler flowered in him, spilling over without words; always without words, from the dark witchlord, but vivid and clear none the less: she had given herself to him as a student, a vassal, and to break away as she had done, to call her power and hide from him so she might pursue an errand of her own, was a slight that must be answered.