The Pretender_s Crown ic-2

by C. E. Murphy

  The Cordoglio has been painted white, the better to be seen by the ships she leads and the better to catch the colour of the rising sun. The better, too, to be seen by her enemy: the colour is a calling-out, a bold statement that the armada is not afraid of Aulun's aging navy, that Javier de Castille mocks the Aulunian ability to harm him or his cause.

  They left port before the tide turned, knowing Aulun would expect them to come with the tide, not ahead of it. The winds are high enough to make excellent time even against the tide; once it turns, the Cordoglio leaps forward with a speed that brings a jubilant yell from Javier's throat.

  His shout is picked up among the sailors, and from them rolls through the navy at his back, until it feels as though he rides on the strength of their cry. Full of exuberance, he releases witchlight, a silver spray that turns the red waters around them to brilliance, then tears ahead with a will of its own, searching out their enemy. For a moment temptation is there, the impulse to see if he might simply smash through the Aulunian ships with his magic, but as he reaches for them, he feels a weakening of his strength: the distance is as yet too great, and there's no point in exhausting himself now when he knows in closer quarters he can deal devastating damage.

  There's that, and there's another truth that has more to do with politics and morale: coming on the Aulunian navy already battered and broken, its ships nothing but empty hulls and weathered boards on the sea, will frighten his sailors, not encourage them. Javier may be Pappas-blessed, but his men expect a fight. A too-easy victory will leave them wary of what lies ahead; a navy of ghost ships will turn their bowels to liquid and sap their will. If they see Javier fight alongside them, see him call witchpower now and again, save their lives and take their enemies', they'll revere the gift, not fear it. No victory in the world is worth undermining his army's nerves.

  Even now they're seeing the witchlight that guides them, awe and uncertainty turning to broad grins as Javier calls, “God's light guides us, my brothers. We cannot fail!”

  It seems only moments later that they're on the Aulunian navy. It's not: battles at sea are not quick things, with tremendous time taken to close ships enough for combat, to turn and settle against the wind, to take the best advantage of weather and light. It is not fast, and yet it seems to Javier that one moment there is nothing but empty sea between himself and Aulun, and the next there is the uproar of battle, with cannon erupting from ship to ship; with terrible storm-born waves throwing them around when only seconds ago the water was their friend. But the sea is no one's friend, and the Aulunian navy, with everything to lose, is even less so.

  Javier is on the prow, hands clutching the rail, throat raw from screaming orders not even he can hear. They're not yet close enough to the Aulunians for man-to-man battle; all Javier is good for here is shouting and watching as cannon-fire digs holes in ships and the sea both. He is wet to the bone and freezing: the storm has come on them and rain falls in sheets that he should stagger under.

  Only with that realisation does the shield of power glimmering around him come into his notice, though from the way his crew have slowed in their madcap rush to battle, they have already noticed. A sense of foolishness descends on the Gallic king: he's good for more than standing and screaming after all, and indeed that was why he came into battle in the first place.

  He gathers witchlight, gathers strength, gathers his willpower, and turns toward the closest Aulunian ship, his hands a-glow with devastating magic. He practised this under Rodrigo's tutelage, destroyed forests and fields and beasts, and he can forgive himself for losing his head a few minutes, and forgetting what he has at his disposal. God's light was guiding them; remembering to turn it into a weapon takes some doing.

  Javier de Castille volleys witchpower toward the Aulunian ship with all his will behind it.

  And encounters, to his astonishment, resistance.

  MARIUS POULIN

  Marius Poulin is not a soldier.

  He is not a coward, either, which is why he is there, but he is not a soldier and has never wanted to be one. He has wanted to serve his king and brother, Javier de Castille, that is all.

  That is why he is now meeting blades with a wicked-looking, scarred Aulunian soldier whose confident swordwork says he's killed before and has no compunction against doing so again.

  The ship lurches, a trough found in the water, and Marius, almost by accident, gains the upper hand and shoves his sword into the Aulunian's chest. They're both astounded, but it's Marius's surprise that will last, because the Aulunian slides off the blade and into the ocean, never to rise again.

  If he had time, Marius would be sick. Every part of his body feels in rebellion, his steps clumsy and his bladework ponderous. Men come at him with blinding speed and a few fall to his sword, many others to the soldiers around him. He thinks he lost his bladder when the Aulunian ship slammed into his, but he is so wet it makes no difference, not even in his opinion of himself. A braver man-Sacha, perhaps-would have held his water, would have died rather than humiliate himself in fear.

  Sacha is a thought that helps keep Marius moving forward; Sacha and Eliza, and Javier. If he fights for them, he may do them proud, and that thought gives him some little heart. Not enough: he seems likely to die on this slippery ship deck, tripping over dead men and sliding in blood, and he would rather do them proud by living.

  What Marius Poulin cannot see is himself from the outside. He was taught swordwork by the king's own swordmaster, and from the outside he's a whirlwind, leaping bodies and skewering men, using a blood-and-water-slick deck to slip behind enemy guard and come up again a savage-eyed beast standing over the dead.

  He's flung to the side when something smashes into his ship. Through a daze of stars, he feels a wracking born from the bottom of the sea, and throws a panicked look around, afraid he'll see a kraken's tentacles capturing and crushing them.

  Instead he sees another Gallic vessel has broadsided his. Eliza swings from the other ship's crow's nest, a knife held in her teeth and the gondola boy held in her arm. She is, for an instant, a wild thing, as unearthly as the kraken. Her eyes are bright with glee, and the gondola boy is laughing madly.

  The mast comes crashing down behind them with a rip and shriek of wood, lying crosswise across Marius's deck. It barely misses their own mast, and for a moment everyone from both ships is arrested, staring, impressed, at the broad beam that has interrupted their fight.

  Then the gondola boy screams and jumps on an Aulunian sailor, his slight weight enough to bring the man down on the wet decks.

  Before the sailor can recover, before anyone else moves, the gondola boy slams two knives into the sailor's back: once, twice, thrice, before he leaps away, a demonic grin splashed over his young features.

  Battle comes again. Eliza has Marius's back, and for a moment they're children again, fighting under Javier's disgruntled sword-master's tutelage. He had been willing to teach Sacha, and reluctantly agreeable to teaching the merchant son Marius, but Eliza he had taught only under high-handed and arrogant orders from a nine-year-old prince.

  Eliza, of necessity, became the best of them.

  Not in strength, no, though her lighter sword and lither body gave her an advantage in speed. It was her ruthlessness that set her apart, and their swordmaster had grown ever more bitter and ever more drawn-in as the little girl learnt, extrapolated, and defeated her playmates.

  She stopped fighting when her family made her grow her hair again, and it became an encumbrance, long enough to grab. Marius has always supposed she gave up the blade for good at that time, an easy decade ago now.

  With her at his back, with the flash of her blades in the rain, with the blood that sprays as they fight, he knows she has never stopped practising, and that until death claims her, she never will.

  The gondola boy flings a dagger and it sticks in someone's eye. He shrieks delight and Eliza's approving shout echoes it.

  The Gallic ship from whence Eliza and the boy came takes anoth
er cannonball, its shudder knocking their ship askew, and then it slides into the boiling sea, leaving them with a double-contingent of crew all thirsty for blood. The Aulunians retreat, slicing their grappling ropes as they go, and Marius hears an order bellowed from belowdecks. The Aulunian ship is barely thirty feet off their starboard when cannons send it to join Eliza's ship in sinking. The crew rush to the rail, drawing wet pistols to shoot the survivors and scream victory.

  Marius, alone in blood and water, watches them, and knows he is not like these people.

  RODRIGO DE COSTA, PRINCE OF ESSANDIA

  Unlike his idiot nephew, Rodrigo doesn't find it necessary to be in the thick of battle. Perhaps because he's an old man and has seen his share of war; perhaps it's that a fight on land does not, at least, have the added danger of surviving a swordfight only to drown when the ship goes down.

  Perhaps it's that he lacks Javier's witchpower, and the sense of immortality such a gift must carry. Or perhaps he lacks the sense of duty it might also bear, though Rodrigo would cut down anyone who dared suggest he lacks a dutiful nature.

  “You can do nothing from here, Rodrigo. When the storm passes we'll learn what there is to know.”

  Rodrigo, who is standing over the maps and toy ships in the same way Javier did last night, allows himself a moment with his eyes closed, and a thought that he would never allow to pass his lips: perhaps he remains behind because the idea of leaving Essandia to his newly wedded wife is so appalling.

  Then he speaks in the language she used, Khazarian; she often speaks to him in her native tongue, and he hasn't asked if that's so she doesn't forget it, or because she imagines his spies might not number it among their languages. “I know, and yet can't stop myself from studying them and wondering.”

  “Yours is not the hand of God. You can't direct the ships as you see fit. At best you can move them as they ought to move, and worry yourself sick over whether they do as you wish.”

  “Javier is on one of those ships.” In the end, it's the only answer he has to give: Javier is his only living relative, and for all that the prince of Essandia can do nothing to protect him, nor can he sit and drink wine and eat sweetmeats waiting for an answer to come across storm-ridden waters. His nephew is an idiot, but he is something special as well, and Rodrigo wouldn't lose him for the world.

  For the church, perhaps, and the world after, but not for this one.

  Akilina sighs, nods, and comes forward to put a hand over Rodrigo's. It's a wifely gesture; it is, in his estimation, entirely calculated. Rodrigo almost enjoys that; it gives him a different game to think about, one he has a little more chance of controlling.

  “You will return to Isidro, will you not?” His voice is conciliatory, all due concern from a husband to his gravid wife: hope and worry, not orders. Akilina Pankejeff does not respond well to orders. “If the winter is temperate and this war drags out toward Christmas, you'll return to warmer and safer climes to bear the child.”

  “We've yet to see a full day of battle, and you would already have me packed off to Isidro.” Akilina is teasing, but her accusation is full of other emotions as well: exasperation, pleasure, anticipation. The pleasure is not for his concern, but for what she regards it as meaning: that he is weaker than she, and can be directed through his fear for her well-being and his need for an heir.

  If circumstances were utterly other than what they are, Rodrigo de Costa and Akilina Pankejeff might have made a devastating team.

  But they are not, so he gives her a rueful smile that will no doubt play into her idea of his weakness, and he shrugs. “I anticipate this battle,” and he gestures between himself and her, “to be a protracted one, my lady. I thought I had best get my first volley in now, the better to begin wearing you down.”

  Coquettish is not a look Akilina does well: there's too much challenge in her sharp features, but Rodrigo can see her appeal, when she gives a sly look through black lashes. It stirs amusement in him more than any baser emotion, but he can see how men might fall before it, and so when she says, “There might be better ways to wear me down, my lord,” he is obliged to take her hand and draw her toward a more private part of the tent.

  Obliged to murmur, “We must be quick, then, and quiet, for the men will think poorly of their prince rutting in the shadows while they prepare to fight for their lives.”

  “And if I wish to be loud?”

  Rodrigo releases her, and from the flash in her eyes that's not the answer she wanted to her challenge. “Then you'll get no wearing down until after our victory, my lady, when the men might forgive their prince his passion and dare to imagine themselves pulling those cries from their queen's lips.”

  Astonishment and perhaps offence parts those lips. “You would condone such crassness in them?”

  “It's a rare man who listens to a woman in the heat of passion and doesn't put himself in her lover's place,” Rodrigo says calmly. “Indulge in noisy desire in the heart of an army camp, and you'll become their fantasy. They'll undress you with their eyes where once they might have worshipped. Reverence is less dangerous than lust, lady. Choose your position wisely.”

  And she does, becoming a queen on her knees with her mouth hot on his cock, filling her throat and silencing any cries she might have made. It's a deliberate cruelty to leave her there when he's sated, but Rodrigo has a battle to worry over, and an interest in seeing to whom his lady goes if he leaves her with an itch unscratched.

  BELINDA PRIMROSE

  She doesn't have to be there to see the battle.

  The glee that rises in Belinda Primrose banishes every other moment of delight in her life as if they were the stuff of dreams, wispy and unobtainable. It is as though the storm itself carries the shapes of ships and soldiers to her: the storm, and Javier de Castille's witchpower, which she can feel on the water as though it's a living thing. Javier is aware of where his ship is-in the lead, a place of arrogance and power-and aware of where the other ships of the armada are in relation to him. Silver spiderwebs between them, catching water drops and shimmering with life; Belinda only needs to touch it and it vibrates. She can imagine a quiet gasp birthing from that touch, a sound any man might make in the midst of intimacy.

  Her own power searches out the other ships, the ones not latticed together by Javier's magic. Those ones are her own: they become golden with raindrops, not so much bound to each other as becoming bright spots in her mind, warm against the cold of the storm and against Javier's moonlight power. With these bits of magic, she draws an image in her mind.

  The picture is a dire one.

  The storm has driven the Aulunian navy back and the armada forward, and the armada's greater numbers are allowing them to close on the Aulunian ships like a crab's pincers. They are not quite surrounded on all sides: the cliffs at the Aulunians' back are dangerous, and while they still may be miles from shore, the Cordulan captains are being cautious. The pincers are still open at their tips, leaving a narrow gauntlet that the Aulunians could try to run. Assuming they survived that run, it would leave them racing for the Taymes with the entire armada on their tails. Tall protective cliffs and men ready to drop boulders onto enemy ships would only slow the Ecumenic army a little, should it come to that.

  Belinda, as though she reaches for a lover, opens one hand, then the other, and makes herself supplicant to the sky.

  For weeks she has practised with the quieter weather in Alunaer. Has brought rain, has pushed clouds around the sky and has blown skirts and hats awry with wind. Once, walking back from Dmitri's home, she brought a patch of sunlight with her, no larger than a half step in front of her or a half step behind her. She imagined the sisters would see it as walking in God's light, graced by His presence, and had been obliged to let her little square of warmth go before entering the convent, for fear fits of giggles would overcome her. She'd scolded herself once more that Beatrice Irvine had been bad for her, but in the obliging tag-along sunlight, she'd felt no real remorse.

  She has e
ntertained herself with rainstorms and downpours, and they have only hinted at preparation for opening herself to the raw, uncaring weather of the straits.

  There is no will behind the storm; that's her first thought. It truly is uncaring, a thing of neither malice nor goodwill; it simply is, just as the sun is, just as the ocean is. Nothing in it pushes back at her magic. Dmitri makes a warning in the back of her mind, things he's said in study: that a weather pattern changed here affects the weather there; that it is the sort of thing she must keep in mind.

  She has, it seems, dutifully kept it in mind. Now she discards it, because like the storm, Belinda has no care for what happens there, only here, and here, she demands that the winds bend under her will, and break themselves on the silver net of Javier's power.

  Astonishment lashes back at her.

  Of a sudden, there are two games at play: there is the wheedling of the storm, calling on it to pitch and roll and fling silver-bound ships toward the sea bottom. She knows it's her own eagerness that she assigns to the waves; they themselves have no care for the destruction they wreak. But there's more satisfaction in imagining she's unleashed a fury hungry for purpose, and that she's given it that purpose through benediction of heart.

  It needs to be kept tame, though, this storm, because without taming, its indifference to which ships it sends to the ocean floor counts in cost to the Aulunian navy. And there is the second game: Javier, in the midst of the straits, now tries to bend the storm to his own whim. He's in the heart of it, and she can feel his confidence, thrumming with the same power the bashing water holds. He has defeated her once, and now has rage to back his magic.

  For an instant, deep inside her, a knife cuts, and lets stillness out.