The Pretender_s Crown ic-2

by C. E. Murphy

  The queen fell silent, turning a gentle gaze to, it seemed, each and every face in her audience. Even Belinda waited nervously on the story's end, no less taken by it than were the courtiers. “She lay insensible for two days,” Lorraine finally breathed, “and when she wakened, it was with confusion in her eyes. ‘Mother,’ she said. ‘How came I here? I am certain I stood on the cliffs, with God guiding me to protect our fleet.’

  “ ‘Our fleet,’ I said back to her, and said it with humour. ‘Your fleet, child, for with His guidance you have brought them safely home, and devastated the armada Cordula brought against us. They are yours, and you are their banner of hope, of light, of life, my child. I am only a vessel made to bring you into this world, so in the hour of our greatest need you might stand atop those cliffs and save us all.’”

  It was as well a roar came up from the courtiers, hailing Belinda, hailing Lorraine, hailing God, for without it Belinda thought she might have lost all sense and laughed aloud at Lorraine's maternal modesty. Witchpower told her what the shouts and cheers would have anyway: the people believed. They'd heard stories of the Madonna on the cliff-tops, how she had appeared and disappeared; they'd embraced her as their saviour, and now were willing to embrace Belinda, raised as godly as a woman could be, as the embodiment of that saviour. It didn't matter whether it was true, not even to the cynical: it was wondrous, and that was better than truth.

  Smug satisfaction bubbled beneath Lorraine's white-painted facade. She turned to Belinda and offered an embrace, shocking in its warmth. Twice, Belinda thought: twice before her royal mother had touched her, and now they held each other in a mockery of family compassion. It was not where she had ever imagined her road would end, the day she'd looked on Lorraine Walter and known herself for the queen's bastard.

  “Where is the priest?” Branson's voice grated through the cheering, asking a question that should have been expected. Witchpower warned Belinda of Lorraine's alarm, though none of it showed on her mother's face as she looked at the earl. Looked down at him, perhaps with a hint of impatience, as though he were a bit of unpleasantness likely to stain her dress.

  “Are you in need of one, Lord Branson? Have you sins to repent? A sin of greed, perhaps? A sin of pride?”

  Mockery failed her: Branson's face twisted, but he refused to let it alone. “The same name witnessed wedding and birth. I think it not outside the realm of reason to ask that he come forward so we might hear these pages confirmed by the man who wrote them. Or is he conveniently dead, majesty? Dead, like your pretender daughter, so usefully murdered by a rival queen.”

  Before Lorraine could speak again, before she might give in to the anger and alarm Belinda felt boiling in her, another voice interrupted, soft and sorrowful: “He is dead, my lord. He died when I was seventeen.”

  Long moments passed before she realised, with surprise, that the voice was her own.

  She extended the witchpower, unfurling it toward Branson with all the gentleness of a lover's touch. Doing so heightened her awareness of the rest of the court's high-running emotion, of their breath-holding anticipation that there would be war made here today, the Aulunian palace a new sort of battleground. What Belinda and Lorraine faced now would only be the first skirmish of many. The people and the army of Aulun would love the mythic story Lorraine had concocted out of half-truths, but there would always be men like Branson, hungry for a crown and unwilling to believe the word of a queen.

  Defiance flowed from the man, prickly and determined. Robert remained a rock, steady and calm, but surprise piqued in both Dmitri and Lorraine, the latter tinged with relief. Lorraine had no easy explanation as to the priest, casting more of Belinda's doubt on the legitimacy of the papers her mother had produced.

  Balance hung in the silence as Belinda took a few steps down toward Branson. She had never looked for the burden and gift she was being given; this was the moment in which she might make a lie of it all and free herself from its weight. A part of her wanted to: she had been raised in shadow, and even now her heart flew out of time, unregulated, terrified at being under the weight of so many eyes. Beatrice Irvine had been this exposed, and Beatrice Irvine was dead. It would be easy to draw the extended witchpower around herself and disappear, to avoid the life being thrust on her and become no more than she had been.

  Duty, sharp and agonising, cut into her, and then witchpower ambition, and Belinda knew she would never retreat.

  “His name was Christopher, after the patron saint of lost children,” she murmured, “and he was the closest thing to a father I knew in my sequestered years. I would see him of a Sunday, when he was allowed to visit the abbey chapel and bend an ear to hearing the labours of my studies each week. In the summer and on fine winter days we would walk and argue doctrine, both religious and political.” She wove the fiction from the life she had known, growing up under Robert's fond and distant tutelage, and from a dream of what might have been. That dream, laced with witchpower, drifted toward Branson, wrapping around him gently so it might settle against his skin and become comfortable before Belinda exerted her will behind it. It reminded her of Javier's casual expectation of obedience. She'd never imagined she might one day command the same influence.

  And it was a different thing than she had done to Marius or Viktor; then, she had relied on the sexual link she shared with each man, able to control through it and it alone. But she was stronger now, much stronger, and breaking Branson would be too obvious, especially in front of so many witnesses. He required seduction; they all did. They required the vulnerability of a young woman raised away from the world, telling a story about death: about the death of the only person she'd thought loved her. They needed to believe it would never occur to her to lie-and they needed to trust that despite honesty, despite vulnerability, that she was not an easy target, ready for crushing and throwing away. Impatience swam over her, a sudden disdain for politics and an impulse to simply dominate, force them all to her will. Too much danger lay in that desire; despite Lorraine's promises, witchcraft would see Belinda burnt, and such a demonstration of power would be seen as witchcraft, not the Madonna's generous influence.

  “He was tall,” she said, and felt her own gaze grow distant, as though she looked back through memory. Indeed, she felt as though she did, while Lorraine's concern still spiked at the corners of her mind, and Dmitri's curiosity washed over her. “Tall, at least, to a child,” Belinda added with a brief smile, then passed a hand over her eyes. “No, tall in fact: as a girl I often had to run to keep pace with him, and even when I reached my growth I looked up to him. Sharp-featured, with black hair, and he told me of the monastery where he'd studied.”

  Belinda had no doubt that, by the time Branson got a man there, there would be records of her imaginary priest, brothers who remembered him, a story of how he enjoyed gardening, their regret at his passing; all the things that made up a life, real or not. The world seemed a cruel place, that a man who had never been could take on more permanence than many who had been born, lived, and died without regard.

  Lorraine, who had in all the brief times Belinda had enjoyed her presence, been a master of control, emotionless to Belinda's witch-breed senses, was now, beneath her painted face, full of disbelief; full of a growing concern that bordered on terror. It rattled Belinda, distracting her from the spell she tried to weave, and in a moment of inquisitiveness, she turned a few degrees back toward the throne.

  “He told me of my mother, not of the queen, but of the woman. She who had wed and created life in secret, knowing herself to be the most valuable piece she had to broker, yet knowing she couldn't risk leaving her throne empty after years of playing suitors against one another. He called her bold and clever, and”-Belinda smiled quickly-“and apologised for it, for who was he, a humble priest, to pass such comment on a queen? But he gave me what he could of the mother who had to hide me.”

  Belinda reached out, trusting, sweet, hopeful, toward that mother, and wondered if there might have been a ti
me when she would have done so and have it be less than the act of showmanship it was now.

  Lorraine, even knotted with fear, was a consummate actress: when the daughter she had long been separated from reached for her, it was instinctive to take her hand, creating a line of compassion, of family, and of new beginnings between them.

  Creating the link of touch that had always made stealing thoughts easy for Belinda Primrose, ever since she had awakened to her witchpower under Javier de Castille's guidance.

  The girl knows was the underlying thought in Lorraine's touch, half incoherent with confusion. A flinch ran under Belinda's skin, an unexpected wound opening at how Lorraine thought of her: the girl. She had no name in her mother's mind, and that cut unfairly deep. Only in the past few days had Belinda often allowed herself the luxury of thinking of Lorraine as her mother; those were thoughts too dangerous to be reflected, even in her own mind. She was Lorraine, or the queen , and despite her skill in weaving stories, Belinda could hardly imagine a day might come when she would call the queen Mother. It ought not hurt that Lorraine thought of her similarly, rather than by dangerous words like daughter, or by her name.

  Ought not, and yet it did. Belinda put the hurt away: there would be time to nurse it later, and she had only a few brief seconds in which to steal Lorraine's thoughts and find the source of her consternation.

  Words came clear again within the constraints of Lorraine's mind: the queen was disciplined, her mouth curved in a gentle smile as she looked on Belinda, her gaze tender, with no hint of the rushing, bewildered thoughts behind her eyes. How can she know, but then how could she know that I was her mother, and she knew that as well. Knew herself for the queen's bastard and made nothing of it, so perhaps she'll make nothing of this, either, that the priest who oversaw her birth-

  An image came into sharp focus: a hawk-faced man with black hair and deep-set eyes, with a sensual mouth and long hands. The kind of man Lorraine might have considered for a lover when she was young and not yet a queen. By the time she took the throne she knew better than to dally with the church. She was head and heart of her religion, and would allow no churchman above her.

  All of that, all of it and more came with the picture of Dmitri Leontyev in Belinda's mind. For all her control, for all the life she'd spent honing discipline, when Belinda smiled shyly and turned from Lorraine to once more address Branson, her gaze went first to the disguised witchlord in the courtroom.

  There was nothing of concern in Dmitri's eyes, nothing of the amusement she could feel beneath his surface. He knew himself a stranger here, an envoy of Irina Durova's court, there for no other reason than to make polite of the failed attempt to build an alliance between Aulun and Khazar. Lorraine couldn't recognise him; the witchpower saw to that, misdirected both her eyes with the changes it had worked on his countenance and her memory, so that even if a hint of suspicion came into her mind, it would fade away again. As ever, Belinda had no words from Dmitri, only smug satisfaction that allowed her to understand the direction of his thoughts.

  He'd been there at her birth, and Lorraine thought him dead.

  “I can't speak to his age,” Belinda said to Branson. She trusted the life she'd led to give her voice the right timbre, to show youthful uncertainty and sorrow even when she herself barely attended the words she spoke. “His hair was dark, but not all men lose their colour as they age, and he seemed old to me. That winter a cough took him, and he grew frail.” Tears filled her eyes and she glanced to the side so she might brush them away in a semblance of privacy; a semblance watched by all the court. She would believe her, if she were they; such performance was what she was made for. “When he died I was alone.”

  A single thread of her attention was taken up by awareness of rising sympathy: the courtiers were half in love with her, in love with a romantic idea of a lonely girl destined for a throne; in love with the thought that they might now warm her and make her welcome. Mothers with marriageable sons plotted how a convent-raised princess might be best seduced; mothers with daughters considered how a crowned novice might need friends and guidance within the court. Younger women sighed in melodramatic compassion, imagining if only they had been the secret heir, and so it went, all through the court, all making a place for Belinda within their hearts. The romance would fade soon enough, leaving politics and manoeuvrings behind, but now, as she stood on the throne dais beside Lorraine, they warmed to her.

  And she all but ignored them, her gaze on Branson but her thoughts on the two witchlords and the Aulunian queen. An energy crackled between them, nearly a quarter century of secrets kept. Belinda had no need to look over her shoulder at Robert to feel that he, too, was remembering the day of her birth, and the priest who had overseen it.

  Bloody curls over translucent skin: that was the easiest memory for Belinda herself to draw up. The warmth of Robert's hands enveloping her, and the command: it cannot be found out. Robert's voice replying, promising that it would not be found out. And another command: attend her. Another response, a man's voice agreeing, and in the present, in the courtroom, hairs rippled on Belinda's arms, bringing a chill.

  Dmitri, agreeing. Dmitri, promising to attend the queen who had just birthed Belinda, whose memories stretched all the way back to the moment of her birth. He had, so often in her life, awakened witchpower magic; she wondered now if his presence all those years earlier had helped shape the strength of her recollection, even before she could form coherent thoughts.

  Lorraine, outside the weight of memory that burdened Belinda, but carrying her own fears, still performed the show they'd set in motion. Belinda had reached toward her once; now the queen reversed the offer, putting a hand out toward Belinda, and Belinda, as much the actor as her mother, took it.

  “Not alone,” Lorraine murmured. “Though it may have seemed you were for all those years after Christopher's death, you remained in our hearts. Our greatest regret is that we have been unable to know you, and we hope that God will grace us with at least a few more years in which we might become family.”

  For the second time, she drew Belinda into an embrace, and while courtiers shouted cheers and threw their hats into the air, clear memory, stolen from the queen's touch, thundered into Belinda's mind.

  Afterbirth still rippling her belly: that, Belinda remembered herself, in the moments before Robert turned away and took her from the first and last glimpse of her mother for over a decade. But what Lorraine remembered and Belinda did not, that Robert did not, was the unexpected pain of another labour contraction, more violent than she thought to expect with passing the afterbirth. She had gasped with it, and the priest, rightfully concerned, came to her side.

  It was he who delivered the second child almost an hour later. A boy, noisier in his entrance to the world than Belinda had been, and a source of appalled horror to the woman who'd birthed him. Robert was gone with the girl; with the bastard heir upon whom Lorraine had decided to risk everything. Lorraine had been pleased the child was female; she, after all, had done well enough as a woman alone, and fancied the idea of a daughter coming after her.

  A son threatened everything, on every level. One bastard child was risk enough; a bastard son, should he learn his parentage, would consider himself rightful heir to a throne Lorraine intended on being Belinda's, if it should come to that. And the people would support him: no matter how fond they were of their virgin queen, a woman on the throne sat badly with many of them, and they would raise a banner to her son.

  It was maternal instinct, oh yes, but not the instinct so lauded by men, which made Lorraine Walter thrust the squalling babe into her priest's arms and say, flatly, “Drown him, stone him, leave him to die in the forest, but do not let him see the dawn, priest. It cannot be found out. More than the girl, this cannot be found out.”

  In memory, Dmitri took the child and silenced his cries with a rag dribbled in water so the boy had something to suckle, and left the queen of Aulun to attend to herself.

  Minutes later, pale
, regal, trembling, she came barefoot to her guardsmen's door, and from there commanded them ride after the priest in secret until the ninth hour, and then to put him to death. They, without question, saluted agreement and left Lorraine alone again for the second time.

  Alone, exhausted, but confident it would not be found out, she returned to her chambers, and with the ninth bell of the morning murmured a prayer for the priest's soul and for that of the dead boy then emerged from the shadow of her father's death to take up her crown and sceptre again as an uncontested queen.

  Lorraine released Belinda from their embrace and smiled; Belinda returned the expression without hesitation, and heard nothing of what Lorraine said next. The queen was wise to be afraid: should it be known she sent a son to his death, her people would never forgive her.

  A curious spot of emptiness grew in Belinda's belly at the thought of a brother she hadn't known, chilling her in a way the stillness never had. She knew regret well enough to recognise it, but this was something else, a calmer and steadier aspect to that emotion, if such a thing was to be had. Not sorrow that needed regret, and she had too little attachment to a befuddling idea to regret it as of yet. Disbelief, maybe; a simple thing, that she might not have been so alone as she'd always been, had the world been just a little different. Yes: there, she knew it now. The coolness inside her was that same thick wavering glass through which she'd always seen the other side of her life, the one where she'd been born legitimate heir to the Aulunian throne. It was a curiosity, barely worth considering in one part for its unattainability and in the other, for the rage she might have felt if she permitted herself to dwell on it. That was the shape of her dead brother inside her, and all wisdom said it should be left that way, impossible to touch.

  Instead she sent an unfelt smile over the courtiers, catching gazes for an instant here and a moment there, until with witchpowered precision, her eyes met Dmitri's.

  She had stolen only snatches of emotion from him, no clear thoughts or memories the way she could from one who wasn't witchbred himself. But the satisfaction beneath his changed demeanour lay in parallel to Lorraine's thoughts: they shared a source, one that inspired fear in the titian queen and smugness in Dmitri. His mind was guarded against hers, too familiar already with Belinda's ability to subsume his will and demand his power be used to her satisfaction. But she'd changed yet again, not only in holding the power of the storm, but in riding the high emotion that now lashed the court. If it could affect her, she could draw it in and make a needle point of it.