The Pretender's Crown

by C. E. Murphy

  The Queen's Bastard

  The Pretender's Crown

  THE WALKER PAPERS

  Urban Shaman

  Thunderbird Falls

  Coyote Dreams

  THE NEGOTIATOR TRILOGY

  Heart of Stone

  House of Cards

  Hands of Flame

  WITH MERCEDES LACKEY AND TANITH LEE

  Winter Moon

  For Duane Wilkins

  Years and names are useless; they tie him to a calendar that means nothing to him or his kind. Still, if they must be put in place, he is—or will be—Robert, Lord Drake, and the date, by the reckoning of the people he'll have the most contact with, is the mid-fifteenth century But that name, those dates, lie ahead of him: for now, he stands on a starship far above the surface of the small blue planet whose future he'll shape.

  They call themselves Heseth, his people; the people of the sun, as the people of the world below him might someday call themselves Terran, for people of the earth. Every race the Heseth have encountered across the span of aeons and galaxies has been quite literal in their naming of themselves. Not even the Heseth themselves are immune to it; they're called the people of the sun for the never-darkening sky at the heart of a galaxy where they began. Even now, light burns at the back of his mind, reminding him where they came from and what it is they seek.

  That, of course, is simple: they seek to survive, as do all living organisms. Their world has long since burned away, making their home the stars. They might once have searched for a new place to live, but every race learns a certain reality: there are no habitable planets so remote that they cannot be found and stripped to their core. Hydrogen to power starships is easily found, but the ships must still be built of something. All people with an eye toward exploration search out asteroids and planets from which to mine and shape their starships, and so any world that might suit settlement is also ripe for ruin.

  They are a people of tremendous psychic power, the Heseth, their talent an extension of will born of large bodies meant largely to withstand dry hot places under myriad suns. Graced with less physical dexterity than other races, they found different ways to take their sentience beyond its rudimentary development. Their communication is largely silent, but shared by all; only the deepest intimacies are spoken aloud, made private between one person and another.

  That gift has given them the easiest method of draining a populated planet of its resources: infiltration. They hide amongst its peoples, shaping them as they develop and raising them up to be unknowing slaves.

  They cannot do this in their natural forms; the point is subtlety and intrigue, making a game out of conquering. There's little enough by way of entertainment between the stars, and so their plots are as much a way to provide a show as they are to develop resources. The creature who will become Robert Drake wasn't yet born the last time the Heseth queens conquered a world, but he has the memory of it, as do all his brethren. It's a time-consuming pursuit, taking generations, but it's more interesting than brutality, and safer for a people whose strengths don't lie in warfare. Besides, their enemies are far behind them, and interstellar distances are great: there's very little risk in taking a slow path toward victory. They've lost a world or two in the past, when their enemy has come on more quickly than expected, but that, too, is part of the game; there'd be no purpose if there was no challenge.

  Challenge, though, is one thing; terrorising a young race of people is something else, and anathema to their ends. His natural form would cause horror amongst peoples unable to keep peace between themselves, much less understand a creature birthed on another world. The truth is, any young life-form fears that which is different, even strangers of its own race.

  And so to conquer, a plan was devised to take away the fear.

  It takes generations to splice the genes just so; to make a creature who is human in form and figure but retains a handful of Heseth markers. Loyalty, bred in the bone; psychic talent, vastly diminished by the new body but present; ambition to see his queen's race survive and prosper above all else.

  He-who-will-be Robert leaves his viewpost, the blue planet long since memorised, and takes himself to the laboratories where scientists work to create that new life. There are already vats filled with mistakes, kept to study; they've been working at this for almost a human century, and it may be that long again before they succeed. It's time in which the chosen study the world they'll be entering, though by now they know most of what they need to: it's brutish, cold, and ripe for direction. The earth's wise men look to the stars and search for answers in science, and it's that ingenuity the Heseth intend to fan.

  One of the geneticists becomes aware of his presence and turns to greet him. They have no need to face each other to make the other welcome, but making eye contact connotates particular honour. Within a moment everyone has turned to make that same greeting, and for an instant he feels he's already left them; that he's already become alien to his people. In so feeling, he sees them through human eyes.

  They're delicate monsters, light catching silver scales and turning them to a host of shimmering colours that negates uniformity. They're sinuous beings, able to move with or without the help of many legs that are used as grasping appendages as well as for locomotion. They're creatures of cartilage and chitin, narrow chests coming to a rigid point from whence a long neck curves back and up into a slim, slit-eyed head. The queens have great and wonderful horns curling above their eyes, and the oldest amongst the males have similar, but smaller, protrusions.

  Humans might call them dragons.

  They're not, of course, not at all; they have neither wings nor breath of fire, but there's a certain pleasant grandiosity to the name. Robert-to-be likes the idea that a human legend will be birthed into mortal form to walk amongst them. He acknowledges his family's greeting, then takes himself away again: being watched over by one who is meant to change is distracting, and he has no wish to agitate them as they work. He'll come back in time; they, and his queen, will be the last thing in this life he'll ever see.

  It will be worth the pain, when the moment comes; worth the long slow years of growing up in a human body, which is one of the necessities of this plot. They've never been certain if these created infants have personalities of their own, and rather than risk it, the chosen leave their first bodies behind when the geneticists are satisfied with their creations. They're guided by their queen's gentle touch into a new form, and there is no reversal: the journey is honor and death sentence both.

  But Robert-to-be embraces it gladly, because if he succeeds in shaping this world—and the Heseth have rarely failed—then he will become a father to the next generations of his people. His genetic legacy will live on, a true prize indeed for a ship-bound race that must breed selectively and rarely in order for the whole to survive. It's a chance worth any risk: he'll die locked in human form, but his memory will live on, and his children will know his name.

  There is, in the end, little else that drives a man, and Robert Drake is satisfied with his fate.

  BELINDA PRIMROSE

  21 January 1588 † Alunaer, capital of Aulun

  It had not taken long to escape Gallin.

  It had not taken long, and yet it seemed she had never left there at all. A day to cross the channel, another to wait and meet the Aulunian spymaster Cortes in secret, and on the third morning that man's expression had remained impassionate as he told her of how an Aulunian spy had been uncovered in the Gallic court. “Beatrice Irvine,” he'd said. “They also called her Belinda Primrose, and she is dead.”

  Astonishment and ice coursed through Belinda, though wisdom had warned her there could be no other way for her story to end. The woman she had been lay dead, her head no doub
t on a pike for all to see, and the woman who had returned to Alunaer would become someone else entirely. In a lifetime of doing murder, Belinda had never lost a role she'd played to death's dark hand. To do so now unmoored her.

  She had drawn a soft breath, steadying her outward countenance: it would never do to show the spymaster how her hands wanted to shake or how the pulse in her throat threatened to choke her with its urgency. There were other matters to attend to; there always were. Matters more important than herself: matters such as Robert, Lord Drake, whose name she voiced quietly, hoping against an answer of a fate as black as the one Cortes had named for Beatrice Irvine.

  “Ransomed,” Cortes replied unexpectedly. “Ransomed, but not yet returned to her majesty's court.” There was a question in his voice, and Belinda, constrained with relief, answered it.

  “Ransomed because he escaped before he could be put to death. Sandalia would have preferred to start a war by returning his head in a basket, but her majesty would know if it was other than Robert himself. Ransoming him instead was clever,” Belinda had acknowledged, more to herself than the spymaster.

  Cortes had nodded, then lifted insubstantial eyebrows. “There's something more you should know. Rumour, fed by Lord Drake's precipitous departure from Aulun and his abrupt arrival in the Gallic court, claims the woman who died was Drake's adopted daughter whom he'd gone to rescue. It's a story without purport as those close to Lord Drake know his adopted daughter joined a convent a decade since.”

  Bemusement had darted through Belinda, chasing the shock of her own death away. It would return, but she was grateful for a brief respite. “The girl was wise enough to accept God's embrace rather than risk her majesty's well-known jealousies?”

  “Indeed.” Cortes had dismissed her with a promise that all the news she bore would be brought to Lorraine's ear.

  Barely a day later stories of Sandalia de Costa's death swept Alunaer. In the week since, Belinda had waited to be called on, and in waiting found herself turning again and again toward Gallin, where she had died. Gallin, where she had found in Javier de Castille a soul as lost as her own, and betrayed him.

  Dignity, it seemed, was no longer hers to court. Belinda permitted herself a snort of disgust and turned away from memories of Gallin and Javier alike. Turned toward what she had awaited since leaving Gallin; toward what she had awaited, in any meaningful way, every day since she had been eleven years of age and had realised she was the natural-born daughter of Lorraine Walter, unwed and so-called virgin queen of Aulun.

  When Belinda permitted herself to dwell on that thought, she enjoyed the blunt unforgiving words: the queen's bastard. They meted out her place in the world with raw boundaries, admitted she was a secret and a shame in one breath and conceived of daring and drama in the next. There was no better way to describe the unknown child who had grown up to be her mother's best-hidden and loyal assassin.

  Boldness had driven her to an indulgence: rather than the formal, strait laced gowns of Aulunian fashion, she wore a Gallic gown, one of the impetuous, flirtatious designs by Javier's friend Eliza Beaulieu. It had no waist or skirt in the manner of dresses worn in Lorraine's court, but fell away from high-shelved breasts and a waistband just below them in layer upon layer of delicate thin fabric entirely unsuited for the January weather. In deference to winter, the tiny puffed caps at her shoulders had been laced through with ruched sleeves that came to a point over the backs of her hands. Belinda refused to rub at those tips, denying the reminder they offered of a gown made to fit her so tightly it had become a gaol. Instead she folded into a deep curtsey, skirts floating and settling around her as she lowered her gaze and waited a little longer.

  There had been no concession to the cold in the gown's neckline. It curved very low and wide, a gentle scoop that displayed an astonishing amount of flesh. That, in the end, was why she had chosen to wear this particular dress.

  It was a dangerous choice for myriad reasons, least subtle being that it suggested her loyalty no longer belonged to her royal mother. More subtle, but not much more, it was a youthful fashion, and that was a challenge to a queen who struggled against age and therefore came to it without grace. Moreover, it was pink, a colour the red-headed queen couldn't wear easily even if it wasn't considered too strong a shade for women. Good reasons all not to dare Eliza's design in Lorraine's court.

  A breath of warmth stirred the air, the only indication that a door had opened. Fabric rustled, footsteps fell, and the hint of heat faded again as familiar scents brought excitement and fear in equal parts: thinned-out white lead makeup; a hint of perfume she didn't know the name of, but which was etched indelibly in her mind as belonging to the queen. Only Lorraine would wear that perfume, so its name was of no import, if it even had one. A faint sharpness beneath those two: ordinary mortal sweat, such as a monarch shouldn't suffer from. Belinda hadn't known she would be able to find Lorraine Walter in a darkened room, more than ten years after the only time they'd met.

  “We are unobserved?” The words were a matter of ritual, given to her by Robert. Speaking them was entirely new to Belinda, but she was comfortable with ritual; it had shaped much of her life. Most of it, perhaps, even before she knew she was being shaped.

  “We are,” came Lorraine's response, tart with impatience. “We do not have a rash any longer, girl. We thought we told you, eleven years ago, to dispose of modest coverings in the spring, not in the dead of winter a lifetime later.”

  Triumph rose in Belinda's breast, flowing so brightly she loosened a smile of delight at the floor. Ah, she had changed, she had fallen: the woman she had once been would never have allowed such a transparent change of expression. But the woman she had played over the past six-months had laughed too easily, smiled too readily; Beatrice Irvine was easy to cling to. A joyous smile was an indulgence she ought to have excised, and yet she was glad of it.

  “I beg forgiveness, your majesty,” she murmured, and did nothing to still the wide smile directed at the floor. This was no way at all to present herself to her monarch, her mother, but the threads that held them together were dark and deep and buried. To play the single one that lay in the light, and to have it recognised and struck back as a matching note, was a risk and a gift beyond revelation. “I was not at court that spring, and loathed the thought of disappointing your majesty in any small way at all.”

  Lorraine Walter, queen of all Aulun, gave a snort that sounded very much like the one Belinda had indulged in earlier. “Stand up, for pity's sake. You look like a rose ready for the plucking, down there in all that pink. Whoever heard of a woman wearing such a colour?”

  Belinda stood slowly, leaving her gaze on the floor until she was certain her expression could be schooled, though it was still with merriment in her eyes that she met Lorraine's pretence at irritation. Oh, but Beatrice Irvine had been bad for her. Only a handful of months earlier she would never have allowed herself so much emotion, much less the boldness of assuming that the queen's annoyance was perhaps not entirely genuine. The ability to control her own humour was still there. The stillness she had learnt as a child, and shored up with golden witchpower in the past months, would never truly desert her.

  But witchpower and the stillness had their price. The latter left her untouchable, as she had taught herself to be, and the former left her greedy for power and blind with ambition. Even a lifetime's training in constraint was barely enough to master it. She would no more dare release witchpower in Lorraine's presence than she might set a wild boar free upon the unarmed queen. She was her mother's daughter, and a creature of her father's making. Loyalty defined her; duty made the boundaries of her life. It had, for nearly twenty-three years, been enough. If she could now reach back to a solitary meeting with Lorraine, more than ten years earlier, and make a small jape of it, then perhaps that was diplomacy, and its success worthy of a smile.

  “Do you laugh at us, girl?” Lorraine was cool as winter winds, drawing herself up. She was tall for a woman, taller than Bel
inda herself, and beneath full square skirts, boxy shoes added to that imposing height. Illusion, but effective: Belinda ducked another curtsey in a show of contriteness, and when she lifted her eyes it was with no hint of merriment.

  Nor did she feel it any longer, its spirit quenched beneath necessity. Beatrice Irvine might laugh too easily, but Beatrice was a construct, and as such could even yet be put away when needs be. “No, majesty. I beg forgiveness,” she said again, and this time meant it.

  Lorraine stared down a long nose at her, weighing the sincerity of that plea. Proper deference would have Belinda drop her gaze and wait on the queen's clemency; proper as a subject, a daughter, and a secret. Proper, too, if she fully embraced the learned ability to not offend, to hardly be there even when she was obviously present. She had spent her life honing that talent, and could make herself small and meek and unthreatening, everything in her stance and stature hinting of her place beneath notice—or, if noticed, beneath the lord of the manor. It would work on Lorraine; it worked on everyone, except perhaps Belinda's own father, and on Dmitri, the other witchlord man of Robert's acquaintance.

  Belinda did not do what was proper, and saw in Lorraine's eyes that she marked it. She met the queen's gaze and looked her fill: it had been more than ten years since she had seen the woman who'd birthed her, and might well be ten years before she saw her again. There was little enough chance for making such memories as these, and she judged it worth risking Lorraine's wrath to burn the monarch's image into her own flawless memory.

  Ten years earlier, Lorraine had still held the last edge of youth that gave her beauty. Then, as now, as always in Belinda's memories, titian curls fell loose, bloody against translucent skin, but now the translucency was born of far heavier white paint than Lorraine had worn a decade ago. She had been in her forties then, a woman of unprecedented power; indeed, she had set the precedent of a queen ruling without a king. Sandalia in Gallin had held her own throne partly in ironic thanks to her bitter rival across the straits: if Lorraine could manage alone, so, too, could the one time Essandian princess. And much farther to the east and north, Irina Durova reigned as imperatrix of the enormous Khazarian empire, unchallenged on her throne since her unlamented husband's death. They were a sisterhood, these queens, a sisterhood of loathing and distrust and tension, bound together by a determination to hold power in the face of innumerable men certain they were incapable of doing so.