by C. E. Murphy
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.”
Dmitri knelt, which Belinda did not expect. Knelt, and made himself subservient to her, gave her the position of power. Men had done that with startling frequency this past year, from rough lustful Viktor to the prince of Gallin, and now this dark-haired, hazel-eyed witchlord whose powers and ambitions reached far beyond Belinda's own. The impulse to open her legs and command pleasure boiled up. She squelched it, crushed her thighs together instead, and swallowed a sound of sweet anguish at the spike of half-answered need it drove through her.
“Tell me more, Dmitri.” Belinda turned her hands palm up, encouraging. Dmitri gathered them in his own and lowered his face to their touch, almost reverent. Soft witchpower, ebbing and flowing within Belinda, gave her tastes of his emotions: not words, not the way she could steal clear thoughts from others, but an abiding sense of the peaks and valleys of what he felt.
The show of reverence was built on truth. It was not, perhaps, so profound as he pretended, but respect underlay the gesture with no cynicism, no ploys. Familiarity jolted Belinda; she had felt that same respect inherent in her father, bound up in an inexplicable combination of Lorraine Walter and a monstrous creature of silver scales and sinuous shape. The one made sense, though its depth had shocked her: men, in Belinda's experience, paid lip service to high regard and remained smug with confidence of their own superiority. To find her father's heart as true as his words had lain outside of imagination.
As did the other bewildering images she'd stolen from him, so far outside imagination Belinda had chosen not to dwell on them. Had chosen not to try to understand what Robert had told her she would not, and had instead grasped what she could: that Robert was incapable of surviving without that fathomless
streak of esteem, and that she now felt a similar channel in Dmitri. It ran less deeply in Dmitri than in Robert, tempered with a different ambition, but it still lay within him, as much a part of him as his breath or bone.
“My father says I have a purpose.” Belinda bent over Dmitri's bowed head, her lips almost against his thick black hair. Witchpower sluiced through her, contained within something like the stillness. Shaped by Belinda's will, rather than shaping it. Left to itself it would rage, but bound, it rolled slow and deliberately tantalising. Her heart pushed golden light with every beat, until she thought her fingertips would shine and illuminate Dmitri's hair. Force was unnecessary, when her ends could be achieved through subtlety. It felt right, and that rightness brought a flashing smile to her face. Lorraine, too, avoided force, instead teasing compromise and change out of delicate negotiations. It seemed a fresh and fragile link between mother and daughter, and Belinda took delight in it.
“Robert says someday I'll understand my purpose, but that for now it's enough to know I have one. I think your plans for me are different from his, dark prince. He has kept me all unknowing, stunting my power and then leaving me to learn its extent myself when it could no longer be held behind the wall in my mind. Will you do the same, or will you do me more honour? You call me a queen, Dmitri. You and I both know that it is your soul's duty to serve your queen in all ways, and as best as you can. You've already begun to teach me, begun nurturing my witchpower where Robert let me founder. Will you tell me his purpose, and yours, and where mine meets in the centre?”
Ambition and guilt wove together as she spoke, one part of her eager for Dmitri's lessons, the other still bound to the life she'd known. But then, Robert trusted Dmitri, and if the Khazarian witchlord had plans of his own, learning them was only part and parcel of what she had always been. The argument seemed a slender thread, yet enough to hang herself with. Hang herself, or balance upon, depending on how the wind blew.
Turmoil bubbled within Dmitri's mind, heavy in presence but unclear in detail. Belinda caught her breath and held it a long moment, waiting on Dmitri, waiting on her own curiosity, waiting to see how far he might go unprompted, and when he did not speak, gambled what little she had with all the gentle confidence at her disposal. “You come to conquer in your queen's name,” she whispered. “You come to make this land yours, and not for Irina of Khazar. I know your secrets, Dmitri; I know the things I should not, so you need not bite your tongue and wonder at what you dare say.”
Astonishment flooded all other expression from his eyes as he lifted them to meet hers. “How can you know?”
“From Robert, of course.” Surprise lightened her voice, perfect artifice; there was no need to tell him she'd stolen near-incomprehensible images of invasion and conquest from her father's mind. Better to let him think Robert had confided in her, and to draw him out through illicit confidences.
Witchpower danced through her, unusually subtle, and with it came a daring thought: what she'd taken from Robert's unwilling mind might be improved upon by a glimpse of Dmitri's startled thoughts. She had failed to take words from him, but even pictures were a thing to work with, and so she let witchpower flow, searching for any unguarded idea in the witchlord's mind.
Nightmares came to her, fire pouring through the sky and a world so scarred by mining and ugly buildings it could hardly be her home. More half-caught ideas flooded with it, but she drew her fingers back from Dmitri's hair, trying not to flinch as her heart made a sick place in her chest. Too much truth went into the words “I don't pretend to understand,” and she meant it, not only for what she'd gleaned from Robert, but for the too-dark and deadly pictures now swimming through her thoughts.
“I don't pretend to understand,” she whispered again, and thought that at least there was purpose telling this truth: a lie twinned with honesty was a stronger one. “I understand very little beyond the idea you are harbingers of invasion, and that Robert refused to tell me of my part in this war.”
“There will be no war, not with my queen, not with my people. Belinda—” Dmitri got to his feet suddenly, leaving her open to the fire and flushing with its heat. “You're familiar with brutish conquest, with all manner of violence. Imagine instead that you could take Gallin by slipping across the straits and offering work to its people. Imagine you could offer them salt and butter for prices far below what they might otherwise pay, and that what you asked in return was to be thanked in Aulunian rather than Gallic.” He paced as he spoke, Belinda turning to follow him with her gaze, hungry to take her mind off the pictures she'd stolen. “Imagine you had a better way to harvest wheat, and that you would teach it to the Gallic people, school them in the improvements, but your schoolings were done in Aulunian. And then after that perhaps you have a better way to weave cloth for clothing, or you have better insulation to offer them for their homes, and you would teach them each of these things and in doing so make them a little more Aulunian with each new measure.”
“Sandalia—well, Javier—would never allow it,” Belinda said pragmatically. “He would see his country being stolen from him in bits and pieces, and retaliate with war.”
“Yes.” Dmitri turned, smiling. “But perhaps not if you had slow decades or centuries in which you might encroach upon Gallin and make these changes. Perhaps not if you only send one or two into a vast area, little more than missionaries, tolerable because they're so outnumbered.”
“No one has that kind of time. Robert is aging well, as are you, but it would take generations to—” Belinda came to her feet with understanding. “You've fathered new generations.”
“To guide and become the heads of state,” Dmitri confirmed. “To shape our progression. Aulun is the heart of the Reformation church; Gallin and Essandia and Cordula all bond together to make the Ecumenic stronghold in Echon. Think, Belinda, if you had no reason to make war over religion, if you turned all those resources toward new ideas and technological development. Think of how the world might change.”
“But Sandalia is dead. War will come.” Belinda sank back into her seat, fingertips pressed to her temples.
“War will come.” Dmitri crossed back to her, knelt again, this time with less subservience and more passion in his changeable gaze. “And from it we must make peace at any cost.”
“Robert sent me to Gallin to sniff out a plot for Aulun's throne, to find an excuse to depose Sandalia. Why would he do that if he wanted the Echonian states to work together, to make peace and prosperity?”
“Because war is a time of innovation. It begins a creative process, and for Echon to move forward, it must make certain leaps that peace will not bring. It's only with those changes that gentler subversion can begin to take place.”
“And what is the end?” Belinda dropped her hands, frowning. “You serve a …” The alien images stolen from witchlord minds rose up again, bewildering, and she set her mouth, choosing words with cautious precision. “A queen from a foreign land.”
Humour glinted in Dmitri's eyes, telling Belinda her careful choice of words betrayed how little she understood. But he nodded, and she took a steadying breath before continuing. “The purpose of ruling a land is to gather taxes and tribute, to mine its salt and gold and iron, and to call on its men for armies when the need arises. Is this your queen's purpose?”
Dmitri made a moue, a small throw away gesture. “It's what I would offer you. My queen will never come here, no more than Lorraine might go to the Columbias to look on the red savages.”
Each of Belinda's heartbeats became a knife's blade, cutting fascination and fear into separate things. Witchpower pooled in the silence separating beats, warming her blood, urging her to seize what was offered. Duty lay in the contractions and releases: duty to Lorraine, duty to Robert, and a never-imagined question of what her duties to herself were danced between them. “Then you would make me a queen and a vassal both, paying tithe to a monarch I would never see.”
The words descended around her like snowflakes, each l
ight and thoughtful, barely there and yet building to a white cloud that could break wagons and roofs with its weight. She looked within, searching out how ambitious witchpower reacted to the idea: how it responded to putting herself on high, but not quite at the pinnacle of power.
To her surprise, it lay satisfied, whispering this will serve; you will serve, in contentment. Belinda absorbed that, looked for meaning in it, and found what she sought.
It was not enough.
Oh, it was more than enough, had she been one raised to expect a throne, had she been born to the privilege that Javier de Castille knew. She might have accepted becoming queen and vassal both, had she been born to that kind of duty. But she had not been, and there was sudden secret delight in expecting more of herself, of Dmitri, of the world itself. There was a game afoot, and she had yet to see how the board was laid out. With careful clarity, Belinda murmured, “No.”
Shock rose off Dmitri in a wave, so quick and hard Belinda was glad she'd returned to her seat. Within her, matching Dmitri's shock with its own, witchpower surged and turned the world yellow. Belinda denied every outward example of what it took to rein that power back in: she did not allow herself to clench her jaw or tighten her fingers on her chair's arms; didn't permit her spine to straighten or her stomach to clench. She remained in repose, relaxed and calm in the face of twin witchpower storms.
Unlike Javier, though, Dmitri didn't batter her magic with his, didn't pound on it until she failed. It danced and sparked around him, black magic where hers was gold, where Javier's was silver; the colours, she thought, meant nothing, no more than an individual fondness for wearing a particular shade. One hue was not more powerful than another, or more dangerous, except in the skill its wielder had.