The Pretender's Crown

by C. E. Murphy

  And now, for now, she was certain Dmitri still had the greater skill. It was only that streak of respect that kept him from dominating her the way Javier had, and it was that streak which made him more difficult and more fascinating to play.

  “No,” Belinda said again, and this time she let a tremble come into her voice. This would be easier with Javier, with Marius, with Viktor; with any man who was not Dmitri, her father's friend, sub-ordinant, and partner. It would be easier with a man who believed women inferior, as Dmitri and Robert seemed not to do. A man such as that, one like those she knew, would assume her fear and uncertainty to be natural, and his place as her guide and teacher to be obvious. Dmitri did, she thought, believe his position as her teacher to be obvious, but only because she was untutored, not because she was incapable.

  And it would be easier with a man she'd lain with, because despite what the witchlord thought, sex was power. It deepened the link between Belinda and her lover, made stealing thoughts and guiding behaviours easier to accomplish. Perhaps she could unlearn that, but in the now, it was the weapon she had at her disposal. “I cannot, my lord. I am not bold or skilled enough, and I am far too alone. What you suggest, should it fail, rips away what little structure I've known. I have Robert, now. I have my duty to the queen. Perhaps it seems like nothing to you, but they are all I have. I will not risk it.”

  Furious witchpower boiled through her body, searching for a crack in her armour: searching for a way to burst free and assure Dmitri that every word she said was a lie, that she would be driven, will she or not, toward the ends he suggested. But she was diamond, or better yet granite, too hard to be broken, too solid to be seen through. She lowered her eyes, not because she was afraid her gaze might give her away, but because youth and fear and penance and apology could all be read into that minute piece of body language. She lowered her eyes, so she only heard, did not see, Dmitri's approach, and when he touched her it was gentle, as though she had become fragile. His fingers stirred her hair, nothing more, before he murmured, “You are not alone, Belinda.”

  “You are different, my lord.” Belinda put a crack into her voice, kept her eyes lowered, waited on the weight of his hand changing; waited on his inevitable question: “Different?”

  “You were rough with me in Khazar. Impatient, almost angry. Here, you have been … different.” Now she glanced up, one brief look. He stood at her shoulder, almost behind her, so his glimpse of her was all eyes and appeal; she could, when she wished, be appealing, even innocent. Then she spoke to the floor again, gaze locked downward and words soft with a deliberation she didn't intend him to hear. “Because of my witchpower waking, I think. Because of what I asked of you at the abbey.”

  “Asked,” Dmitri said, amused.

  Belinda ducked her head. “Demanded,” she admitted in a whisper. “But you didn't give me all I asked for, so I know you acted of your own will, not mine. Perhaps that's a man's talent,” she added with a bitterness she didn't feel. Javier, Marius, Viktor, had all done as she'd forced or connived them into doing, from speaking lies to toppling a maid to freeing Belinda from a prison she would never have left alive on her own. She had no fears for her own talents; her purpose was to offer Dmitri the upper hand, the guiding touch.

  “It could be your talent,” Dmitri said. She could feel caution shifting in him, examining her stance; examining, she hoped, his own. He had treated her with deference in teaching her, even when exasperation was clear in his voice and words. Belinda wished she could taste his thoughts, to see if they followed the path she hoped they might. “I was eager to awaken your power, in Khazar,” he said carefully. “Now, with it aroused, I had imagined …”

  He had imagined, Belinda expected, that she would become as she had become, testy and angered by men showing dominance over her, over the innate assumptions that she was weak and incapable, and that she should naturally subsume her desires to fit what was expected of her. She couldn't allow herself the luxury of holding her breath. It would give too much away, hint too strongly that she waited on a progression of thoughts and dared not move again until they'd been worked out.

  She felt his conclusion in the way his hand rested in her hair. The touch had been light, asking permission; it changed, taking possession. Listening to stolen thoughts became unnecessary with that subtle change: it said that he had followed through to realisations that would be anathema if he had not watched how men and women acted together for so many years. Belinda allowed her head to tilt back a little under that new weight, acquiescing to it. Making herself the creature men expected her to be, as she'd always done: making herself, in the here and now, seem weaker and more biddable than Dmitri presumed she would be. Making her fear larger than her ambition, and her need for guidance greater than it was.

  Anyone could reach, greedily, for power, snatching and grasping at it like the edges of a dream. But Belinda had been raised as a secret, a weapon hidden behind thrones and courtrooms and lies, and to retain that, to build on it, to hold in her grasp not only her magic but the ambitions of the witchlord men around her …

  That was power.

  She had time enough to learn under Dmitri's tutelage. He was of a nature to accept her word as law, but the weight of his hand in her hair said he was ready enough to be the master. The better she knew his talent, knew his mind, knew his ways, the better she could judge whether his goals were ones she might support. Her own witch-power wanted more of him, wanted more of her, but she was its master, whether it spiked or throbbed with interest when appealing favours were laid at her feet. She had learned more of Robert's purposes in the last few minutes than she had in an entire lifetime previously, and that gave her a better sense of the game that her father had never intended her to be a player in, but only a pawn.

  He ought, she thought with razor-edged surety, to have thought better of her than that. For all his passion for his queen, both mortal and … not, for all his reverence of Lorraine and females, it seemed he thought of Belinda as a tool, something to be manipulated and used. There would be more satisfaction by far in coming into her own than there could be in anything given to her by Dmitri or by Robert, be it the crown Dmitri made noises of or Robert's more ambiguous goals. They could all be manipulated and taken into hand. She had only to show patience, and patience was something she was very good at.

  It was only the shell of a plan, but shells could be filled. If nothing else, Sandalia's death proved that, but indeed, all of Belinda's life had proven it. Du Roz's startled gaze in the moment before he fell to his death flashed through her mind; Gregori Kapnist's burgeoning illness, so much more rapid than arsenic could account for, and the death that had come on so suddenly it had earned Belinda an accusation of witchery.

  Someday she would have to learn whether it had indeed been her will that had destroyed the Khazarian count's health, or if it had been a bad summer sickness and Belinda's good fortune in bedding him to exhaustion that had bound together to reach the same ends. Dmitri, who roused power in her, who had taught her rudimentary healing skills, would know the answer. Either way would do, but if it had been her new-birthed witchpower, then no man or woman in Echon could be safe from the queen's bastard.

  Troublesome thoughts tucked aside, she allowed the tiniest catch of her breath as Dmitri's hand weighted itself in her hair. Submissive, fearful, excited, relieved: she could be all of those things without need of consideration, could use them to give herself into Dmitri's hands and see how he would mould her, without ever losing the core that was Belinda Primrose and belonged, at the end of it all, to no one but herself.

  JAVIER, KING OF GALLIN

  25 February 1588 † Isidro

  Tomas's terms had laid heavily on Javier the past three nights. He'd held his tongue in meetings with Rodrigo, had held his tongue because with each breath he took he could not believe that Tomas's ambiguous phrasing—“persuade your uncle to wed”—meant what it seemed it must. Tomas knew more clearly than most just how persuasive Javier could
be, and the young king of Gallin could not imagine the priest was suggesting he bend Rodrigo's will to match the church's.

  Couldn't imagine, and yet could see no other possible way he might accomplish what Cordula and a dozen Echonian heads of state had failed to manage in Rodrigo's more than thirty years on the throne. The only wedding bed Rodrigo had ever seriously entertained had been Lorraine's, and that for the sole purpose of bringing Aulun back into the Ecumenic church. The Essandian prince's faith was all to him; for nothing less, not even for the certainty of his country's future, would he marry.

  And Tomas had said, if not blithely at least with no apparent care for the impossibility of it, persuade your uncle to wed.

  There was no witchpower practise tonight, as there had been every night for the month past. Javier had fought with Rodrigo over that, had finally thrown himself on God's own mercy: surely He could not want Javier squandering his gifts on unsuspecting forests and undeserving cattle. Better to accept what they now knew he could do, and save his strength for the coming war.

  His uncle had eventually relented, and tonight Javier came to his chambers with a bottle of fine wine and the need to pick another kind of battle. He would not, he told himself, would not use the witchpower on Rodrigo de Costa, not for any reason, and even that adamant refusal sent a thin line of seething silver through him, as if the magic raged against denial.

  Guards opened the door for him, ushered him into a warm room where an aging prince sat before an unbanked fire. Rodrigo twisted toward the doors, then chuckled and waved a hand toward a nearby seat. “You've a sour look about you, nephew. What's brought that on? We could burn off your temper with another bout of practise. Perhaps you've become accustomed to using your talents, and denying them sets the blood on fire?”

  Bumps chilled Javier's skin, discomfort of fearing Rodrigo'd come close to the mark. Witchpower bubbled in offence and flattened under his grim denial as he scooped up cups to pour generous glasses of wine. “It's marriage on my mind, not power.”

  Rodrigo gave him an amused look and got to his feet when it became clear Javier would not sit. “You say that as though they're two different things. You're not yet crowned, boy. A wedding bed can wait a year or two.”

  “I'm Gallin's only heir, and yours,” Javier said shortly. “If we're looking for delay, better to put off war, not weddings.”

  Rodrigo's eyebrows rose and he sipped his wine, trying poorly to hide amusement behind the glass. “Have you someone in mind, then? The Kaiser has daughters, if you've an eye for blondes, though the Parnan Caesar's girls follow the faith.”

  Silver-tinged exasperation flooded Javier. He tightened his fingers around the glass stem, obscurely certain that if he could keep himself from shattering fragile crystal, he could surely convince Rodrigo of what needed doing without witchpower coercion. “I'm not the only one who needs a wife, uncle.”

  Rodrigo went still, amusement draining away, then sipped again at his wine. “Don't tell me you've joined that harping chorus. I'm in my sixth decade, too old for such nonsense.”

  “You're in your sixth decade, and I'm your only heir, and you would have us all go to war.” Javier's voice fluted high and broke, a humiliating reminder of his comparative youth. A sip of wine fortified him and cleared his head, and for a clarion moment he realised that, witchpower or no, Tomas's demand or no, he, too, believed that a marriage for the prince of Essandia was necessary. Neither Essandia nor Gallin, nor the Ecumenic church, could afford to lose their monarchs, and he was too fragile a thread to hang all hopes on.

  Power flared, fueled by his sudden certainty. Javier grasped at it this time, not to roll Rodrigo's will, but to fill his own voice with passionate conviction. “I've never understood you or Lorraine in this matter, though in this one instance I grasp her motivations more clearly than yours. Marrying means putting a king above her, and losing control of what is now hers. You have no such excuse. No woman could wrest Essandia from you, and with this one exception, your piety has never made you foolish.” Anger, more than humour, creased his mouth. “You're even willing to set aside any question of whether my own gifts are God-granted or devil-born because they're useful to you and to the ends you desire. So is a wife, Rodrigo.”

  His uncle's gaze sharpened on him again, marking clearly that Javier had used his name with no honourifics at all. “Think you my equal now, lad?”

  “I think myself a crowned head of Echon. I have neither your wisdom nor your battlefield experiences, but I do have profound interest and concern over the Essandian succession.”

  “Do you not wish that throne yourself?”

  Stupefaction rose up in Javier, blinding him with silver. “Do you think one throne is not enough for most kings? Oh, aye, an empire's an appealing thought, but I would be stable on my own throne before looking to yours. Nevermind me: you are about to go to war, and you will leave behind a people very nervous about their kingdom if there is no hint that you intend to do well by them. A marriage, even, God forbid, an unconsummated one, gives them hope. Do you not like women?”

  Whether it was audacity or exasperation that drove the last question, Rodrigo's expression was worth any price Javier might pay for it. He might have been a cow, round-eyed and dull with witlessness, and despite his pique Javier laughed.

  A backhand blow, much the same as he'd dealt Marius a few days earlier, exploded white light behind his eyes, littering it moments later with the red throb of pain. Head turned to the side, though he had not staggered, Javier touched fingertips to his cheek and found it split open, a divot of flesh marked by Rodrigo's ring of state. Dumb-foundedness had left the prince's eyes, replaced by rage and insult.

  Javier found a thin smile and emphasised it with a mocking bow. “Forgive me, your majesty, my tongue has grown too bold.” Then, with no more regret than he'd felt in speaking in the first place, he added, “It's a common enough question, uncle. You've had no faithful male companions any more than women, but a man, a king, of your age, without a wife or children? It's what people wonder.”

  There had been less of the knife twist in Marius's telling of what people whispered about Eliza. Shame shot through him, leaving a channel for anger: he had no reason or need to apologise to one of his own subjects, and kings did not belittle themselves with such talk betwixt each other.

  “Are you through?” Rodrigo's voice was made of ice, colder and more distant than Javier had ever heard it. More ashamed than before, and angrier still, Javier bit his tongue, wondering how he'd become the wrongdoer when he had held back witchpower temptation and used only words to make his arguments. Rodrigo, exuding calm and confidence, with nothing of a sulk in his stride, walked past Javier to open the door.

  “What will you do?” Javier threw the words after Rodrigo in a shout, hearing a plaintive note where there ought to have been challenge. Rodrigo turned a disinterested gaze on him, then lifted his eyebrows at the open door.

  Javier, witchpower rage boiling in his mind, stalked out.

  RODRIGO, PRINCE OF ESSANDIA

  26 February 1588 † Isidro; the small hours of the morning

  The thought that rides Rodrigo as he closes the door on his nephew is a simple one: it appears he's made a mistake.

  The admission's not a comfortable one for anybody, much less a prince of the realm. A king, in anyone else's terms, but old history keeps the Essandian royal line from naming themselves kings, though their women are queens. It's one part honouring ancient and pagan gods, and another part acknowledgment of the Maure peoples who conquered Essandia once upon a time. They have gone, for the most part, but they've left behind a racial memory of their ease in taking the westerly Primorismare country, and a recollection that, as rulers, they called themselves princes, not kings. Why solidarity with a conquering people seems important to Essandians, not even Rodrigo is certain, but he rather likes being the sole prince among the kings of this continent. No one doubts his equality, and in the end, that's all that matters.

  Javier
, though, might discount tradition and name himself king when the Essandian crown passes to him. The boy is unexpectedly arrogant, an aspect Rodrigo doesn't remember from his childhood. It may be his damnable witchpower, or it could simply be youthful fear, but it will not earn him any followers, and a young king intending on a war needs his people to love him. A young king who may become a young emperor needs far more: he needs blind passion from most and clearheaded, dogged loyalty from a handful. Arrogance will not earn him either.

  And now, because the boy is arrogant, because he bears a cursed power, because his vision seems to end at the tip of his nose, because of all these things, for the first time in the thirty and more years he's reigned, Rodrigo finds himself genuinely considering the unpalatable possibility of marriage. There has always been Lorraine, yes; he would have married her out of duty to the church, but neither of them ever had any intention of stepping out that far. She has, in many ways, provided him with the perfect foil, for he couldn't seriously consider other offers while the endless negotiations with Aulun dragged on. But he'll no more marry the aging queen than he might marry beautiful young Tomas; neither could give him heirs, and if Javier has grown up a fool, Rodrigo may need an heir more than he believed.

  The truth is that of the two—Tomas and Lorraine—Rodrigo would prefer to bed the former. He's known since childhood that a man's clean lines are more appealing to his eye than a woman's curves, but he's known as well that to lie with men is a shocking sin. He knows a few men who have struggled with this, and others who have embraced their doom, but for himself it has never been an especial difficulty. He sleeps with neither, not for purity's sake, but to keep his lineage uncluttered on the one side and to avoid castigation and guilt on the other. Whether God has given him this bent to test him or to tempt him makes no difference: Rodrigo does not succumb.