The Pretender's Crown

by C. E. Murphy

  The skies rained blood that night.

  He awakened to the sound of it, falling like any other rain from the sky. For a few seconds he lay still, placing himself: this was his tent, this the cot he'd slept in the last fortnight. The rain was a comfort, washing away sins, at least until Marius ducked into the tent, bloody streaks rolling down his cheeks. Javier felt his face give away his fear; until Marius said, abruptly, “It's not mine.”

  Relief slumped Javier in the cot before confusion pushed him upward again. He trembled with the effort, sending the cot to rattling, and Marius pushed him back down again easily. “You've been unconscious fourteen hours. Drink this.”

  Javier took the wineskin Marius thrust at him and coughed on the first sips. “The battle? The army?” His voice broke on the second question, recollection coming back to him more clearly.

  “Lost,” Marius said grimly. “Khazar crushed us, Jav. You held them for almost an hour, but when you collapsed …” He took the wineskin without asking and drank heavily himself. “Our forces are split, with the larger surviving side with you, and a smaller battalion on the other side of the God-damned Khazarian army. Aulun broke through our defences to the north and they've met in the middle. They're dancing on our corpses.”

  “The blood?” Javier gestured at the stickiness on Marius's face, and used the same motion to ask for the wineskin back. “I thought you weren't fighting.”

  “There was no choice, by the end of the day, but the blood's not mine.” Marius handed the wine back and jerked his chin at the tent's front. “Go look for yourself.”

  Jaw set, Javier sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the cot, then swayed. Where witchpower usually lay within him was an emptiness, so deep he'd never known he relied on the magic until it was gone. “Mari…”

  His friend was there, an unexpectedly steady shoulder, a strong arm helping him to his feet. “I've got you, Jav.”

  “You always have.” Javier put too much weight on Marius, barely able to move his own feet, but they stumbled to the door, and took a step outside.

  The smell of blood filled the air, rain doing nothing to wash it away. Clouds turned the sky black, even in the height of summer, and Javier could see little more than pathetic campfires in the distance as water collected and rolled down his face. They stood there a few long moments before Marius said “That's enough,” and pulled him back inside.

  Only then, under the lamplight in the tent, did Javier understand. The water dripping from his hair was tainted red, tasting of copper and dirt. Witchpower fluttered inside him, low warm feeling of satisfaction that overrode, then sank beneath growing horror. Javier wiped his face, watched blood fill the lines of his palm, and whispered, “I did this?”

  Marius shrugged, voice weary beyond disgust. “It's Khazarian blood. The rain's been carrying it all night. Yes, Javier. You did this. It's all right.” A faint note of something familiar replaced the weariness in his words: a note of camaraderie and of pride. “You probably saved us all, Jav. It's terrible, but we'll find a way to make it right.”

  “Get me Tomas.” Javier, still staring at his hands, barely heard what Marius said, glancing up only in time to catch a spasm cross his friend's face. “Get me Tomas, Marius,” he whispered again. “I need the priest.”

  “Yes,” Marius whispered, and even Javier heard agony and understanding in his voice. “Yes, I expect you do.”

  Javier was kneeling when he arrived: kneeling at a tub of water, scrubbing his hands until he thought they might bleed themselves. He heard a movement at the door and let go a cry of relief, making it to a confession: “I enjoyed it.”

  “Good,” Sacha said flatly.

  Javier flinched and turned, still on his knees, to stare at Sacha without comprehension. “I asked for Tomas.”

  “And I'm sure you'll have him soon enough, and as often as you like. But I thought that since you're awake now you might want to know what's happened out there. I'll leave you if I'm in error, my king.” Sacha scraped the words out, grinding them into Javier's skin so he blanched again with each sentence. “Rodrigo is near, perhaps twelve or fifteen hours away. Birds have brought messages to him and back again, since the Khazarian betrayal. The last missives say they've broken for the night and will be here by afternoon. The troops must sleep.”

  “Of course. We'll need them fresh.” Javier's voice came more roughly than he expected. “Akilina?”

  “Under guard and in hysterics. She swears she knows nothing of it; that it's all Irina.”

  “Irina and Lorraine,” Javier whispered. “On what basis?”

  Sacha shrugged and came all the way into the tent, flinging himself into one of the chairs and taking up the wine Marius had abandoned. “Rumours are flying, most of them saying that God's shown Irina that Aulun walks the true path, but we have no answers yet. We're broken, Javier. Your army is split and your men are terrified. I'm the last to counsel caution, but you may need to sue for peace.”

  “No.” Javier closed his fist on bloody water. “No. Today I learned what the witchpower can do.”

  “You overextended yourself and thousands of your men died for it. If you can't do better than that—”

  “I can!”

  A smirk twisted Sacha's face. “Then tell me why you're crying for your priest, and why your first words on my entering were a confession. You need strength, Javier, and if that means rolling in the stench of blood, then you'd better do it. Men are dying on your command. For an hour today you gave them hope, and then you fell and took all their strength. If you want to win this war, you're going to have to do better.”

  Javier, distantly, whispered, “You're cruel, Sacha.”

  “Because I see a man, my friend, my king, crawling when he should stand tall. Because you have power and you loathe yourself for using it. You have got to do better.” Sacha was abruptly in Javier's space, kneeling before him, hands knotted on his shoulders. “We all depend on you, Javi. I depend on you.”

  “And his majesty is right to depend on God's guidance in what is right and what is wrong,” Tomas murmured from the doorway. “Forgive me, majesty Marius said you asked for me.”

  Frustration contorted Sacha's features and he held Javier even more tightly, bringing their heads together so he could whisper, “Don't let the priest weaken you, Javier. We need what you can do.” Then he released Javier as though he'd grasped a hot coal and got to his feet, stalking by Tomas and crashing shoulders with him as he left the tent.

  Tomas jostled with the hit, no hint of his thoughts marring his features as the door rustled and fell into stillness. “You did well,” he finally said, quietly.

  Javier croaked laughter. “Did I? Is the fall of blood from the sky not a sign of the end times? Tomas, I enjoyed it.” Sacha's warning burnt him, but the all but empty place where the witchpower magic had been burned more deeply. “I've never known a woman as sweet, and in the heat of it I thought this must be God's grace giving me pleasure for doing his will. But the magic is gone.” The last words came out a broken whisper, as if spoken by a frightened child. “I'm empty, and know nothing of how to refill this place inside me. What if I'm wrong and the pleasure is the devil's?”

  “The Pappas blessed you.” Tomas came to him, touched his hair, then knelt. “We must believe this is God's will, Javier, all of it. That the Khazarian betrayal is meant to test our resolve, and that we must push all the harder against Aulun.”

  “Sacha thought you would stay my hand.”

  Instead, Tomas took his hands, warm touch that brought a discovery of his own chill. “I've walked this far with you,” the priest whispered. “We've entered Hell, and I'll not leave your side now. We'll pray,” he promised. “God will replenish the magic, and you'll stand fast and take back the ground we've lost. Aulun will be our kingdom, yours and mine in God's eyes and in His name. Don't be afraid, Javier. Don't be afraid.”

  Javier, trembling, leaned forward into Tomas's embrace, and as the priest began to whisper a prayer, f
elt the hunger of witchpower begin to grow again within him.

  BELINDA WALTER

  Belinda should have reached Javier by now, a full fortnight after she slipped away from Alunaer. Should have, and didn't like to think that it was fear keeping her from making contact. There were reasons to have delayed: whispering the stillness around all the ships, drawing it close so that even eyes searching for them were unable to see them, had wearied her. The same trick again spread over the army as it left the water and penetrated Brittany's north shore. They moved in silent secrecy, an advantage her people would have paid dearly in blood had they done without. Worthwhile, but tiring.

  She felt Javier on the edges of that secrecy, felt his awareness of her presence, and shivered under the intensity of his hatred. He would mark this war a success if it ended with her head on a pike, even if every soldier he brought with him died in putting it there. Even his ambitions on Aulun's crown would be satisfied by her death, though he clearly intended on attaining both.

  Hiding an army from plain sight was more exhausting by far than hiding only herself. She'd learned in Lutetia how far she could push herself, and had grown far beyond those limitations now, but even so, without a need to drive herself forward and face Javier, without a mission assigned to her by someone else, she risked a few days of lingering and recovering while the first battles were met. Her confidence in her own witchpower was immense, but she respected Javier's as well, and preferred meeting him when she was at full strength.

  It was not, she had told herself again, fear.

  And then Javier tore the front lines of the Khazarian army apart, turned them to mist that lifted to the sky and came down as red rain. Standing under that hideous downpour, Belinda Primrose admitted fear, and for the first time in her life, stood stymied by it.

  The weight of his power, its destructive potential unleashed, brought ice to her skin, red rain colder than it had any right to be. She'd found the play of his magic erotic, once; now, even beside the truths she'd learned, she could hardly imagine finding anything but horror in what he turned his power to. And yet she felt no maliciousness in it, not like how his anger became pointed and focused when he thought of her. The bloody rainfall was a result of war, a necessary evil: that was what cold red water collecting in her hair and in puddles around her feet told her.

  Slowly, as the sky bled through her clothes and soaked her to the skin, she came to recognise the necessity of what he did in what she had done to the Cordulan armada only weeks before.

  They were both monsters, and she took comfort in that.

  It released her from her fear, gave her a direction to move in. The combined Aulunian and Khazarian armies had won the day, but sleeping under the falling blood of their comrades stripped away their bravado. They would need it come morning, and that, at least, was a thing she could help with.

  Standing unnoticed in the midst of a war camp, Belinda turned her face to the weeping sky and reached for magic. Golden warmth chased the ice away, then stretched upward, though she tried to mute the witchlight itself. Tried, but with her eyes closed, could hardly know if she succeeded, and she had no intention of parting her lashes to risk blood drops splashing in her eyes.

  After the storm and the armada, pushing a handful of summer rain clouds away from her camp seemed simple, little more than a whisper of concentration and an encouragement to empty themselves elsewhere. They had no will of their own, no personality, and yet she was inclined to assign them willingness or stubbornness, depending on how easily the wind bent to her call. She sent them out to sea, not just from over her camp, but from over Javier's. Her armies were distressed by the falling blood, and she thought Javier's might be shorn up by it, such proof as it was of their king's power. Better to take away their source of pride as well as her people's source of worry.

  She waited, witchpower still extended, in expectation of Javier's response. They might fight the war themselves, sister against brother, Aulun against Gallin, Reformationist against Ecumenical, and leave the rest of the armies to return home, there to sleep safe in bed, to lie in the arms of lovers, to forget the savagery that had made up this day and those like it.

  But there was no answer from Javier, no angry lash of power to match the outpour he'd made that afternoon. Recognition sluiced through Belinda, a suspicion without foundation: he had exhausted himself, as she'd done the first time she used her magic extensively; as she'd done, indeed, at the armada, and again in concealing Aulun's navy and army from Gallic eyes. Unlike Belinda, though, Javier had never needed to measure his ability to continue beyond the edge of exhaustion: what he faced now would be new to him, a frightening depletion of witchpower. The war, if it came down to them, would not happen tonight; if she was lucky, if her army was lucky, he would be days in recovery, and his confidence would be even longer in returning to form. With a little leeway, the newly allied forces could finish taking Brittany and move east to Lutetia.

  And Belinda could face an unarmed Javier with her secrets and her plans.

  Satisfied that the rain had stopped, hopeful of her deductions, she opened her eyes to find herself the centre of a gathering, all wide-eyed men struck with awe. She smiled, gentle as she could, and murmured, “You don't see me, my friends. I was never here.”

  For the rest of her life she would wonder what they'd seen that night, and so, for the rest of theirs, would they.

  Javier had recovered by morning.

  Belinda knew it the moment she awakened: the air tingled with released power, far more controlled than it had been for an exhausting long hour the day before. She left the camp, taking high ground a mile or two away, and from there saw Javier standing alone in a column of silver.

  It washed out from around him, ripples that cascaded over his people, shielding them from the Khazarian onslaught. Only sometimes did he lash out with a witchlight bomb, and after the first time she recognised the building of power in him, and so aborted the explosion's power.

  He flinched as though he'd taken a physical hit, just as he'd done months ago in his bedroom as they'd played at this game now made deadly. She was harder to see than he, her power less active; that, it seemed briefly, was how it had always been, Javier with a showy talent and herself keeping hers under wraps, more subtle. Dismay twisted her stomach as she saw how neatly those two things fit together, the one the half of the other, and again cursed herself for not seeing the impossible before. Dmitri would pay for the folly he'd led them into, she promised herself again, and then Javier's attack leapt across the space between them and she flung up a shield of her own.

  She knew Javier's power better than Dmitri's, knew its shape and knew his thoughts, and yet when she followed his magic back, reaching for its source as she'd done with the dark witchlord, the knack of grasping it and cutting it off eluded her. Silver magic hammered her shields as she searched for that point of closure, until a blow slammed through and left her gasping.

  Triumph rather than a second strike hammered through her cracked shields. Belinda pulled back from searching for Javier's weaknesses and strengthened her focus, sealing up her own frailties as she might plaster gapes in a wall. Javier smashed down with his magic again too late, and she felt his shock as strongly as she'd felt his exultance. For all that she'd drowned his armada he still thought of her as weaker than himself, easily overwhelmed as she'd been in the Lutetian courtroom. His next attack came with more anger behind it, verging on frantic: she wasn't supposed to be able to resist him. Mouth pursed, eyes gone vacant as she stared across the distance at her rival, she let her idea of a strong front fade, trying to make herself appear weaker than she was.

  Javier's magic jumped at the chance, crashing down with all the force he had to muster. It rebounded again, less strongly, but Belinda's hand lashed upward, as though she threw a knife, and with that idea pitched her own power back at Javier.

  He staggered, visible action, across the flatlands. More ready for his weakness than he'd been for hers, Belinda flung a second,
weightier ball of witchpower after the first, gold attacking a weak point in his silver shield. The impact felt to her as profound as a cannonball, and for the second time, the Gallic king stumbled. On the battlefield, her army surged forward, taking whole yards of land and beating down the enemy as Javier's shields faltered.

  Delight surged through Belinda: so long as she could distract Javier, her armies had the advantage of numbers and of position. She need only keep him occupied while the shields he'd built to protect his people failed. Aulun would triumph without effort.

  Javier realised his mistake only moments after she did, and she felt the sharpness of his rage before he pulled back from their battle to turn his attention to the larger one below.

  She was tempted to taunt him into another sally, as caught up in the game of war as any of the soldiers on the fields below. She could take him: she knew she could, and in doing so could bring Gallin's ambitions to an end. It was in all ways what the queen's heir should do; it was what duty whispered she must do.

  Carefully, deliberately, Belinda drew her own power back, turning it to nothing more than the containment of Javier's witchpower bombs. They came more rarely as he began to understand what she was doing and saw that his expenditure of magic got too little result. But her own golden power flared in outrage, as though it wanted to respond to Javier's blatant use of magic; as though the part of her which fanned ambition would never rest so long as anyone else dared their own aspirations. She, and she alone, was meant to inspire loyalty, as much as she was meant to be loyal to her queen.

  Belinda's hoarse laugh scraped her throat. Robert and Dmitri and their far-off queen had made of her a bewildering thing; a thing she barely understood herself. Childish logic told her that loyalty built from peasant to lord to king to God. No one walked at the head of such a chain without both owing and owning loyalties. By that reason she could be Aulun's heir and demand her people's loyalty, and still bend her own to her queen.