The Pretender's Crown

by C. E. Murphy

  AKILINA, QUEEN OF ESSANDIA

  Rodrigo murmurs “I'm sorry” the moment they're outside the strategy tent, and what's more, he does it in Khazarian. Akilina, whose pride is keeping her from rubbing her wrists or hissing in pain as blood comes back to her fingers, is not so prideful that she can't be made to trip over her own feet in surprise, and in regaining her balance promptly loses the battle to keep her hands still. She wrings her wrists and stares at him in astonishment, and Rodrigo de Costa, her husband and the prince of Essandia, repeats, “I'm sorry I shouldn't have let them keep you in ropes, but I believed you were safer that way.”

  “I was.” Akilina can't tell which she begrudges more, that he's right or that she's admitting it. “Rodrigo, I did not—”

  “I know.” Rodrigo rolls his eyes so dramatically his eyebrows move, giving him the look of a much younger man, there in the Brittanic moonlight. He turns a rueful smile down at her, and says, “Well, you might have, I suppose, if you'd imagined six months ago that Sandalia would die, that three countries would unite under Cordula's banner to take revenge on her murderer's throne, that you'd be bartered in marriage as a piece to wed a tremendous army and an unstoppable navy together, and that that navy would be drowned in the first battle the war saw.”

  “Irina did.” Akilina sounds bitter to her own ears: she had not imagined Irina Durova to be so foresightful.

  “No.” Rodrigo shakes his head and turns toward the battlefields. They're aglow with campfires now, and the wind carries voices speaking half a dozen languages up to them, an unintelligible blur of humanity that he speaks over without heed. He seems to Akilina a perfect monarch in that moment, literally above the concerns of ordinary men. “Irina saw a chance to ally herself with the Essandian navy and its trade routes, all for a price far less than her own hand or Ivanova's in marriage. But Javier's right. She holds her throne with an iron grip, and would never close channels with Lorraine completely. She'll have sent an envoy to Aulun to smooth the waters and to be there waiting, orders in hand, should the alliance our marriage built go sour in any way. Anything less makes an enemy of Lorraine, and with Sandalia gone, Irina will want her sister queen to side with her. They have only each other now.”

  He glances at her, a darkness in his eyes, and Akilina, seeing where that comes from, dispenses with everything but the truth: “If Sandalia had died by my hand, husband, I wouldn't have been there to scream over her body.”

  Rodrigo's eyebrows quirk upward, and then a second time, making something of a shrug. “No. No, you wouldn't have been.” He puts the slightest emphasis on you, giving Akilina credit that amuses her. Lesser killers, that emphasis suggests, might have been at Sandalia's side to watch her die, but not Akilina Pankejeff. She's wiser and more subtle than that.

  Of course, so is Belinda Walter, who did murder the queen of Gallin, and who has managed to earn herself the heirdom to a throne through it. Akilina's admiration for the young woman knows no bounds, and she looks forward to an opportunity to kill her. There's an amber rose that she carries with her, a jewel Belinda wore for a few very short hours after Akilina gifted it to her. It had been meant to go with her to the grave, but instead Akilina rescued it from the aftermath of the bloody mess in Sandalia's courtroom six months ago, and has kept it nearby ever since. It had been beautiful at the hollow of Belinda's throat, and that's where Akilina will place it again, when she finishes the game between herself and the Aulunian heir.

  There's a new and interesting side to that particular game, now that Akilina is the Essandian queen. If Belinda is dead, then Javier is all the more likely to gain the Aulunian crown as a pretender to the throne, making him king or heir to half of Echon. He's as of yet unmarried and without children, and so there's a chance Akilina might be able to set her child as heir to the lands he'll claim.

  Javier de Castille will, of course, have to die childless to solidify her child's claim, but it's no more outside of bounds than Javier's claim to the Lanyarchan throne through his mother's first marriage. The gaining of thrones is a delicate matter, born of politics and cleverness, and if Akilina Pankejeff can topple a row of dominoes, it will make her queen of an empire to rival Irina's.

  That would be ambition realised to a glorious degree, and that, if anything, would be safety. It's a complex path to security, but the risk is worth it.

  “You should return to the generals and their strategies,” she murmurs, as though that's the only topic she's been considering.

  “Not until I've seen you safely back to our tent.” Rodrigo pulls a thin smile. “We may be among friends here, but I would prefer not to risk my wife or her child to someone bitter over Khazar's betrayal.”

  “Allow me, my lord.” Sacha Asselin comes out of the dark, looking broody. It's not an expression well-suited to his sandy hair and light eyes; Marius would wear it better, though from what Akilina knows of him, Marius doesn't tend toward brooding.

  Rodrigo makes a sound of pleasure and surprise and embraces the young lord, then steps back to tease him: “Have you been hiding here waiting for the chance to squire my queen, Sacha?”

  Sacha loses some of his sulkiness to smile at Rodrigo. “For weeks, my lord, ever since duty called me back to Gallin.” Then the smile falls away and he glances toward the strategy tent; toward, more precisely, the unseen red-haired king within.

  “He'll be free soon enough,” Rodrigo promises quietly. “If I can entrust Akilina to your escort I'll herd those old women out of there on the good sense of all of us needing sleep before tomorrow's battle. It'll be good for him to see you, Sacha. It's hard, being newly come to a crown.”

  Sacha turns to Akilina, all politely mocking concern. “Is it true, majesty? Is it difficult, bearing the weight of a crown?”

  Akilina, who a day ago would have played along, finds her throat sour with bile, and lifts her hands to show the red raw marks around her wrists. “More difficult than I had imagined, Lord Asselin.”

  Sacha blanches and actually drops to a knee, hand fisted against it. “Forgive me. I was foolish and meant no offence.”

  “Get up, Sacha,” Akilina says gently. She's not angry; indeed, she could almost feel sorry for the young man. “You meant no harm. I know that.”

  “I should be wiser than this.” Sacha gets to his feet, but his hands remain balled, and Akilina wonders if it's her pain or his embarrassment he feels the most for.

  “That much,” Rodrigo says lightly, “is true. Keep her safe back to our tent, Sacha. There will be trusted guards posted, so you needn't stay. Javier will wait on you.”

  “My lord.” Sacha's voice is barely a whisper, and he offers his elbow to Akilina with all the attitude of a whipped puppy. Rodrigo nods to them both and removes himself to the strategy tent, while guards—trusted escort or no, there are always guards—fall into step ahead of Akilina and Sacha to bring them to the battlefield tent that's the home of Essandian royalty.

  “You've lost the look of pleasure you had about you in Isidro, Sacha.” Akilina speaks in Khazarian; Sacha has enough of the tongue to be passable, and the guards are Isidrian. She can say anything she likes without fear of being understood by those who should not understand. “Are things not well with the king?”

  “He's besotted by his priest.” God, the bitterness in Sacha's tone! Akilina has the lighthearted impulse to bring his hand to her mouth and lick it, to see if he tastes as sour as his words. Instead she squeezes his forearm, perhaps imparting comfort, but more important, offering solidarity. She and Sacha are in this scenario together, and she would choose him over Rodrigo if she could: these are the things she wants him to believe. For an amusing moment, it occurs to her that the latter, at least, is true: Sacha's easier to control, and Akilina prefers men to bend at her whim. Lips pursed, she walks a little way, considering that, and decides she's glad she hasn't had Sacha murdered yet. He's close to Javier, and if she should need to have the young king killed, Sacha might easily give her the way in.

  But that's not wh
ere her thoughts ought to be resting, not now. “Does the priest weaken him?”

  Sacha makes a derisive sound. “He's been weak all along. I never knew how weak, not until I learned about the power he's been granted. He's had this his whole life, and still he hid behind his mother's skirts, and now behind Tomas's cassock. He doubts his every step and begs forgiveness from a God who gave him power to be used. And nothing I do or say seems to sway him, not anymore. Not with the priest on hand.”

  Akilina barely thinks about her response; doesn't think at all, but lets the obvious fall from her lips: “Then the priest must be removed.”

  The young Lord Asselin, who is not as pragmatic or hard as he likes to imagine he is, comes to a stop and stares at her as though she's voiced the unthinkable. Akilina widens her eyes and, if they were not in public, would put her fingers against his chest, mould herself to his body, make of herself an innocent and sweet thing ripe for the taking. Sacha's an easy mark, and will agree to anything if he believes she'll be his reward. But they are in public, and she's not fool enough to throw over a throne in favour of a crude lordling with tall ambitions. She jostles him into walking again, quickly enough that it should look only as though one or the other has put a foot down wrong, and when they're once more in pace she says, “Would it not solve many problems, my lord? His majesty has been led astray so often this past year, looking for salvation and answers in newcomers. You three must know, though, that you're his heart and his guides, if only his eyes can be cleared. Beatrice Irvine is gone. Without the priest, who else can he turn to but you?”

  “It would be better.” Sacha's speaking to a dream, not to Akilina, but that's all right. They've reached Rodrigo's tent, and the guardsman there—Viktor, poor Viktor, so besotted and bewitched by Belinda Primrose that he has, in the months since she broke his mind, become little more than an automaton. Akilina had hoped he might heal with Belinda's death, and so brought the wretched man to watch the beheading Sandalia had staged. But no, the axe fell and some poor girl's head rolled, and Viktor let go a terrible shout and fell to his knees, face in his hands as he cried, “She is not my Rosa, she is not my Rosa, she is not my Rosa!” He has said nothing else since, not in Akilina's hearing, and yet she's kept the guardsman on, waiting for some thread of sanity to work its way through his fractured mind. It may never, but the dvoryanin is curious, and it does her no harm to have a guard who never speaks. So it's poor Viktor who pulls the tent flap aside and allows them entrance, and Viktor who lets it fall again without any thought as to whether the Essandian queen ought to be left alone, in private, with a man.

  Which gives Akilina all the opportunity she could want to tuck herself against Sacha's side and sigh the sigh of a woman bereft. “If Rodrigo were not so sure he would return soon …”

  “I've done my duty by you both,” Sacha says, not for the first time, but without the smug attitude he once displayed. “Cuckolding's one thing, but asking to be caught for it, that's something else. Not even a queen's that fine a spread.”

  Someday, Akilina is going to stuff a knife into Sacha Asselin's guts, and smile as he bleeds out.

  The thought cheers her, and she turns a toothy grin on the youth. “Nor is any young buck, my lord Asselin.” Then, because she doesn't want him off her hook, she softens her expression and smoothes her hand over her belly as she adds, quietly, “But Rodrigo's not a young man, and children need fathers.”

  Sacha's gaze snaps to her stomach, then returns to her face with such neutrality it screams of ambition. Akilina smiles again, then lets her eyebrows draw together and says, gently, “Think a while on the priest, my lord. Find us an answer.”

  JAVIER DE CASTILLE

  There would be no battle, come morning. Not of the usual sort; that was agreed on. The day's duty was to unite the splintered aspects of the Cordulan army, and, those tactics decided, the generals and Rodrigo had left Javier to his tent. He doused torches with witchpower will, too weary to get to his feet as a normal man might, and sat in the dark a long while, his eyes gritty with exhaustion.

  No one—not Gaspero in Parna, not these gathered generals tonight, not Rodrigo—had struggled against his will as effectively as Tomas del'Abbate. Simplicity told him he should be grateful, that the young priest and his faith in God had greater strength than any of the other men Javier had tried to overpower, or that Javier's magic had grown to such strength that these men were easy to break. Here, at least, they were of a mind to fight; he hadn't needed to push them in an unnatural direction. And yet that they acquiesced so easily stole his confidence, rather than enhanced it.

  Nothing, it seemed, could satisfy him. Javier opened his eyes to the muggy black tent, of a mind to call for Tomas and guilty at how many times he'd interrupted the priest's sleep. Surely he could find comfort elsewhere for a while; Tomas carried enough of Javier's troubles on his shoulders. Sleep might be enough for Javier himself, at least for tonight. He shoved out of his chair, trusting his feet to know a safe path through the tables and seats strewn about the tent.

  “You faltered.” Sacha's voice cut through the darkness, a thick growl of accusation.

  Javier looked up blindly, exhaustion filming his vision as much as night did. “I didn't see you come in.” Witchpower only twitched sluggishly as Javier reached for Sacha with it, and subsided without bringing him any hint of his friend's intentions. That was all right: words had done well enough for all of them, most of their lives. Javier passed a hand over his eyes, trying to wipe away the haze, then picked out what sense he could from what Sacha'd said. “I faltered? When?”

  Concern washed weariness away while he thought of the day's battle, then sagged. “At the end, when Rodrigo came. I know. I was… so tired, Sacha. I should have tried harder.”

  “When Rodrigo came?” Sacha spat the words hard enough to send a cramp through Javier's shoulders. “I watched you this morning, Javier. After yesterday, we all know you can make concussive blasts with the witchpower, but you gave up on them almost before the battle was met. You threw a handful, no more, when you might have decimated the enemy troops.”

  “That—” Javier's voice cracked on the single word and he searched for wine in the dark tent, then gave it up and swallowed instead. “Sacha, I—”

  “What did the priest say to you?” Knives had duller edges than Sacha's questions, and fire, less heat. “I begged you to be strong for us, Javier. We needed your power today, and instead you were a woman on the field. What did he say to you?”

  “He said nothing! Sacha, you understand nothing!” Javier crashed into the table, sending pages and quills to rattling. The witchpower awakened again, pounding silver through his veins, feeding on his anger. “There was no point in bombing—”

  “It was what we needed you to do!” Sacha flung a chair aside, crashing it into others to underline his shout. “It was what I asked you to do, Javier, and what am I to the king if my pleas fall on deaf ears? How can I advise a man who won't listen? How do I lend boldness to the troops if our king, with his God-granted gifts, shivers and shies at shadows? How—”

  Witchpower roared in Javier's ears, louder than blood. He moved with its tide, taking long steps toward his oldest friend with no thought in mind but to silence him. Sacha, unafraid, forthright, stood his ground, still bellowing accusations that he refused to hear answers to. Javier would make him hear, make him hear at any cost, and seized his shoulders with that intent.

  “Leave off, Sacha.” This time the unexpected voice came in a shaft of moonlight, Eliza pushing the tent flap open far enough to admit herself. Sacha bit off his fury with a snap, and Javier flinched, suddenly too aware of what he was about to do. Too aware that in another breath he would have snapped Sacha's will, would have proven himself, once more, untrustworthy amongst his friends. A blade gutted him, bright and mocking: his own power, stronger than he was, and Tomas not there to lend him the hardy faith he needed to stand against it.

  Silver clarity brightened his world, witchlight anger filli
ng the tent because it had nowhere else to go, with Javier's will to dominate abated. Everything was illuminated: each action they'd taken in the last weeks had been well-lit, forbidding them to hide their darkest thoughts in shadow. Only the night of the blood storm had been a black one, and that, too, seemed as it should be. Heart hammering, witchpower still surging in him, he released Sacha and turned toward Eliza.

  No light was unkind to Eliza Beaulieu. In witchlight she was porcelain, short hair grown long enough now to tuck behind her ears and frame her face, making her eyes larger and darker than ever. There was insufficient strength to the blue moon to make a shadow of her body within her clothes, and witchlight only offered promises and hints, but Javier imagined her lithe curves so easily it seemed he could see them. So, he thought, did Sacha, and there again lay a sword between friends, one Javier had never intended to forge.

  “Destruction has a price, Sacha.” Eliza left the flap pulled open so light spilled in and came between them in fact as well as figuratively. Fingertips on Sacha's chest, she pushed him back a step. “The skies rained blood, and we survived, but at what cost to Javier's soul? We need a warrior, but we also need him to come out a king on the other side of this war, and I'm not sure anybody can do what he did for long and hold on to what makes him human. Is your pride worth that price? Go on.” She jerked her chin toward the door, dismissing him more crudely than a king might, but with as much finality “Get drunk if you have to, but sleep it off and come to your senses, Asselin. He's going to need you in the morning. We all will.”

  “Women and priests.” Sacha looked beyond Eliza, looked to Javier again, and his mouth twisted as he hissed the words. “If this is what you are, Javier, I've been a fool all my life.”