The Pretender's Crown

by C. E. Murphy

  Distant from the mining sites lay cities, great square buildings with uniform windows and tall smokestacks that belched black muck into the sky. The men and women who worked them looked weary, ill-fed, grey with smoke as they guided ugly chunks of precious metal down rattletrap belts that led to processing centres a thousand times larger than any forge Javier had ever dreamt of. Heat boiled out of them, turning the sky to hazy waves and bringing the very depths of Hell to life.

  His voice cracked, pushing aside the pictures: “If this is what they want, they must be stopped—”

  “Wait.”

  Another ship sliced through the sky, and this time fire did rain from it, huge slabs of light slamming into the ground, into buildings, into the mines, and killing men by their hundreds. Belinda whispered, “I've seen inside their ships, Javier …”

  With the whisper came the image of a man, though that simple word fell away into nothingness as the creature came clearer. It was man-shaped in the way a peddler's monkey might be, with a misshapen head atop a central column, but nothing else in its makeup said man in any way. The face was a snarl of rage, eyes set wide apart and swiveling independently of each other, and too many brutish limbs manoeuvred the controls of its ship. It had half again the bulk of any man Javier had ever seen, so thick and fearsome it might forgo its radical weaponry entirely and simply pull its enemies apart. Even as nothing more than a picture in his mind, it stank of something that made his bowels turn to water, as though it could crawl inside his head and trigger a primitive terror that undid any rational thought and strength of character he might cobble together.

  “What …?” Horror lay somewhere in the depths of his question, but bewilderment was what coloured it.

  “Invaders from a foreign land,” Belinda whispered. Her voice and her magic were both laden with uncertainty, not in what she shared but in how it could be. “They come for our … our salt and our metal and our land. These ones are Robert's enemy, the enemies of his queen. They fear them in particular because the witch-power has so little effect on them.”

  “In particular?” Now horror did break through, Javier shaking off the images to stare at Belinda. “There are others?”

  “Dozens. Dozens of races, all in need of the same resources, as we need what we take from the Columbias. Some are more easily defeated.” Belinda put her hands along her temples as though she tried to hold her thoughts together. “Some fall before the witch-power easily. Those ones pursue other paths of exploration, staying away from Robert's kind. The space between the stars is almost infinite, and they rarely meet anymore. But those who can fight the witchpower will come on Robert's heels, will come to strip this world of its iron and water and greenery. Robert means for us to feed those resources to his queen, to advance us so far as to deliver them what they need while they never soil their … hands.”

  Another picture rode with the last word, a great silvery scaled monster with no more hands than an insect might have. It cried of dragon to Javier's mind, though only because no mortal creature he knew had such size or such sheen: it looked less like a great wyrm or terrible lizard than a giant, segmented insect, oddly fragile for all its enormity. “My father's people consider themselves delicate invaders,” Belinda whispered. “They make slaves to do their bidding rather than destroy populations and take what they desire. The ones who come after them would simply wipe us from our homes as if we were rats.”

  “But what are they? Where are they from?” Not why—the why of what the things Belinda told him of made sense, in a remote and unemotional way. His people raided the Columbian continent for goods and raw materials; the idea that someone else might invade them for the same seemed only reasonable. But those who might come for Echonian resources should be Khazarian, or Aferican, not monsters encased in ships that cut through sky instead of water. Cold crawled over Javier's skin and inched its way to the bone, carrying disbelief beginning to border on refusal.

  Belinda laughed, soft sound of near panic. “I don't know. Alien. Inhuman. Things I never dreamt existed. God hasn't peopled only our world, Javier, even though your church or mine would burn me for the heresy of saying so. But what I've taken from their mind is real. No one could imagine it.”

  “But he's—” Javier choked, unable to put voice to the idea that Robert could be other than a man.

  Belinda swallowed, so strained he felt it through the witchpower. “The soul leaves the body at death, transcending to Heaven or Hell. They have a way of capturing it, giving it a new body and a new life.” Her uncertainty rose through the witchpower, not in doubting that something like what she described happened, but unable to comprehend how. “It has to do with the witchpower, with their ability to make magic with their minds. It defines them, more than it defines us. We see our talents as powerful, but they consider what they can do here to be weak. But it's strong enough to slip into a few places and to shape our countries and our continents so that we'll be raised up to serve them. And if we don't allow this shaping we'll have no defence when their enemies come. We'll have no way to fight back against any of them.”

  “So you would play both sides against the middle,” Javier said slowly. “You would hide from Robert Drake the fact that we move against him even as we embrace the changes he brings?”

  “We don't dare turn to him for help. He'll use his witchpower against us and bend us to his will.” Belinda's argument rang with unshakable surety. “You said I'd hidden my power behind walls of womanly fear, but it was Robert who locked it away. I was too young, my power developing faster than he was prepared for, so he placed that wall in my mind. I remember him doing it, though I didn't understand all that it meant until I met you. And he stopped your power in Lutetia, stopped it without effort. He could well be able to do it again.”

  “We're stronger now, both of us.” Javier spoke without knowing whether he was truly entertaining Belinda's madness or simply drawing it to its inevitable conclusions. “We might be less easily taken now.”

  “And if we defeat him only to learn he reports to his foreign queen? We can't know what she might expect of him.” Belinda sank back, face pinched. “I know a thing or two about living in the shadows, Javier. About shaping events from there, and the wisdom of moving subtly.”

  Javier bared his teeth, anger coming to sudden light inside of him. “If we can do nothing about Drake, then—”

  “Dmitri,” Belinda said in a low vicious voice. “He's under Robert's command, a servant to the general, and he has in more ways than Robert used us badly. He has strength, but I know his secrets now, and with him removed Robert will rely on me all the more, giving us a place of power inside his plans.”

  “Us. The day when we were us has long passed. Why are you here, telling me this?” Muscle tightened in Javier's jaw, anger fanning higher. “What good am I to you in this power play?”

  “I need allies. This battle is larger than Gallin or Aulun, larger than Reformation or Ecumenic law. I might succeed in the shaping of one country, but to stand against what's coming we need a continent of a single mind. A world, if we can make it.”

  “No.” Anger burst over Javier's skin, driving away the cold and leaving him staring down the Aulunian heir with fresh loathing. “This madness is of your own making. This war is of your making, in the shape of my mother's death.” He threw those words at her, claiming Sandalia as family; the ties there were far stronger than the story Belinda had spun, no matter how much truth he felt in its core. “These plots are yours to unmake, not mine. You don't need allies, not to fulfill your ambitions, not to murder this Dmitri or trick your Robert. You want friends, people to salvage whatever desperate fraction of yourself still has a conscience. I owe you nothing, least of all that. You say we've been used, but I've been used, and by you. Your nasty truths, the things you've learned, they change nothing. I'll delight in crowning myself the Aulunian king, knowing in my gut that it's no pretender's crown, and you, my enemy, will die on a hangman's tree, nothing more than a fast-fading
memory.”

  Honest astonishment filled Belinda's eyes, and she was silent a few seconds before saying, “But the things I've shown you—”

  “Are madness. Even if they're true, they're madness, and lie so far beyond my grasp that I cannot even pretend to believe we could face them.”

  “What if you're wrong? What if we can?” Belinda leaned forward as though she'd catch his hand again.

  Javier pulled back, denial and rage filling his motions as he spat, “Then Belinda Primrose can save us all. You can give me nothing that makes entertaining your games worthwhile.” He climbed to his feet, all but stumbling over Marius's grave in his anger and his haste to be away.

  Belinda's voice followed him, hard with desperation: “I can give you a child.”

  BELINDA WALTER

  This time she was prepared for the witchpower lashing that came down on her, and shielded herself from it. Disgust and fury drove that blow, and she weathered it, knowing she'd spoken so poorly as to earn the burst of temper. “I am pregnant,” she said beneath the storm of his anger. “Not by you, but by Dmitri, and so will bear a child who is fully heir to the witchpower. Eliza can't have children, Javier. If you mean to make her your bride, you'll need an heir, and she can't give you one.”

  “And you would—” Javier's barrage of wrath ended in a sputter of unwelcome hope. “Why?”

  Breathing hurt, as though she'd been laced into a corset tightly enough to damage her ribs. Despite that, despite too little air, her heart beat much too fast, flooding her body with heat. This was a devil's bargain she'd never dreamt of making, and it twisted tears through her, though they didn't rise so far as her eyes. No, they only reached her throat, making her voice small and tight as she answered. “Because you're still outside Robert's easy realm of influence. Because to get a controlling hand in your court, in your life, he'll have to send or become someone else, and you can sense the witchpower if it comes close. Because you need this, and it's all I have to bargain with.”

  She dragged in a deep breath and felt something pop in her chest, a shard of pain that loosened a little of the tightness that bound her. Everything she'd said was true, but this last was perhaps truest of all, and most risky to admit: “Because I'm Lorraine's heir and I won't be permitted to bear a child out of wedlock. If I can only stay free long enough to bear it, this is my child's best chance to survive.”

  “You would be well off a prisoner of war, then.” Scratchiness filled Javier's tone, making him sound as rough as Belinda felt. Hope lanced her, a blow so hard she folded with it before forcing herself straight to meet Javier's gaze.

  “Help me orchestrate these next few days and weeks of war, and I'll come to your war camp a willing prisoner. Lorraine and Robert know by now that I've left Alunaer. They'll have some poor girl playing my part until I can be returned, and won't make a public spectacle of my being missing. It looks too clumsy as if they can't control me. You can negotiate the terms of my release under that cover, and be satisfied with them a month or two after the child is born.”

  “Or I could just have you killed.” Javier sounded almost curious, so matter-of-fact as to be dismissive.

  Witchpower rose in her like a tide, seeming slow but also inexorable as it turned her vision to gold. “You could try.”

  Javier chuckled, though his own silver power made no effort to respond to Belinda's flat anger. He'd tested her, then, nothing more, but even knowing that, she wanted to spit fire at him, to crush him and his ambition where he stood. The impulse still rode her as he asked, “Why would I give up the Aulunian heir? Particularly when I desire her crown?”

  “Because Aulun will show you no quarter if Lorraine believes me dead at your hand. We have the Khazarian alliance, and Irina's army is endless. A sweet enough bargain will have Gallin sandwiched between the army already here and a new force sweeping in from the east. You're already outnumbered. Gallin would be destroyed.” Belinda's nails cut into her palms, a luxury of reaction she once would never have allowed herself, but she no longer cared. A lifetime of stillness had done its duty, had made her invisible and had permitted her to excel at the tasks she'd been set, but she was coming into a different life now. She was no longer a secret, and should a crown be placed on her head the knack for hiding thought and feeling would be useful, even crucial, but her role would be to be seen. She could permit herself the indulgence of emotion now, and a part of her revelled in it.

  “And with Gallin your child.”

  Belinda's smile felt sharp enough to be a snarl. “Your child, for all they'd know. Aulun would show grace and kindness toward the babe and toward her enemies, and rescue the wretched tot, adopt it and raise it up, and the Gallic throne would become Aulun's after all. We can do this dance all night, Javier, and I have no more patience for it. Will you take my bargain?”

  “And let you walk free to sow chaos on the battlefield? You're here now. It wouldn't be my wisest move, to let you go.”

  Belinda stood, finally making herself an equal to the king across the grave. “Do you think you can stop me?”

  “No,” he said after a long moment. “No, I don't suppose I can. This plan of yours… needs Eliza's blessing.”

  “Oh,” Belinda muttered, “this will be rich.”

  ELIZA BEAULIEU

  The only clever thing Javier has done is to not bring Belinda Walter with him to propose their mad alliance. Eliza might have ended the entire question with a thrown dagger, if he'd been that foolish, and a very large part of her wishes he had.

  Instead, she has a knot in her gut, one that draws her heart and her bladder and her stomach into a single knocking spot, so every time her heart beats she feels the need to both vomit and pee. It might be funny, if it didn't weaken her legs and set a tremble in her hands, which reminds her of the fever that nearly took her life and did take her ability to bear children; and that, somehow, brings her back around to where she is, staring at Javier de Castille as though he's put a knife through her.

  “How can you even be thinking this?” is what she finally asks, though it barely begins to scrape on the things she wants to say. “You want me to raise her child? Is it yours?”

  Javier shudders and shakes his head. “No. No. Thank God, no. She says the child's due at Christ mass, and so it can't be mine. I wouldn't wish that it was. But it is—” He catches her hands in his and holds on too tight, not quite hurting her, but as if letting her go might set him adrift. “It's perhaps our only chance,” he whispers. “It's—”

  “This is far more than asking me to live with her as your spy,” Eliza snaps. “Even if I were to bear your child, Javier, nobody would care if you got a bastard on me as long as you also wed a proper princess and make a litter of children on her.”

  “I want to marry you,” Javier whispers. “Eliza, how much must I pay for being a fool? Marius is dead—”

  “And you're plotting how our lives will go on without him with him not a day in the grave!”

  “I have to!” Javier lets her go with a burst of energy propelling himself backward. “Eliza, if we're to make this thing work it needs to be decided now. Now, yes, in the midst of all this hell. We are given no surcease.”

  “Why does she even suggest it? Out of love for you?” Bitterness fills Eliza's voice and she can't stop it. Javier, though, only sags and takes the anger as though it's his due.

  “Because she wants the babe to live, and Lorraine can't have a bastard grandchild. Giving it up to us saves its life and gives us a chance to be together.”

  “And what does she care if we're together? She wanted you for herself, once. Why not seduce you and claim the baby's yours, and end this war with a marriage between Gallin and Aulun?”

  Javier, drily, says, “I'm not quite so easily led as that, Eliza.” Some of the dourness fades and he looks away. “She took Sandalia's life. Perhaps she offers us this one in exchange. It's not a fair price, but perhaps it's not a bad one either.”

  “She saved me, too.” Eliza slides
fingers over her belly, feeling a place where not even a scar remains. “That blow would have killed a child in my womb, Javier.”

  “Not if God's blessing was on us both,” Javier whispers. “Our army could use a miracle.”

  Hurt stings Eliza, making her feel childish and sullen. “That isn't fair.”

  “No. But then, none of this is. I can't begin to find the moment when it all went wrong.”

  Eliza takes a breath, then holds her tongue. She has an answer to that, a too-clear answer that harkens back to the moment Marius Poulin walked Beatrice Irvine into the prince of Gallin's favourite gentleman's club. The world began an endless tumble toward horror then, and hasn't righted itself since.

  But had Marius done otherwise, Eliza herself would not now be the king's lover, and despite the prices that have been paid, that's the one thing she's wanted all of her days. Had she known the cost would be Marius's life she might have long since walked away, but there was no knowing; there never can be a clear picture of how the future will unfold.

  A bowstring ties itself around her heart and contracts, a small pain accompanying a cruel thought: if there is any way in this world for Eliza Beaulieu to triumph over Beatrice Irvine, it may well be in taking her child, raising it and loving it as her own, and knowing that Belinda will never share that joy.

  It's the wrong place to begin, adoption out of vengeance, and yet Javier's right in more than one way. It's the one chance they might be given, and if the babe is due at the Christ mass, then she and Javier have been lovers just long enough to make it possible. The Pappas in Cordula will be angry, and so will the Parnan king, but no one would condemn Javier for wedding and making legitimate the first child born to his body, not in a time of war. Most will rejoice, and count it a blessing.