The Pretender's Crown

by C. E. Murphy

  How easy it is. Eliza falls back a few steps and finds a seat so she can drop her head into her hands. How terribly easy, to slip over the precipice from denial to belief. She's thinking already that the child is Javier's, and if it's Javier's then it can be her own as easily. And to be a mother … that's a dream she put away a long time ago, sealed it with lead edges and tried to forget about. “I have never been able to refuse you.”

  Javier lets go a rush of air and crashes forward to land on his knees before her, to hide his face in her lap. Eliza puts her fingers in his hair, her alabaster ring white against ginger before she bends to kiss his head. “This is madness, my love.”

  “Yes.” Javier's answer is muffled and trembles on the edge of both laughter and tears. “I had better call for the priest, and for Rodrigo. Shall we be wed by noon?”

  “A battlefield bride,” Eliza murmurs. “What will you have me wear, Javier? My trousers and linen shirt, and my tall boots with a dagger at the thigh?”

  “Do that,” Javier whispers, and looks up with a laugh marred by tears. “And I'll wear one of your diaphanous creations, for my hair's longer than yours already. We'll flummox them all.” He kneels up and catches her face in his hands, kisses her carefully, as though she's suddenly become fragile. As if, Eliza thinks, she truly is pregnant, and he, a man suddenly afraid that his touch might damage her or the child. Heart full of confusion and hope, she returns the kiss, then shoos him to find Tomas and Rodrigo so a wedding might be performed.

  In the end she wears one of her gowns, and it's Javier in trousers and a linen shirt. Eliza forgoes her wig, so the short length of hair she's grown out is tucked behind her ears. It's pulled askew by the wind, and is echoed by the flutter and twist of her skirt around her legs and the dance of her heart in her chest. She's never truly imagined being married, has Eliza Beaulieu, and in the crux of it she finds she's terrified. Excited, but terrified, and she wonders if all women come to the altar in such a state.

  Word runs to the troops, down to the battlefield, and for a short while at the noon hour, all the fighting comes to a stop. Eliza has no idea why, but as the allied Cordulan troops turn to watch distant figures on the hilltop, Aulun does not advance. Instead they all watch the handful of people presided over by a priest whose voice cannot carry to the men below.

  It carries as far as Javier and Eliza, and to the prince of Essandia who's come to stand witness, and to Belinda Walter, who watches from the safety of her witchpower stillness, where no one can see her. Her heart's strangely full as she watches this marriage, giving it most of her attention.

  Most, but not all: some of her mind is given over to a witch-power shield keeping Aulun from attacking Gallin's unprotected flank. She ought not: she ought to let her army crash into Javier's and watch the Cordulan alliance crumble under the strength of her army. But she won't have that, not today, not in this moment: that much, at least, she can give to Javier and Eliza de Castille.

  When the vows are said and the kiss is made, the watching troops send up a roar of approval that must be audible across the straits. Rodrigo steps forward then, to kiss Eliza's cheeks and then to murmur something in her ear, something that makes her take knee, and before the world's armies, Rodrigo of Essandia crowns a pauper the new queen of Gallin.

  Belinda, smiling and appalled at her sentiment, slips away, and spends the day doing what she can to mute antagonism between two warring factions, that a king and a queen may be given one brief moment in the heart of loss and sorrow and blood to find a little joy in the knowing of each other.

  ROBERT, LORD DRAKE

  26 June 1588 † Brittany; the Aulunian camp

  Generals, messengers, soldiers; all are listless. It's not the aura Robert expected from an army with the size and strength to easily crush their enemy; he has come to Brittany expecting an enthusiastic victory and a tremendous welcome for the Khazarian ambassador who has given Aulun its overwhelming edge. They had the welcome, Dmitri uplifted by their effusive praise, but they've not had the crushing defeat Robert anticipated.

  Instead he's watched a slow dance on the battlefields as the Cordulan army has worked its way back together, becoming a unified mass instead of huddled, disspirited troops. It's Javier de Castille's witchpower that's done it, and Robert has watched without interfering, almost too interested in the game to worry, for now, about the outcome.

  But today the war's tenor has changed: today Aulun's army has lost its focus, seeming to no longer care that they've got an enemy on the field. Word has come through the troops that Javier has taken a bride, and Robert would think the audacity of marrying in the middle of a war might heat the Aulunian soldiers' blood. Instead they seem content to lay down arms for the day and let Gallin celebrate.

  “It's Belinda,” Dmitri says beside him, and Robert startles.

  “Who's married Javier?” That thought hadn't occurred to him, and for a moment it brightens his day.

  Dmitri snorts. “Not in this or any other world, I think. No, it's Belinda dampening their spirits. Can't you feel it?”

  “Oh,” Robert says, “that.” Now that Dmitri's put the words to it, he can, of course, feel that it's witchpower weighing down Aulun's troops. Belinda's dangerous to him, her witchpower too much like his own, perhaps, for him to notice properly, and that's a thing he doesn't dare admit to Dmitri. “I wonder why.”

  “I suppose she harbours feelings for him still, though I'd think they'd drive her to send her army storming his when he showed a moment of weakness. Shall I clear it away?” Dmitri asks airily and in asking insinuates that Robert's incapable of it.

  “Let them have their rest. Tomorrow will dawn another day.”

  “You trust her implicitly even if she quells the army's fighting urge. What if she's turning against you, Robert?”

  “What if all the stars should fall from the sky?” Robert gives back, with as much concern for the one as the other. “She's one of us, Dmitri. Loyalty bred in the bone. She's never reached beyond the limits she's been given. Not even now, when she's been made heir to a throne, has she striven beyond it. This is her duty and she'll follow it through. If sentiment's taken enough hold to make her soften our troops today, then tomorrow she'll have shaken it off, and will make war with the strongest heart of any of us.”

  “How can you be so certain?”

  Robert looks the scant distance down at Dmitri, bemused. “Because she's my daughter.”

  Dmitri ducks his head, evidently satisfied, and after a moment leaves Robert alone to watch the quiet battlefields.

  BELINDA WALTER

  The distance from Javier's wedding site back to the heart of the Aulunian camp seemed less when she had no witchpower shields to fight against. It was a mile or two, no more, and Belinda traversed it within an hour of the wedding. She felt safer on her side of the Aulunian line, and was glad to climb the hills that gave her a view of the battlefields from the south.

  Gossip amongst the troops warned her that Robert was there, and she came on him speaking with Dmitri. She hung back, listening with mild curiosity until the Khazarian witchlord left. Only then, without dropping the blind she'd wrapped around herself, did she ask, “Do you know why he doesn't trust me?”

  Robert didn't flinch, which perversely pleased her: he shouldn't have known she was there, and yet a part of her wanted him to be the infallible father, looking through her veil of deception as he had when she was a child. “Either he's built a plot with you, or has been unable to,” her father said. “If it's the former, he knows you're untrustworthy; if it's the latter, he hopes to make me think you are. Which is it?”

  Belinda loosed the power that kept her hidden and, smiling, stepped up to Robert's side. “He believes you serve your queen poorly. That this war is wrong, and that alliances must be built instead. He thinks a people inspired by peace and education will leap forward more quickly than a people ravaged by war. He would take your place in the line of fathers, by proving himself wiser and more clever than you.”
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  “Really.” Robert sounded astonished. “I didn't think he had it in him. He shouldn't. What did he offer you?”

  Belinda gave a laugh that belonged to someone she no longer fully recognised. She knew her role so well that it could never falter, and yet the light note of sarcasm and dismissal in her voice felt harder than she wanted, anymore, to be. “A crown. A kingdom. All the things I never coveted, and which patience has brought to me anyway. I sought none of this, Robert. How can I be who I am, what I am, and have truly never reached for what lay beyond the glass?”

  “Because you're a good girl,” Robert said seriously. “Because you've been given tasks and duties and have been happy to fulfill them, knowing yourself a vital and integral part of the dark moments that keep a queen safe on her throne. We live in a world of ambition, my Primrose, but there are those who truly wish only to serve. I'm one. I've raised you to be, too.”

  “And Dmitri?”

  “Dmitri.” Robert fell silent a few moments, watching the fields below. “Dmitri ought to be. How much intelligence have you gathered on his plots, Primrose?”

  “Enough to know he means to use me to displace you.” Belinda's forehead wrinkled, the thought difficult to pursue, even still. “He thinks my ambition, whetted, will push me toward ridding us of you, because he'll tell me more, teach me more, and give me more than you might.”

  “And you think?” A cautious note sounded in Robert's voice, so faint Belinda might not have heard it if she hadn't spent a lifetime attuned to his hints of approval and censure.

  “I think I'd like to know. But from childhood what has mattered to me is that I serve my queen as best I can. I never asked,” she added, almost lightly. “Du Roz was sent to plot against Lorraine, and I never asked what part a young Gallic noble might play in her downfall. Perhaps I was too young then, or perhaps it never mattered. What mattered was you told me it must be done for the queen's safety, and asked me to do it, and I would rather have died than disappoint you. So would I still.”

  “Ah, du Roz,” Robert said. “Du Roz meant nothing to anyone. He was only convenient, and I needed a man no one would miss to see if you could do murder and walk away unscathed. The haste I came for you in was born from his intention on returning to Gallin in a day or two, having spent only enough time in Alunaer to pride himself on walking through enemy courts.” He threw the man away with a gesture of his hand, and in so doing left an empty place of astonishment in Belinda's chest. “Dmitri, though; Dmitri could do us harm.”

  “No.” Belinda's voice sounded thin to her own ears, though it was unmarred by the tremours shaking her body. Du Roz had been a fop, a tool used to shape her, and nothing more. Not an enemy, not a criminal, not a threat: only a man barely beyond a boy's years in the wrong place at the wrong time, where he could die to make Belinda Primrose the queen's most secret assassin. She called stillness and was dismayed at its lack of strength, at how it all but deserted her when she stood at her father's side and needed it most. “Dmitri won't be a problem. He trusts me,” she said with a smile as thin as her voice. “Let me teach him the folly of standing against his queen's desires.”

  “That's my girl.” Robert smiled, a bright and genuine thing she would have given her life to earn as a child, and he pulled her into a powerful embrace. “I'll leave it in your hands. Keep him alive if you can bend him to your will, but if not, better dead than a troublesome thorn in our sides.”

  “This is how it shall go.” Belinda curtsied, smiled, and left Robert on the hillside so she might find a private place and fall to her knees in horror of what she had been made into, and how.

  She emerged at dawn, having spent the night hidden in stillness. The world had gone away from her, no cold, no breeze, no biting bugs; no witchpower or politics pushing or prodding her in any direction.

  Now, with the first morning light, she felt Javier's joy in Eliza, and felt, too, the cold iron will that had kept her from crossing Gallic lines. She admired that he could separate his attention so thoroughly, and do so much with his divided will.

  Robert was closer, a waterwheel of power, running deep and fast and utterly self-absorbed. That, perhaps, defined him in a way Belinda had never realised: all that he was, was meant to serve another, and the single-mindedness of that duty allowed him to look no further than his own needs and ends, with no care for the cost it might extract from others.

  But then, she was little different. She'd come out from hiding clear-eyed, clear-minded; clear of all difficult and weighing emotion—or that was what she told herself. The why of du Roz's death didn't matter: it was a thing done long in the past, and if it had shaped her, then it had done so that she might slip across battlefields inciting both wars and alliances. Come the end of the day, she was as she needed to be.

  So, at least, she told herself.

  Belinda curled a lip at her own softness and wrapped her arms about her shoulders, ending with a hard shake, the sort of thing a frustrated father might visit on an aggravating child. For a lifetime she'd embraced what she was. Becoming coy and shy about it now bordered on absurdity Doubt had to become action, a truth that had been made vividly clear when she'd squatted to pee: her belly was beginning to swell, and she had almost no time left in which to implement her plans and retire to the comparative safety of Javier's war prison. Dmitri had to be dealt with: that was foremost. From there, she could turn her mind to other plots.

  She had no immediate sense of where the dark witchlord was. Perhaps he had deliberately tamped his magic, making himself invisible to her.

  As though anyone whose bed she'd shared could hide from her, much less a man whose own power she'd commanded more than once. Incensed by the idea—and then, below that, faintly amused at her own ire; the witchpower still, even now, tasted of its own opinions and ambitions, though at the same time she couldn't say they were anything other than her own—she cast out a web of witch-light, watching it glimmer briefly in the early-morning sun before it faded into nothing more than her will searching for a singular and most particular presence.

  She found it like a battlecharger riding her down, a wall of black magic with no cracks or infirmities she could sense. Dmitri himself stalked out of that black cloud, fiery, full of passion, beautiful in his hawk-featured way. Oh, yes: even in repose this man was compelling, and when driven by ambition and anger, then whole continents might fall before him, ready to cry his name and take up his banner.

  “That has been my purpose,” he snarled, and for an instant Belinda was taken up in his dream, a whole world united behind a powerful leader whose vision led them to technological wonders and mechanical glories. A world united behind him, venerating him, lifting him to his queen's notice on their words of praise. Cordulan emperors might have striven for such adulation, and wept to see how easily he commanded it.

  Belinda's laugh came soft beneath that picture, making mockery of herself as much as Dmitri. “I thought I was to be the leader under whom this world rallied.”

  There was no apology in the rolling wall of Dmitri's power. To his mind she was a tool, easy to manipulate. “You turned against me, against our dream, and think to steal my child.”

  Belinda had an instant in which to gape, in which to absorb shock. Dmitri had not been meant to know about the child: she'd shielded her thoughts and taken her body from him before she thought he could know. Yet if he did know, reason followed that he would hold back his onslaught of power: surely a witchbreed babe was worth more than the cost of his plans betrayed to Robert Drake. Even as she thought it, though, threat formed as a black-edged weapon in the witchlord's hand.

  New astonishment flooded her, though if she could build a shield with her magic, certainly a sword might be made of it, too, for shields were meant to be shattered by blades. Belinda shoved thought away, turning her attention to the needs of the moment, and Dmitri struck, a terrible crash of power that sent dark spider-webs over Belinda's golden magic. The blow came on as though it had struck through armour, blunted bu
t still strong. She lashed back with a volley of thrown power like she'd used against Javier.

  Dmitri caught those bursts easily, flinging them back toward her. They penetrated her shields, her mind and magic unable to distinguish between her attacks and her own power turned against her. Dizzy more with surprise than pain, she fell under the onslaught, and for a vivid moment saw herself, saw Dmitri, through the eyes of frightened soldiers around her.

  Witchpower lanced back and forth, bright with gold and dark as death. It looked inhuman: she looked inhuman, blazing with more power than she'd ever imagined. Her hair was alight with it, answering to a breeze no mortal man could feel, and her eyes were vivid brilliance. A nimbus enveloped her, blurring her features so she was only feminine, and not any individual woman, and Dmitri, in turn, had become a black knife of masculinity, driving forward to strike at her. In witchpower regalia, they became gods, and for the first time Belinda fully grasped the power Robert's foreign queen could hold over Belinda's own people. If the witchblood could make her seem something so alien and magnificent, then a generation raised up under foreign rule would worship and fear their star-born queen, and never have the heart to stand against her.

  Unexpected compassion broke in Belinda's breast. She might have spared the men around her this battle, might have drawn a veil of secrecy around herself and Dmitri, but she had nothing to spare. Envy sizzled through her, that Javier had learnt to hold shields even when he was distracted by other matters; it was a knack she would bend herself to in the days to come. All she could do now was scramble back.

  Triumph slashed through Dmitri's attack, his view of her fall erupting as confidence in him. She'd stolen the upper hand a few times in Alunaer, but conviction soared toward her on his witch-power: he'd allowed it, had given up his own will in order to gain her trust.

  Belinda, on her elbows and her arse in the dust, seized that open channel of magic to ride it back into Dmitri's core. That should have been her plan from the start, forcing a weakness in his defences. Power blazed through her, shaking off the images stolen from watching soldiers and bringing her to life. Darkness cracked under the brilliant shafts of her witchlight.