The Pretender's Crown (16 page)

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.

He is, for a moment, sharply aware of the parallel between his desires and Javier's magic. It stings him, stiletto pricks on his skin, and then fades. Such is the price for wielding power of any sort: it makes hypocrites of men, and Rodrigo prefers results over a consistency that cannot be maintained.

That, in fact, is one of his beloved church's weaknesses. It's slow to change, unsurprising given its size and age, but it demands its followers cling to consistencies that fly in the face of fresher knowledge. God's power and mystery are not lessened by science, to Rodrigo's mind, but are instead deepened by it. Still, it's Cordula's faith he walks in step with, not university radicals.

Irritable and temperamental, Rodrigo sends for Tomas del'Ab-bate. When the sleepy golden-eyed boy appears, it occurs to the Essandian prince that he might have waited until morning, but then, one of the benefits of being a monarch is arranging the world to his whim. Tonight he wants to talk to Cordula's young priest, and the only apology he'll make is pouring and offering the young man a glass of wine.

Tomas has brought a narrow satchel, the sort that quill and paper might be kept in: he is prepared for whatever Rodrigo might want, but he sets that parcel aside to accept the wine and a seat by the fire, and to huddle over both drink and flames. Rodrigo gives him a few moments to wake up, though he himself strides around his rooms like a man twenty years younger than he is. When he judges Tomas has had time to gather himself, he says, “What do you think of Javier?”

Whatever Tomas might have expected of a three o'clock rousal from bed, it's clear that question was not it. He straightens, momentarily agape, then visibly regains his centre, growing pensive. “He is troubled, your majesty, and if I may be bold …”

“You may,” Rodrigo says, amused, because anyone who asks permission to be bold usually intends to be whether permission is granted or not. He rarely denies it, but once in a while there's entirely too much pleasure from an airy “You may not” and the chagrin on the applicant's face. Tomas, however, is Rodrigo's confessor, and a priest of the church, and might very well speak regardless of whether Rodrigo gave him leave.

“He's troubled, and you're not helping. His talent frightens him, as it ought, and you well know he should turn his back on it. Instead you have him explore its boundaries with intent.”

“We have a war to attend to, Tomas.” Rodrigo brushes off his own words and sets aside the royal persona for the singular; it is, after all, three of the morning, and these his own chambers, and this his confessor. Surely he may be himself now and here, if nowhere else. “I need what weapons I have. No, I meant what manner of man is he, to your mind? Will he make a good king?”

“He would make a better one if he were not tormented by this demon power. Each time he uses it he succumbs a little more. By the time your war is finished, there may be nothing left of your nephew to repair.”

“I see.” Rodrigo retires to his own chair by the fire, hands templed in front of his mouth and long legs spread out so his feet are close to the low flames. “And so we come to the matter of succession yet again.”

Tomas doesn't move, but he seems to sharpen, as though only now coming fully awake. “Javier's indisposal puts two thrones at risk, majesty. Unless he weds now and fathers quickly, there's nothing to be done for Gallin, but you can still change Essandia's path.”

Rodrigo's toe taps in the air, irritable twitch that ends when he asks, “And who does Cordula have in mind for me?”

He knows the answer, has seen the lists, has turned a deaf ear to many pleas, including Tomas's, that he consider them seriously. But this is their plot, not his, and he's put no mind to remembering names or faces. Nor is he surprised when Tomas is prepared, drawing a parchment scroll from his satchel and offering it over without commentary. Rodrigo takes it and snaps his fingers; the same servant who fetched Tomas comes out of shadows and lights candles, so Rodrigo can read.

An overwhelming number of the names are Parnan. Rodrigo lowers the parchment to eye Tomas over its top. “Could you find no Essandian noblewomen to litter my choices with?”

“Your faith has always been such that the Pappas thought you would be honoured by closer ties to our church,” Tomas murmurs with a surprising lack of pomposity In another that statement would have been ludicrous; from Tomas it sounds sincere.

Rodrigo says, “Mmf,” and raises the parchment again, skimming the names. There are likenesses drawn next to many of them, all lovely, dark-eyed women with a sameness to their faces that says more about the artist than about his subjects. “And what would Cordula say if I found myself a round peasant girl from an Isidrian field and made her Essandia's queen?”

“Cordula would rejoice with the birth of your sons,” Tomas replies evenly, and Rodrigo grins at the parchment.

“Beautiful
and
diplomatic. Your father must be proud, Tomas.” He sees a shadow of action as Tomas crosses himself and murmurs, “I hope so.”

“I'll consider them,” Rodrigo finally says, once the list is memorised. He'll consider one or two, at least; the rest he's already discarded for family reasons, and he's not happy that there are so few Essandian women on the list. He can do better, he believes; he's spent a lifetime in negotiations, and while he'd marry Lorraine for his church, he's less enamoured of marrying some slip of a girl for the same reason. If he must wed, then there will be something brilliant made of it; that, at least, he can give himself.

“Send for my scribe,” he says, a dismissal, and Tomas rises, bows, and leaves to do as he is bidden, while Rodrigo sits alone with a parchment full of women who are meaningless to him.

1 March 1588
†
Lutetia, capital city of Gallin

Nothing, not one thing in the past eight weeks, has gone as Akilina Pankejeff intended it to, not in its entirety. For others this is a matter of course, simply the way of the world, but she is dvoryanin, a grand duchess of Khazar, and she is accustomed to having things her own way She has the men she wants, when she wants, at least, until untimely death takes them. That's happened often enough in her thirty-three years of life that behind her back the servants and even some of the courtiers call her Baba Yaga, the black witch.

There are worse fates than being a witch, as Akilina sees it.

There is, for example, boredom. She is too high-ranking to be thrown in a dungeon cell, and so instead she sits in a tower with a single window, thirty feet above the ground, her only chance of escape. She has been six weeks in this room, and looks on the long drop with more favour every day, but not that much. Never that much.

Six weeks since she shared a cup with Sandalia, queen of Gallin, both women grimly determined to drown the tensions of a stolen treaty in the aroma and flavour of an old and fine vintage. Sandalia sipped first, then asked a question; Akilina waited on drinking to reply, and before her words were finished, the petite Gallic queen lay writhing and dying on the floor.

Akilina, naturally, screamed. Flung the betraying cup away and dropped to her knees, uselessly grabbing at Sandalia's shoulders, trying
to hold the woman down, trying to comfort her. That was how the guards had found her, and since then she has been locked in a tower room, pacing its small area and, she is certain, slowly losing her mind.

She has money and power enough—and perhaps beauty enough, though hers is a sharp beauty, challenging, and not all men are eager to face it—to have bribed guards to let her send carrier pigeons back to Khazar bearing news of Sandalia's death and, by proxy, news of the treaty's failure. Whether she'll be rescued from her tower by a missive from the Khazarian imperatrix or whether she'll be left to rot, an apology in body if not in words, she does not yet know, and so Akilina is trying to earn enough favours that she might obtain release on her own.

Favours, she is finding, are in short supply these days.

The worst of it—worse even than the boredom—is how clearly she can see the fall she's taken. She was very nearly outplayed on Sandalia's courtroom floor, in the matter of Belinda Primrose. Bitchy little Ilyana paid for Belinda's secrets with her life; rough-hewn handsome Viktor had faltered in the face of his onetime lover's pleas. Akilina had counted on neither of those things happening, and yet had held a secret back, waiting for the right moment to expose him.

Capturing Robert Drake, Lorraine's longtime lover and once Akilina's, had been a triumph. It had, indeed, been the very last thing that had gone right, and so Akilina savoured it more fulsomely than she might have otherwise.

She had seized him through a woman, of course. A striking courtesan whose dramatic colouring let her wear outrageous hues to great effect. Akilina's tracker had learned the courtesan's name, and had found a trail bringing her to Lutetia; it had not, after that, been difficult to locate the woman calling herself Ana Marot, who was known to Robert Drake as Ana di Meo, and who was his spy and his whore.

Like anyone, Ana di Meo had a price, and hers was finery: an easy life, a duchy from a grateful crown, enough cash to see her to the end of her days. For these things she was willing to write a letter to Robert Drake, calling him to Gallin and into Akilina's grasp. For
that, and not her occupation, Akilina thought Ana di Meo a whore, and the whore had betrayed him in court. She had named Robert Drake her lover and named “Beatrice Irvine,” whom she knew as Belinda Primrose, his daughter. That,
that
, at least, had gone as it was meant to.

Ana di Meo was not supposed to die two nights later, in all likelihood at Robert Drake's hands. No, the courtesan was meant to live, and Robert had been meant to rescue copies of the Khazarian-Gallic treaty before Sandalia moved so hastily as to destroy them. Akilina wanted that leverage, wanted it most particularly because Sandalia had offered hospitality that amounted to arrest. Until all matters international were settled, Akilina would be Sandalia's guest. The queen insisted, and such insistence could not be refused.

Nothing, Akilina thinks for the ten thousandth time, has gone right, and she has nothing but her own thoughts going in circles around it to keep her company. She is therefore both startled and grateful when the heavy locks on her door are undone, hours away from any meal time. Like any woman would, she rushes to her window seat, snatches up the mindless embroidery that's all she has to occupy her time with aside from her thoughts—and the latter are preferable, in her opinion—and looks the picture of a settled and calm woman when the door opens to reveal the prince's confidant and lifelong friend Sacha Asselin.

Somehow, he is not who she expected. Akilina lowers the embroidery into her lap and looks across her prison at the stocky young lord, and wonders not so much what he is doing there, as how his presence can be turned to her advantage.

Then she's on her feet, curtseying, and sees through her eyelashes that he sweeps a bow deeper in proportion than her curtsey. She's pleased, as he is by far the inferior in rank, and indeed she need not make knee to him in any fashion. But she is the prisoner here, and will accord him any slight honour that might help her to walk through the door behind him as a free woman. In fact, she'll gladly accord him a great deal more than that, and regrets she had no warning of his arrival so she might have enhanced her charms.

“My lord Asselin,” she murmurs from her curtsey. “You give a poor woman gladness by visiting her lonely cell.”

Sacha snaps his fingers at the guard, who closes the door without interest, leaving them alone together. Akilina straightens, not bothering to play at demurity any longer; Asselin likes women who bite, that he may bite back all the harder. She says, lightly, “I thought you had abandoned me,” and he barks laughter, as rough a sound as his bite is hard.