The Pretender's Crown (2 page)

21 January 1588
†
Alunaer, capital of Aulun

It had not taken long to escape Gallin.

It had not taken long, and yet it seemed she had never left there at all. A day to cross the channel, another to wait and meet the Aulunian spymaster Cortes in secret, and on the third morning that man's expression had remained impassionate as he told her of how an Aulunian spy had been uncovered in the Gallic court. “Beatrice Irvine,” he'd said. “They also called her Belinda Primrose, and she is dead.”

Astonishment and ice coursed through Belinda, though wisdom had warned her there could be no other way for her story to end. The woman she had been lay dead, her head no doubt on a pike for all to see, and the woman who had returned to Alunaer would become someone else entirely. In a lifetime of doing murder, Belinda had never lost a role she'd played to death's dark hand. To do so now unmoored her.

She had drawn a soft breath, steadying her outward countenance: it would never do to show the spymaster how her hands wanted to shake or how the pulse in her throat threatened to choke her with its urgency. There were other matters to attend to; there always were. Matters more important than herself: matters such as Robert, Lord Drake, whose name she voiced quietly, hoping against an answer of a fate as black as the one Cortes had named for Beatrice Irvine.

“Ransomed,” Cortes replied unexpectedly. “Ransomed, but not yet returned to her majesty's court.” There was a question in his voice, and Belinda, constrained with relief, answered it.

“Ransomed because he escaped before he could be put to death. Sandalia would have preferred to start a war by returning his head in a basket, but her majesty would know if it was other than Robert himself. Ransoming him instead was clever,” Belinda had acknowledged, more to herself than the spymaster.

Cortes had nodded, then lifted insubstantial eyebrows. “There's something more you should know. Rumour, fed by Lord Drake's precipitous departure from Aulun and his abrupt arrival in the Gallic court, claims the woman who died was Drake's adopted daughter whom he'd gone to rescue. It's a story without purport as those close to Lord Drake know his adopted daughter joined a convent a decade since.”

Bemusement had darted through Belinda, chasing the shock of her own death away. It would return, but she was grateful for a brief respite. “The girl was wise enough to accept God's embrace rather than risk her majesty's well-known jealousies?”

“Indeed.” Cortes had dismissed her with a promise that all the news she bore would be brought to Lorraine's ear.

Barely a day later stories of Sandalia de Costa's death swept Alunaer. In the week since, Belinda had waited to be called on, and in waiting found herself turning again and again toward Gallin, where she had died. Gallin, where she had found in Javier de Castille a soul as lost as her own, and betrayed him.

Dignity, it seemed, was no longer hers to court. Belinda permitted herself a snort of disgust and turned away from memories of Gallin and Javier alike. Turned toward what she had awaited since leaving Gallin; toward what she had awaited, in any meaningful way, every day since she had been eleven years of age and had realised she was the natural-born daughter of Lorraine Walter, unwed and so-called virgin queen of Aulun.

When Belinda permitted herself to dwell on that thought, she enjoyed the blunt unforgiving words:
the queen's bastard.
They
meted out her place in the world with raw boundaries, admitted she was a secret and a shame in one breath and conceived of daring and drama in the next. There was no better way to describe the unknown child who had grown up to be her mother's best-hidden and loyal assassin.

Boldness had driven her to an indulgence: rather than the formal, strait laced gowns of Aulunian fashion, she wore a Gallic gown, one of the impetuous, flirtatious designs by Javier's friend Eliza Beaulieu. It had no waist or skirt in the manner of dresses worn in Lorraine's court, but fell away from high-shelved breasts and a waistband just below them in layer upon layer of delicate thin fabric entirely unsuited for the January weather. In deference to winter, the tiny puffed caps at her shoulders had been laced through with ruched sleeves that came to a point over the backs of her hands. Belinda refused to rub at those tips, denying the reminder they offered of a gown made to fit her so tightly it had become a gaol. Instead she folded into a deep curtsey, skirts floating and settling around her as she lowered her gaze and waited a little longer.

There had been no concession to the cold in the gown's neckline. It curved very low and wide, a gentle scoop that displayed an astonishing amount of flesh. That, in the end, was why she had chosen to wear this particular dress.

It was a dangerous choice for myriad reasons, least subtle being that it suggested her loyalty no longer belonged to her royal mother. More subtle, but not much more, it was a youthful fashion, and that was a challenge to a queen who struggled against age and therefore came to it without grace. Moreover, it was pink, a colour the red-headed queen couldn't wear easily even if it wasn't considered too strong a shade for women. Good reasons all not to dare Eliza's design in Lorraine's court.

A breath of warmth stirred the air, the only indication that a door had opened. Fabric rustled, footsteps fell, and the hint of heat faded again as familiar scents brought excitement and fear in equal parts: thinned-out white lead makeup; a hint of perfume she didn't know the name of, but which was etched indelibly in her mind as belonging to the queen. Only Lorraine would wear that perfume, so its name was of no import, if it even had one. A faint sharpness
beneath those two: ordinary mortal sweat, such as a monarch shouldn't suffer from. Belinda hadn't known she would be able to find Lorraine Walter in a darkened room, more than ten years after the only time they'd met.

“We are unobserved?” The words were a matter of ritual, given to her by Robert. Speaking them was entirely new to Belinda, but she was comfortable with ritual; it had shaped much of her life. Most of it, perhaps, even before she knew she was being shaped.

“We are,” came Lorraine's response, tart with impatience. “We do not have a rash any longer, girl. We thought we told you, eleven years ago, to dispose of modest coverings in the spring, not in the dead of winter a lifetime later.”

Triumph rose in Belinda's breast, flowing so brightly she loosened a smile of delight at the floor. Ah, she had changed, she had fallen: the woman she had once been would never have allowed such a transparent change of expression. But the woman she had played over the past six-months had laughed too easily, smiled too readily; Beatrice Irvine was easy to cling to. A joyous smile was an indulgence she ought to have excised, and yet she was glad of it.

“I beg forgiveness, your majesty,” she murmured, and did nothing to still the wide smile directed at the floor. This was no way at all to present herself to her monarch, her mother, but the threads that held them together were dark and deep and buried. To play the single one that lay in the light, and to have it recognised and struck back as a matching note, was a risk and a gift beyond revelation. “I was not at court that spring, and loathed the thought of disappointing your majesty in any small way at all.”

Lorraine Walter, queen of all Aulun, gave a snort that sounded very much like the one Belinda had indulged in earlier. “Stand up, for pity's sake. You look like a rose ready for the plucking, down there in all that pink. Whoever heard of a woman wearing such a colour?”

Belinda stood slowly, leaving her gaze on the floor until she was certain her expression could be schooled, though it was still with merriment in her eyes that she met Lorraine's pretence at irritation. Oh, but Beatrice Irvine had been bad for her. Only a handful of months earlier she would never have allowed herself so much emotion, much less the boldness of assuming that the queen's annoyance
was perhaps not entirely genuine. The ability to control her own humour was still there. The stillness she had learnt as a child, and shored up with golden
witchpower
in the past months, would never truly desert her.

But witchpower and the stillness had their price. The latter left her untouchable, as she had taught herself to be, and the former left her greedy for power and blind with ambition. Even a lifetime's training in constraint was barely enough to master it. She would no more dare release witchpower in Lorraine's presence than she might set a wild boar free upon the unarmed queen. She was her mother's daughter, and a creature of her father's making. Loyalty defined her; duty made the boundaries of her life. It had, for nearly twenty-three years, been enough. If she could now reach back to a solitary meeting with Lorraine, more than ten years earlier, and make a small jape of it, then perhaps that was diplomacy, and its success worthy of a smile.

“Do you laugh at us, girl?” Lorraine was cool as winter winds, drawing herself up. She was tall for a woman, taller than Belinda herself, and beneath full square skirts, boxy shoes added to that imposing height. Illusion, but effective: Belinda ducked another curtsey in a show of contriteness, and when she lifted her eyes it was with no hint of merriment.

Nor did she feel it any longer, its spirit quenched beneath necessity. Beatrice Irvine might laugh too easily, but Beatrice was a construct, and as such could even yet be put away when needs be. “No, majesty. I beg forgiveness,” she said again, and this time meant it.

Lorraine stared down a long nose at her, weighing the sincerity of that plea. Proper deference would have Belinda drop her gaze and wait on the queen's clemency; proper as a subject, a daughter, and a secret. Proper, too, if she fully embraced the learned ability to not offend, to hardly be there even when she was obviously present. She had spent her life honing that talent, and could make herself small and meek and unthreatening, everything in her stance and stature hinting of her place beneath notice—or, if noticed, beneath the lord of the manor. It would work on Lorraine; it worked on everyone, except perhaps Belinda's own father, and on Dmitri, the other witchlord man of Robert's acquaintance.

Belinda did not do what was proper, and saw in Lorraine's eyes that she marked it. She met the queen's gaze and looked her fill: it had been more than ten years since she had seen the woman who'd birthed her, and might well be ten years before she saw her again. There was little enough chance for making such memories as these, and she judged it worth risking Lorraine's wrath to burn the monarch's image into her own flawless memory.

Ten years earlier, Lorraine had still held the last edge of youth that gave her beauty. Then, as now, as always in Belinda's memories, titian curls fell loose, bloody against translucent skin, but now the translucency was born of far heavier white paint than Lorraine had worn a decade ago. She had been in her forties then, a woman of unprecedented power; indeed, she had set the precedent of a queen ruling without a king. Sandalia in Gallin had held her own throne partly in ironic thanks to her bitter rival across the straits: if Lorraine could manage alone, so, too, could the one time Essandian princess. And much farther to the east and north, Irina Durova reigned as imperatrix of the enormous Khazarian empire, unchallenged on her throne since her unlamented husband's death. They were a sisterhood, these queens, a sisterhood of loathing and distrust and tension, bound together by a determination to hold power in the face of innumerable men certain they were incapable of doing so.

Those things were etched around Lorraine Walter when Belinda looked at her; as much fixtures of who she was as the signs of aging: the wattling neck; the length of nose brought out by flesh falling away; the long lines of a face that had once been striking and now fought age in an inevitably losing battle beneath the white lead face paint. Belinda saw that it had been years, perhaps decades, since Lorraine's hair had been naturally red, and knew that even at the height of youth it had never been that especial shade. But those were trappings, a prison to the spirit housed within, and that spirit burned bright. Her eyes showed it, thin grey gaze expecting and receiving adoration. Even, perhaps especially, from the secret daughter, adoration.

“You are not afraid,” Lorraine said in time. She sounded a mix of pleased and perturbed, and her mouth pursed as though she'd encountered
an unexpected flavour. “You are unafraid of us. We wonder if you realise how rare that is.”

Belinda folded a deep curtsey, eyes lowered. “No, majesty.”

“You were not afraid when first we met, either. Rise,” Lorraine said sharply. “Rise, for I would see your face when you give me answers. Why are you not afraid?”

Belinda did not rise, but lifted her face so she could look at Lorraine. The position put a crick in her neck, but she held it, exhaling a quiet sigh of satisfaction. Small discomforts were how she had begun training herself in stillness. To have one upon which she could now fall back helped her to remain steady as she watched her queen. “My life has not taught me to fear, majesty, but to be bold. I would dishonour myself and you by pretending otherwise when in your presence.”

“So much so that you are willing to disobey my direct command.” Lorraine snapped her fingers and Belinda finally straightened, hairs on her arms dancing with awareness. Twice Lorraine had forgone the use
of we
and spoken of herself as an individual. A monarch did not do that lightly. Belinda remembered all too clearly, and with blistering shame, how Sandalia had used that apparent intimacy to draw Beatrice's eager, foolish plots to light, even when Belinda had known better. Such a slip could easily prove fatal, and Belinda dared not trust that being her mother's daughter would save her from perfidy now. She held her tongue, and Lorraine breathed a sound of exasperation.

“I suppose you'd be of little enough use if you couldn't see what lines you might walk, and on what ropes you might balance. Where is he, girl? Robert left our side six weeks ago, and we have been obliged to pay a ransom for his return, which has not yet manifested. Tell us what we must needs know, Primrose.”