The Queen's Bastard (10 page)

It was well-appointed, if not extravagant. A fire burned higher than necessary for a summer night, throwing warm and wavering shadows about the room. It brought out the gold in a brocaded armchair a few feet from it; the rug that lay between chair and fire had burns from embers popping free and sizzling there. A footstool to match the chair sat opposite it. Belinda glanced around for another chair and found one lacking: it would be she who sat on the footstool, and Robert in the fine upholstered chair. Her mouth twisted a little, memories of childhood spoiling coming back to her, and she sighed as she gathered her skirts and went to the footstool.

She passed the bed, the only other piece of furniture worth noting in the room. It was a renter’s room, without a kitchen or visiting area. Windows looked over a canal, but nearly every window in Aria Magli did; a room without a canal view could be far more dear than those with. The surfeit of noise from traffic that never ceased, day or night, was sometimes worth the cost. Belinda smoothed her skirts over her thighs as she sat, watching Robert move through the fire-cast shadows.

There was something in warm orange light that brought depth out in his handsome, craggy features. All the things she had remembered before looking at him were still true: he was aged enough to be sober and trustworthy, young enough to be playful and charming, but in firelight he looked dangerous as well. And he was—more dangerous than most anticipated. Lorraine’s court granted him a measure of power, because he was beloved to the queen, but few of them regarded him as personally ambitious or worthy of note. Only his oft-discussed romantic liaison with Lorraine made him interesting.

Belinda knew better. Her father was Lorraine’s secret spymaster, and had been for as long as she herself had lived, maybe longer. Cortes, a showier man, thin and clipped and rude, was Robert’s disguise: he held the title Controller of Intelligence, and had a network that extended from nobles to playwrights and into the common populace. Behind Cortes’s shadow, Robert worked, answering threats to Her Majesty in a brutal, efficient manner that could never be traced back to the queen or even her notorious spymaster. And of those secret spies, Belinda was the best-hidden of all.

“You know Sandalia,” Robert said abruptly, coming out of shadow to take his seat by the fire. Belinda lifted her eyebrows a telling fraction, mildly offended by the question even though she understood it as rhetoric.

“Rodrigo’s sister, who sits as regent in Gallin,” she answered, keeping her tone patient. This, too, harkened to childhood ritual, Robert testing and quizzing her on whatever sprang to his mind. Things she ought to have studied, and usually had. Belinda had not been caught out by his unexpected questions since her fifteenth birthday, and had no intention of letting Robert take the upper hand in their little game now. She went on, voice lilting as if she lectured a child.

“Wed and widowed twice before she was eighteen, Sandalia and her son, Javier, stand heir to three thrones: Lanyarch, left to her by Charles, who, by the by, would have been Lorraine’s heir should he have lived and should she never marry. Then there’s Gallin’s throne by way of her second husband, and finally Essandia’s, should her brother, Rodrigo, produce no heir.” Javier would have to be a strong leader indeed, when Rodrigo passed on, to hold the thrones of Essandia and Gallin both, much less add Lanyarch to the mix. If he managed, it would be through the strength of those religious ties, and a fair amount of luck besides. Luck arranged, perhaps, by Sandalia de Costa. “I do not,” Belinda added, “know her personally.”

Robert gave her a black look. Belinda lifted an eyebrow again. Her father subsided, pushing away her snip, and any acknowledgment that his question had been foolish, with a wave of his hand. “When were you last in court, Belinda? In Lorraine’s court.”

“Eight years and some. After du Roz, but not long after.” Belinda watched her father warily, uncertain of where his question led. “Not since I was a child. You know this, Robert.” Calling him “Father,” as she had at the foot of the stairs, was a bladed luxury Belinda indulged herself in once each time she saw him. Someday she thought it would sting when she used that weapon, but in the ten years since she’d learned the truths he and Lorraine Walter hid, he had not yet flinched. She wondered, sometimes, if he did not realise what she knew; if to him the change from “Papa” to “Father” and “Robert” was nothing more than a sign that Belinda had become an adult and put away childish things. They had none of them confessed the circumstances of Belinda’s birth and heritage, and certainly Lorraine never would. It seemed impossible that Robert could not know that Belinda had, since the day she became the queen’s assassin, also known that she was her mother’s weapon.

But then, memory did not stretch so far back, and a babe still wet with birthing blood should not recall a narrow, regal face and titian curls spilling over pale skin. That was a recollection Belinda kept close to her heart, and had never spoken of to her father. It seemed impossible that he could not know, but perhaps it was even more improbable that she could.

“I do. And I wonder if there are any who might know you.”

“In the Aulunian court? A few, perhaps. More who would claim to,” Belinda began, but Robert lifted his hand again, stopping her words.

“In Gallin. In the regent’s court at Lutetia.” Robert brushed his hand over his eyes. “It is a risk.” The words were low, spoken more to himself than to Belinda. “The straits are not so wide, but the godly gulf is deep. And ten years might be ten decades in this place.”

“My lord?”

Robert’s gaze snapped up again and he shook his head. “Forgive an old man’s ramblings.”

Belinda snorted, loud and undignified. Robert looked chagrined, then laughed, bringing his hands together in a solid clap. “Which is it you’ll claim? Not old, or not rambling?”

“Not either, my lord,” Belinda said, smiling. “Your every word falls like a precious gem on my listening ears. I have not been placed somewhere so high as a regent’s court, Robert, and you have not come to see me yourself in a long time. D—” She broke off, remembering abruptly that her childhood memories were supposed to be asleep. Dmitri had not given her his name, in the Khazarian north. She ought not know him or his name. “—the man who came to me in Khazar—”

“It was nicely done with the count,” Robert interrupted. “What did you slip him to bring on that conveniently bad summer cold? The symptoms were unexpected.”

Belinda held her mouth in a long moue, hiding a fluttering heartbeat behind a wry examination of her father before she lowered her gaze with a smile. “That would be telling, sir, and a lady never tells.”

But only because there was no answer that would satisfy. The one she wanted to offer was arsenic, but uncertainty lay beneath it. She hadn’t let herself linger on Gregori’s death; it had been achieved, and that was all that mattered. For the second time that evening she remembered the alien emotion pounding through her. In Khazar she had trusted it must be her own; at the Magalian pub she had been certain that the emotion she’d known belonged to those around her. It tasted of witchery.

No.
Belinda clamped down on a shudder, unwilling to release her control even—especially—in her father’s presence. She would not show fear, would not give in to the power of childhood stories. Illness was brought on by arsenic, not wishes, no matter the desire she’d held in her heart to bring Gregori low, for Lorraine and for the bruises Belinda herself carried from his hand. Pretty, bitter Ilyana was superstitious and jealous, her accusations of witchcraft the creation of a small, frightened mind. It could not be otherwise.

Prickles of cold washed over Belinda’s skin in spite of the fire’s heat, and she set the discomfiting thoughts aside as her father laughed again. “A lady never does,” he mocked her. “A gentleman never tells.”

“You know far fewer ladies than I do, then, sir,” Belinda said drily. “Not that I would wish to malign the reputations of any of the fine women I know.” She thought, briefly, of Ana, swinging her around on the table, and let herself smile. The stolen afternoon and evening had been worth Robert’s anger, which seemed to have fled quickly enough once she was back in…custody? she wondered. It was not a term she was accustomed to using for herself. “The man who came to me in Khazar said time was of importance. What’s stirring in Gallin?”

Robert’s expression blackened for a few seconds. “If time is so much of an essence, and you are aware of that, what excuse do you have for dallying away your day today?”

Belinda exhaled a quiet long breath. “Even the queen takes holidays, my lord. If one day is so desperate a difference, you ought have sent me to Gallin straight away rather than coming here as we always do.”

Robert steepled his fingers and pressed his lips against them, frowning at her. “Yes,” he said abruptly, eventually. “Yes, you have the right of it there. Damn you, anyway. Who taught you cleverness?”

“My nurse, my lord.” Belinda lowered her eyes demurely, remembering the staid old woman, then peeked up with an arched eyebrow, not bothering to hide her amusement. Robert guffawed and came to his feet, catching Belinda’s hands in his own. He pulled her to standing and into a rough hug.

“My lass. There’s my girl. Outwitting the old man. Soon enough there’ll be no place for me.”

“Robert,” Belinda began, but he shook his head and put her back from himself, holding her shoulders.

“Not yet. This old dragon has a few flames left in him yet. There is rumour of insurrection from Gallin, Belinda.”

“Who? Against Sandalia? Or the boy? Javier?”

“He’s your age, lass, not such a boy at all. Twenty-two years old and holding back from claiming the throne out of respect for his mother, that’s what they say.”

“Or out of a fear he’ll never see another day that belongs to his own self and isn’t owed to another.”

Robert’s eyes darkened again, this time with thought. “That may be some of it, too. No, no. Sandalia visits with her brother Rodrigo in Essandia, and my people warn that their cloistered discussions say she chafes at her boundaries and eyes Lanyarch and Aulun. You named the threads that link her to Aulun’s throne yourself. Sandalia may think a pretender’s crown would look well upon her head. You will not let that happen.”

Belinda closed her eyes, absorbing Robert’s orders along with the decade-old ritual that set them into place.
This is how it shall go, Primrose. Heed me well.

When he was done she opened her eyes again, all but swaying with the music of his words. “It’s a chess game you’re playing, my lord, one where the black queen is not yet even on the board. Why send me to Lutetia and not Isidro in Essandia?” She passed off the question with a wave of her hand even as she asked it. Passed off, too, the chiding, flat-mouthed glance her father gave her; she went to Lutetia because Sandalia was
not
there, and that gave Belinda space to insinuate herself in society before the queen’s return. “Does it matter to you how I become close enough to the throne to watch it and judge its actions?”

“Has it ever?” Robert asked lightly enough. It had not; not from the night he’d murmured Belinda’s duty to her, and set her on du Roz. All she had known was the man’s death must be accomplished, and even at not quite twelve, that it should look like an accident seemed obvious. Robert had been astounded at the swiftness of her actions, and at the method of du Roz’s death. Belinda recalled with exquisite clarity the brief admiring expression on her father’s face as she’d swooned and trembled in a guard’s arms during the aftermath of sudden, dreadful death. No, if even then she had accepted her tasks and determined her own path to achieving them, Robert would not likely now commanded her walk a road of his choosing.

“Find a way to shove Gallin from the parapets; that’s all we need,” he said, as though following her thoughts of du Roz. “Sandalia has never had Lorraine’s caution, and an ill-advised word spoken to an ear
we
can trust is what we need. Find that weakness, Primrose. Find that ambition, and exploit it. We cannot allow Aulun to fall into Ecumenic hands again.”

Belinda widened her eyes in a mockery of innocence, a hand placed against her breastbone. “Why, my lord, do you say that you trust me so very much, then?”

Sudden unexpected fondness deepened Robert’s eyes, and Belinda glanced away. “You are a good girl, loyal and true,” her father said, as if from a distance, “and I would trust no other beyond you.”

Belinda stood, gathering her soiled skirts, and dipped a curtsey of unnecessary depth. “Then I’m away to Gallin in the morning, my lord, to prove your faith in me.”

A
NA DI
M
EO, COURTESAN
17 July 1587         
         Aria Magli, Parna

A door opens, almost soundless, breaching the space between rooms more thoroughly than a handful of spy holes can do. A man enters, long strides eating the space in small rooms. His voice, his question, is abrupt with unusual uncertainty: “And?”

Ana taps a fingertip against the arm of her chair, a soft thump of flesh rather than the rat-tat of longer nails. She leans on the other elbow, one knuckle pressed over her lips as she watches Drake pace in front of the fire. In another man such action might speak of nervous energy. In Robert, it has more of the predator to it, heavy solid movements that threaten to back quarry into position for the kill. He is the only man who has ever refused to pay her in coin.