The Pretender's Crown (45 page)

And Belinda could face an unarmed Javier with her secrets and her plans.

Satisfied that the rain had stopped, hopeful of her deductions, she opened her eyes to find herself the centre of a gathering, all wide-eyed men struck with awe. She smiled, gentle as she could, and murmured, “You don't see me, my friends. I was never here.”

For the rest of her life she would wonder what they'd seen that night, and so, for the rest of theirs, would they.

Javier had recovered by morning.

Belinda knew it the moment she awakened: the air tingled with released power, far more controlled than it had been for an exhausting long hour the day before. She left the camp, taking high ground a mile or two away, and from there saw Javier standing alone in a column of silver.

It washed out from around him, ripples that cascaded over his people, shielding them from the Khazarian onslaught. Only sometimes did he lash out with a witchlight bomb, and after the first time she recognised the building of power in him, and so aborted the explosion's power.

He flinched as though he'd taken a physical hit, just as he'd done months ago in his bedroom as they'd played at this game now made deadly. She was harder to see than he, her power less active; that, it seemed briefly, was how it had always been, Javier with a showy talent
and herself keeping hers under wraps, more subtle. Dismay twisted her stomach as she saw how neatly those two things fit together, the one the half of the other, and again cursed herself for not seeing the impossible before. Dmitri would pay for the folly he'd led them into, she promised herself again, and then Javier's attack leapt across the space between them and she flung up a shield of her own.

She knew Javier's power better than Dmitri's, knew its shape and knew his thoughts, and yet when she followed his magic back, reaching for its source as she'd done with the dark witchlord, the knack of grasping it and cutting it off eluded her. Silver magic hammered her shields as she searched for that point of closure, until a blow slammed through and left her gasping.

Triumph rather than a second strike hammered through her cracked shields. Belinda pulled back from searching for Javier's weaknesses and strengthened her focus, sealing up her own frailties as she might plaster gapes in a wall. Javier smashed down with his magic again too late, and she felt his shock as strongly as she'd felt his exultance. For all that she'd drowned his armada he still thought of her as weaker than himself, easily overwhelmed as she'd been in the Lutetian courtroom. His next attack came with more anger behind it, verging on frantic: she wasn't supposed to be able to resist him. Mouth pursed, eyes gone vacant as she stared across the distance at her rival, she let her idea of a strong front fade, trying to make herself appear weaker than she was.

Javier's magic jumped at the chance, crashing down with all the force he had to muster. It rebounded again, less strongly, but Belinda's hand lashed upward, as though she threw a knife, and with that idea pitched her own power back at Javier.

He staggered, visible action, across the flatlands. More ready for his weakness than he'd been for hers, Belinda flung a second, weightier ball of witchpower after the first, gold attacking a weak point in his silver shield. The impact felt to her as profound as a cannonball, and for the second time, the Gallic king stumbled. On the battlefield, her army surged forward, taking whole yards of land and beating down the enemy as Javier's shields faltered.

Delight surged through Belinda: so long as she could distract
Javier, her armies had the advantage of numbers and of position. She need only keep him occupied while the shields he'd built to protect his people failed. Aulun would triumph without effort.

Javier realised his mistake only moments after she did, and she felt the sharpness of his rage before he pulled back from their battle to turn his attention to the larger one below.

She was tempted to taunt him into another sally, as caught up in the game of war as any of the soldiers on the fields below. She could take him: she knew she could, and in doing so could bring Gallin's ambitions to an end. It was in all ways what the queen's heir should do; it was what duty whispered she must do.

Carefully, deliberately, Belinda drew her own power back, turning it to nothing more than the containment of Javier's witchpower bombs. They came more rarely as he began to understand what she was doing and saw that his expenditure of magic got too little result. But her own golden power flared in outrage, as though it wanted to respond to Javier's blatant use of magic; as though the part of her which fanned ambition would never rest so long as anyone else dared their own aspirations. She, and she alone, was meant to inspire loyalty, as much as she was meant to be loyal to her queen.

Belinda's hoarse laugh scraped her throat. Robert and Dmitri and their far-off queen had made of her a bewildering thing; a thing she barely understood herself. Childish logic told her that loyalty built from peasant to lord to king to God. No one walked at the head of such a chain without both owing and owning loyalties. By that reason she could be Aulun's heir and demand her people's loyalty, and still bend her own to her queen.

Witchlight, seductive, warmed her as she held to that thought, then cooled again as she whispered, “To Lorraine.”

There were wars on the battlefield, and wars inside her. Loyalty to Lorraine meant destroying the young witchlord who stood miles away, drawing on his own power to protect his men.

But Javier de Castille—against all odds, against all reason—was not her enemy. Dmitri was. Robert was. Their unknowable queen, too; they made up a triumvirate of power stretching beyond the obvious, beyond the sensible and beyond the practical. Loyalty, bred
into Belinda's bones, lay stretched between two needs, and that she had come this far should have made her path a clear one.

Serving Aulun had to mean betraying Lorraine.

Belinda slammed her hands into fists and pulled her power back, leaving the blended Aulunian and Khazarian armies unprotected, and leaving, she hoped, the thinnest of bridges on which she could cross the distance between herself and Javier.

He would very likely kill her on sight.

Belinda lowered her head, tucked herself in stillness until she was all but impossible to see, and amended her thought:

He would very likely
try
.

Rodrigo's arm of the Cordulan forces, eight thousand strong, rode into the back of the Khazarian army at sunset. Belinda watched, holding her magic in until it cramped her belly and made her hands sweat with the need to act. It was little more than a salvo on Rodrigo's part, an announcement of his arrival: the day had gone on too long already, and no one had the heart to fight. A few men died on both sides before falling back from the battle, exhaustion driving them to rest.

A hundred and fifty thousand soldiers would come to battle in the morning. Two-thirds of them were the allied Khazarian and Aulunian armies; they should, by rights, defeat Cordula's troops through numbers. But her army was wedged between two forces of almost-equal size now, and retreating to present a unified front would only give Javier's men a chance at their backs. No, it would have to be done through numbers; watching campfires light up, Belinda was glad she wasn't a general, obliged to move men like chess pieces and watch plans fall awry.

She had left crossing into Javier's camp until nightfall: witch-power or no, walking through a battlefield invited more trouble than she wanted to risk. They weren't so very far apart, the Gallic king's camp and her own watching-place in the woods. But Belinda left her safe place with more trepidation than she'd felt since childhood, since Robert had come for her in the middle of the night and set her on the road to murder. Then, as now, all that she was
hinged on a few critical moments at the end of her journey, and then, as now, she was uncertain of how that ending would play out.
This is how it shall go, Primrose
. The memory of Robert's voice echoed in her ears so clearly she thought, for an instant, that he'd spoken in her mind in the same manner as a few months earlier. But the echo came again, rising from within her, not from an external source.
This is how it shall go
, and with that promise came her own confidence. The words this time were hers, as was the plot. “Heed me well,” she whispered to herself. “For this
is
how it will go.”

22 June 1588
†
Alunaer, the queen's private chambers

Of all the things that should not be dancing through Robert Drake's mind, Irina Durova's beautiful face is high on the list. But the imperatrix's image is there, bringing with it a humour that Lorraine, queen of all Aulun, would not appreciate at all, which is why Robert is biting his tongue in an attempt to keep laughter at bay.

It is, as he's observed before, easier to be angry at a plain woman than a beautiful one, but Lorraine's wrath makes it quite clear that a woman of failing beauty is still very capable of being angry at a man. Any man, but most particularly himself in this time and place, and if he were asked, Robert would admit Lorraine has the right of him.

He, after all, taught Belinda Primrose to be a sneak.

Another girl has been wimpled and put on display for the moment, an event she should revel in as the most exciting of her brief life, because it will almost certainly be the culmination of it. Lorraine's brother, who died little more than a child, was so ruined by the disease that had wracked him that another pretty blond boy took his place as the funereal body, while the young king himself was buried in a shallow grave in the middens. A family of such pragmaticism is unlikely to allow Belinda's double to live long after Belinda's safe return.

A return, Robert hears, which he is expected to expedite. He brings his attention back to Lorraine, and against all wisdom smiles
at her. “Forgive me,” he says, and though he's cheerful, there's honesty in the request. “I should say I expected this, but I didn't. Belinda's been a well-directed tool all her life, unaccustomed to taking her own rein. I didn't think she would.”

“My experiences with the girl say she's impetuous and—” Lorraine breaks off with a muttered curse. “And clever. But I thought her loyal, Robert. I thought her loyal beyond question.”

“She is.” Robert says that with easy confidence, and rises out of his kneel to emphasise it. “You set her a task, Lorraine.” He's made much freer with the queen's name since her revelation of their long-ago marriage, a stunt so well-considered and oft-discussed that even Robert barely remembers whether it happened in truth or in fiction. “You told her to keep her people safe. I've never, not since she was a child, given her the
how
of accomplishing her duties, only said they must be done. You may be her queen—”

“And her mother,” Lorraine snaps, but Robert shrugs dismissively.

“That, too, but the one holds more weight than the other, and it should, given how we chose to raise her. Either way, I think she's chosen her own path to fulfilling the job set to her.”

“We did not grant her permission—”

“How often,” Robert interrupts, greatly daring, “have
you
waited on permission, my queen?”

Lorraine stares at him, and stares hard. Robert smothers another smile, far too pleased with the girl-child he raised and feeling a little sorry for her mother. Belinda's presence in Gallin isn't something he counted on, but it, and her stormy relationship with Javier de Castille, will drive the war in dramatic waves. This is what Robert wants: the more passion and the less reason, the longer it will last, and the more room he'll have to push forward leaps in technology. These people have guns, they have metal workers, but they have no automation, and he requires a level of automation beyond what they can currently imagine. He admires their blue jewel of a planet, but he'll turn its skies grey and let its people forget the colour of the sun, if it will help to arm his own people for their long nights between the stars, and for the battles they find there.

“Are you suggesting,” Lorraine finally says, icily, “that your Primrose
is…” She can't, it seems, finish the evidently appalling thought: Belinda may be her daughter, but Lorraine is unaccustomed to thinking of anyone as being like herself.

“You're a force unto yourself, my queen,” Robert says both smoothly and truthfully, but then he allows that smile to encroach. “And she's admired you her entire life, Lorraine. She will do anything for you and for this country. Don't worry. I'll go to Gallin and bring her back, but don't worry for her safety or her methods. If she's bold, she comes by it naturally.”

“For me,” Lorraine says, still coolly. “For me, for Aulun, and for you, Robert. Her loyalties don't begin and end with me.”

“But mine are yours to command.” A wash of foolishness heats Robert's jaw and creeps up his cheeks at the simple truth of those words. His other queen may wait beyond this world's moon, preparing for the time when humans break far enough away from their small planet to shuttle ore and minerals and fuel to her ships, but in the here and now, a very large part of Robert Drake is given over entirely to the red-haired queen of Aulun. Still flushed, he bows deeply and takes himself to the door, trying to shape his thoughts to a journey across the straits, and to finding a wayward daughter.

“Robert.” Lorraine waits until he's turned back, then says, “Take the Khazarian ambassador with you. I want one of Irina's chosen men on the front lines, as much to oversee her troops and report to her as to be seen and reported on. We are unified, Aulun and Khazar, and the world will see it in my lord consort and Irina's ambassador standing arm in arm.”

“Your will, my queen.” Robert, more than satisfied, bows again and leaves the chambers with a lightness in his step.