The Pretender_s Crown ic-2 Read online

  The room was not warm; her gown was not warm. Still, a second rush of bumps over Belinda's arms startled her. She was accustomed to more control than that over her own body, but then, Lorraine, queen of Aulun, wasn't supposed to know that murder had been done by her people for another regent's benefit.

  Lorraine shot her a pointed glance. “We know what you are, girl. We know why you are. Do not for a moment imagine that we do not know what you do. You are very like Robert. He, too, thinks we are blind to what is done in our name, and that we cringe from a violent path because of feminine weakness.”

  “No, your majesty.” Belinda bit her lower lip, cursing her impetuous tongue. Lorraine arched an eyebrow in challenging surprise, and Belinda fisted hands in her skirt before continuing. “I do not think, and I doubt Robert thinks, that you hesitate out of weakness. I think it to be wisdom. It is a dangerous game we speak of now, and a queen should not trouble herself with its details, most especially when the subject should be other heads of state. Once such a play is set in motion it is far too easy for thoughts to turn from one regent to another. It is not weakness that stays a hand like yours, majesty. Not at all.”

  A new leaden silence filled the room before Lorraine, drily, said, “We thought you were supposed to be meek and controlled, girl. We are surprised to discover you have so many opinions.”

  “Forgive me, majesty.” Belinda fixed a gaze so expressionless it felt like a glower on the floor. Beatrice's impulsive words, Belinda's own struggle to choose duty over desire, inexplicable images stolen from her father's mind, hours of foolish gazing toward Gallin; she no longer knew herself, and wished briefly for a retreat to Robert's estates, where she might re-familiarise herself with the stillness that had sustained her through most of her life. Return to the beginning and start again; if nothing else could be done to reestablish the woman she'd once been, then that was what she would do. “I have been keeping peculiar company of late.”

  “With a prince and his peers. Have you got above yourself?”

  “I do not think so, your majesty.” Her response was soft, but golden witchpower flared with outrage. Jaw set, Belinda quelled it, holding back its petulance with a willpower that was beginning to slip. She was not above herself in mingling with a prince and his fellows; they were of no better blood than she, and only the necessity of preserving Lorraine's reputation kept Belinda from standing beside Javier as an equal. Even more, his witchbreed blood whispered that Javier was not the son of any man his mother had married. Only Sandalia's reputation kept him in line for the throne, and to face the truth that the prince of Gallin was as illegitimate as Belinda herself, yet held a place of respect, tasted bitter as almonds.

  Her own witchpower cried that it was unfair, and that, at least, was so absurd as to allow Belinda to quash it without remorse. Nothing in the world was fair or unfair; those were expectations born of a belief that things should be easy, and nothing was, not even for a queen. Belinda thought of Robert, and thought, perhaps most especially, not for a queen. “I am trained for something else,” she murmured. “My place is not on a throne, and I have never set my ambitions so high.”

  “Have you not?” Lorraine's question startled Belinda. Its asking gave substance to the truth of her birth, a topic about which she, by all rights, should know nothing. Lorraine couldn't possibly know that Belinda's memories stretched back so far, so clearly; that she remembered bloody curls and thin grey eyes, remembered a regal voice then worn with exhaustion, even remembered her mother's swollen belly rippling with afterbirth in the brief seconds before her father had taken her away.

  They had shared a moment, mother and daughter, twelve years later, just before Belinda had murdered a man to protect Lorraine's safety. There had been endless things unspoken in that instant, a weighty nothingness, and in that nothingness Belinda had found everything. Her reason for existing, her strange aching pride in being an unrecognised secret; it had all been there, in what she did not see in Lorraine's grey gaze. She had imagined that Lorraine, too, had seen that admission of silence, and that it had bound them in a way that logic defied.

  That the queen should ask such a question now gave credence to Belinda's childhood whimsy, though that light word belittled the strength of emotion that had overtaken her that day. Usually quick with an answer, Belinda stayed silent, gauging what she might and might not say, and at the end, settled on a truth sufficiently unpolished as to discomfit her. “No, your majesty. I have known what I am since I was a girl, and have taken a sort of pride in it. Playing this recent part…”

  She pushed out of her curtsey without having been bade do so, and turned toward the small room's round walls. Stone of a lighter shade suggested a window had once broken the unrelenting solitude, and she spoke to that brighter spot rather than dare Lorraine's countenance. “Your majesty has looked through old glass, has she not? Thickened and wavering, distorting all that lies beyond it? So the part I have played has seemed to me: a thing lying on the wrong side of that glass, unrecogniseable and uncomfortable in all ways. I have never looked to stand beyond the glass. I have never needed to. I have loved my place on this side of it, and hoped for nothing more than to serve my country and my queen as best I could.”

  Truth in all ways but one, and for that one falsehood, Belinda forgave herself. Witchpower demanded recognition and a place on Lorraine's side of the glass, but that was an ambition never to be pursued. She wouldn't overthrow a lifetime's training and willingness to serve for a madness born of golden magic and the sensual touch of a prince's hand.

  “And if the boy had married you?”

  Belinda blinked over her shoulder at Lorraine, realised she'd turned her back on a monarch, and nearly allowed herself the luxury of throwing her hands up in exasperation. Perhaps it was the intimacy; perhaps it was witchpower daring to put herself on the same level as the queen in small but noticeable ways. Whichever, whatever, drove her to those tiny indiscretions, they would cost her her life if she didn't regain control and become once more what she had always been: meek, modest, unremarkable. “I can't imagine a world in which that would have been permitted. The engagement was a ploy to see if wedding a Lanyarchan noble to the prince of Gallin might frighten the Aulunian throne into foolish action; you must know that as clearly as I did. Sandalia would have had me killed before she would allow me to marry Javier, though I should think I might have escaped that fate through my own wits, if not Javier's-” For the second time she found herself verging on dangerous language, and ended with “fancy” rather than words with more emotional weight.

  “And Javier? Would he have pursued the union?”

  Might he yet? underlay the question, and Belinda permitted herself a rough chuckle. “He would have, but no longer. I should think myself his enemy from ten days ago until the end of time.”

  “Youth,” Lorraine said, “is much given to dramatics. Enemies are a luxury we indulge in from time to time, and make bedfellows of when a new one comes along.”

  Belinda, daring, asked, “Sandalia?” and Lorraine gave her another steady look that turned to a soft answer Belinda knew she had no right to expect.

  “We did not dislike her. We might once have been friends.”

  “If the world had been other than it is.”

  Lorraine nodded once. “But it is not, and we are pleased, girl, to know that you do not look for it to be.”

  “Never,” Belinda whispered, and crushed the flare of witch-power in her mind.

  LORRAINE WALTER, QUEEN OF AULUN

  The girl is not what she expected.

  She has been dismissed, has left the private chamber in a flurry of ridiculous pink skirts and soft feminine foolishness, and has left Lorraine more alone than usual in a room meant for secrets. More alone than usual: that, for a queen, is a thought of some weight. Were she to give in to it, it might be a thought of some despair.

  Lorraine Walter, queen of all Aulun, is fifty-five years old, and that frothy child is the only heir she will ever have.r />
  When Belinda is well and truly gone, not just from the window-less chamber but has left Lorraine's rooms through other secret passageways, Lorraine exits her cold tower room and enters her own apartments again. They're warm, which she's glad of, though she would no more admit to cold than she might admit to loneliness or fear. Those are things to be acknowledged only in the deepest and most private part of her: to the world, she must be untouchable, unaffected: the virgin queen.

  Belinda, Lorraine fancies, has a hint of that same cool core to her. Women require it, if they are to succeed in a world shaped by men. Women must become masculine, and yet make eyes at their men, play both sides and hold a place in the middle. Lorraine has worked at that game for a lifetime. So, too, she thinks, has Belinda Primrose.

  There is wine, set well away from the fire that it might retain its coolness. Lorraine, not wishing to be disturbed by servants, pours a glass herself, and takes a box of sweets to the fire with her. She believes chewing them improves her breath, but for the moment they're merely an indulgence. No more than two: even at fifty-five, she has her figure to maintain, especially if she intends to continue the endless rounds of marriage negotiations with Essandia's Rodrigo.

  A brief smile curves her lips as she taps a marzipan treat against them. Neither she nor Rodrigo has any interest in marriage. How much easier it might have been for both of them if they could have set that absurd dance aside decades ago and instead turned their might and ambition toward other lands. But that is not, has never been, the way of Echonian countries, and it is not the way of the Ecumenic church. It is, and always has been, everything or nothing: Cordula will reclaim Aulun at any cost; Aulun will retain its Reformation church at any price. They cannot, it seems, find another path.

  Faith, Lorraine thinks, is a dangerous business, and one that men should resist fiddling with. But not even her own father was immune to that particular folly. Indeed, had he been, the legacy he'd left might have played out very differently.

  And that future, had it come to pass, might well have seen Lorraine married, or not queen, or both, and with heirs born to pomp and circumstance rather than silence and secrecy. That, as Belinda said, was a world seen through ancient glass, too warped and misshapen to truly consider.

  The wine is warming in her hand. Lorraine sips at it and sets her second sweet aside, less hungry for delicacies than answers. Robert should be here; Robert has always been here, offering advice when it was sought and silence as full of commentary as his words when it was not. Of all her courtiers, of all her advisers, indeed, of all her lovers, Robert Drake has been the most faithful and least likely to pressure her. Men accept that she is queen and do her bidding because they can do nothing else. Robert does it because he believes in her, and if that's a caprice a queen ought not indulge in, well, on this one topic she permits herself to do so regardless.

  If he ever betrays her, she will be destroyed. Oh, so, too, will he, more visibly and quickly than Lorraine, but the handsome bearded lord's devotion is the one thing she truly believes she cannot do without.

  Then again, as lines work their way into her face and take heavier paint to fill, it begins to seem there may be one other thing she cannot do without, and that is a legitimate heir. Lorraine has always understood, in a way her half-sister Constance did not, that their father Henry's desperation for a son drove him to the extraordinary ends that begot half a dozen marriages and a new church in Aulun. It's easier, perhaps, for Lorraine to be forgiving, for she's the daughter of the second marriage, and Constance was born of the first. Of course, Constance's mother survived, and Lorraine's did not; maybe Lorraine should be less understanding than Constance was.

  But this is an old cycle of thought, as useless now as it was when she was a girl. Then, she'd understood well enough; now, as an adult, as a woman, as a queen without an heir, Henry's concern is no longer a thing to be imagined. Lorraine lives it every day, hiding panic behind a regal aspect. It's easy enough to do when she is looked on as God's vessel on earth; she is not expected to have weaknesses, and so she simply does not allow them to show. An impassive face, white makeup, elaborate gowns, all go far in disguising a knot of sick worry that disturbs the heartbeat with its intensity. Without an heir Aulun faces the all-too-real possibility of civil war on Lorraine's death, and though she is so very loathe to admit it, Lorraine is not a young woman any longer. She is, in fact, old, and it's God's grace that has kept her in health and wits these many years. God, however, has not granted the miracle necessary for her to bear a child should she wed at this late hour, and Lorraine's own disposition does not incline her to do that anyway.

  Even if she should, who she might wed is a difficulty. Rodrigo has no children of his own, which means marrying him does not solve the problem of an heir. Or rather, it does, in the most bitter way possible: it sets the crown toward Javier de Castille, Sandalia's redheaded son, and Lorraine will be damned before she hands her kingdom to that family. Sandalia held the Lanyarchan throne in Northern Aulun for two short years and thinks it makes her heir to Aulun's; Lorraine has no intention at all of making a pretender's crown legitimate.

  That leaves, then, in any practical sense, Ruessland or the Prussian confederation, which is made up of principalities headed by young bucks whose ultimate allegiance slips between sprawling Prussia and smaller westerly Ruessland as quickly as the wind changes. In their favour, they've begun to embrace the Reformation church; that, at least, helps to reduce the chance of war within Aulun.

  But it also means, should she wed a young man, that when she dies her young king will marry again and make children for his throne who have no tie at all to Aulun, which is hardly an appealing thought. No: the time to marry was twenty years ago, and she had no more desire to do so then than she does now.

  And so she is brought back, again, to Belinda.

  Twice. Twice in twenty-three years she's laid eyes on her daughter. Lorraine remembers the first time clearly: the child was pretty, self-contained, with wide hazel eyes bending toward green and thick brown hair. She looked nothing like Lorraine, a blessing to them all. She curtsied, then lifted her gaze, and even now, more than a decade later, Lorraine recalls the shock of meeting the girl's eyes, whose fathomless depths said, without apology or explanation, that Belinda Primrose knew.

  How, Lorraine has no idea. Robert had not told her; of that, Lorraine was, and is, certain. It was as though the girl recognised her, and more, recognised that neither of them could ever admit the truth. There was acceptance so forthright it was challenge in the twelve-year-old's eyes, and Lorraine had been well-pleased, though she trusted herself not to have shown it.

  Exactly the same expression had been in Belinda's eyes today. So bold, so calm, that Lorraine tread on topics she has rarely had occasion or desire to voice. Had thrown Belinda's brief engagement to Javier de Castille at the girl, and under that cover demanded to know if the daughter she had borne had any ambition toward the throne she has more than half a claim to.

  Unless Lorraine is a fool, and she is not, Belinda meant it when she'd said her aspirations didn't reach so high. Unless Lorraine is drowning in sentiment and fear, Belinda spoke truth, and while Lorraine admits to herself-and only to herself-that fear exists, it does not rule her. No one can retain a throne for thirty years and by ruled by fear; no woman can retain a throne for thirty minutes if fear holds the upper hand. And sentiment is something the queen of Aulun excised from her life long ago, except, perhaps, in the matter of Robert Drake. But if he is her weakness, so be it: Lorraine may be God's vessel on earth, but only the Heavenly Father himself is without flaw, and Lorraine might have done far worse than to find her own vulnerability in Robert. He has, after all, held the most dangerous piece of knowledge about her close to his heart, utterly secret, for nearly a quarter of a century.

  She recalls clearly what her thoughts were, when she realised her pregnancy. She had been thirty-two, queen for a handful of years and already determined never to marry. Wisdom dictated endi
ng the pregnancy, and it was not sentiment that had stopped her. It was this far-off day that she'd known she must eventually face: a day when she was old, and her country in danger of being left without a sovereign. The risk had been tremendous, but she had been young, and already in the habit of taking a long holiday every year or two. For many months corsets and heavy gowns and the fact that it was a first child helped to keep her body to the slender tall lines she was known for. The maidservants who saw to her were allowed to on pain of death, and when they disappeared, one by one, Lorraine had allowed herself to look the other way and ask no questions.

  The last few months of her pregnancy coincided with the fifteenth anniversary of her father's death. Lorraine, deeply affected by his memory, retreated from the public eye for a time, and when she emerged a little heavier, a little paler, her people loved her for it. They loved her even more dearly when she discovered Robert Drake had dallied with another woman while she had been in mourning, and blasted him for it. She sent him from her side for almost a year, and they loved her best of all when she relented and began to be seen with him again.

  Politics, Lorraine thinks now as she thought then, is showmanship and misdirection, and a child born and bred under those two stars, a child whose ambitions are to serve loyally and whose heart is undisturbed by being unknown, is a child who might, at the end of it all, serve as a suitable heir.

  For the first time since her courses stopped, giving lie to the story she might one day wed and bear children for Aulun, the knot in Lorraine Walter's stomach loosens a little, and, alone with her wine and sweets, she smiles at the fire.

  C.E. Murphy

  The Pretender's Crown

  JAVIER DE CASTILLE, PRINCE OF GALLIN

  22 January 1588 † Isidro, capital city of Essandia

  Typically, an honour guard was just that: men sent to lend importance to a visitor's arrival. Oft-times that importance lay primarily in the caller's mind, but not when it was the heir to the throne who came to visit.