the child. Perhaps she told him, perhaps…” She closed her eyes, drawing a slow breath to calm her heartbeat. Too many emotions, twisting in and out of being too quickly. Perhaps that was what war did, tore every possible reaction from deep in the soul and gave exhausted men and women too little time to deal with even one feeling before another rose up to drown it. “We're witchbreed, all three of us,” she finally said. “He would want the child born. He'd see it as a tool to be used in the future, a new generation to shape this world. So perhaps he saw what I did: that the only kind of safety I can find is here.”
“And the rest of it?” Javier's voice cracked again. Belinda brought her attention back to him, seeing pale skin and grey eyes and ginger hair all working together to make him look sallow. Grief etched lines in his face, aging him and offering no hint that he'd been distracted from his losses by the change in topic. He'd only set them aside, and not far, at that: they scratched just under the surface, until looking at him was painful. She had not, she thought, ever suffered a loss that scored her so deeply; indeed, the closest she'd ever come was in Beatrice Irvine losing Javier de Castille to Belinda Primrose's duties. She looked away sharply, suddenly feeling as though she'd given away too much.
“One problem at a time,” she whispered. “This game is hard enough to second-guess. Until we have other proof, let's assume he's looking only as far as the child's birth. I think he wouldn't expect me to look farther.” She hesitated a moment, thoughts running ahead of her words, then murmured, “Go to Eliza. Bury Sacha and your priest. I don't belong in the midst of your sorrow, and will not keep you from what needs doing.”
That he accepted the dismissal, got to his feet and left the tent, might have been amusing, had Belinda not thought of someone else who might profit from his solitude.
It was not done for the queen's daughter to slip from one enemy tent to another in the middle of the night, no more than it might have been done for that same daughter, unacknowledged, to demand an audience with her mother. Still, Belinda did the one as readily as she'd done the other, and did it exquisitely aware that not so long ago, she might have been acting on official orders to enact what she planned. No more. The Aulunian heir would never be sent to assassinate anyone. That part of her life had passed in Lorraine's courtroom, as final as any death.
She'd called stillness, and, wrapping herself, entered Akilina Pankejeff's tent with no one the wiser. She had no proof at all that the Khazarian duchess was responsible for Tomas's death, only a sense of rightness about it. Javier was almost entirely bereft of friends now, and had no one beyond family to turn to. Rodrigo had never in all his years as Essandia's monarch proved himself so cold, but Belinda well knew Akilina's ambition and skill in the game of politics. Even if the priest hadn't died, there was still a matter of Belinda's own vengeance to be answered. Akilina had stripped her bare in Lutetia; she would repay the dvoryanin by stripping her of her life.
In more than ten years of doing murder, Belinda Primrose had never moved with such focus. Death was a duty, not a passion: not until tonight, and she succumbed to the desire to forget all else while she pursued her retaliation. Once inside Akilina's tent she released the stillness to stand and watch a dead woman breathe a while. It was a dangerous indulgence: Akilina might open her eyes, might have time to draw breath and scream. Even so, she'd have no more time than that, and she would die with Belinda Walter's image burned into her mind.
“She's pregnant.”
With a silent howl at her own lack of caution, Belinda snapped the stillness back into place, wrapping it tight so that all eyes might slip away from her, but when she turned toward the voice, Rodrigo of Essandia seemed to stare at her still.
She had not seen him. She ought to have seen him, ought not to have allowed herself to concentrate so compleatly on her own revenge. Her life was a trinket now, one dangling from the Essandian prince's long and well-shaped fingers. Those fingers were steepled in front of his mouth, and he sat relaxed in a scoop-shaped chair, one leg cocked at the knee and the other loose and straight before him. He was nearly as hidden by shadow as Belinda herself could be, but she ought to have seen him.
“My nephew cannot do what you're doing,” he murmured, more curious than afraid. “More's the shame for him, perhaps, though I can imagine why you might have developed that skill where he did not. He was brought up in sunlight, and you, in shadow. I wonder why you dropped this cloak of obscurity at all. Is it so she would see your face and know whose vengeance was exacted in the moments of her death? Let me see you, Belinda Walter. Let me see our beloved Aulunian queen's bastard. Please,” he added after a moment, almost droll, when she remained where she was, draped in dark safe shadow. “You and I both know that I'm no match for you, if you want me dead.”
Because that was true, and because he knew it, and, in the end, because her curiosity was as great as his, Belinda released the witch-power again. Stillness faded away, exposing her to moonlight and vision once more. She felt beacon-bright, unmasked. A glance at Akilina betrayed her intentions, and she turned her attention to Rodrigo, suddenly aware of the sound of his voice in the air. Robert had once muffled noise around himself: Belinda drew on that feeling of rag-stuffed ears, and built a circle of silence around herself and the Essandian prince. Only then did she dare to speak. “We know why I'm here. Why are you, my lord?”
Amusement creased Rodrigo's eyes. “My lord? How formal. You're well-trained.”
Belinda said, “I am,” without regret, and looked toward the sleeping woman on the cot. “Will you try to stop me?”
“The child isn't mine.”
Surprise snapped Belinda's gaze back to Rodrigo. He spread his fingertips, thumbs still touching, making a wave of indifference with his body that his emotional presence echoed. The temptation to cross to him, touch him and steal his thoughts, raised hairs on Belinda's arms, though she quelled the impulse and instead said, “You're certain?”
“I paid her washer-woman very well for certainty of when her courses came. Even if she'd had the wit to lie to me with her words, her face told me what I needed to know. She should have been bleeding the day we married. She was not, nor has she since. The child is not mine.” Rodrigo smiled thinly. “I sit here in the nights, trying to decide which page from your grandfather's book I might follow.”
Belinda, suddenly as droll as he'd been a moment before, said, “Let me encourage you to divorce her, my lord prince. Join Aulun in its Reformation, and set Cordula on its ear.”
A broader smile flashed over Rodrigo's face. He was handsome, better-looking by far than Javier, though Belinda's insides twisted at that thought. His looks would have left no mark on Javier, of course, but it was easier not to dwell on that, and to try to ignore the taste of ashes in her mouth.
“I think not,” Rodrigo said, thankfully not privy to Belinda's thoughts. “I might have the marriage annulled; the Pappas would grant me that willingly enough, knowing the child wasn't mine. He'd grant it anyway,” he added shrewdly. “He wants me wedded to one of his own faithful women, the better to control me.” His gaze slipped from Belinda to Akilina. “Or I might have her beheaded. No one would blame me.”
“Irina might.”
Rodrigo's smile changed again, became something smaller and more approving. “You think quickly. Lorraine may have chosen well. But then what am I to do,” he said, and his hands spread again, making mockery of the question. “Do I close my eyes and pretend I don't know? Do I raise another man's child as heir to the Essandian throne?”
“Whose?” It hardly mattered, but curiosity had her in its grip, and Rodrigo de Costa seemed inclined to offer answers.
“Sacha Asselin's, I should think,” he said. “It was he whom I paid to liberate Akilina from prison. You may have done me a favour today, in cutting down my nephew's oldest friend.”
Belinda's heart beat once with the speaking of Sacha's name and hung endlessly in her chest, a pain that struck her breath and did not cease for long seconds after Rodrigo had finished speaking. Witchpower, bright and gold, flooded her mind, her body, and squeezed her heart, setting it to beating again. Then she was across the room, not kneeling at Rodrigo's feet; she, or the witchpower, had too much pride for that. Too much ambition, as well: those things were what drove her hand to touch Rodrigo's hair, drove desire coupled strongly with revenge, and drove a wicked delight that brought many paths in Belinda's life to a full circle. “One throne,” she murmured, “might see fit to do another a second boon, my lord prince.”
He caught her wrist and moved her hand from his hair, opening a shock of thought that ran counter to anything she'd stolen from a man since her gifts had developed. Oh, she was pretty enough, in his eyes, all bright with moonlight and intense with golden power that was in every way Javier's opposite. He might desire her in an abstract way, in the same fashion a painting or a landscape might be desired, but lying with the wife he'd chosen
