had not awakened in Rodrigo a particular enthusiasm for earthly vices. He would take Belinda from a sense of duty, but only if he were certain of getting a child, and thereby Aulun, for his troubles.
For a heady and amusing instant, he was easily the most desirable man Belinda had ever known. Habit kept laughter from breaking out loud, but it danced on her lips, and witchpower swirled through her, more than ready to break a prince's will. She shut it away, more pleased with his ruthless pragmaticism than she could ever be with bedding him. She was trained to turn practicality into need, so she might seduce when and where she must. She'd never imagined finding the same remorseless lack of romanticism in a man.
“What,” he said aloud, “favours might we exchange, Belinda Walter?”
“Do not marry again. Permit Javier to be your heir. He and Eliza will have a child within the year; your succession, and Gallin's, will be assured.” Belinda's heartbeat ran rabbit-quick with the excitement of setting plots in motion. These were not the plans Robert had, nor even the ones she'd shared with Javier. These were her own, and not even the witchpower struggled against her ambitions.
“Do not marry again,” Rodrigo said, with just enough emphasis on the final word, and a glint of interest in his eyes. “My faith only permits me one marriage at a time, till death do us part, Lady Belinda, and my wife is young and healthy. How ever do you imagine I might marry again?”
“Get what sleep you may, prince of Essandia,” Belinda suggested. “The next days will be difficult, and you'll need all your wits about you in your time of sorrow.” She stepped back, and he rose, pausing to study her with a curious expression.
Whatever he found in her gaze seemed to satisfy him; after a moment he went to the tent's door and there stopped to look back and murmur, “Belinda.”
And Belinda, who rarely permitted herself the intimacy of a name, said, “Rodrigo,” in return, and watched him go.
RODRIGO, PRINCE OF ESSANDIA
What is most violently clear in Rodrigo's mind is that he has just walked away from the woman who murdered his sister. There's room in his thoughts to wonder if it's worse that he has turned that same woman on the perfidious creature who is his wife, or if allowing Sandalia's murderer to walk free is the greater crime. Either way, she's Javier's prisoner of war and his nephew is wise to keep her alive, so whatever ends Rodrigo might pursue in revenge would be ill-advised, and yet…
She ought not be allowed free rein of these camps, much less tacit permission to murder his wife, but Rodrigo watched her appear and disappear from his sight, which tells him there's likely no way to prevent her from doing precisely as she wishes. And the worst of it is she would indeed be doing him a favour, and that's a topic he doesn't dare broach with Javier or even breathe to the new priest who will have to take his confession. He can't go to God burdened with this particular plot, but there's time a-plenty to repent, and perhaps in later years he'll be able to face a confessor.
He's unpleasantly surprised, come morning, when Akilina joins him for breakfast. A flush creeps up his face, making him feel the fool, and when the Khazarian dvoryanin enquires after his health, he is forced to leave the fire, claiming a sickness of the belly that is entirely true. Akilina, astonished, drinks the watered wine that's been all she can stomach in the mornings, and lets him go.
It's that afternoon that she complains of cramps, and she is bleeding by evening. The worried doctor feeds her more wine to keep her blood up, and Rodrigo, watching now, begins to feel a slow horror that is worse even than having allowed Belinda to survive. He can't be certain that this isn't nature rejecting a faulty child, and that, he's sure, is the brilliance of the Aulunian queen's bastard daughter at work.
It takes three days, in the end. The child is lost by the morning, but the bleeding will not stop. Not until the second evening is Akilina weak enough to slip into unconsciousness, and Rodrigo keeps vigil during the night, from duty and an uncomfortable conscience. It would have been one thing to awaken to a murdered wife. It is another entirely to stand by and watch her die by pieces, and to know that he didn't stop it happening. That he commanded it happen, in any way that matters.
It's during that long night that he wonders why Belinda Walter is so cruel, though the answer comes to him easily enough. Her father was captured, tortured, and thrown at Sandalia's feet all on Akilina's word; Belinda herself was stripped bare of both possessions and the lies that had insinuated her in Sandalia's court, all at Akilina's bidding. It is a precise vengeance, this death, a repayment for humiliation, and it is deeply telling. It is also profoundly natural, for women die of childbirth and difficult pregnancies all the time. The man in Rodrigo loathes Belinda and the prince admires her; she is a honed weapon, and will be a dangerous, worthy opponent when she sits on the Aulunian throne.
He opens the tent flaps at dawn, wanting, oddly enough, for Akilina to die in the light. Her faith is not his own, but last rites were given in the last minutes of her consciousness, and it seems better, somehow, to take the final journey with the first rays of sunshine touching her skin.
When the flaps are pulled open, he looks at his dying wife, and a glitter of gold catches his eye. There's an amber rose on her breast, a beautifully carved thing that wasn't there when he left her side.
Rodrigo snatches it up and races the few steps to the door, looking frantically through the camp with no clear idea of what he searches for. No, no real belief that he'll see it, though he knows well enough what he imagines is there.
And there she is, slipping out of shadows cast by soldiers' tents, illuminated by the same new sun that guides Akilina into death. Belinda Walter stands in the middle of his camp, her hair alight with morning colour and the oval of her face darkened by the light behind her. She nods, once, as he did when he left her three nights ago, and then sunlight and shadows fold around her and she is gone.
So, when he turns back, is Akilina Pankejeff.
JAVIER DE CASTILLE, KING OF GALLIN
7 July 1588 † Brittany; the Gallic camp
The past three days ought to have been a triumph, and instead they'd been a particular and new bleak hell. Rodrigo hadn't slept in two nights, sitting watch over Akilina; the only time he'd left her side was to attend first Sacha's, then Tomas's funeral services. The great guns still fought on, holding the Aulunian line; their enemy had lost both heart with Belinda's capture, and an impossible number of lives to the hideous weapons. Javier had overseen the guns' deployment, had stood and watched numbly as men fell before their fire, and had accepted the cheers and accolades of his own troops as they beat down the Red Bitch's army.
They didn't know, and Javier didn't want to tell them, that they had bullets enough for one more day of slaughter, and then the war would return to the footing they had known: man against man, swords gutting one another, blood in the eyes, bile held back between clenched teeth, feet slipping in mud and muck as they all struggled to survive. Rodrigo had men pouring new bullets into moulds as quickly as they could, but it would be days, even weeks, before they had enough of a stockpile to continue the onslaught at its present rate.
The old man's guns had evened the battlefield. Aulun and Khazar still had more men than the combined Ecumenic armies, but not nearly as many more, now. They could no longer count on sheer numbers to defeat Javier's troops, and that, he hoped, would take their heart from them, too. But then, it ought to have lent him confidence, and somehow it hadn't; it seemed he had nothing left to give, not certainty, not grief, not magic: Aulun had not gotten near enough to his men in the past three days to bother with the shielding, and his own witchpower attacks had been half-hearted. Ghosts sat on his shoulders, Tomas on one and Sacha on the other, urging him to different ends.
“You could finish it.” Eliza spoke from behind him, an unexpected interruption to his thoughts. The words so closely echoed what he thought Sacha might say that Javier wondered if she, too, heard voices whispering from their past. She sat at his feet, an odd mix of awkwardness and grace born from the false pregnancy she carried. “We only have enough bullets for another day, and you've got the Aulunian heir locked up in a tent on our side of
