“Don't,” she said, startling herself with the word. His eyebrows flashed up and she curled a lip, already cursing herself for giving something away. “No one calls me Belinda. Not since I was a child.”
“You haven't been Belinda since you were a child,” he replied mildly. “You've been Robert's Primrose, his thorned and lovely assassin, and you've been every name she's taken to make herself a success. But there's a core of you that owns the name, and who are you if you don't claim it?”
She had not slept at all, after that. Oh, Dmitri had worn her down, training her in the witchmagic in ways she'd never dreamt. She had taught herself not to flinch at pain: he taught her to draw heat away from a burn or blood from a cut, and how to make damaged flesh heal. Her power stuttered and stumbled, injuries filling with rough-seeming witchlight, as though it was nothing more than unpolished amber. It would do, Dmitri finally said in disgust, so long as she had only herself to treat.
When he tired of her faltering ability to heal, he turned her toward the alteration of wind and clouds, and that came more easily: witchpower and wind alike billowed, pushing at the world, searching for places it had never been. Clouds only marked its passage, making the invisible possible to see. Dmitri made a sound of approval, but his acid comment from the morning lingered, following Belinda back to the convent and settling around her with a weight of its own. When the young sister came to her cell again, Belinda sent her away, too caught up in thought to indulge in base desires.
She knew herself; she knew her place. Witchpower fought with that knowledge, pushed her beyond the space she had been carved for. That had been a discomfort, one she'd struggled against, citing loyalty and duty. Not just citing it, but feeling it so deeply that denying it was physically revolting, even when her heart might have guided her elsewhere.
In the cold dark of her convent cell, she allowed herself one low laugh. Her heart had never been a guide; until Javier she wouldn't have imagined it could be.
But with a few biting words Dmitri had thrown a lifetime's focus into question, far more sharply than Belinda would have ever permitted herself to do. It was almost intriguing when voiced by someone else, as though hearing her own uncertain thoughts spoken aloud by another gave them a legitimacy she wouldn't have dared assign them.
The hawk-faced witchlord was right: Belinda Primrose was almost no more than a creation, an idea that barely existed, and yet it was all she had. Robert called her Primrose in honour of a memory that had never been: Rosemary his sister, Belinda's supposed mother. If she were to give herself a proper name, it might be Belinda Drake, or if she dared reach all the way, even Belinda Walter, for Lorraine held the higher rank in that assignation, and should it ever be legitimised, it would be Robert whose name would be subsumed.
She had always known what she was. That who she was might not be the same question had never struck her. She rose after a sleepless night, offered devotions that meant nothing to her, and clad herself in modest clothing so that she might go, for the seventh morning in a row, into Alunaer with the man who played the part of her father.
“How can who I am and what I am be different?” she asked when they reached his house. Other mornings they'd spoken quietly, but these were the only words she'd said beyond the show of pleasant greetings that they had, without discussion, settled on as the right show of emotion for the abbess.
Curiosity lifted Dmitri's eyebrows and he took her wrappings like a gentleman's servant might, hanging them so the spread fabric might dry in the heat while they studied. Belinda nodded her thanks and took herself to a padded chair by the fire, sitting to frown into the flames. Frowning: she had, it seemed, given up on all pretence of stillness. Instead emotion rode her raw, after nearly fifteen years of bending to her exacting control. Perhaps that was how, who, and what she was could differ: they had once been flawlessly intertwined, but that bond was crumbling.
She kept her gaze on the fire, finding it safer than Dmitri's slim body and hazel eyes. Aware that she broke a week's ritual in studies, but more interested in the discussion of who she might be than what she could do, she said, “Belinda Primrose is the only name that has ever belonged to me, and I don't care for you using it because it is mine. I have little that is.”
“Ah.” Dmitri came to crouch beside her chair, fire lighting his eyes and making craggy shadows of his face. “Shall I call you Primrose, then, or Rosa, or Beatrice, or any of the other masks you've worn?”
“How can they be masks if they're all I've ever known? There's nothing below them, only duty, only loyalty.”
“And the witchpower.” Dmitri rested his hand on her knee, then straightened again. “When I saw you in Khazar there were only the first two, but the third is born in you now, Belinda. Does it not change who you are? Does it not change what you desire, and what you find yourself willing to risk to have it?”
“But I have no…” Words failed her, turning her hands to a strangling gesture. “I do not exist, Dmitri. I'm not my mother's child, my father's daughter. I'm not a prince's bride. Whether I have desires or not, there's no path upon which I can follow them. I'm a servant, and-”
“You are a queen,” Dmitri interrupted, voice sonorous. “A queen in the making, even if you must do the making yourself.”
Witchpower awakened in her, a warm wash of light that spilled through her mind, heightened her heartbeat, tingled her fingers. Gentle warmth, not the compulsive hunger that it so often manifested as, and that seduction was more erotic than the burn. It stung, but sweetly, an ache of promise in her breasts and between her thighs. She had never in her life stoked ambition. To hear it offered heated the centre of her, deepened her voice to throatiness that no man could mistake for anything other than an appetite for pleasure. “Dangerous words, dark prince.”
Her hand crept toward his; touched it, then passed it to touch his hip as she turned her gaze up toward him. “Dangerous words,” she whispered again, and then let truth damn her, damn it all: “I would hear more.”
C.E. Murphy
The Pretender's Crown
Dmitri knelt, which Belinda did not expect. Knelt, and made himself subservient to her, gave her the position of power. Men had done that with startling frequency this past year, from rough lustful Viktor to the prince of Gallin, and now this dark-haired, hazel-eyed witchlord whose powers and ambitions reached far beyond Belinda's own. The impulse to open her legs and command pleasure boiled up. She squelched it, crushed her thighs together instead, and swallowed a sound of sweet anguish at the spike of half-answered need it drove through her.
“Tell me more, Dmitri.” Belinda turned her hands palm up, encouraging. Dmitri gathered them in his own and lowered his face to their touch, almost reverent. Soft witchpower, ebbing and flowing within Belinda, gave her tastes of his emotions: not words, not the way she could steal clear thoughts from others, but an abiding sense of the peaks and valleys of what he felt.
The show of reverence was built on truth. It was not, perhaps, so profound as he pretended, but respect underlay the gesture with no cynicism, no ploys. Familiarity jolted Belinda; she had felt that same respect inherent in her father, bound up in an inexplicable combination of Lorraine Walter and a monstrous creature of silver scales and sinuous shape. The one made sense, though its depth had shocked her: men, in Belinda's experience, paid lip service to high regard and remained smug with confidence of their own superiority. To find her father's heart as true as his words had lain outside of imagination.
As did the other bewildering images she'd stolen from him, so far outside imagination Belinda had chosen not to dwell on them. Had chosen not to try to understand what Robert had told her she would not, and had instead grasped what she could: that Robert was incapable of surviving without that fathomless streak of esteem, and that she now felt a similar channel in Dmitri. It ran less deeply in Dmitri than in Robert, tempered with a different ambition, but it still lay within him, as much a part of him as his breath or bone.
“My father says I have a purpose.” Belinda bent over Dmitri's bowed head, her lips almost against his thick black hair. Witchpower sluiced through her, contained within something like the stillness. Shaped by Belinda's will, rather than shaping it. Left to itself it would rage, but bound, it rolled slow and deliberately tantalising. Her heart pushed golden light with every beat, until she thought her fingertips would shine and illuminate Dmitri's hair. Force was unnecessary, when her ends could be achieved through subtlety. It felt right, and that rightness brought a flashing smile to her face. Lorraine, too, avoided force, instead teasing compromise and change out of delicate negotiations. It seemed a fresh and fragile link between mother and daughter, and Belinda took delight in it.
“Robert says someday I'll understand my purpose, but that for now it's enough to know I have one. I think your plans for me are different from his, dark prince. He has kept me all unknowing, stunting my power and then
