With her at his back, with the flash of her blades in the rain, with the blood that sprays as they fight, he knows she has never stopped practising, and that until death claims her, she never will.
The gondola boy flings a dagger and it sticks in someone's eye. He shrieks delight and Eliza's approving shout echoes it.
The Gallic ship from whence Eliza and the boy came takes another cannonball, its shudder knocking their ship askew, and then it slides into the boiling sea, leaving them with a double-contingent of crew all thirsty for blood. The Aulunians retreat, slicing their grappling ropes as they go, and Marius hears an order bellowed from belowdecks. The Aulunian ship is barely thirty feet off their starboard when cannons send it to join Eliza's ship in sinking. The crew rush to the rail, drawing wet pistols to shoot the survivors and scream victory.
Marius, alone in blood and water, watches them, and knows he is not like these people.
RODRIGO DE COSTA, PRINCE OF ESSANDIA
Unlike his idiot nephew, Rodrigo doesn't find it necessary to be in the thick of battle. Perhaps because he's an old man and has seen his share of war; perhaps it's that a fight on land does not, at least, have the added danger of surviving a swordfight only to drown when the ship goes down.
Perhaps it's that he lacks Javier's witchpower, and the sense of immortality such a gift must carry. Or perhaps he lacks the sense of duty it might also bear, though Rodrigo would cut down anyone who dared suggest he lacks a dutiful nature.
“You can do nothing from here, Rodrigo. When the storm passes we'll learn what there is to know.”
Rodrigo, who is standing over the maps and toy ships in the same way Javier did last night, allows himself a moment with his eyes closed, and a thought that he would never allow to pass his lips: perhaps he remains behind because the idea of leaving Essandia to his newly wedded wife is so appalling.
Then he speaks in the language she used, Khazarian; she often speaks to him in her native tongue, and he hasn't asked if that's so she doesn't forget it, or because she imagines his spies might not number it among their languages. “I know, and yet can't stop myself from studying them and wondering.”
“Yours is not the hand of God. You can't direct the ships as you see fit. At best you can move them as they ought to move, and worry yourself sick over whether they do as you wish.”
“Javier is on one of those ships.” In the end, it's the only answer he has to give: Javier is his only living relative, and for all that the prince of Essandia can do nothing to protect him, nor can he sit and drink wine and eat sweetmeats waiting for an answer to come across storm-ridden waters. His nephew is an idiot, but he is something special as well, and Rodrigo wouldn't lose him for the world.
For the church, perhaps, and the world after, but not for this one.
Akilina sighs, nods, and comes forward to put a hand over Rodrigo's. It's a wifely gesture; it is, in his estimation, entirely calculated. Rodrigo almost enjoys that; it gives him a different game to think about, one he has a little more chance of controlling.
“You will return to Isidro, will you not?” His voice is conciliatory, all due concern from a husband to his gravid wife: hope and worry, not orders. Akilina Pankejeff does not respond well to orders. “If the winter is temperate and this war drags out toward Christmas, you'll return to warmer and safer climes to bear the child.”
“We've yet to see a full day of battle, and you would already have me packed off to Isidro.” Akilina is teasing, but her accusation is full of other emotions as well: exasperation, pleasure, anticipation. The pleasure is not for his concern, but for what she regards it as meaning: that he is weaker than she, and can be directed through his fear for her well-being and his need for an heir.
If circumstances were utterly other than what they are, Rodrigo de Costa and Akilina Pankejeff might have made a devastating team.
But they are not, so he gives her a rueful smile that will no doubt play into her idea of his weakness, and he shrugs. “I anticipate this battle,” and he gestures between himself and her, “to be a protracted one, my lady. I thought I had best get my first volley in now, the better to begin wearing you down.”
Coquettish is not a look Akilina does well: there's too much challenge in her sharp features, but Rodrigo can see her appeal, when she gives a sly look through black lashes. It stirs amusement in him more than any baser emotion, but he can see how men might fall before it, and so when she says, “There might be better ways to wear me down, my lord,” he is obliged to take her hand and draw her toward a more private part of the tent.
Obliged to murmur, “We must be quick, then, and quiet, for the men will think poorly of their prince rutting in the shadows while they prepare to fight for their lives.”
“And if I wish to be loud?”
Rodrigo releases her, and from the flash in her eyes that's not the answer she wanted to her challenge. “Then you'll get no wearing down until after our victory, my lady, when the men might forgive their prince his passion and dare to imagine themselves pulling those cries from their queen's lips.”
Astonishment and perhaps offence parts those lips. “You would condone such crassness in them?”
“It's a rare man who listens to a woman in the heat of passion and doesn't put himself in her lover's place,” Rodrigo says calmly. “Indulge in noisy desire in the heart of an army camp, and you'll become their fantasy. They'll undress you with their eyes where once they might have worshipped. Reverence is less dangerous than lust, lady. Choose your position wisely.”
And she does, becoming a queen on her knees with her mouth hot on his cock, filling her throat and silencing any cries she might have made. It's a deliberate cruelty to leave her there when he's sated, but Rodrigo has a battle to worry over, and an interest in seeing to whom his lady goes if he leaves her with an itch unscratched.
BELINDA PRIMROSE
She doesn't have to be there to see the battle.
The glee that rises in Belinda Primrose banishes every other moment of delight in her life as if they were the stuff of dreams, wispy and unobtainable. It is as though the storm itself carries the shapes of ships and soldiers to her: the storm, and Javier de Castille's witchpower, which she can feel on the water as though it's a living thing. Javier is aware of where his ship is-in the lead, a place of arrogance and power-and aware of where the other ships of the armada are in relation to him. Silver spiderwebs between them, catching water drops and shimmering with life; Belinda only needs to touch it and it vibrates. She can imagine a quiet gasp birthing from that touch, a sound any man might make in the midst of intimacy.
Her own power searches out the other ships, the ones not latticed together by Javier's magic. Those ones are her own: they become golden with raindrops, not so much bound to each other as becoming bright spots in her mind, warm against the cold of the storm and against Javier's moonlight power. With these bits of magic, she draws an image in her mind.
The picture is a dire one.
The storm has driven the Aulunian navy back and the armada forward, and the armada's greater numbers are allowing them to close on the Aulunian ships like a crab's pincers. They are not quite surrounded on all sides: the cliffs at the Aulunians' back are dangerous, and while they still may be miles from shore, the Cordulan captains are being cautious. The pincers are still open at their tips, leaving a narrow gauntlet that the Aulunians could try to run. Assuming they survived that run, it would leave them racing for the Taymes with the entire armada on their tails. Tall protective cliffs and men ready to drop boulders onto enemy ships would only slow the Ecumenic army a little, should it come to that.
Belinda, as though she reaches for a lover, opens one hand, then the other, and makes herself supplicant to the sky.
For weeks she has practised with the quieter weather in Alunaer. Has brought rain, has pushed clouds around the sky and has blown skirts and hats awry with wind. Once, walking back from Dmitri's home, she brought a patch of sunlight with her, no larger than a half step in front of her or a half step behind her. She imagined the
