from its weight. A part of her wanted to: she had been raised in shadow, and even now her heart flew out of time, unregulated, terrified at being under the weight of so many eyes. Beatrice Irvine had been this exposed, and Beatrice Irvine was dead. It would be easy to draw the extended witchpower around herself and disappear, to avoid the life being thrust on her and become no more than she had been.
Duty, sharp and agonising, cut into her, and then witchpower ambition, and Belinda knew she would never retreat.
“His name was Christopher, after the patron saint of lost children,” she murmured, “and he was the closest thing to a father I knew in my sequestered years. I would see him of a Sunday, when he was allowed to visit the abbey chapel and bend an ear to hearing the labours of my studies each week. In the summer and on fine winter days we would walk and argue doctrine, both religious and political.” She wove the fiction from the life she had known, growing up under Robert's fond and distant tutelage, and from a dream of what might have been. That dream, laced with witchpower, drifted toward Branson, wrapping around him gently so it might settle against his skin and become comfortable before Belinda exerted her will behind it. It reminded her of Javier's casual expectation of obedience. She'd never imagined she might one day command the same influence.
And it was a different thing than she had done to Marius or Viktor; then, she had relied on the sexual link she shared with each man, able to control through it and it alone. But she was stronger now, much stronger, and breaking Branson would be too obvious, especially in front of so many witnesses. He required seduction; they all did. They required the vulnerability of a young woman raised away from the world, telling a story about death: about the death of the only person she'd thought loved her. They needed to believe it would never occur to her to lie-and they needed to trust that despite honesty, despite vulnerability, that she was not an easy target, ready for crushing and throwing away. Impatience swam over her, a sudden disdain for politics and an impulse to simply dominate, force them all to her will. Too much danger lay in that desire; despite Lorraine's promises, witchcraft would see Belinda burnt, and such a demonstration of power would be seen as witchcraft, not the Madonna's generous influence.
“He was tall,” she said, and felt her own gaze grow distant, as though she looked back through memory. Indeed, she felt as though she did, while Lorraine's concern still spiked at the corners of her mind, and Dmitri's curiosity washed over her. “Tall, at least, to a child,” Belinda added with a brief smile, then passed a hand over her eyes. “No, tall in fact: as a girl I often had to run to keep pace with him, and even when I reached my growth I looked up to him. Sharp-featured, with black hair, and he told me of the monastery where he'd studied.”
Belinda had no doubt that, by the time Branson got a man there, there would be records of her imaginary priest, brothers who remembered him, a story of how he enjoyed gardening, their regret at his passing; all the things that made up a life, real or not. The world seemed a cruel place, that a man who had never been could take on more permanence than many who had been born, lived, and died without regard.
Lorraine, who had in all the brief times Belinda had enjoyed her presence, been a master of control, emotionless to Belinda's witch-breed senses, was now, beneath her painted face, full of disbelief; full of a growing concern that bordered on terror. It rattled Belinda, distracting her from the spell she tried to weave, and in a moment of inquisitiveness, she turned a few degrees back toward the throne.
“He told me of my mother, not of the queen, but of the woman. She who had wed and created life in secret, knowing herself to be the most valuable piece she had to broker, yet knowing she couldn't risk leaving her throne empty after years of playing suitors against one another. He called her bold and clever, and”-Belinda smiled quickly-“and apologised for it, for who was he, a humble priest, to pass such comment on a queen? But he gave me what he could of the mother who had to hide me.”
Belinda reached out, trusting, sweet, hopeful, toward that mother, and wondered if there might have been a time when she would have done so and have it be less than the act of showmanship it was now.
Lorraine, even knotted with fear, was a consummate actress: when the daughter she had long been separated from reached for her, it was instinctive to take her hand, creating a line of compassion, of family, and of new beginnings between them.
Creating the link of touch that had always made stealing thoughts easy for Belinda Primrose, ever since she had awakened to her witchpower under Javier de Castille's guidance.
The girl knows was the underlying thought in Lorraine's touch, half incoherent with confusion. A flinch ran under Belinda's skin, an unexpected wound opening at how Lorraine thought of her: the girl. She had no name in her mother's mind, and that cut unfairly deep. Only in the past few days had Belinda often allowed herself the luxury of thinking of Lorraine as her mother; those were thoughts too dangerous to be reflected, even in her own mind. She was Lorraine, or the queen , and despite her skill in weaving stories, Belinda could hardly imagine a day might come when she would call the queen Mother. It ought not hurt that Lorraine thought of her similarly, rather than by dangerous words like daughter, or by her name.
Ought not, and yet it did. Belinda put the hurt away: there would be time to nurse it later, and she had only a few brief seconds in which to steal Lorraine's thoughts and find the source of her consternation.
Words came clear again within the constraints of Lorraine's mind: the queen was disciplined, her mouth curved in a gentle smile as she looked on Belinda, her gaze tender, with no hint of the rushing, bewildered thoughts behind her eyes. How can she know, but then how could she know that I was her mother, and she knew that as well. Knew herself for the queen's bastard and made nothing of it, so perhaps she'll make nothing of this, either, that the priest who oversaw her birth-
An image came into sharp focus: a hawk-faced man with black hair and deep-set eyes, with a sensual mouth and long hands. The kind of man Lorraine might have considered for a lover when she was young and not yet a queen. By the time she took the throne she knew better than to dally with the church. She was head and heart of her religion, and would allow no churchman above her.
All of that, all of it and more came with the picture of Dmitri Leontyev in Belinda's mind. For all her control, for all the life she'd spent honing discipline, when Belinda smiled shyly and turned from Lorraine to once more address Branson, her gaze went first to the disguised witchlord in the courtroom.
There was nothing of concern in Dmitri's eyes, nothing of the amusement she could feel beneath his surface. He knew himself a stranger here, an envoy of Irina Durova's court, there for no other reason than to make polite of the failed attempt to build an alliance between Aulun and Khazar. Lorraine couldn't recognise him; the witchpower saw to that, misdirected both her eyes with the changes it had worked on his countenance and her memory, so that even if a hint of suspicion came into her mind, it would fade away again. As ever, Belinda had no words from Dmitri, only smug satisfaction that allowed her to understand the direction of his thoughts.
He'd been there at her birth, and Lorraine thought him dead.
“I can't speak to his age,” Belinda said to Branson. She trusted the life she'd led to give her voice the right timbre, to show youthful uncertainty and sorrow even when she herself barely attended the words she spoke. “His hair was dark, but not all men lose their colour as they age, and he seemed old to me. That winter a cough took him, and he grew frail.” Tears filled her eyes and she glanced to the side so she might brush them away in a semblance of privacy; a semblance watched by all the court. She would believe her, if she were they; such performance was what she was made for. “When he died I was alone.”
A single thread of her attention was taken up by awareness of rising sympathy: the courtiers were half in love with her, in love with a romantic idea of a lonely girl destined for a throne; in love with the thought that they might now warm her and make her welcome. Mothers with marriageable sons plotted how a convent-raised princess might be best seduced; mothers with daughters considered how a crowned novice might need friends and guidance within the court. Younger women sighed in melodramatic compassion, imagining if only they had been the secret heir, and so it went, all through the court, all making a place for Belinda within their hearts. The romance would fade soon enough, leaving politics and manoeuvrings behind, but now, as she stood on the throne dais beside Lorraine, they warmed to her.
And she all but ignored them, her gaze on Branson but her thoughts on the two witchlords and the Aulunian queen. An energy crackled between them, nearly a quarter century of secrets kept. Belinda had no need to look over her shoulder at Robert to feel that he, too, was remembering the day of her birth, and the priest who had overseen it.
Bloody curls over translucent skin: that was the easiest memory for Belinda herself to draw up. The warmth of Robert's hands enveloping her, and the command: it cannot be found out. Robert's voice replying, promising that it would not be found out. And another command: attend her. Another response, a man's voice agreeing, and in the present, in the courtroom, hairs rippled on Belinda's arms, bringing a chill.
