eyes. For months his image had been an indulgence of wistfulness; now it seemed to mock her with what she hadn't known, and could all too clearly recognise now that she'd been granted the eyes to see it. She didn't want those eyes, nor the burden of knowledge that came with them, but neither could be erased. If she found even the slightest release in pointed words, in playing herself as almost an equal to the two she shared a room with, then she would take it, and for once trust herself too valuable to be thrown away.
Robert turned to Lorraine, full of good nature and wide eyes. “Primrose has a point, majesty.” He took in Lorraine's tight mouth and stiff carriage, and softened both his words and his mood. “I have not sought a crown or title, Lorraine, not even in the staging of this particular play for these especial ends. Surely you know this, after all these years.” He knelt, and to Belinda's eyes, to her cold witchpower senses, there was nothing but honesty in the action. “I am honoured to be named the queen's husband, and need no pretty titles. If you will call me Robert, and the rest of them Lord Drake as they have always done, then I'll count myself a favoured man.”
Lorraine sniffed, a sound denoting pleasure, but her gaze was still hard as she looked toward Belinda. “And you, I suppose, will want the title of princess, as is your due.”
“All I covet is a place as a novice again, my queen, that I might adjust to the awe of my new position under God's watchful eye, and amongst women who will not be impressed by my change of status.” Belinda rarely indulged in sarcasm, and never with her superiors, but her tongue and tone had minds of their own today, and she could not control them.
Lorraine's expression went flat, but Robert, climbing to his feet, chuckled again. “She reminds me of you, Lorraine. Come now,” he said to the look she gave him. “It's no secret you're known for your quick tongue and ginger temperament, majesty.”
Another sniff said Robert had diffused Lorraine's pique for the second time. “The girl has not the hair for it.”
Neither does her majesty, anymore. For a horrifying instant Belinda thought she'd spoken aloud, and bit her tongue against the inclination to do so. Newly made heir or not, stomach-sick with knowledge or not, there were boundaries she shouldn't even dream of crossing, and mocking Lorraine's physical aspect was unquestionably one of them.
“There's no need for her to enter the convent again,” Robert was saying with a casual wave of his hand. “She can stay in the palace and study-”
“No.” Inexorable cold, the same chill Belinda felt within herself, cut through Robert's easy plans. He stopped and looked at her with genuine astonishment, and she tried to remember when, if ever, she'd refused his intentions so flatly. “Unless I stay in this chamber, I can't go unnoticed in the palace, and even here there will need to be food brought, and drink, and chamber pots emptied. Unless her majesty wishes to field rumours on how she has begun eating and eliminating twice as much, it seems a bad idea. Besides, the courtiers are enamoured of my seclusion. We want them to love me, not think me a sneak.”
Robert, drily, said, “You are a sneak.”
“All the more reason to not let them see it.”
“You enjoyed your time at the convent so much that you hasten now to return there?” Lorraine was as dry as Robert, and for a moment Belinda admired them as she might a set of horses. One might be bay and the other brown, but they were a matched pair for all of that, a lifetime of working together making them excellent complements to each other.
“It was your majesty's idea that I should be so pious as to gain God's support in our sea battle against Gallin.” The coldness was dropping away leaving strips of anger where it fell. “I can emerge from the convent more and more regularly as the months go by becoming part of society without leaving behind the impression of purity Your majesty knows the value of such illusions. At Yule I can finally be bold enough to take my place, and by then, majesty, we should have some clear idea of who are our enemies within the court and who will support us.”
Lorraine's painted eyebrows shot up. “‘We,’ girl?”
“Your majesty, his highness, and myself,” Belinda said shortly. “I do not put myself so high as to use a royal plural. This life is still on the wrong side of a looking glass to me, Mother, but I do have some skill in making a place for myself where I was once unknown.” The barb hit home, Lorraine tensing satisfactorily at Belinda's use of the familial honorific, tensing in a way Robert had never done when she had called him “father.” She might never earn that reaction from Robert, not now, but to cut it from Lorraine was worth sacrificing it from Robert. “I would never presume to tell your majesty what to do, but it might be wise to permit me to do what I do best.”
“Murder?” Lorraine asked archly, and for one exasperated moment, Belinda found herself tempted.
Robert intervened, his palms turned down as though he quieted a room full of squabbling old men. “Primrose has a point,” he said a second time. “One I hadn't entirely considered. Perhaps she should be permitted to arrange the details of her coming out. She has both experience and reason to make it work, and…”
And, Belinda concluded, if she failed in endearing herself to the people with her slow exposure, then that, too, would be something of use for Lorraine and Robert to know. They bickered a little longer, but the answer was foregone. Lorraine eventually drew herself up and turned a hard look on Belinda. “Whether the public do or not, we will see you in a week's time, girl, and the matter of which we spoke had best be resolved.”
Robert shared a look of open curiosity between the women as Belinda tightened her jaw and curtsied to the queen. “Majesty.”
There was no other word she trusted herself with, no other response that could both satisfy and forbid bone- deep horror from spewing across the floor. Lorraine nodded, content, and together the three left her private chambers.
Belinda Walter emerged from the queen's apartments in a novice's grey robes and with her hair pulled back tightly, making nothing glamorous of who or what she was. Lorraine went with her to the palace doors, there to embrace her for the third time, and Robert, clearly amused at his role, kissed her cheek with great solemnity. Belinda curtsied to them both, and a procession delighted by her humility came together around her and made an escort of itself as she was returned to the abbey.
The eager young sister greeted her almost before the abbess, and a shy touch to the girl's cheek washed away any lingering memories of nights spent together. The girl, awed and delighted by Belinda's status and by the grace of her touch, turned pink and ran off to make a confession of pride so happily Belinda nearly laughed, the first time such humour had risen in her since the courtroom.
She could not, in this place, make confession. Not to the abbess or anyone else; the girl they'd taken in was an innocent, not one who knew any man's touch, much less one who had all unknowing spread her legs for her brother.
The thought brought another flinch, awakened the witch, harlot, whore singsong in her mind again. Belinda set her teeth and whispered a request to the convent's holy mother, and that brisk old woman led her to the chapel where she could kneel and fold her hands in prayer. To the world around her she was a penitent overwhelmed by her new standing, thanking God for it and asking that she be guided in His light for all her days. That was what they wanted to see, and Belinda was happy to let them see it. A part of her did, indeed, pray for the souls and bodies of the soldiers who were going to war, though she had little faith that prayers would protect any of them.
But mostly she knelt in silence, head bowed and, if not empty of thought, at least as unfocused as she could make it. The song of recrimination swam through her mind time and again, dismay and disgust turning her body to ice even when heat rose inside her as though she might sick up. She had made a lifetime of using people and things and had not loathed herself for it; now, having been used in a way inconceivable to untwisted minds, she thought there was a cleanliness to using people in begetting death. Death left scars on the survivors, but those scars healed: dying was part of life, not a sin, but what she and Javier had done was, and Dmitri had allowed them to enter it. Ill winds ride in Gallin, he'd said to her a year past, in the Khazarian northlands. He had known where Belinda would go and had known what her mission there would be, and he had warned neither herself nor Robert that a wickedness beyond comprehension lay in her path. No, there was no honesty to Dmitri's machinations, the way there was honesty in death. Belinda had no doubt that keeping such secrets furthered some end of Dmitri's own; he and Robert were at odds, though perhaps only one of them knew that.
Only one of them, and Belinda herself.
Slowly, slowly, through the chaos of thoughtlessness, a plan made a shape in her mind. She had knowledge and she had power: all she lacked were allies. Robert was not an ally, not in this, and Dmitri never would be. Whatever his plans, she would thwart them, and destroy him if she could. If that furthered Robert's goals, it was a
