price worth paying. But a cruel knot of surety held a place in Belinda's thoughts. Robert hadn't known, still didn't know, whose child Javier was, because he had been surprised at the Gallic prince's witchpower.
And yet cold, dreadful certainty whispered that if he had known, he still would have sent Belinda to seduce and murder, with no care for their consanguinity or the cost against their souls for brother and sister becoming lovers. That his loyalty to his foreign queen was far greater than any worry for an ungodly union between two witchbreed children. From Dmitri's words about siring heirs to continue their world-changing plans, Robert might in fact have welcomed another child born to the witchpower, even if that child was issue of an affair no human morality would condone.
That, though it was all but beyond her comprehension, there was something alien enough in her father as to make him into a singular concept that she could grasp.
An enemy.
With the calm of horror cloaking her, Belinda drew stillness around herself, then rose and left the chapel, left the convent, left the country, and went in search of Javier de Castille.
JAVIER DE CASTILLE
8 June 1588 † Gallin's northern shore
The messenger came through a sleeping camp long before dawn, riding a horse for all that the distance between the camp's centre and the nearby ocean channel was barely a mile. The gondola boy who rarely seemed to sleep, but who was unwakeable when he did, roused Javier bare seconds before the rider arrived. Eliza dragged a robe over her own shoulders and belted Javier's sword around his waist before he staggered, bleary with sleep, to meet the agitated courier.
The man all but fell off his horse and dropped to one knee, shoulders heaving with breathlessness. “My lord, there's an Aulunian heir.”
For an eternity the words made no sense. Javier stared at the top of the man's head-he was balding, with sweat rolling through thin hairs-and then transferred his gaze to the island nation invisible with distance and predawn light. “An heir?”
He was king of Gallin; he should be wittier than that. Shock, even coupled with a half-sleeping mind, should clear more quickly and leave him more able to accept and ask clever questions. “Lorraine of Aulun has declared an heir?”
“One of her body,” the messenger gasped, and dared look up. Javier gaped at him, too thick-headed to even echo the man. Either emboldened by his king's silence or sympathetic to it, the messenger continued. “She has produced writs of marriage and of birth, my lord king. Marriage twenty-five years ago to Robert, Lord Drake, long since known as her paramour, and the birth two years later of her daughter. The girl was raised as an adopted niece by Robert until her thirteenth year, when she entered a convent. Yesterday in the queen's court she was presented, your majesty Her name is Belinda Walter, and she is the Aulunian heir.”
That had been seven days ago.
Too many points had made a line that morning: Beatrice Irvine, who was also Belinda Primrose, had given the truth to her bloodline when Robert Drake's witchpower had stood against Javier's in the Lutetian court. The Aulunian heir, it was said, stood on the cliffs of Aulun and called God's light to her, and in so doing destroyed the Essandian armada. Beatrice Irvine, spy, whore, witch, and traitor, was Belinda Walter, daughter of the Titian Bitch.
Javier de Castille had bedded, and nearly wedded, the heir to the Aulunian throne. Even now, in the midst of battle, when that thought came to him it came with a tang of bitter irony. How Sandalia would have adored that coup: she, who had stood against his marriage to Beatrice, might have handed Javier her rival's throne without a drop of blood spilled if she had only encouraged their union.
He had been poor company this past week, had Sandalia's son. Rocked between betrayal and a twisted admiration, he had drawn the lines for his friends, for Rodrigo and Akilina, and most of all for himself, struggling to see if he might have understood the truth before it had fallen from a messenger's lips.
He could not have. The wiser part of him knew it, but the knowledge had emptied him, and then it had filled him with rage. She had played him for a fool since the beginning, and that was a game she would pay for.
Blood tasted of metal. His nose was full of thick scents: more metal, more blood, viscera, and once in a while the startling clear salt and fish smell of water off the straits. When that faded the sun-rotted stench of everything else seemed all the worse, and Javier heard others around him coughing and gagging in the same way he did.
He was the king of Gallin, and he was not meant to be in the midst of a battlefield, spitting blood and blinking sweat away.
Aulun had come to Gallin at the southern jut, in the northern Gallic province of Brittany; the very place Javier had argued to Rodrigo they would not try for. The two countries' proximity there had made the province a contested stretch of land for centuries; Aulun claimed it and Gallin refused to give it up. Lorraine even had holiday retreats in one or two of the area's more beautiful low valleys, and as Javier knocked away an Aulunian sword and skewered the man carrying it, he had the brief vicious wish that someone had simply slipped into one of those rarely used manors and done away with Lorraine on one of her visits. He would not now be numb with exhaustion from the ears down, had someone been so foresightful, and would be enjoying a blazing summer afternoon instead of desperately wishing for water and a lull in the fighting.
They had the numbers to defeat the Aulunians, some forty thousand Cordulan soldiers and Khazar's massive contingency of seventy thousand troops soon to join them. Rodrigo had sent the larger part of the Cordulan force to Brittany, convinced Lorraine's army would take the longer march in an attempt to surprise Lutetia by coming up on its southwestern side instead of from the north and east. It was the harder journey all around, not just for distance but because the Sacrauna protected the city on its southern border, but Rodrigo had been certain, and Javier had taken his uncle's lead and thirty thousand men to Brittany.
Aulun had not been marching on Lutetia as expected. Lorraine's army had been nowhere in sight, not marking the land and not distant on the sea. Javier, cursing, had posted a rear guard and retreated to ground that would give him the advantage when they came. If they came; he couldn't help but think of Rodrigo and the smaller part of their army to the north, perhaps taking the brunt of Aulun's attack.
They waited for three exhausting days for pigeons to wing back and forth, bearing messages of battle. Rodrigo, to the north, was at war, while Javier waited in boredom for an army that had turned its attentions elsewhere.
The fourth morning, they broke camp, and that was when the Aulunians came.
There were too many to have hidden, and sentries had been posted each night. Whispers of witchcraft followed the first battle, and witchcraft it had to be. Not even Javier had realised his eyes were fogged to the ships that suddenly appeared off shore, or his ears to the sounds of an army edging itself into place around his own. He had the high ground, and yet the Aulunian army swept around them, a collapsing wedge that drove his men into a narrower and narrower line of defence. He had never intended to fight amongst his men, thinking it wiser to wield magic from a distance so he wouldn't terrorise his own soldiers.
Caught in the midst of the Aulunian attack, he found himself with no choice, and then found his men to be happy to have a witch-or God-on their side, too.
Since then he had fought with them, revelling in the first gut-wrenching moments of panic and in how that fear faded into a noisy drive for survival. He had fought innumerable fencing matches, learning his skill with a sword, but had never known the moment that went beyond exhaustion, where his weapon's weight became as nothing, and he himself became a warrior who could fight forever. He had learned to rally men with a cry, and when they fell, to whisper a prayer over a dozen bodies without his own ever stopping its endless slash and stab and cut. He had learned, too, to be agonisingly grateful for the times when a retreat was called or an advance succeeded; times when he, like those ordinary men around him, could sink down, gasping for air, and take a moment to be astonished that he was still alive.
Such a moment had not come in some time, and wouldn't until one side or the other took a significant loss. They had fought since the morning, and with sunset's late arrival in the middle of June, it was all too possible they
