“You told her to keep her people safe. I've never, not since she was a child, given her the how of accomplishing her duties, only said they must be done. You may be her queen-”
“And her mother,” Lorraine snaps, but Robert shrugs dismissively.
“That, too, but the one holds more weight than the other, and it should, given how we chose to raise her. Either way, I think she's chosen her own path to fulfilling the job set to her.”
“We did not grant her permission-”
“How often,” Robert interrupts, greatly daring, “have you waited on permission, my queen?”
Lorraine stares at him, and stares hard. Robert smothers another smile, far too pleased with the girl-child he raised and feeling a little sorry for her mother. Belinda's presence in Gallin isn't something he counted on, but it, and her stormy relationship with Javier de Castille, will drive the war in dramatic waves. This is what Robert wants: the more passion and the less reason, the longer it will last, and the more room he'll have to push forward leaps in technology. These people have guns, they have metal workers, but they have no automation, and he requires a level of automation beyond what they can currently imagine. He admires their blue jewel of a planet, but he'll turn its skies grey and let its people forget the colour of the sun, if it will help to arm his own people for their long nights between the stars, and for the battles they find there.
“Are you suggesting,” Lorraine finally says, icily, “that your Primrose is…” She can't, it seems, finish the evidently appalling thought: Belinda may be her daughter, but Lorraine is unaccustomed to thinking of anyone as being like herself.
“You're a force unto yourself, my queen,” Robert says both smoothly and truthfully, but then he allows that smile to encroach. “And she's admired you her entire life, Lorraine. She will do anything for you and for this country. Don't worry. I'll go to Gallin and bring her back, but don't worry for her safety or her methods. If she's bold, she comes by it naturally.”
“For me,” Lorraine says, still coolly. “For me, for Aulun, and for you, Robert. Her loyalties don't begin and end with me.”
“But mine are yours to command.” A wash of foolishness heats Robert's jaw and creeps up his cheeks at the simple truth of those words. His other queen may wait beyond this world's moon, preparing for the time when humans break far enough away from their small planet to shuttle ore and minerals and fuel to her ships, but in the here and now, a very large part of Robert Drake is given over entirely to the red-haired queen of Aulun. Still flushed, he bows deeply and takes himself to the door, trying to shape his thoughts to a journey across the straits, and to finding a wayward daughter.
“Robert.” Lorraine waits until he's turned back, then says, “Take the Khazarian ambassador with you. I want one of Irina's chosen men on the front lines, as much to oversee her troops and report to her as to be seen and reported on. We are unified, Aulun and Khazar, and the world will see it in my lord consort and Irina's ambassador standing arm in arm.”
“Your will, my queen.” Robert, more than satisfied, bows again and leaves the chambers with a lightness in his step.
C.E. Murphy
The Pretender's Crown
JAVIER DE CASTILLE, KING OF GALLIN
22 June 1588 † The Brittanic battlefields
Javier had hardly believed Rodrigo would arrive in time. In time, as though the Essandian prince's fragment of an army could break the Khazarians' backs, as though there was some terrible and wonderful difference another eight thousand men could make to their cause. Javier had let almost all of his magic go when Rodrigo's troops did finally come over the hill, not because they deserved less of his protection, but because he was only barely on his feet, and permitting someone else to take the brunt of the allied attack was the only way to retain consciousness for the night's remainder.
Rodrigo himself rode up the hill with the last rays of sunset behind him, making a tall beautiful slim line of masculinity against golden shadows. Javier saw Belinda's power in that colour, then bared his teeth and shoved the thought away: she was out there, but not to make Rodrigo of Essandia look heroic as he gave the Cor-dulan armies a modicum of hope.
Akilina rode with him, evidently free, until Rodrigo dismounted and strode to his wife, lifting her from her horse. There was stiffness in his movements, speaking of an injury, but he was gentle with Akilina, and as he set her on the ground Javier saw the ropes that bound her wrists. Red scrapes said she'd been wearing them a while now.
“Surely,” Javier said with all the steadiness at his command, “this is unnecessary, uncle.”
Anger flashed in Rodrigo's eyes, and with it Javier's intuition leapt: the anger was for binding his wife, not for Javier's question. “The generals will have it no other way. It seems they doubt an army's ability to keep one single woman under watch without subjecting her to such indignities.” He put an arm around Akilina's waist, steadying her as they went into Javier's tent, where more of those generals waited to argue strategy and tactics and to make accusations of betrayal and perfidy. Javier stood where he was, swaying with the wind as it wrapped him, and gave half an ear to the arguments already rising in the tent.
There was nothing new to them-there would be nothing new. They were old women gnawing at old bones, trying to find marrow that had long since been sucked away. Blame was flung about as though it were a cannonball itself, its weight crushing where it couldn't be deflected. Low anger, tainted with silver, rumbled in Javier's belly, and he stood waiting for the inevitable phrase that would push him into action. He would wait until then, would wait until emotion ran so high that the witchpower could simply seize it and direct it as he wished, and if that was a sin against God, so be it.
Javier closed his eyes and listened to the mounting debate in the tent, and repeated those words to himself: so be it. He was king, he was God's chosen, he was blessed-or cursed; it no longer mattered which-with the witchpower, and between Tomas's faith and his own need, Javier de Castille no longer gave much concern to whether God approved of his decisions. Better to be damned trying to save souls than in not acting.
A bitter laugh coughed up from his chest, a thick wet sound. Sacha would be proud. Finally, Sacha would get the ambitious liege-lord he had always wanted.
Someone inside the tent snapped, “Rumour from Lutetia is that Akilina herself poisoned Sandalia's cup.”
Javier lifted his chin, opened his eyes to watch the fading horizon, and waited a little longer. Not much longer now. Anticipation strengthened and excited the witchpower, though it seemed that all such emotion belonged to the magic, not to himself. There was only the nausea of dreaded necessity in his own thoughts, the discomfort of determination. It would be better to revel in the witch-power's enthusiasm, and perhaps later he could. Too much lay at stake now to enjoy his choices.
Rodrigo, so softly, said, “I would not say such things if I were you,” to the offending general, but another voice took up the first officer's cry.
“First Sandalia dead and now the Khazarian army our betrayers, and Akilina Pankejeff a very common link, your majesty.” The honorific was a tag weighted with sarcasm, questioning Rodrigo's worthiness to bear it. Javier closed one hand into a slow fist, waiting, still waiting. Witchpower anger began seeping through him, heating resolution into passion.
A third took up the call. All of them were voices Javier knew, men he could put names to without seeing their faces. Men who ought to have been more unquestioningly loyal, and who ought not dream of saying what this one did: “The woman's well-known in Khazar as a witch, Rodrigo, and she's naught but bad luck to all of us here. There's a sure answer to this problem in the sharp of my sword.”
There: there were the words Javier had waited on. He heard breath catch in every throat in the cloth-walled room, and demanded, without speaking himself, that no word be said. Half a beat later he threw open the tent doors and stalked inside, all of it so quick he might not have needed witchpower to stay their voices. Might not have, and yet he flexed it, uncaring of the right or wrong in using magic to silence objections. “We will hear no threats of a queen's neck on a cutting block. We have lost enough royal blood already and are not eager to lose more. Akilina is not the problem here.”
