Emotion so strong it might have been his own rose up in all the men and the solitary woman in the room. It was sweltering inside the canvas walls, torches thickening the air as they offered light, and the night was already warm. Coupled with outrage, with disbelief, with insult, and with a soprano relief over all that masculine fury, the heat poured sickness into Javier. It sprang out as cold sweat on his lip and clogged his throat. For a terrible moment he thought he would lose all control and become a fool in front of half-rebellious generals. He could not let that happen.
Witchpower answered that need, all of its anger turning cool and soothing. It coated his insides and spilled outward, lending him strength and a confidence bordering on eroticism. He would have his way, and the thought gave him the same comfort and delight he'd felt in raining blood on his enemies.
“Akilina is a charm, nothing more, a thing dangled in front of Essandia in order to give the Khazarian alliance a pretty face. She hasn't the power to reforge that alliance, and if you made use of your minds instead of retreating into childish fears of witches you would know that. Only Irina could have made the decision to ally Khazar with Aulun at this late hour. Our navy is crushed and now Khazar stands with Aulun on Echon's western border. Irina could not have foreseen the armada's defeat.” That much, at least, Javier was certain of: none of them had foreseen it, and even if he'd known Belinda's powers were increasing, he'd never have fathomed they'd grown to such devastating effect. Irina Durova couldn't have known the Cordulan navy would suffer such a loss.
He left a silence, both to gather his thoughts and to lend weight to what he'd said, and no one broke it. Silver magic told him no one could, that witchpower held the generals' tongues even as they fought for speech. Hands planted on the map table, Javier levelled his gaze toward men resentful but unable to stop listening. “She couldn't foresee it, but I think we face a tactician more talented than any of us had realised. There was always a chance, however small, that the navy might fall. Irina didn't send a man to strike a bargain with Aulun after the armada. He would have been there, waiting for word to offer the Red Bitch the alliance she's always wanted.
“Sixty thousand of Irina's army are already here, and as many again remain in Khazar. She has Echon in the palm of her clawed hand, and Aulun at her side. These two queens need only break our back here in Brittany and then they'll move across Echon in their own names and for their own heathen gods. Gentlemen, we have been outplayed by women, and I will not have it.
“In the morning we will bring our army back together, regardless of the cost. God has offered me a blessing and I'll turn what small talent I have toward easing our reunion pangs, but it will be your skill, generals, that will win the day. The combined Cordulan armies are a formidable force, even in the face of the Khazarian alliance. Reuniting our men will give them heart, which I deem more valuable than any flanking tactics we might manage to manoeuvre out of our current positions. Our armies will be one, and then with our strength united and God's mandate driving us on, we will defeat Aulun and drive Khazar back to her frozen northlands, and Echon will for once and all bend knee to Cordula's church!”
The uproarious agreement came so quickly and with such pleasure that it might have been born of honest emotion, rather than relief at finally being able to speak, rather than Javier's implacable willpower directing them toward cooperation. This was an easier battle than with Tomas, if it was a battle at all: these were men who wanted a fight, though they might not have chosen it in the manner Javier did. There were objections, but they came in the form of how best to implement his plans, not inherent opposition to what he demanded. Javier sat down, fingers steepled, and watched old men bicker over strategy as they rushed to do his will.
Out of them, Rodrigo remained silent, watching Javier. His opinion was a note in the crowd, a sentiment that stood out more clearly than the others. There was pride in the Essandian prince, but more, there was curiosity, and Javier didn't need clearer thoughts to know his uncle wondered if the generals acted of their own accord or his. In time Javier met his eyes and shrugged a shoulder; it didn't, in the end, matter, and Rodrigo pursed his lips before giving an acknowledging shrug. Only then did he get to his feet and go to Akilina, taking a blade to cut apart the ropes that bound her wrists.
Though her hands must have been numb, she gathered her skirts as she stood and made a curtsey toward Javier: thanks, he knew, for distracting the generals and sparing her life-as much thanks as he was likely to get from a woman unaccustomed to subservience. He tipped his head toward the door. The Essandian queen was better off out of sight, and Rodrigo quietly offered her an elbow. They left together under the cover of arguments, a royal pair too unimportant to notice.
AKILINA, QUEEN OF ESSANDIA
Rodrigo murmurs “I'm sorry” the moment they're outside the strategy tent, and what's more, he does it in Khazarian. Akilina, whose pride is keeping her from rubbing her wrists or hissing in pain as blood comes back to her fingers, is not so prideful that she can't be made to trip over her own feet in surprise, and in regaining her balance promptly loses the battle to keep her hands still. She wrings her wrists and stares at him in astonishment, and Rodrigo de Costa, her husband and the prince of Essandia, repeats, “I'm sorry I shouldn't have let them keep you in ropes, but I believed you were safer that way.”
“I was.” Akilina can't tell which she begrudges more, that he's right or that she's admitting it. “Rodrigo, I did not- ”
“I know.” Rodrigo rolls his eyes so dramatically his eyebrows move, giving him the look of a much younger man, there in the Brittanic moonlight. He turns a rueful smile down at her, and says, “Well, you might have, I suppose, if you'd imagined six months ago that Sandalia would die, that three countries would unite under Cordula's banner to take revenge on her murderer's throne, that you'd be bartered in marriage as a piece to wed a tremendous army and an unstoppable navy together, and that that navy would be drowned in the first battle the war saw.”
“Irina did.” Akilina sounds bitter to her own ears: she had not imagined Irina Durova to be so foresightful.
“No.” Rodrigo shakes his head and turns toward the battlefields. They're aglow with campfires now, and the wind carries voices speaking half a dozen languages up to them, an unintelligible blur of humanity that he speaks over without heed. He seems to Akilina a perfect monarch in that moment, literally above the concerns of ordinary men. “Irina saw a chance to ally herself with the Essandian navy and its trade routes, all for a price far less than her own hand or Ivanova's in marriage. But Javier's right. She holds her throne with an iron grip, and would never close channels with Lorraine completely. She'll have sent an envoy to Aulun to smooth the waters and to be there waiting, orders in hand, should the alliance our marriage built go sour in any way. Anything less makes an enemy of Lorraine, and with Sandalia gone, Irina will want her sister queen to side with her. They have only each other now.”
He glances at her, a darkness in his eyes, and Akilina, seeing where that comes from, dispenses with everything but the truth: “If Sandalia had died by my hand, husband, I wouldn't have been there to scream over her body.”
Rodrigo's eyebrows quirk upward, and then a second time, making something of a shrug. “No. No, you wouldn't have been.” He puts the slightest emphasis on you, giving Akilina credit that amuses her. Lesser killers, that emphasis suggests, might have been at Sandalia's side to watch her die, but not Akilina Pankejeff. She's wiser and more subtle than that.
Of course, so is Belinda Walter, who did murder the queen of Gallin, and who has managed to earn herself the heirdom to a throne through it. Akilina's admiration for the young woman knows no bounds, and she looks forward to an opportunity to kill her. There's an amber rose that she carries with her, a jewel Belinda wore for a few very short hours after Akilina gifted it to her. It had been meant to go with her to the grave, but instead Akilina rescued it from the aftermath of the bloody mess in Sandalia's courtroom six months ago, and has kept it nearby ever since. It had been beautiful at the hollow of Belinda's throat, and that's where Akilina will place it again, when she finishes the game between herself and the Aulunian heir.
There's a new and interesting side to that particular game, now that Akilina is the Essandian queen. If Belinda is dead, then Javier is all the more likely to gain the Aulunian crown as a pretender to the throne, making him king or heir to half of Echon. He's as of yet unmarried and without children, and so there's a chance Akilina might be able to set her child as heir to the lands he'll claim.
Javier de Castille will, of course, have to die childless to solidify her child's claim, but it's no more outside of bounds than Javier's claim to the Lanyarchan throne through his mother's first marriage. The gaining of thrones is
