Belinda caught herself, bit her tongue and reined in her temper. “Did you know I was born here? In Brittany? At one of my grandfather Henry's estates, where Lorraine had retired to mourn the anniversary of his death. And her priest, when he took the boy, had only to ride a week to the east to bring the child to Lutetia, and to a queen who'd lost her babe when word came of her husband's death in the Reussland border skirmishes.”
She waited then, waited for the inevitable incomprehension, then the necessary leap of Javier's thoughts, and then for the response she knew he'd make, his voice sharp: “You lie.”
Belinda lowered her gaze, waiting. That denial was the easy one, the simple disbelief that he could be other than his mother's son. There was more to come as he faced the possibility of truth and what it meant that they had lain together.
She ought to have expected the colossal witchpower blow that knocked her aside, flung her a dozen feet from the graveside and made her head ring with agony. She did expect Javier's furiously repeated “You lie!,” and when his second witchlight attack came, she did nothing but curl on herself and keep the assault from landing. Through his outrage, through the pummel of power, she heard him shout, “Fight me! You must fight me!” and a crack of misery within her chest made her feel as though she might shatter into a thousand pieces. She knew his horror too clearly, and it was inevitable that the only person she could share it with would want her destroyed.
“I remember hearing her say ‘It cannot be found out,’” Belinda whispered. Whispered, and for all that there was no way Javier could hear her under the rain of magic he threw down on her, she had every confidence that he would. “Before I even knew what words were, I heard her saying that, and they've been a part of me all my life. I said them to you once, Javier.” Flawless memory was a gift and a curse. “It was snowing, and I stood on your balcony and you pulled me back. Warned me of discretion, and I said It cannot be found out. Do you remember what you did, Javier? Do you remember how you felt?” She remembered, too clearly: discomfort had flared in him, and he'd moved away, leaving a sense of unhappy and inexplicable recognition as his legacy jostled awake in those words.
“Like a clarion bell had been struck under my skin.” The witch-fire had lessened as she spoke, and faded into a faint prickling in the air when Javier answered. “Like I'd heard them before, like they were familiar, but I couldn't remember why.”
“She said them again when you were born. When she gave you to the priest. Javier, we're secrets, you and I. Not even Lorraine knows you survived.” Belinda lifted her head a little, unwilling to make herself much larger, but witchpower pushed at her skin from the inside. It whispered of uncomfortable truths, making every word she spoke too clear and too real; pushed by it as she was, she doubted she could speak a lie to Javier and make him believe. “You have her look about you. I… saw it, once I knew.”
“Once you knew. Does your heathen church even care?”
“Yes!” Heat curdled in her face and she struggled to bring her voice down, words tight in her throat. “The Reformation church is not so different as that. And I-I cannot get clean enough since I have learned the truth. I…” A shudder crawled over her, revulsion revisited before she exercised command over her body and her thoughts. “You believe me.”
Javier laughed, hoarse angry sound, and sat down, the grave mound half hiding him from Belinda's view. “I wanted Rodrigo to have the witchpower. When I went to Isidro, knowing your power came from Robert, knowing it ran in the blood… but Rodrigo is only a man. This cannot be!”
“It cannot be found out,” Belinda agreed wearily. She pushed herself up, got to her feet, and came around the grave to kneel a few feet away from the Gallic king. “Three of us know this secret, Javier. We two, and the priest who made this happen. He lives, and he didn't stop me from coming to Gallin and to your bed. There's vengeance, if you want it.”
“He can't live,” Javier whispered. “No queen would let him live, not when he carried such secrets as these.”
“They would if his witchpower led them to believe him dead.”
She had him then, had him so thoroughly that for an instant she wished she played a game. Javier's gaze snapped to hers, grey turning silver with outrage and confusion. “Robert?”
“No. His name is Dmitri, and he's of Irina's court, and probably Ivanova's father. He and Robert…” Belinda thinned her lips. “They serve a foreign queen, so strange I barely understand. And they're harbingers of war, not just between Gallin and Aulun, but between… between continents,” she finally said, faltering. “A war for the world, Javier. I've snatched thoughts from them, just enough to see-”
“You've always been able to do that, haven't you?” Javier threw away the rest of what she'd said with a gesture, focusing on the witchpower use she'd named. “I've only just begun to read emotion in others, but you've been able to since the beginning. You used it to convince me to release you in Lutetia.”
Belinda's jaw clenched, but she nodded. Javier stared at her as though she'd become a foreign thing herself, then slumped, arms around his drawn-up shins and forehead touched to his knees. “I should say you're doing it now, but I think you can't anymore. Not to me. I'd know it now. The world can't go to war, Belinda. It's too big.”
“Look to your battlefields,” Belinda murmured, “and tell me that again. All of Echon fights there today; all of Echon and so many Khazarians. The world's already at war, Javier, and my father's worked to orchestrate it.”
“So have you,” Javier said sharply, bitterly.
Knots tied in Belinda's belly, admission of guilt that made her nod. “He wants us fighting each other. War drives us to advance in technologies.” She spoke the unfamiliar word slowly, struggling to latch concepts stolen from Robert's mind and ideas half-explained by Dmitri to solidity and sense. She felt as though she tried to grasp water: it looked to be a whole, united object, but when she plunged her hands in it to take it up, it slipped apart into droplets and spilled through her fingers. Such was her comprehension of what Robert was, what Dmitri was, what she and Javier were, though to perhaps a lesser degree. “He wants us fractured but dangerous, so when his queen comes to us we'll make good soldiers but not good generals. We're being used, Javier.” That much, at least, she was sure of, and desperation deepened her voice.
“Dmitri sent me to Gallin knowing our heritage and knowing I would find my way into your bed, and he didn't care. He did it so this war would come about, and if those are his means then I'll do everything I can to destroy his ends. I've spent a lifetime unquestioning and loyal, but this is too much. This is further than I can bend. They want a war, Javier. They want our guns and science to advance while we fight one another, so that when their queen comes we have weapons she can use, so she can make us her soldiers without losing any of her own.”
Three weeks; three weeks and longer, it seemed, the idea had been burning in her mind as an answer, a vengeance, a plan, all to seize back a far-flung destiny. “Bastard or heir, I am the daughter of a queen, and I will not let men who have sent me to lie with my brother turn my country into a breeding place for foot soldiers for a monarch from foreign lands. I cannot break them without you, Javier. I can't take the shaping of our futures from them on my own. It needs both of us, and it needs Ivanova if we can get her, and it needs Dmitri Leontyev dead.”
JAVIER DE CASTILLE, KING OF GALLIN
Everything he'd known of Beatrice Irvine was a lie. Her name, her presence in Gallin, her very existence was a story meant to bring her closer to him, a fabrication to allow her access to the queen, his mother, so that Sandalia might die. The love Beatrice had professed for him was a lie because Beatrice herself was a lie: everything, everything about her, a lie.
Everything but the witchpower.
Falsifying it was impossible. It was a part of her as much as it was a part of him, inherent in their beings, a solitary truth shared between them that could not, in any way, be undone. It could be used, manipulated, shaped, but not unmade, and it lay between them like a blade, cutting everything else away. Hate was numb beneath grief already, but against the vibrancy of the witchpower even hatred faded. Logic aside, sin aside, he wanted collusion with the one other being like himself.
So much like himself. That they shared witchpower when no one else did carried too much weight: Belinda Primrose, Belinda Walter, spoke the truth when she named him Lorraine's son and her full brother. That Robert Drake was their father, both of them… the bitterest dredge was that in a cold, gutted part of him, it made sense.
