bordering on avarice. Robert nearly allows himself to seize Dmitri’s arm again, more intentionally threatening.
The truth is there are moments when Robert loses sight of his goal. Moments when the politics of Echon and Khazar overwhelm the end game. Moments when it’s difficult to remember his queen’s face, her image replaced by an aging redhead whose power is blunt and worldly and the centre of his everyday existence. He has spent thirty years guiding Aulun and her regent, coaxing reluctant love and desire out of a woman determined to stand alone. He has never threatened her, never shown interest in stealing her power for his own, and this is why she trusts him. It’s as well she has no need to understand that her power is transitory and unappealing to him. She is a vessel, and she has long since done her part in ensuring the downfall of her world.
There may yet be one thing left for her to do, though, and until that thing is done, he will love, honour, and manipulate her, and regret none of it. When it’s done, he knows he might find that frail human emotion has gotten the better of him, and that he might love the Titian Queen until the end of her days.
Robert has no objections to that. She’s a formidable opponent, all the more so for being a female regent to a society that believes women to be weak and inferior. How they can stand before Lorraine, before Sandalia, before Irina, and retain that conviction is beyond him, though he’s heard it said many times that all of those women are unnaturally masculine. The idea that they are wholly feminine and wholly capable doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone, or if it has, they’ve found it such an appalling and frightening thought as to put it away again and never let it see the light of day. There are moments when Robert has wanted to smack courtiers alongside the skull, not to defend Lorraine, but out of simple exasperation at their determined thick-headedness.
He wonders, briefly, if Dmitri might suffer the same loss of focus if the invasion were his to conduct.
“No,” he says, and makes it light, refusing to allow himself the luxury of physically threatening the slighter man. It’s a closer match than it might look, anyway: Robert has bulk, but Dmitri’s slenderness holds wiry strength. They were always well-matched, even before. It’s why they were selected.
Seolfor, though…Seolfor is their third, waiting, and Robert has no doubts of his loyalty. No one would: breaking faith with the queen is a concept that has only slowly become even conceivable, and that only through long years of watching human betrayals. The idea turns Robert’s stomach, makes him physically sick, and Seolfor is no less staunchly the queen’s own than he. But Seolfor is a renegade, if any of them are; Robert believes, though he’d never ask, that this is why the queen sent him on this one-way journey. Because of that, Robert has preferred to keep him off the playing field until his participation is critical. “But with kings and queens playing at pieces as if their lives were their own to direct, it may be time to activate him. Seolfor can be a charming bastard when he wants to be, and there’ll be no taint of foreign courts to him.”
Curiosity darts across Dmitri’s angular face. “Is that why you’ve kept him out for so long? Where will you send him?”
“Essandia,” Robert says drily, “to plant a woman on Rodrigo’s cock long enough to make the child she bears seem reasonably his. I’ll never understand the hold Cordula has on these men. The women are more pragmatic. I only wish Sandalia’d given in to you soon enough to make her son seem Charles’s, instead of catching by that foppish Louis.”
“So does she.” Dmitri lowers his eyes, oddly womanish in his apology, then looks up again, all sharp hazel eyes and hawklike features. “But Gallin is under control, isn’t it? I thought your girl was there.”
“She is, and Sandalia will be there soon. My Primrose will have slipped in quietly, made herself a part of the court, and be waiting to gain the queen’s confidence.” Of all the tasks he’s set Belinda to, this one is both simplest and most difficult. Murder is easy to achieve; sedition much harder, particularly spoken from royal lips. But they need so little, and Belinda is so very good at her winsome ways. It’s why Robert sent her, and not someone of lesser import: even he finds himself inclined to trust his daughter; and that’s why he sent Ana de Meo to watch over her, in turn. Trust is a weakness that hides flaws; better to set a second pair of eyes over that which he dares trust. “One wrong word from Sandalia spoken in Primrose’s ear, and we’ll have our war.”
“And then it will be properly begun.”
Robert nods and claps his hand on Dmitri’s shoulder. They stand like that a moment, Dmitri covering Robert’s hand with his own. Then they break ways, no more words needed between them, and go about their separate duties. There is a rapping, not at his door, but from within a wall. He knows, though he should not, that the passage there leads to three different bedrooms. None of them is Irina’s, which is a shame: even Robert isn’t above the secret thrill of a queen coming to him in the night.
He’s at the hidden door before the tapping comes a second time, his head tilted against it, listening, scenting, seeking. The first two garner nothing; the door is too thick for subtleties to slip through. The third encounters a woman’s mind, not agitated, but calm and focused. Again, not Irina: she, like Lorraine, is all but impossible to read, her throne granting and demanding an indomitable will. The woman who has come to him is not thinking of who she is but of what she wants: a high-born lover to replace the one she had.
Robert will take no pains to remind her of his own lowly beginnings.
He finds the mechanism that opens the door, slides it open, and looks down at Akilina Pankejeff, a grand duchess within Irina’s court. She, like Lorraine, is not beautiful, but in her age she will be terrifying. Black hair sweeps back from a violent widow’s peak, one that rumour says grows sharper with every lover who dies. Akilina Pankejeff has outlived two husbands and three well-placed lovers, the last of whom was Count Gregori Kapnist, and she is only thirty-two. The superstitious and fearful-nearly everyone in this stars-forsaken place-call her Yaga Baba behind her back, and make the sign of God to ward off witches. She has a golden cast to her skin, and eyes as black as her hair; there is nothing soft about her, not even when she comes to him dressed in loose sleeping gowns. They only play up her narrow shoulders, her small breasts, and the length of her limbs.
The door hisses shut behind her and Robert kneels without speaking, putting his hands on her hips. Her eyes can’t darken any further, but surprise colours them and she touches his hair as he gathers her nightgown, one palmful at a time, toward her waist. He is attentive and delighted to please; Akilina is lusty and ready to be pleased. Minutes later she stands slumped against the wall, fingers still knotted in Robert’s brown hair, gasps chuckling from her. “Not what I came for,” she breathes, “but well worth coming for. No wonder the Titian Bitch keeps you at her side.” She pushes Robert’s hands away, not unkindly, and lets her sleeping gown fall again. Robert wipes his beard without a hint of discretion and climbs to his feet still licking his lips.
“Then why are you here?” He’s surprised for the second time in a day; that doesn’t often happen. Akilina smiles, unexpectedly predatory, and walks her fingers up his chest. He, too, is dressed for sleeping, and her touch is warm through the soft linen of his shirt. He does not catch her hand and pull her back to the bed to roost above him; that decision is hers.
“I require an escort, my lord Drake.” She offers another smile, as pointed as the first, and leads with her hips as she steps into him. “I’ll pay you in whatever coin you prefer.”
He kisses her fingertips, politeness, not ardor. “An escort, my lady?”
Playfulness falls out of her gaze, leaving it flat. “Our winters are long and cold, and my lover’s five months in his grave. I’d intended to retreat to my estate for the winter, but if I can go farther afield that’s much to be preferred. A woman might travel safely in your party, Lord Drake.”
“I travel light, my lady.” Robert isn’t trying to dissuade her. More likely to convince a snake not to bite, he thinks, though he’s far too diplomatic to let the thought anywhere near his expression. “Myself and a handful of men, and with winter coming on we’ll set a hard pace. Can you keep up?”
The challenge glints in her eyes. “I won’t travel as light or as fast as you’d prefer, my lord. Wherever I winter, I can have new gowns made, but a woman of my stature can’t arrive in a new city with nothing but what’s on her back. Give me an extra day for every three you travel in speed, though, and I’ll keep your pace.”
“Where will you go?”
Akilina smiles. “I’ve always wanted to see Aria Magli.”
BELINDA PRIMROSE
15 October 1587 Lutetia, Gallin My Dearest Jayne; The letters were etched into parchment, retraced so many times they might have been inked onto the table beneath it. In the deepest of the grooves, ink sat in shallow puddles, the parchment’s ability to absorb it lost. Belinda picked up her quill for the dozenth time, scraping it over the shapes of the letters. She had thought too much; she must simply write, and when the words had spilled out
