Besides, her complexion could be roughened, weight gained or lost, her hair darkened or lightened. Those things could lend her anonymity again, if such measures were even necessary. Belinda stood aside as a gaggle of court ladies passed in a rush of perfume and giggles. They looked through her, no more seeing her than they might see the air they breathed, and she watched as they disappeared down the hall in a flurry of bright colours and shining hair. Mundane disguises faltered and fell before the witchpower-granted ability to stand amidst a gathering and go unseen. The only danger there was in avoiding those who could see through her magic, and thus far, the only ones who could were on her side.
The thought slowed her as she approached Javier’s chambers. Robert worked for the love of his queen, but Khazarian-born Dmitri-if indeed he were born of that northern country; his accent when he’d accosted her in the Count Kapnist’s estates had been flawlessly Aulunian-had no such tie to Lorraine. Belinda stepped into an alcove, holding her breath as she conjured memory, the distant voices of her father and Dmitri as they climbed the stairs to Robert’s sitting rooms. Dmitri’s, low and marked with the Khazarian accent: “-begun. The imperatrix is with child-”
And amusement from her father: “That was quickly done.”
“As it had to be,” Dmitri agreed. “With the imperator’s wars, that Irina has even a chance of childbearing is-”
“A blessing to us all,” Robert’s tone, sanctimonious, garnered a staccato laugh from Dmitri, one that cut through the stillness surrounding Belinda even now. She half-focused across the hall, understanding coming to the woman where the child had seen no meaning at all.
Ivanova Durova was no more the Imperator Fodor’s daughter than Belinda herself was. Dmitri had lain with Irina and gotten a child on her, and as much as Robert had, guided that child’s growth to adulthood. Like herself, like Javier, Ivanova was witchbreed.
Sudden coolness poured down Belinda’s insides, chilling the shadows that held her safe. Robert was her father, and Dmitri Ivanova’s. Sandalia showed no signs of witchpower, and the king whose name Javier bore was long dead.
Belinda found that she did not, for an instant, believe that Louis IV of Gallin had carried the witchpower in his blood.
Who was Javier’s father?
Laughter trilled in her throat, more desperation than humour. Belinda pressed herself against the walls, folded her hands against her mouth and winced as she found the bruise again. Its ache soothed her and she increased the pressure against it, ignoring pain until it faded. The impulse to flee the Lutetian palace, all the way back to Aulun, so she could put the question to Robert Drake in person filled her. It was not a question to be asked in a letter, even to dearest Jayne; those, while cryptic, could be discovered and decoded. A hint, even the slightest hint, that Javier, like herself, was a queen’s bastard, would send Gallin flying apart and shame both Sandalia and Cordula to no end.
Belinda’s heart crashed once against her ribs and held there, emptiness in her chest that thrummed through her veins until it felt that she might erupt from negative pressure within her.
It would send Gallin flying apart and shame Sandalia and Cordula to no end.
Javier’s ties to Lanyarch would be shattered. Sandalia was only heir by marriage, not blood, and for her son to have come from the wrong side of a marriage bed would break his claim to that long-empty throne. Likewise, his mother was regent in Gallin, holding the throne for her son.
Her son. Not Louis’s son. Javier, as a bastard, had no right to Gallin’s throne. Only his heirship to Essandia would be legitimate, coming through his uncle to his mother to himself, and Rodrigo, for all his fondness toward Sandalia, might well not be able to see past a bastard child. Not when his faith in his church was so much to him that he himself had never wed and fathered an heir. His piety, Belinda thought, must have been a frustration to Robert and Dmitri, who now seemed to her intent on littering Echon’s royal families with witchbreed bastards.
Yes. If it was their plot, then Dmitri had to be Javier’s father, though the look of the ginger-haired prince held nothing in common with the hawk-faced man at all. Perhaps his pale skin and slim build, nothing more, certainly not the narrowness of his grey eyes or his long jaw.
Uncertainty washed through her. Javier looked far more like the washed-out blond king who was his father by law than like Dmitri or even his own mother. Maybe witchbreed magic was less rare than either she or Javier thought, and slept unnoticed through most generations, only sparking from time to time in certain families.
But then her own father should not have the power that he did, and perhaps then Ivanova, daugher of Irena of Khazar, had no power at all. But had Dmitri and Robert not been certain of that gift arising, then the circumstances of Ivanova’s birth made little difference to anyone. Belinda quelled the urge to clutch her temples, as if she’d try to hold her thoughts together. No, witchbreed parents knew what they had when they made a child, and Robert would know, must know, who Javier’s father was. Perhaps not Dmitri after all, his sharp features and darkness clearly not inherited by the witchbreed prince. Someone else, then, a user of witchpower outside of Belinda’s realm of knowledge. Someone at court who could guide Javier in the development of his skills.
No.
Javier had told her she was the only one like himself. Belinda had recognized almost immediately that her father, too, was like them, but Javier had spoken freely of having no guidance, only his own sense of self to show him the way.
Robert didn’t know. The thought came with startling clarity. Her father, who seemed to Belinda to be always in control, did not know that the prince of Gallin was witchbreed. Had he known, he would have influenced Sandalia through her son rather than insert Belinda into the realm. It was what Belinda herself would have done, and her father was far more calculating than she. Javier lay outside Robert’s realm of influence, and that meant he, even more than Sandalia and her ambitions, stood as a threat to Aulun.
A chill of curiosity lifted bumps on Belinda’s skin as she thought of other royal scions, and wondered how many of them were their father’s children, and what purpose they served if they were not. Her purpose was clear: as the hidden daughter of Aulun, she was a secret weapon, trained to protect a throne that stood on the faith of a new religion. Ivanova, openly Irina’s daughter, could hold no such position in her mother’s court; she had been born in wedlock, if on the wrong side of the sheets, and no one would question her heirship. But that in itself could be a purpose, if Ivanova could be controlled and influenced through witchpower. An unbreachable Khazarian alliance would strengthen Aulun immeasurably.
Belinda shuddered in a breath through her fingers, then spread her hands wide, staring at her palms. Echon’s fate lay in her hands more thoroughly than even Robert imagined.
Excitement darted through her, testing her external stillness like a hummingbird in search of life-giving nectar. She kept it locked within, golden witchpower cloaking her against all comers as she considered her needs. Foremost, always foremost, was to find proof of a plan against the Aulunian throne, but beneath that now lay the task of discovering who had fathered Javier de Castille. To learn, in short, what other players influenced Echon’s royal families by way of the base side of a marriage bed. It cannot be found out thrummed in the back of her mind, her father’s lifelong warning, and she thought that even if she had the means to ask, Robert might withhold that answer from her. She had often asked questions and rarely had them answered-that lesson had been learned early on. Better to discover what she could on her own and, armed with knowledge, come to her father with details that shone light on Sandalia’s indiscretions and shattered Javier’s claim to a trio of thrones.
To do otherwise was to question her own existence, focused and purposeful as it had been, and even with power growing inside her with its own ambition for dominance, Belinda did not doubt herself or her place in the world. And even if-alien thought, difficult to so much as endure, much less truly consider-even if she were somehow to be brought into the light as her mother’s daughter, every step toward securing Aulun’s future secured her own. The truth of Javier’s heritage would inevitably help fashion that security.
It would take more than a hint. Belinda’s head spun, glee rushing through her veins in sparks of golden light. The extraordinary potential of what lay before her threatened to burst her self-imposed calm, and she didn’t care. It would take more than whispers to properly bring down the Gallic regent and her son. She would need proof of Sandalia’s infidelities, and a wise queen would have done away with proof.
Belinda uncurled a slow smile at her palms. Sandalia had let one shred of proof go: Javier himself. Knowing what to look for, the rest could be done. Not by anyone, perhaps, but by Belinda, with her burgeoning gift for stealing thoughts and influencing emotion. It could be done, and when it was done, Ecumenic Echon would be in shambles, and Lorraine’s Reformation throne safe for years to come.
