bones. Sound encroached even more slowly: the drip of water broken by an occasional spill of the same, splashing against rock. Droplets spattered her body when that happened, bringing a shiver that she felt in her jaw and stomach but not on her skin’s surface. A dank scent came with the water, too-old straw grown soft with mold, and the stench of human offal gone uncleaned.
She knew where she was before consciousness came, and when she opened her eyes to darkness, all that was visible was a remembrance of Pierre’s exquisite creation, shredded and torn and trampled beneath guards’ feet. Courtiers would have surged forward to snatch up scraps, using a shimmer of gold or green to prove that they had been there the day Beatrice Irvine fell beneath the look of angry betrayal in Prince Javier’s eyes.
Belinda sat up slowly, stiffness in every joint. Her hair fell around her shoulders, shockingly warm against the coldness of her skin, and brought a rash of gooseflesh to her. The dichotomy in temperature made her nipples tighten, absurd erotic thrill that activated genuine desire. She closed her eyes against the darkness, wet her lips, and whispered, “Javier,” on that wash of longing, then folded her arms over her breasts, clutching her shoulders to contain what little heat her body had left.
She had not been left so much as her petticoats, all those things ripped away from her on the courtroom floor and left there when they took her away. That she had been given nothing at all to cover herself with suggested the remainder of her life could be counted in hours, not days: no queen would be fool enough to allow such a prize as Belinda was to die of exposure before she could be hanged in a public square, and the oubliette would ensure her death by cold within a few days.
Belinda found she was not at all afraid to die, and wondered if that was fatalistic acceptance or blind denial.
She got up because it was better to move than sit and wait for her fate to come. Better to force blood to flow through her body in hopes that doing so might warm her than to remain seated against the cold and feel life drain out of her one slow minute at a time. She found the walls of her prison: there was enough room, just, to open her arms and turn in a circle; stone brushed her fingertips when she did so. A few pieces of straw had enough strength to prickle her soles, barely felt through numbness, and the faintest crack of light came down from above. She stretched her arms up, searching for a ceiling, and found nothing. For an instant the darkness pressed on her, weighty, before she let go a raw laugh and cupped her hands together, calling witchlight.
A soft glow lit her palms and the confines of her prison. Above her, out of reach for even a tall man, a square of stone made most of the dungeon’s ceiling. An oubliette, yes: simply a roofed pit to be dropped in and forgotten about, too wide to somehow scramble up its sides, too deep to reach its lip even if it were not closed up. There would be other cells elsewhere, but she-and Robert, she warranted-had earned special attention, a private dungeon such as this to prevent any other prisoners from falling on them and risking Sandalia’s sport.
Her fingertips seemed warmer, the witchlight bathing them. Belinda spun it out, expanding the golden ball and stretching it until she literally wrapped herself in it as she so often imagined herself wrapped in stillness. Some of the ache faded from her bones, whether from actual warmth or an illusion of it she neither knew nor cared. It was a way to pass the time, building gowns of light from her power. When the warmth that spread over her body came from a different source, urging an exploration of her sex with her fingers, laughter broke through, unexpected in the cold stone prison. She’d learned to ward herself to some degree against the raging passion that built when she extended power to influence others; to find it equally demanding when she turned her magic on herself was disproportionately amusing. For a time she hoped with active enthusiasm that a guard might be sent to check on her; the prospect of being discovered locked in a black hole in the ground, writhing with passion, struck her as tremendously funny, an emotion Belinda was completely unaccustomed to experiencing or giving in to.
When stone finally scraped against stone and external light flooded her little prison, though, she had long since left witchpower desire behind, and instead lay shivering against the cold stone floor in darkness. Less stagnant air flooded her cell, bringing new chill with it, and she squinted toward the light.
Javier crouched above her prison at its lip, torchlight behind him to hide his face in shadow, though shadow did nothing to disguise the cold anger that rolled off him. He stretched out a hand, opening it; a dagger, no more than palm-length, fell to Belinda’s floor with a clatter. “This was found in your bedclothes.”
Belinda uncurled herself and reached for the blade, tucking it against her chest. She could thwart Sandalia’s execution with that small knife, testing its sharpness in her own heart rather than Sacha Asselin’s, as she’d once dreamed. “Perhaps the countess hid it there,” she whispered. “Javier, I am so cold.” She risked, as she had never risked before, a thread of power stretching toward the prince, seeking any hint of sympathy he might have for her.
“Not for long,” he said implacably. “You die at dawn tomorrow. You and Robert Drake, for intent to kill a queen. Lorraine will have to deny you both to keep her throne, but it should go a long way toward destabilizing Aulun.”
Fear, it seemed, had a place in her after all. Belinda’s muscles contracted all over, urging a soft squeak of terror from her throat. “How can you believe the Khazarians over me?” The tremble in her voice was real, Belinda no longer able to tell her own emotions from Beatrice’s. “I’m like you, Javier. Witchbreed,” she breathed.
The slightest sense of hesitation broke Javier’s surety. Belinda, waiting for the chance, whispered encouragement to that hesitation, sitting up on the dirty stone floor to lift her gaze toward the prince’s. She made a pretty and pathetic picture, she knew, all wide eyes and tangled hair, dirt smeared across her naked body from lying on the ground. She kept her arms folded over her chest, a woman’s frail modesty, and sent her own concept of her helplessness toward the man crouched above.
“Witchbreed like Robert Drake. Your father.” Javier’s words were relentlessly certain, but doubt fogged his emotions, hope sparking through in pulses he tried to quash. “I felt the power in him.”
Belinda shook her head, sending curls over her shoulders. “If it’s there, perhaps that explains how the Red Bitch has kept her throne so long. I don’t doubt you, my lord.” She shivered, half artifice and half genuine. “I don’t doubt that he has the power, but your mother doesn’t. Did your father? My mother died when I was born, and my father herded cattle. The power we share belongs to us alone, not our parents, Javier.” The wish to be free of the oubliette was beginning to pound heavily in her veins, witchpower content to ride quietly until the possibility of escape was at hand. Now, with the stone ceiling removed, the urge to blast through delicacy and demand Javier bend to her will grew harder to fight, for all that Belinda knew it would be folly. She lacked the strength to stand against him with brute force; that had already been proven. She must be subtle, convince him from within of her innocence and of the rightness of her freedom. “I do not know him, Javier.”
He made a fist of his right hand. “Then why did you spare his life?”
Incredulous, frightened laughter broke free. “My lord? Kill a man? Me? Perhaps it’s easier for a man.” Belinda’s voice shivered with respect and not a little fear. “I am only a woman. I have no stomach for such things. That… that girl, the Khazarian girl…I had never seen a violent death so closely, my lord.” She shuddered again, casting her eyes down as much to hide truth as to play at horror and a woman’s gentleness. “I couldn’t do that to any man. Forgive me for my weakness, please, my lord. I did not mean to betray you with it.” She tightened her fingers around her dagger, against her chest, letting the action look like another shiver as she willed her captor to believe her. It was a reasonable argument, she whispered into the witchpower. A woman’s flaw; Javier knew well she was a flawed creature, but she could never be the two-faced creature Akilina had made her out to be.
“Even if I believed you,” Javier said slowly, “my mother never will. Robert Drake is a prize beyond imagining, and to take him from Lorraine far too great an opportunity to pass up. Innocent or not, your death is as much part of the pageantry as his will be.”
“But he is the prize,” Belinda echoed. “I might-” She caught her breath and cut the words away, letting Javier’s hope and curiosity spike again. Making him ask, rather than putting the words into place for him.
“You might what, Beatrice?” He kept his voice low, as if someone might be close enough to overhear. Belinda shook her head, trembling.
“Nothing, my lord. Only a woman’s fear. Only my fancy. Forgive me,” she whispered again. “I couldn’t ask it of you.”
“It,” he murmured. “To allow you to escape.”
She cast her gaze up, full of desperation, and reached one hand toward him, fully aware of her nudity and of the affect cold air had on her body, her nipples tight as if in sexual arousal. Javier’s focus slid from her face down to her throat, then to her breasts, where it lingered as she caught her breath. Desire pricked in him, fed back to her and heating the witchpower she stretched toward him; pink suffused her cheeks and spilled downward, unmistakable excitement to a man whose eyes wanted to see it. She looked to him as her savior, herself a
