The Pretender's Crown (57 page)

Javier shudders and shakes his head. “No. No. Thank God, no. She says the child's due at Christ mass, and so it can't be mine. I wouldn't wish that it was. But it is—” He catches her hands in his and holds on too tight, not quite hurting her, but as if letting her go might set him adrift. “It's perhaps our only chance,” he whispers. “It's—”

“This is far more than asking me to live with her as your spy,” Eliza snaps. “Even if I were to bear your child, Javier, nobody would care if you got a bastard on me as long as you also wed a proper princess and make a litter of children on her.”

“I want to marry you,” Javier whispers. “Eliza, how much must I pay for being a fool? Marius is dead—”

“And you're plotting how our lives will go on without him with him not a day in the grave!”

“I have to!” Javier lets her go with a burst of energy propelling himself backward. “Eliza, if we're to make this thing work it needs to be decided now.
Now
, yes, in the midst of all this hell. We are given no surcease.”

“Why does she even suggest it? Out of love for you?” Bitterness fills Eliza's voice and she can't stop it. Javier, though, only sags and takes the anger as though it's his due.

“Because she wants the babe to live, and Lorraine can't have a bastard grandchild. Giving it up to us saves its life and gives us a chance to be together.”

“And what does she care if we're together? She wanted you for herself, once. Why not seduce you and claim the baby's yours, and end this war with a marriage between Gallin and Aulun?”

Javier, drily, says, “I'm not quite so easily led as that, Eliza.” Some of the dourness fades and he looks away. “She took Sandalia's life. Perhaps she offers us this one in exchange. It's not a fair price, but perhaps it's not a bad one either.”

“She saved me, too.” Eliza slides fingers over her belly, feeling a place where not even a scar remains. “That blow would have killed a child in my womb, Javier.”

“Not if God's blessing was on us both,” Javier whispers. “Our army could use a miracle.”

Hurt stings Eliza, making her feel childish and sullen. “That isn't fair.”

“No. But then, none of this is. I can't begin to find the moment when it all went wrong.”

Eliza takes a breath, then holds her tongue. She has an answer to that, a too-clear answer that harkens back to the moment Marius Poulin walked Beatrice Irvine into the prince of Gallin's favourite gentleman's club. The world began an endless tumble toward horror then, and hasn't righted itself since.

But had Marius done otherwise, Eliza herself would not now be the king's lover, and despite the prices that have been paid, that's the one thing she's wanted all of her days. Had she known the cost would be Marius's life she might have long since walked away, but
there was no knowing; there never can be a clear picture of how the future will unfold.

A bowstring ties itself around her heart and contracts, a small pain accompanying a cruel thought: if there is any way in this world for Eliza Beaulieu to triumph over Beatrice Irvine, it may well be in taking her child, raising it and loving it as her own, and knowing that Belinda will never share that joy.

It's the wrong place to begin, adoption out of vengeance, and yet Javier's right in more than one way. It's the one chance they might be given, and if the babe is due at the Christ mass, then she and Javier have been lovers just long enough to make it possible. The Pappas in Cordula will be angry, and so will the Parnan king, but no one would condemn Javier for wedding and making legitimate the first child born to his body, not in a time of war. Most will rejoice, and count it a blessing.

How easy it is. Eliza falls back a few steps and finds a seat so she can drop her head into her hands. How terribly easy, to slip over the precipice from denial to belief. She's thinking already that the child is Javier's, and if it's Javier's then it can be her own as easily. And to be a mother … that's a dream she put away a long time ago, sealed it with lead edges and tried to forget about. “I have never been able to refuse you.”

Javier lets go a rush of air and crashes forward to land on his knees before her, to hide his face in her lap. Eliza puts her fingers in his hair, her alabaster ring white against ginger before she bends to kiss his head. “This is madness, my love.”

“Yes.” Javier's answer is muffled and trembles on the edge of both laughter and tears. “I had better call for the priest, and for Rodrigo. Shall we be wed by noon?”

“A battlefield bride,” Eliza murmurs. “What will you have me wear, Javier? My trousers and linen shirt, and my tall boots with a dagger at the thigh?”

“Do that,” Javier whispers, and looks up with a laugh marred by tears. “And I'll wear one of your diaphanous creations, for my hair's longer than yours already. We'll flummox them all.” He kneels up and catches her face in his hands, kisses her carefully, as though she's suddenly become fragile. As if, Eliza thinks, she truly is pregnant,
and he, a man suddenly afraid that his touch might damage her or the child. Heart full of confusion and hope, she returns the kiss, then shoos him to find Tomas and Rodrigo so a wedding might be performed.

In the end she wears one of her gowns, and it's Javier in trousers and a linen shirt. Eliza forgoes her wig, so the short length of hair she's grown out is tucked behind her ears. It's pulled askew by the wind, and is echoed by the flutter and twist of her skirt around her legs and the dance of her heart in her chest. She's never truly imagined being married, has Eliza Beaulieu, and in the crux of it she finds she's terrified. Excited, but terrified, and she wonders if all women come to the altar in such a state.

Word runs to the troops, down to the battlefield, and for a short while at the noon hour, all the fighting comes to a stop. Eliza has no idea why, but as the allied Cordulan troops turn to watch distant figures on the hilltop, Aulun does not advance. Instead they all watch the handful of people presided over by a priest whose voice cannot carry to the men below.

It carries as far as Javier and Eliza, and to the prince of Essandia who's come to stand witness, and to Belinda Walter, who watches from the safety of her witchpower stillness, where no one can see her. Her heart's strangely full as she watches this marriage, giving it most of her attention.

Most, but not all: some of her mind is given over to a witch-power shield keeping Aulun from attacking Gallin's unprotected flank. She ought not: she ought to let her army crash into Javier's and watch the Cordulan alliance crumble under the strength of her army. But she won't have that, not today, not in this moment: that much, at least, she can give to Javier and Eliza de Castille.

When the vows are said and the kiss is made, the watching troops send up a roar of approval that must be audible across the straits. Rodrigo steps forward then, to kiss Eliza's cheeks and then to murmur something in her ear, something that makes her take knee, and before the world's armies, Rodrigo of Essandia crowns a pauper the new queen of Gallin.

Belinda, smiling and appalled at her sentiment, slips away, and spends the day doing what she can to mute antagonism between
two warring factions, that a king and a queen may be given one brief moment in the heart of loss and sorrow and blood to find a little joy in the knowing of each other.

26 June 1588
†
Brittany; the Aulunian camp

Generals, messengers, soldiers; all are listless. It's not the aura Robert expected from an army with the size and strength to easily crush their enemy; he has come to Brittany expecting an enthusiastic victory and a tremendous welcome for the Khazarian ambassador who has given Aulun its overwhelming edge. They had the welcome, Dmitri uplifted by their effusive praise, but they've not had the crushing defeat Robert anticipated.

Instead he's watched a slow dance on the battlefields as the Cordulan army has worked its way back together, becoming a unified mass instead of huddled, disspirited troops. It's Javier de Castille's witchpower that's done it, and Robert has watched without interfering, almost too interested in the game to worry, for now, about the outcome.

But today the war's tenor has changed: today Aulun's army has lost its focus, seeming to no longer care that they've got an enemy on the field. Word has come through the troops that Javier has taken a bride, and Robert would think the audacity of marrying in the middle of a war might heat the Aulunian soldiers' blood. Instead they seem content to lay down arms for the day and let Gallin celebrate.

“It's Belinda,” Dmitri says beside him, and Robert startles.

“Who's married Javier?” That thought hadn't occurred to him, and for a moment it brightens his day.

Dmitri snorts. “Not in this or any other world, I think. No, it's Belinda dampening their spirits. Can't you feel it?”

“Oh,” Robert says, “that.” Now that Dmitri's put the words to it, he can, of course, feel that it's witchpower weighing down Aulun's troops. Belinda's dangerous to him, her witchpower too much like his own, perhaps, for him to notice properly, and that's a thing he doesn't dare admit to Dmitri. “I wonder why.”

“I suppose she harbours feelings for him still, though I'd think
they'd drive her to send her army storming his when he showed a moment of weakness. Shall I clear it away?” Dmitri asks airily and in asking insinuates that Robert's incapable of it.

“Let them have their rest. Tomorrow will dawn another day.”

“You trust her implicitly even if she quells the army's fighting urge. What if she's turning against you, Robert?”

“What if all the stars should fall from the sky?” Robert gives back, with as much concern for the one as the other. “She's one of us, Dmitri. Loyalty bred in the bone. She's never reached beyond the limits she's been given. Not even now, when she's been made heir to a throne, has she striven beyond it. This is her duty and she'll follow it through. If sentiment's taken enough hold to make her soften our troops today, then tomorrow she'll have shaken it off, and will make war with the strongest heart of any of us.”

“How can you be so certain?”

Robert looks the scant distance down at Dmitri, bemused. “Because she's my daughter.”

Dmitri ducks his head, evidently satisfied, and after a moment leaves Robert alone to watch the quiet battlefields.

The distance from Javier's wedding site back to the heart of the Aulunian camp seemed less when she had no witchpower shields to fight against. It was a mile or two, no more, and Belinda traversed it within an hour of the wedding. She felt safer on her side of the Aulunian line, and was glad to climb the hills that gave her a view of the battlefields from the south.

Gossip amongst the troops warned her that Robert was there, and she came on him speaking with Dmitri. She hung back, listening with mild curiosity until the Khazarian witchlord left. Only then, without dropping the blind she'd wrapped around herself, did she ask, “Do you know why he doesn't trust me?”

Robert didn't flinch, which perversely pleased her: he shouldn't have known she was there, and yet a part of her wanted him to be the infallible father, looking through her veil of deception as he had when she was a child. “Either he's built a plot with you, or has been
unable to,” her father said. “If it's the former, he knows you're untrustworthy; if it's the latter, he hopes to make me think you are. Which is it?”

Belinda loosed the power that kept her hidden and, smiling, stepped up to Robert's side. “He believes you serve your queen poorly. That this war is wrong, and that alliances must be built instead. He thinks a people inspired by peace and education will leap forward more quickly than a people ravaged by war. He would take your place in the line of fathers, by proving himself wiser and more clever than you.”

“Really.” Robert sounded astonished. “I didn't think he had it in him. He shouldn't. What did he offer you?”

Belinda gave a laugh that belonged to someone she no longer fully recognised. She knew her role so well that it could never falter, and yet the light note of sarcasm and dismissal in her voice felt harder than she wanted, anymore, to be. “A crown. A kingdom. All the things I never coveted, and which patience has brought to me anyway. I sought none of this, Robert. How can I be who I am, what I am, and have truly never reached for what lay beyond the glass?”

“Because you're a good girl,” Robert said seriously. “Because you've been given tasks and duties and have been happy to fulfill them, knowing yourself a vital and integral part of the dark moments that keep a queen safe on her throne. We live in a world of ambition, my Primrose, but there are those who truly wish only to serve. I'm one. I've raised you to be, too.”

“And Dmitri?”

“Dmitri.” Robert fell silent a few moments, watching the fields below. “Dmitri ought to be. How much intelligence have you gathered on his plots, Primrose?”

“Enough to know he means to use me to displace you.” Belinda's forehead wrinkled, the thought difficult to pursue, even still. “He thinks my ambition, whetted, will push me toward ridding us of you, because he'll tell me more, teach me more, and give me more than you might.”

“And you think?” A cautious note sounded in Robert's voice, so faint Belinda might not have heard it if she hadn't spent a lifetime attuned to his hints of approval and censure.

“I think I'd like to know. But from childhood what has mattered to me is that I serve my queen as best I can. I never asked,” she added, almost lightly. “Du Roz was sent to plot against Lorraine, and I never asked what part a young Gallic noble might play in her downfall. Perhaps I was too young then, or perhaps it never mattered. What mattered was you told me it must be done for the queen's safety, and asked me to do it, and I would rather have died than disappoint you. So would I still.”

“Ah, du Roz,” Robert said. “Du Roz meant nothing to anyone. He was only convenient, and I needed a man no one would miss to see if you could do murder and walk away unscathed. The haste I came for you in was born from his intention on returning to Gallin in a day or two, having spent only enough time in Alunaer to pride himself on walking through enemy courts.” He threw the man away with a gesture of his hand, and in so doing left an empty place of astonishment in Belinda's chest. “Dmitri, though; Dmitri could do us harm.”