C. Murphy - The Queen_s Bastard

“Until the dinner bells rang,” Robert spat. Belinda allowed herself a faintly curved smile, well-hidden from the man who followed her up the stairs. At least the boy had allowed her a few hours of freedom, instead of leaving the moment her back was turned. By dinner she and Ana were well away from the canal where Belinda had left the boy, stretching Robert’s search out that much longer. She should have expected that the child would find the man who’d paid him, but hope and naпvetй had won out. It had been a badly played hand.

“Someone threw a coin.” Belinda offered the words as explanation, not excuse. There was no point in making excuses, not with Robert. Another man might be seduced out of his anger, but her father held as stubbornly to outrage as another man might to money. “I thought it was my sign, and only too late realised I was mistaken.” Robert’s hand moved past her head, pushing open a door at the head of the stairs. Fire’s heat swept over Belinda. She lifted a hand against it, protecting her face as she stepped into the room.

It was well-appointed, if not extravagant. A fire burned higher than necessary for a summer night, throwing warm and wavering shadows about the room. It brought out the gold in a brocaded armchair a few feet from it; the rug that lay between chair and fire had burns from embers popping free and sizzling there. A footstool to match the chair sat opposite it. Belinda glanced around for another chair and found one lacking: it would be she who sat on the footstool, and Robert in the fine upholstered chair. Her mouth twisted a little, memories of childhood spoiling coming back to her, and she sighed as she gathered her skirts and went to the footstool.

She passed the bed, the only other piece of furniture worth noting in the room. It was a renter’s room, without a kitchen or visiting area. Windows looked over a canal, but nearly every window in Aria Magli did; a room without a canal view could be far more dear than those with. The surfeit of noise from traffic that never ceased, day or night, was sometimes worth the cost. Belinda smoothed her skirts over her thighs as she sat, watching Robert move through the fire-cast shadows.

There was something in warm orange light that brought depth out in his handsome, craggy features. All the things she had remembered before looking at him were still true: he was aged enough to be sober and trustworthy, young enough to be playful and charming, but in firelight he looked dangerous as well. And he was-more dangerous than most anticipated. Lorraine’s court granted him a measure of power, because he was beloved to the queen, but few of them regarded him as personally ambitious or worthy of note. Only his oft-discussed romantic liaison with Lorraine made him interesting.

Belinda knew better. Her father was Lorraine’s secret spymaster, and had been for as long as she herself had lived, maybe longer. Cortes, a showier man, thin and clipped and rude, was Robert’s disguise: he held the title Controller of Intelligence, and had a network that extended from nobles to playwrights and into the common populace. Behind Cortes’s shadow, Robert worked, answering threats to Her Majesty in a brutal, efficient manner that could never be traced back to the queen or even her notorious spymaster. And of those secret spies, Belinda was the best-hidden of all.

“You know Sandalia,” Robert said abruptly, coming out of shadow to take his seat by the fire. Belinda lifted her eyebrows a telling fraction, mildly offended by the question even though she understood it as rhetoric.

“Rodrigo’s sister, who sits as regent in Gallin,” she answered, keeping her tone patient. This, too, harkened to childhood ritual, Robert testing and quizzing her on whatever sprang to his mind. Things she ought to have studied, and usually had. Belinda had not been caught out by his unexpected questions since her fifteenth birthday, and had no intention of letting Robert take the upper hand in their little game now. She went on, voice lilting as if she lectured a child.

“Wed and widowed twice before she was eighteen, Sandalia and her son, Javier, stand heir to three thrones: Lanyarch, left to her by Charles, who, by the by, would have been Lorraine’s heir should he have lived and should she never marry. Then there’s Gallin’s throne by way of her second husband, and finally Essandia’s, should her brother, Rodrigo, produce no heir.” Javier would have to be a strong leader indeed, when Rodrigo passed on, to hold the thrones of Essandia and Gallin both, much less add Lanyarch to the mix. If he managed, it would be through the strength of those religious ties, and a fair amount of luck besides. Luck arranged, perhaps, by Sandalia de Costa. “I do not,” Belinda added, “know her personally.”

Robert gave her a black look. Belinda lifted an eyebrow again. Her father subsided, pushing away her snip, and any acknowledgment that his question had been foolish, with a wave of his hand. “When were you last in court, Belinda? In Lorraine’s court.”

“Eight years and some. After du Roz, but not long after.” Belinda watched her father warily, uncertain of where his question led. “Not since I was a child. You know this, Robert.” Calling him “Father,” as she had at the foot of the stairs, was a bladed luxury Belinda indulged herself in once each time she saw him. Someday she thought it would sting when she used that weapon, but in the ten years since she’d learned the truths he and Lorraine Walter hid, he had not yet flinched. She wondered, sometimes, if he did not realise what she knew; if to him the change from “Papa” to “Father” and “Robert” was nothing more than a sign that Belinda had become an adult and put away childish things. They had none of them confessed the circumstances of Belinda’s birth and heritage, and certainly Lorraine never would. It seemed impossible that Robert could not know that Belinda had, since the day she became the queen’s assassin, also known that she was her mother’s weapon.

But then, memory did not stretch so far back, and a babe still wet with birthing blood should not recall a narrow, regal face and titian curls spilling over pale skin. That was a recollection Belinda kept close to her heart, and had never spoken of to her father. It seemed impossible that he could not know, but perhaps it was even more improbable that she could.

“I do. And I wonder if there are any who might know you.”

“In the Aulunian court? A few, perhaps. More who would claim to,” Belinda began, but Robert lifted his hand again, stopping her words.

“In Gallin. In the regent’s court at Lutetia.” Robert brushed his hand over his eyes. “It is a risk.” The words were low, spoken more to himself than to Belinda. “The straits are not so wide, but the godly gulf is deep. And ten years might be ten decades in this place.”

“My lord?”

Robert’s gaze snapped up again and he shook his head. “Forgive an old man’s ramblings.”

Belinda snorted, loud and undignified. Robert looked chagrined, then laughed, bringing his hands together in a solid clap. “Which is it you’ll claim? Not old, or not rambling?”

“Not either, my lord,” Belinda said, smiling. “Your every word falls like a precious gem on my listening ears. I have not been placed somewhere so high as a regent’s court, Robert, and you have not come to see me yourself in a long time. D-” She broke off, remembering abruptly that her childhood memories were supposed to be asleep. Dmitri had not given her his name, in the Khazarian north. She ought not know him or his name. “-the man who came to me in Khazar-”

“It was nicely done with the count,” Robert interrupted. “What did you slip him to bring on that conveniently bad summer cold? The symptoms were unexpected.”