C. Murphy - The Queen_s Bastard

It would hardly do to show surprise that a base-born Lutetian had any especial grasp of crusading, though interest piqued in Belinda’s breast, flickering her eyebrows upward. “Naw. What is it?”

“It’s a lot of people thinkin’ like you do getting together and riding off to some foreign land to correct their religious beliefs.” The bulky man raked a hand through sandy hair, signaling for another tankard. Half a dozen people reached to pay for it. Satisfaction glinted in his eyes as he lifted it to them all in thanks.

“So I don’t see what’s so wrong with that,” Belinda snapped. “Someone’s gotta save the heathens, don’t they now?”

“Mebbe, mebbe. But it’s the noble houses leading ’em, lovey, and it’s the likes of you and me who die for ’em.”

Belinda put all her suspicion into a squint. “How d’you know so much?”

“My granfa three hundred years back went to the Holy Lands.”

Belinda snorted. “And my grandmother was the Aulunian consort. You’re full of shit.”

“She coulda been, with the way that bastard went through women.” Raucous laughter split the air. Belinda leaned forward to pound on the table.

“That’s what I’m sayin’! All them wives and divorces and what have you, and leavin’ the Church behind! It ain’t right! Don’t the regent have a right to Aulun, better’n that red-headed harlot they got on the throne? How long’s the Reformation bitch sat on the throne, anyways?”

“What’s the point in changin’ out one woman for another?” the man demanded. “God didn’ give any of them teats so they could think, neither.”

“But the regent is a godly woman,” Belinda protested. “The son’s been raised in the true church. I’ve got no call against you, mister, women don’t belong on thrones but for holdin’ ’em for their sons. But that woman, Lorrene?”

“Lorraine,” someone said. Belinda waved a hand at the man in thanks before hitting the table again.

“Lorraine. She’s got no get and no chance of it now, as long in the tooth as she is. Does she think she’ll live forever? We got a duty! Think of all them souls being damned to hell because the regent won’t act!”

A rumble of discontent swept through the men and women gathered around her. Her debate partner snorted and drank from his tankard, watching her with hazel eyes less bleary from drink than she expected. Others refused to meet her gaze, letting theirs slide uncomfortably away from her even as they exchanged little nods to one another. “It ain’t right,” someone agreed.

“Mebbe not,” someone else said, “but I’m not lookin’ to die for it.”

Belinda’s drinking partner leaned forward, crooking a finger at her. She folded her arms under her breasts and leaned on the table, watching his gaze drop to her bosom before he lifted it to her face. “You’re trouble, lass,” he told her in a smelly growl. “There’s them that agrees with you, but it ain’t good for your health to be spouting off like you’re doin’, you understand me?”

“No one cares what I say,” Belinda said, infusing it with all the bitterness she could. “A woman without two coins to rub together. No one cares.”

The man smiled, lecherous and foul with beer. “Can’t do a damned thing about the womanhood, but the coin, now. Might have a few to spare for a woman as eager in bed as she is about politics.”

He was, Belinda thought later, considerably less coarse than she’d expected.

23 August 1587 Lutetia, Gallin The priest’s fingertips touched her tongue. For a gleeful instant Belinda let herself wonder what he would do if she caught his finger in her mouth and suckled it as she gazed up at him through long eyelashes. Then again, what she’d heard of Ecumenic priests suggested it would be a gesture wasted, as she had a woman’s curves and not a boy’s narrow hips. She swallowed the sweetened bread, sipped the wine-better wine than she expected-and kept her eyes lowered. A fit of giggles in the magnificently silent cathedral would not do at all.

The grey flagstones beneath her knees were worn in smooth hollows from centuries of parishioners taking the blood and body of the Lord as she had just done for the first time. Belinda had more faith in her queen than in the God she’d never seen, but worshipping in an Ecumenical church made the hairs on her arms rise in discomfort. She had never played a role so close to her own and at the same time so diametrically different.

A queen’s life depended on hers; that was as it had always been. But now, for the first time, it was not Lorraine’s length of days, but Sandalia de Costa’s, that she held in her hands. Sandalia had a viable claim to Aulun’s throne and a lifetime of preparation behind her: if the rumours Robert had heard were true, the time for waiting was over. Sandalia intended to make a play for Lorraine’s country, to take her throne and restore Aulun to Ecumenic rule.

Belinda had spent a decade slipping through the lower ranks, taking lives and ruining reputations to protect the Aulunian queen. Robert’s whisper came back to her: This is how it must be. She would insinuate herself in court, make herself as close to Sandalia as she could, and seek out any hint of perfidy that might condemn Sandalia as an active, physical threat to Lorraine’s person. She sought written confirmation in the form of treaties or ambitious letters if it was to be found, or to become embroiled in a plot to set Sandalia on Aulun’s throne herself, if pen could not be pursuaded to parchment. For a rarity, she was not commanded to do murder, though Robert had left that dangling, neither condoning nor condemning it as a possibility. A queen might die at Belinda’s hands, that another might live.

The priest bade her rise, and she did, murmuring thanks and crossing herself as easily as if she’d done it every night of her life. She stepped back, then turned, retreating to her seat, closer to the back of the cathedral than the front. Merchants and bankers sat here, the wealthy working class caught between nobility and poor. Belinda allowed herself a seat toward the front of that class, in keeping with the small wealth her persona commanded. More than one mother examined her critically, judging her clothes and bearing. More than one son caught her eye, judging her breasts and hips. Belinda took note of them without watching, her eyes fixed piously toward the front of the cathedral and the magnificently dressed priest who lectured there. Around her, women whispered the words of worship they had learned by rote; Belinda instead listened to his speech, delivered with passion. His voice carried up the cathedral walls, rolling to the back without effort.

Ancient Parnan was not her strongest tongue, but she could do more than translate a sermon with it. The priest never faltered, his voice rising and falling until the lecture sounded almost like a song. Belinda drifted on it, listening less to the speaker than to the cathedral itself. Morning light slashed down through stained-glass windows, sending a multitude of colours over the congregation. It looked, Belinda thought, as if God had stretched out His hand and graced the believers with the light of faith. She turned her head and discovered bright patches of yellow speckling her shoulders, and thought perhaps He graced the less faithful as well. She smiled, turning her face back to the sermonizing priest, but not before meeting the gaze of a young man a few pews away. He offered a brief, hopeful smile that lit brown eyes, making him even more youthful than an unruly cascade of brown curls suggested. Belinda quelled the impulse to curl her fingers, as if snagging the man with her gaze put him in the palm of her hand. Marius Poulin, whose sturdy loyalty lent him friends of higher rank than the son of a merchant family might aspire to. She had studied him and half a dozen others from her gutter-rat station, hiding at the back of the cathedral to hear worship and watch the young men who might fall to her traps. Marius, handsome and good-hearted, was her first choice. Belinda let her eyes flicker back to his after a moment, and his smile brightened.