C. Murphy: The Pretender_s Crown

Truth in all ways but one, and for that one falsehood, Belinda forgave herself. Witchpower demanded recognition and a place on Lorraine's side of the glass, but that was an ambition never to be pursued. She wouldn't overthrow a lifetime's training and willingness to serve for a madness born of golden magic and the sensual touch of a prince's hand.

“And if the boy had married you?”

Belinda blinked over her shoulder at Lorraine, realised she'd turned her back on a monarch, and nearly allowed herself the luxury of throwing her hands up in exasperation. Perhaps it was the intimacy; perhaps it was witchpower daring to put herself on the same level as the queen in small but noticeable ways. Whichever, whatever, drove her to those tiny indiscretions, they would cost her her life if she didn't regain control and become once more what she had always been: meek, modest, unremarkable. “I can't imagine a world in which that would have been permitted. The engagement was a ploy to see if wedding a Lanyarchan noble to the prince of Gallin might frighten the Aulunian throne into foolish action; you must know that as clearly as I did. Sandalia would have had me killed before she would allow me to marry Javier, though I should think I might have escaped that fate through my own wits, if not Javier's-” For the second time she found herself verging on dangerous language, and ended with “fancy” rather than words with more emotional weight.

“And Javier? Would he have pursued the union?”

Might he yet? underlay the question, and Belinda permitted herself a rough chuckle. “He would have, but no longer. I should think myself his enemy from ten days ago until the end of time.”

“Youth,” Lorraine said, “is much given to dramatics. Enemies are a luxury we indulge in from time to time, and make bedfellows of when a new one comes along.”

Belinda, daring, asked, “Sandalia?” and Lorraine gave her another steady look that turned to a soft answer Belinda knew she had no right to expect.

“We did not dislike her. We might once have been friends.”

“If the world had been other than it is.”

Lorraine nodded once. “But it is not, and we are pleased, girl, to know that you do not look for it to be.”

“Never,” Belinda whispered, and crushed the flare of witch-power in her mind.

The girl is not what she expected.

She has been dismissed, has left the private chamber in a flurry of ridiculous pink skirts and soft feminine foolishness, and has left Lorraine more alone than usual in a room meant for secrets. More alone than usual: that, for a queen, is a thought of some weight. Were she to give in to it, it might be a thought of some despair.

Lorraine Walter, queen of all Aulun, is fifty-five years old, and that frothy child is the only heir she will ever have.

When Belinda is well and truly gone, not just from the window-less chamber but has left Lorraine's rooms through other secret passageways, Lorraine exits her cold tower room and enters her own apartments again. They're warm, which she's glad of, though she would no more admit to cold than she might admit to loneliness or fear. Those are things to be acknowledged only in the deepest and most private part of her: to the world, she must be untouchable, unaffected: the virgin queen.

Belinda, Lorraine fancies, has a hint of that same cool core to her. Women require it, if they are to succeed in a world shaped by men. Women must become masculine, and yet make eyes at their men, play both sides and hold a place in the middle. Lorraine has worked at that game for a lifetime. So, too, she thinks, has Belinda Primrose.

There is wine, set well away from the fire that it might retain its coolness. Lorraine, not wishing to be disturbed by servants, pours a glass herself, and takes a box of sweets to the fire with her. She believes chewing them improves her breath, but for the moment they're merely an indulgence. No more than two: even at fifty-five, she has her figure to maintain, especially if she intends to continue the endless rounds of marriage negotiations with Essandia's Rodrigo.

A brief smile curves her lips as she taps a marzipan treat against them. Neither she nor Rodrigo has any interest in marriage. How much easier it might have been for both of them if they could have set that absurd dance aside decades ago and instead turned their might and ambition toward other lands. But that is not, has never been, the way of Echonian countries, and it is not the way of the Ecumenic church. It is, and always has been, everything or nothing: Cordula will reclaim Aulun at any cost; Aulun will retain its Reformation church at any price. They cannot, it seems, find another path.

Faith, Lorraine thinks, is a dangerous business, and one that men should resist fiddling with. But not even her own father was immune to that particular folly. Indeed, had he been, the legacy he'd left might have played out very differently.

And that future, had it come to pass, might well have seen Lorraine married, or not queen, or both, and with heirs born to pomp and circumstance rather than silence and secrecy. That, as Belinda said, was a world seen through ancient glass, too warped and misshapen to truly consider.

The wine is warming in her hand. Lorraine sips at it and sets her second sweet aside, less hungry for delicacies than answers. Robert should be here; Robert has always been here, offering advice when it was sought and silence as full of commentary as his words when it was not. Of all her courtiers, of all her advisers, indeed, of all her lovers, Robert Drake has been the most faithful and least likely to pressure her. Men accept that she is queen and do her bidding because they can do nothing else. Robert does it because he believes in her, and if that's a caprice a queen ought not indulge in, well, on this one topic she permits herself to do so regardless.

If he ever betrays her, she will be destroyed. Oh, so, too, will he, more visibly and quickly than Lorraine, but the handsome bearded lord's devotion is the one thing she truly believes she cannot do without.

Then again, as lines work their way into her face and take heavier paint to fill, it begins to seem there may be one other thing she cannot do without, and that is a legitimate heir. Lorraine has always understood, in a way her half-sister Constance did not, that their father Henry's desperation for a son drove him to the extraordinary ends that begot half a dozen marriages and a new church in Aulun. It's easier, perhaps, for Lorraine to be forgiving, for she's the daughter of the second marriage, and Constance was born of the first. Of course, Constance's mother survived, and Lorraine's did not; maybe Lorraine should be less understanding than Constance was.

But this is an old cycle of thought, as useless now as it was when she was a girl. Then, she'd understood well enough; now, as an adult, as a woman, as a queen without an heir, Henry's concern is no longer a thing to be imagined. Lorraine lives it every day, hiding panic behind a regal aspect. It's easy enough to do when she is looked on as God's vessel on earth; she is not expected to have weaknesses, and so she simply does not allow them to show. An impassive face, white makeup, elaborate gowns, all go far in disguising a knot of sick worry that disturbs the heartbeat with its intensity. Without an heir Aulun faces the all-too-real possibility of civil war on Lorraine's death, and though she is so very loathe to admit it, Lorraine is not a young woman any longer. She is, in fact, old, and it's God's grace that has kept her in health and wits these many years. God, however, has not granted the miracle necessary for her to bear a child should she wed at this late hour, and Lorraine's own disposition does not incline her to do that anyway.