The Queen's Bastard

BELINDA PRIMROSE

17 July 1587 Aria Magli, Parna It was Aria Magli; it was always Aria Magli. The city’s peculiar streets, littered with gondolas and filled with vice, were the one place Belinda thought of with anticipation. She sat in a gondola now, leaning forward from under its canopy, allowing herself an unfeigned, unrestrained smile as the boy at the back of the boat poled it along the busy canals.

Rich and poor brushed elbows here; it was thus in any large city, but the possibility of a wealthy lady being dunked in the canal made watching the passersby much more entertaining than in the streets of Alunaer. A man with a rooster balanced on his head leaned out over the canal, one hand firmly wrapped around a water-way pole. Around his feet were caged birds, squawking with indignation. His voice rose over the din, over the sound of water lapping and the voices that bounced back and forth between the canal-separated buildings. The Parnan language rang liquidly in Belinda’s ears, every word a promise, even if the speaker was only hawking chickens. He waved as he caught Belinda’s smile, and she lifted a hand, snapping her fingers to gain the gondola boy’s attention.

“This one will rob you blind, madam,” the boy warned. “I know a better man, much better, and handsome, too. Almost as handsome as me.”

“But are his chickens as healthy?” Belinda asked with a laugh. “I’m not buying a man, I’m buying dinner.”

He clucked as sorrowfully as the chickens did and pushed the gondola toward the lichen-covered canal wall. “What kind of a woman doesn’t want a handsome man to sell her things?” he asked mournfully.

“The kind who wants a handsome man to buy her things,” Belinda suggested.

“If I buy you a chicken, you will see my man!” the boy enthused, and leapt forward to snatch up one of the cages from the hawker’s feet. They fell to bargaining, speaking too low and too quickly for Belinda to catch the words. She settled back beneath her canopy again, entirely certain that the price of the chicken would be added to the fare for her afternoon ride. Another gondola slid by, an expensively dressed woman reading from a book of poetry to a man who doted on her. Belinda watched them go until the curve of the canal took them from her sight, then smiled and searched for another such pair.

Courtesans. Their days of great power in the Maglian courts were over, brought low by the plague and the Heretical Trials half a century earlier, but their stories were still told throughout Echon. Had she been born to the warmer Parnan climes instead of foggy Aulun, Belinda thought she might have been one of them. Not necessarily beautiful, but well-educated in studies forbidden to most women, and then taught to be hedonistic lovers as well. Their lives weren’t so different from Belinda’s own, although a courtesan worked for money, and Belinda for-

A cage with a shrieking chicken was dropped at Belinda’s feet. She looked up to see the gondola boy, who stood with his chest thrust out and arms akimbo. “You see!” he crowed. “I have gotten you a chicken, and now you will see my man.”

“What do I need to see him for,” Belinda asked, “if I’ve already got a chicken?”

The boy’s face fell, comical and quick as melting wax, but he recovered with lifted eyebrows and widened eyes. “He’s wealthy and handsome, lady. Maybe he’s a good husband for you, huh?”

“Or maybe he’s a thief who wants my necklace. Tell him it’s paste and have off with him, boy. I want my afternoon ride.” Belinda searched for biscuit crumbs from the lunch she’d carried with her, and dropped them into the chicken’s cage. The bird stopped protesting and fluffed its tail feathers into the air, pecking at the crumbs. The gondola boy pushed the boat back into the canal, still entreating her.

“But he has asked for you, lady. He says he will give me two guineas for bringing you to him.”

“Two, hm? I must be very important, then.” Belinda smiled again, watching a girl above the canals lean out of her room and wave. Someone smacked her skirts, making her jump, and she fled back inside, but not before Belinda returned the wave and a young man caroled out a ribald poem.

“Yes, lady,” the boy said, undeterred. “He said to look for you, to not take any other riders but you.”

“And how did he tell you to know me?” Belinda asked, willing to continue the banter. It was the courtesans, her sisters in all but name, that made her feel as if she belonged here. She knew rare moments of peace and satisfaction in her life, but only in Aria Magli did she know happiness. Until her father or one of his men met her, she would spend her evenings slipping uninvited into parties, hiding behind masks to speak of politics and poetry to women whose names she would never know. It was the closest thing to freedom the queen’s bastard had ever known.

“He said you would have fair skin,” the boy all but sang, “and hair like the rich brown earth turned up to the morning sun. He said your eyes were the green of new leaves, and your smile softer than a thousand roses.” Belinda twisted to look over her shoulder at him, astonished. The boy looked immensely pleased with himself, and she laughed out loud. “He also said you would be wearing a dress of blue and gold, and gave me the address you lived at. I waited half the morning, lady, and missed many commissions,” he added more prosaically. “Now we have to go to him, or my father will beat me for losing so much money on a day like today.”

“Would he really?” Belinda asked, the question mere noise to hide the dismay that dragged her heart down. There were patterns to follow in Aria Magli: dresses of particular colours, each selected for the day of the week; one address of a half dozen to stay at, rotated through. Either her father or one of his men was here to tell her more of Dmitri’s cryptic message, and to give her a new assignment. There would be no long nights trading whoring secrets and stories with the courtesans, not this time. She lifted her hand, gesturing that the boy should take her where he’d been told, and looked, without expression, at the contented chicken. The boy answered her in the affirmative, babbling on with tales of his father’s heavy hand and the eight, or fourteen, or twelve, brothers and sisters who all scrambled and worked to keep him in his drink and happy. Belinda laughed in the right places, gasped dramatically when it was called for, and heard nothing he said.

He had been waiting, then, her father or his man. For days, perhaps, even weeks; the journey from north of Khazar all the way to Aria Magli was easiest in high summer, but still not quick. She’d parted ways with the coachman-a more inventive lover than poor Viktor-in Khazar’s capital city and travelled alone, only arriving in Aria Magli late the night before. They had been waiting for her, watching. The morning’s taste of freedom had been a false one, and the open, sun-lit canals seemed a mockery now, instead of a pleasure.

The chicken finished its snack and bwocked with irritation. Belinda turned a faint smile on it. “You may have found a stay of execution, my little friend. I may not be here for supper.” And if she were not, the bird would go to the boy and his eight or fourteen or twelve siblings, perhaps a finer meal than they’d had in weeks. Then again, a chicken hadn’t the sense to comprehend false hope, and Belinda did. It left a taste of bleakness in her throat, bitter as almonds.

The boy poled the gondola beneath a low bridge. A coin glittered down off the bridge, landing at Belinda’s feet with a flat tap. She leaned past the chicken cage to collect it, gold a heavy weight in her hand, warmth undiminished by its brief sojourn through the air. “Here,” she said. “At the next steps.”

“No,” the boy said with determination. “The man told me-”

“He told you wrong,” Belinda interrupted. “Here, boy, at the next steps, and this is yours.” She lifted the coin between two fingers and all but felt the avaricious leap of the child’s heart. For a few seconds the image caught her, the stamped golden coin brilliant in the afternoon sunshine, giving a warm cast to her fingers. Beyond her hand, in poor focus, was the water, blue with reflected skies in direct light, brown with debris in shadow. Farther still were figures on the streets, mostly in the strong shades favoured by the wealthy. Probably not her father, then; he preferred the less ostentatious parts of Aria Magli for meetings such as this. Belinda had long since learned it was often as easy to hide in plain sight, as plumed as a peacock, but Robert would have no changing of his ways.

“If you like to dawdle,” she continued, “stay a while. It may be that I’ll return.”

“My father,” the boy hazarded. Belinda smiled a little.

“A bargain,” she suggested. “Wait an hour, and if I haven’t returned, you have the guineas, this coin, and this chicken here to take home to your father.”

“And if you have?” he demanded.

“Then you’ve all of those things and my fare for the rest of the day,” Belinda replied. Another chicken could always be purchased, or dinner taken at one of the inns in the traveller’s part of town.

But she’d reminded the boy with her words, and he hopped forward, a palm extended. “Your fare for the morning,” he said. “Four guineas.”

Belinda lifted her eyebrows. “Two.”

The child looked affronted. “Three and a half.”

Belinda laughed. “Three, and it’s done.”

The boy spat in his palm, offering it to her before he thought. Then dismay filled his eyes and he wiped his palm hastily against his grubby shirt, offering his hand a second time. Belinda dropped the guineas and the larger gold coin into his hand, watching as he secreted each coin into a different, heretofore unnoticed, pocket or pouch in his clothing. “An hour,” he said with the air of an aggrieved parent. “Not a minute more, fine lady.”

“Not a minute more.” Belinda gathered her skirts and climbed from the boat, her picnic basket swinging from one elbow. A young man with dark gypsy eyes and a ready white smile offered her a hand up, and she took it against her better sense, murmuring, “Grazie.”

His smile flashed deeper, showing dimples. She pressed a small coin into his hand and moved away, climbing up the steps and turning to walk back to the bridge the gondola had passed under. When she looked back, the gypsy man was staring at the coin in his hand with an expression of indignation. A woman waited on the bridge, leaning over stone that made up railing and wall both, watching her reflection in the water below. Belinda took up a place on the far side of the bridge, several feet down from the other woman, and studied her as she waited for her contact. She was lovely in the expensive way of a courtesan, not the more demure beauty of a well-behaved wife: she wore chartreuse, the strength of the colour far beyond what Belinda would ever be able to wear. Her corsets made her torso long and slender, narrowing her hips and pushing her breasts high. The skirts were full but light: Belinda imagined the woman could ride a horse astride in those skirts. Her hair was dark, highlighted with gold in the afternoon sun, and her forehead high. Lorraine would approve, adoring the popular theory that a high forehead was a sign of intelligence. The women of Lorraine’s court plucked their hairlines to emulate the queen. Belinda stilled her hand before it wandered to explore her own hairline; she already knew it followed Robert’s more closely than Lorraine’s, and that was just as well. Lorraine’s widow’s peak was distinctive, and a girl marked with it would draw comment and speculation that the queen could not afford.

Belinda deliberately inhaled, changing the tilt of her head to help chase away thoughts of Aulun and the queen. The woman across the bridge laughed unexpectedly, flinging a hand out. A gold coin sparkled through the air and hit a passing gondola’s deck with a thunk barely audible above the sound of water lapping against the canal walls. Belinda went still within herself, keeping her expression mildly animated as her gaze went to the gondola passing beneath her. A delighted pole-boy scampered forward and scooped up the coin that had landed on his boat, shouting, “Thank you, signora!” up at the bridge.

“You’re welcome!” the woman shouted back. She turned toward Belinda, looking through her and beyond her, a smile curving her full mouth. She waved; Belinda looked over her shoulder to see the gypsy man bowing deeply and extravagantly. The woman laughed and turned away again without meeting Belinda’s eyes; without giving her any sign that she was to be approached.

Belinda looked back at the water, watching the shadow of another bridge swallow the second gondola the woman had gifted with a coin. She tapped one finger against the stone wall, and decided: she would wait, and see how fate ruled a third time.

When it ruled in favour of another coin thrown to a bright-eyed young gondola lad, Belinda tilted her face up to the sun and swore under her breath.

“Gone and left you then, has he?” The woman across the bridge had a warm alto, a burr to her voice that gave it an edge of sultriness. A voice practised for the bedroom, Belinda thought, and glanced at the woman. There was still a chance; her father had never before sent a woman to meet her.

“Abandoned and left cold,” she replied. “Ungrateful bastard.”

The woman laughed again, a rich comforting sound, and crossed the bridge to lean next to Belinda, her hands turned wrist-out against the stone wall. “Was he rich?”

“No,” Belinda said. “Nor handsome, either.”

The woman arched finely shaped eyebrows. “What’s the point, then?”

“I suppose it’s all in what we do for God and country.” Belinda spoke the coded words with a shrug. The woman’s eyebrows shot up.

“Sod God and bugger country. I want a palmful of coin and a feather bed.”

Belinda let herself laugh aloud, relaxing against the rail. The dark-haired woman at her side was certainly not her contact. Despite what had seemed to be the signal coin, her answer left everything to be desired as a pass code, though not as a brazen woman. “With four posts and a canopy?” she asked. The woman shook her head vehemently.

“Canopies gather dust, and the only thing more foolish than a naked man is a naked man sneezing his skull off.”

“Oh,” Belinda said, drawn into surprise, “no. A naked man in naught but stockings is worse yet.”

The woman’s laughter rang out once more, and she put a hand out. “Ana. You’re not one of the usual bunch.”

“Rosa,” Belinda said. Ana’s grasp was as solid as a man’s, slender bones in her hand full of strength and conviction. “And no, I’m not.”

“Would you like to be?”

Belinda looked down at the patient boy in the gondola, waiting for her, and thought of the contact somewhere farther down the canal who expected her. “Yes,” she said. If only for a little while. “It is not among my assets,” Belinda insisted over a cup-another cup, but she had lost count of how many anothers she’d had-of small beer. Ana waggled her head and her finger in tandem, dismissing Belinda’s protest as the women gathered around their elbows giggled and prodded at one another. Sunset had long since come and gone. Fish pasties baked in a good light dough had been ordered, demolished, ordered anew, and demolished again. The group of boisterous women had altered somewhat over the hours, but its core, made up of Belinda and a now entirely drunken Ana, remained the same.

“Your assets are quite clear. That-” Ana was interrupted by the vocal rise and fall around her, as happily drunken women cried “Oooh!” and pushed Belinda to her feet, examining her assets. Belinda waved her beer over their heads, shaking her hips in a fruitless attempt to loosen their hands. “Lovely,” an outrageously coifed redhead proclaimed, and another girl sniffed. “Her tits are too small.”

“We haven’t all got docks big enough to tie a gondola to, Bernice.” Ana mocked tossing a rope toward the girl, who sniffed again and subsided as Ana turned back to Belinda with a sniff of her own. “She’s only jealous of your throat. Long and lovely, that. Aristocratic, or meant for hanging.”

“Thank you,” Belinda said drily. “Dangerous thoughts, Lady Ana.” More dangerous than the courtesan could know, and to be headed off as readily as possible. Belinda edged back toward her seat, trying to reclaim it.

“Not a bit of that.” The woman seated behind her lifted her feet to plant them against Belinda’s bottom and keep her away from the chair. “You owe us a song.”

“My voice,” Belinda protested again, “is not chief among my assets.” The woman behind her straightened her legs, sending Belinda stumbling up onto her toes. Ana stood up and grabbed her wrist, climbing onto the table and tugging Belinda with her.

“That’s not the point.” She clutched Belinda’s waist as they both swayed dangerously on the tabletop. Belinda leaned on Ana and squinted at her own feet, alarmingly distant.

“Was the table this crooked before?” she asked in a low voice. Ana snorted laughter.

“You haven’t spilled a beer tonight, have you? There’s a terrible puddle at the end of the table. A drunk man built these.” She nodded, exaggerated, and slung an arm out, lifting her voice into a bellow. “Hey! You there! Me and Rosie, we’re going to sing you a song!”

Three-quarters of the bar’s patrons turned expectantly. Belinda elbowed Ana’s ribs. “Hold your tongue! I told you, I can’t sing!”

“So what’ll it be then? Do you know ‘Era Nato Poveretto’?”

“God,” Belinda said, “barely. Born poor?” she brazened, then caught her breath, searching for another song. “‘C’и La Luna.’ Will it do?”

“Well enough,” Ana said with a firm nod.

Belinda drew in a deep breath, gave Ana one dismayed look, and began to sing.

“My God,” Ana gasped at the break between verses, “you’d best be able to fuck like a dream, with a voice like that.”

“I told you,” Belinda snapped. Ana snagged her arm through Belinda’s as they began the second verse, starting a jig that made Belinda’s voice even hoarser with breathlessness. In counterpoint, Ana’s voice rose and strengthened, until she was carrying the whole melody and Belinda only croaked out a word or two when she caught her breath. The crowd’s cries blurred from jeers into shouts of approval.

A hand clasped around her ankle, making her stumble. She looked down to find a cheerily drunken man beaming toothily up at her. “Give us another one, bonnie Rosie,” he begged. “Your voice makes my wife’s sound like a golden harp, and God knows I need something to take away the edge!”

Belinda shook him off with a kick that missed clipping his temple by a scant inch or two. Then she found laughter bubbling up inside her chest, pressing against her breastbone, and after a moment she let it free. Her singing voice might shame a crowing cock, but her laugh was bright and warm.

“Oh, so that’s how you do it,” Ana said with a knowledgeable and approving nod. Belinda leered at her, flung her own head back, and began to sing the raunchiest song she knew.

Howls of approving laughter roared up to the rafters, while stomping feet shook the floor as the pub patrons kept time. She couldn’t, perhaps, sing, but she could keep a beat, and now she was caught up by it, consequences be damned. As if sensing her abandonment, even the men who had shouted her down earlier courted her for more now. Torches twitched with exuberance, hopping in their nests and sending puffs of black smoke up to the ceiling. Ana grabbed her arm again and Belinda swung her around the table, slipping in spilled beer. The aroma splashed upward, hops mixing with wood smoke in a rich thick scent that made one part of her mind sleepy even as she reveled in the raw country life of it. Her circumstances allowed her few opportunities for unconstrained play, and her temperament fewer yet. It was a chance, rare in a lifetime of duty, to forget who and what she was, and why. Most of all, why. Belinda drank it in, letting the raucous music she made settle all the way down to her bones, where it might leave an impression. A memory for another time, when she would not be able to allow herself the freedom she had tonight.

Stolen freedom. The thought flickered through her mind and she banished it again. The coin from the bridge was a common signal from her father’s men. That it had this time been happenstance leading to rough decadence was…not her fault would be too strong. Belinda had chosen her path for tonight, chosen to deliberately misinterpret and forget. Her voice broke on a high note and she laughed with everyone else, dropping into a deeper register to try the remainder of the verse.

Her corsets pressed into her ribs too tightly in the thick air; her throat felt constricted, though her gown was fashioned with neither collar nor hat-ribbon wrapped around her neck. Her hair had been up earlier in the day. Now it tumbled around her shoulders and down her back, sticking with sweat. If she took too shallow a breath she could smell herself, and so she breathed more deeply, drowning out her own sharpness with the woody scent of spilled beer. The dress would be forever in the cleaning, peacock blue fabric stained not just with sweat but with beer and the invading scent of the wood smoke. Belinda wondered if she could procure a sausage, and spill its grease on herself, just to irretrievably mar the gown.

Calling out, midsong, for a sausage, was an error in judgment. More than one man leapt to his feet, scrambling to undo his trousers, while others cupped their codpieces and swore it was all real. Ana laughed so hard she wept, and Belinda’s dance ended as she leaned on the courtesan, gasping back laughter herself.

In the stillness brought upon by laughter, emotion swept through Belinda like fire. Not her own: that she recognized, even as rare as tonight’s outburst was. No. It came from somewhere else-everywhere else, as burning and uncomfortable as the sickness she’d felt while standing in the dawn watching Dmitri ride away. It ate at her, feeling larger than she was, reaching inside her so it could claw its way out.

From Ana, her nose all but buried in Belinda’s bosom as she tried to keep her feet while she laughed. Beneath the laughter there were tears, forced back by the night’s gaiety. They were buried deep within her, tearing her soul apart. It was only through outrageousness that the dark-haired courtesan was able to keep them at bay.

From the man who’d grabbed her ankle, a fierce and abiding lust, not for the women dancing above him, but for the harpy-voiced wife he’d left at home. He would go back to her soon, trusting she’d be as happy to make a nest for his prick as he was to find one.

From the courtesans surrounding the table upon which Belinda and Ana danced came a pragmatic and determined approach to beauty, youth, and brains. As a unit, they stood together rather than apart simply because there were so few of them, and they needed what sisterhood they could get. Jealousies, petty and profound, were put aside for the few hours of shared companionship that had no guinea price on it.

And from the pub at large: desire and laughter, pleasure and pain. It rolled over Belinda in waves, tickling her in secret places, and discomfort broke as if rising emotion found welcome in the most private parts of her being. She gasped with it, knotting one hand in Ana’s hair. Ana, still mirthful, lifted her head: she knew that tightness in Belinda’s grasp as well as Belinda herself did, a precursor to violence and passion. They met gazes, both aware of their bodies crushed together, both aware of the hard straight lines of corsets that pressed against curves better explored in a more secluded room. Ana’s lips parted and she wet them. Belinda felt her own mouth curve in an avaricious grin. Like a shock wave, those closest to them felt it, the sudden pound of desire that had, for one rare and sweet moment, nothing to do with commerce.

Then rage crashed through Belinda’s belly, smashing need before its strength. She fell back; she saw Ana’s eyes shutter, disappointment hidden away inside an instant. She wanted to speak, to explain, but the fury that beat its way through her only brought a film of blood to her lip as she bit into it. She fell back another step, staggering under the onslaught of unfamiliar anger, and caught the edge of the table with her heel. Her arms pinwheeled as she toppled, knowing she couldn’t catch herself, hoping her new acquaintances might. Knowing, too, that they would not: she had slighted one of theirs, pink-cheeked Ana who had already gone back to dancing as if nothing had passed between her and Belinda.

Strong hands, big hands, clasped her around the waist, and the tang of fury ballooned in her so strongly that blackness swept up through her vision, and silence fell. She did not want to waken.

She did not want to waken for a host of reasons, the first and least comfortable being that someone was carrying her, rudely, over his shoulder. Her nose smacked against the small of his back and she forced herself to let her arms dangle, instead of searching for the small dagger nested beneath her corset. Even if she could snatch it before she was noticed-unlikely-there was the second reason not to. The second reason she didn’t want to awaken: she knew who carried her, and his anger would be great.

The third reason she would have preferred the oblivion of unconsciousness was that dangling like this, the uncounted number of beers she’d partaken of were eager to spill on the cobblestones. Belinda coughed and choked, then twisted as she heaved, trying to get away, less for worry of the man’s clothes than to alleviate her own discomfort. He swore and dumped her on her hands and knees, holding on by her waist, while she cramped and vomited more liquid than she thought she’d drunk. Bright orange bits of carrot and chunks of half-digested meat mixed in with the runny bile. Belinda groaned, pushing up to her knees and wiping a hand across her mouth. Her captor swore again and grabbed her wrist, hauling her to her feet. She’d barely caught her balance before he flung a short door open and shoved her through it, in front of him. She tripped, stumbling to catch herself, and he caught her upper arm, hauling her around and throwing her against the wall. Belinda hit hard enough to lose her breath, and stood with her head turned, eyes downcast as she panted for air.

“Are you mad? Are you eager for the ruin of us all? I’ve been waiting since noon, girl!”

“Father,” Belinda said in a low voice. She didn’t want to look at him yet, to see the dark eyebrows beetled down in anger. She didn’t want the moment of surprise she always felt when she saw how well the years had treated him: she could imagine, without looking, the well-trimmed dark hair with no more grey at the temples than he had borne when she was a child. The dark eyes that would now be clouded with fury, with a crow’s nest of wrinkles around them that seemed to have more to do with eternity than age. If he held as well for another few years as he had the last ten, Belinda would appear to be his sister, not his daughter at all. She had faith that he would, for all that he was already old, nearly forty-five. His still-youthful appearance helped keep him dear to Lorraine, who wore more cosmetics now than she had in earlier years, re-creating the blush of youth. If her darling Robert aged so little, certainly she, too, must be clinging to a more tender age than a loyal populace could believe.

“Have you no answer? Look at me, girl!”

Belinda lifted her chin and her gaze, meeting Robert’s eyes. “How did you find me?” she wondered, feeling as though the question came from a distant place inside her. Robert snorted and caught her arm again, pushing her up the stone steps that began barely a yard inside the door.

“The gondola boy, not that I needed him.”

Damn! The force of the curse startled Belinda, making her clench her hands in her skirts. She ought to have paid the child off, sent him on his way instead of telling him to linger an hour and wait on her return. “How long did he wait before going to you?”

“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.”

Belinda held her mouth in a long moue, hiding a fluttering heartbeat behind a wry examination of her father before she lowered her gaze with a smile. “That would be telling, sir, and a lady never tells.”

But only because there was no answer that would satisfy. The one she wanted to offer was arsenic, but uncertainty lay beneath it. She hadn’t let herself linger on Gregori’s death; it had been achieved, and that was all that mattered. For the second time that evening she remembered the alien emotion pounding through her. In Khazar she had trusted it must be her own; at the Magalian pub she had been certain that the emotion she’d known belonged to those around her. It tasted of witchery.

No. Belinda clamped down on a shudder, unwilling to release her control even-especially-in her father’s presence. She would not show fear, would not give in to the power of childhood stories. Illness was brought on by arsenic, not wishes, no matter the desire she’d held in her heart to bring Gregori low, for Lorraine and for the bruises Belinda herself carried from his hand. Pretty, bitter Ilyana was superstitious and jealous, her accusations of witchcraft the creation of a small, frightened mind. It could not be otherwise.

Prickles of cold washed over Belinda’s skin in spite of the fire’s heat, and she set the discomfiting thoughts aside as her father laughed again. “A lady never does,” he mocked her. “A gentleman never tells.”

“You know far fewer ladies than I do, then, sir,” Belinda said drily. “Not that I would wish to malign the reputations of any of the fine women I know.” She thought, briefly, of Ana, swinging her around on the table, and let herself smile. The stolen afternoon and evening had been worth Robert’s anger, which seemed to have fled quickly enough once she was back in…custody? she wondered. It was not a term she was accustomed to using for herself. “The man who came to me in Khazar said time was of importance. What’s stirring in Gallin?”

Robert’s expression blackened for a few seconds. “If time is so much of an essence, and you are aware of that, what excuse do you have for dallying away your day today?”

Belinda exhaled a quiet long breath. “Even the queen takes holidays, my lord. If one day is so desperate a difference, you ought have sent me to Gallin straight away rather than coming here as we always do.”

Robert steepled his fingers and pressed his lips against them, frowning at her. “Yes,” he said abruptly, eventually. “Yes, you have the right of it there. Damn you, anyway. Who taught you cleverness?”

“My nurse, my lord.” Belinda lowered her eyes demurely, remembering the staid old woman, then peeked up with an arched eyebrow, not bothering to hide her amusement. Robert guffawed and came to his feet, catching Belinda’s hands in his own. He pulled her to standing and into a rough hug.

“My lass. There’s my girl. Outwitting the old man. Soon enough there’ll be no place for me.”

“Robert,” Belinda began, but he shook his head and put her back from himself, holding her shoulders.

“Not yet. This old dragon has a few flames left in him yet. There is rumour of insurrection from Gallin, Belinda.”

“Who? Against Sandalia? Or the boy? Javier?”

“He’s your age, lass, not such a boy at all. Twenty-two years old and holding back from claiming the throne out of respect for his mother, that’s what they say.”

“Or out of a fear he’ll never see another day that belongs to his own self and isn’t owed to another.”

Robert’s eyes darkened again, this time with thought. “That may be some of it, too. No, no. Sandalia visits with her brother Rodrigo in Essandia, and my people warn that their cloistered discussions say she chafes at her boundaries and eyes Lanyarch and Aulun. You named the threads that link her to Aulun’s throne yourself. Sandalia may think a pretender’s crown would look well upon her head. You will not let that happen.”

Belinda closed her eyes, absorbing Robert’s orders along with the decade-old ritual that set them into place. This is how it shall go, Primrose. Heed me well.

When he was done she opened her eyes again, all but swaying with the music of his words. “It’s a chess game you’re playing, my lord, one where the black queen is not yet even on the board. Why send me to Lutetia and not Isidro in Essandia?” She passed off the question with a wave of her hand even as she asked it. Passed off, too, the chiding, flat-mouthed glance her father gave her; she went to Lutetia because Sandalia was not there, and that gave Belinda space to insinuate herself in society before the queen’s return. “Does it matter to you how I become close enough to the throne to watch it and judge its actions?”

“Has it ever?” Robert asked lightly enough. It had not; not from the night he’d murmured Belinda’s duty to her, and set her on du Roz. All she had known was the man’s death must be accomplished, and even at not quite twelve, that it should look like an accident seemed obvious. Robert had been astounded at the swiftness of her actions, and at the method of du Roz’s death. Belinda recalled with exquisite clarity the brief admiring expression on her father’s face as she’d swooned and trembled in a guard’s arms during the aftermath of sudden, dreadful death. No, if even then she had accepted her tasks and determined her own path to achieving them, Robert would not likely now commanded her walk a road of his choosing.

“Find a way to shove Gallin from the parapets; that’s all we need,” he said, as though following her thoughts of du Roz. “Sandalia has never had Lorraine’s caution, and an ill-advised word spoken to an ear we can trust is what we need. Find that weakness, Primrose. Find that ambition, and exploit it. We cannot allow Aulun to fall into Ecumenic hands again.”

Belinda widened her eyes in a mockery of innocence, a hand placed against her breastbone. “Why, my lord, do you say that you trust me so very much, then?”

Sudden unexpected fondness deepened Robert’s eyes, and Belinda glanced away. “You are a good girl, loyal and true,” her father said, as if from a distance, “and I would trust no other beyond you.”

Belinda stood, gathering her soiled skirts, and dipped a curtsey of unnecessary depth. “Then I’m away to Gallin in the morning, my lord, to prove your faith in me.”