her throat to show Ilyana yellowing bruises. “Would a woman who could do a man to death let him do this to her? Is this what you’re so eager for?” Sharp inhalations seemed to thin the air, greedy eyes trying to stare and look away all at once.
“You bespelled him,” Ilyana snarled. “Maybe bruises are the price you pay for your magic, bitch.”
“Ladies.” The castellan, face bleak with anger and grief, stepped between them. “We are all too emotional now. Forget this, and let us behave with the decorum that best suits us.”
Yes, Belinda thought, the serving classes, so much more concerned with propriety than their wealthy masters. But she didn’t miss the castellan’s eyes lingering on her, or the suspicion and doubt that had been planted behind them. “Sir,” she murmured, and backed away, eyes lowered. There would be no time for a discreet exit, then. Ilyana would expose her to angry nobles looking for someone to blame. Belinda had no intention of dangling her slender neck in a hangman’s noose. She stepped into the first servant’s crossed hall off the kitchen, pausing there to consider the ends that needed tightening.
“I leave within the hour,” the coachman said from across the hall. Belinda raised her head, eyebrows lifted. “To bear tidings of the count’s death to the capital city.” He hurried down the hall, booted heels snapping against the stone floors. Belinda watched him go, then gathered her skirts. Viktor could not be found in her room.
3
SANDALIA, QUEEN AND REGENT
27 June 1587
Isidro, capital of Essandia
“I’ve waited twenty years, Rodrigo.” Sandalia whirls herself across her brother’s private rooms, fully aware she s giving in to the histrionics of a much younger woman. “Javier’s long since old enough—”
“Javier,” Rodrigo interrupts, “is his mother’s most loyal subject, and doesn’t itch for a throne. You haven’t been waiting, Sandalia.” He stands, cutting a deliberate swath across Sandalia’s stormy path to pour cups of wine and hand one to her. She glowers, knowing he’s trying to settle her agitation, but takes the cup regardless, sipping quickly.
The years have been kind to the prince of Essandia. In his sixth decade he’s still slender, with streaks of silver highlighting his temples and beard. Noble women still dance their daughters past him, and negotiations have never ceased between the royal families of Echon. Sandalia’s own curvaceous figure will be unlikely to fare as well over the next decades, but for now she knows she, too, makes a striking figure, especially at her brother’s side.
A side that is not supporting her the way she wishes it to. “I have been waiting—”
“Waiting suggests doing nothing. Complacency. Idle hands. You’ve gathered your strength, made the Gallic people love you—and that, princess of Essandia, is no small trick—kept Lanyarch’s heart beating from afar, and have raised a son to follow you. You have kept an army strong enough to stave off Reussland’s encroachments onto Gallic territory, and you have done so without crippling your people with taxes, or building their resentment so high that they refuse to fight in your name. Any…any of those things,” Rodrigo emphasizes, lifting his voice over Sandalia’s protests, “is not waiting. All of them together are preparing. You would have been a fool to move after Javier’s birth, Sandalia. So soon after Louis’s death. No one would have supported you, and Aulun would have crushed you and taken Gallin and Lanyarch in Lorraine’s name.”
“Aulun would have crushed me, and you, backed by Cordula, would have decimated the Aulunian army and destroyed their fleet,” Sandalia retorts tartly, but sighs and looks away. “It’s easier to see it as preparing from the outside, Rodrigo. I was a girl then, and suddenly heir to two thrones.”
“Three,” Rodrigo says mildly. “I still have no heir.”
“You should marry Irina. She’s been a widow ten years now, and no one misses Feodor. Let Ivanova take the Khazarian throne and have the imperatrix breed you a son or two of your own.”
“Irina.” Rodrigo lifts an eyebrow and sips at his wine, casual curiosity in his actions. “That’s not one of the more popular suggestions. Khazar’s church isn’t Cordula’s.”
“Think of it, Rodrigo. The Echonian states would be caught between Khazar’s massive power to the north and east, and Essandia’s long arm south into the Primorismare. Couple that with me on the Gallic throne, and you would hold over half of Echon’s coastline. Aulun would come to heel or be left in the cold, unable to trade.”
“We would surround Reussland,” Rodrigo says with thoughtful dismay.