enough that the queen’s bastard could do to connect herself with her royal mother. A death offered from the daughter as a gift to the mother was the greatest intimacy Belinda could dare imagine, an insurrection stopped and a kingdom preserved. That was who, and what, the secret daughter was. Belinda curled her hands into fists against the heady fear she might fly away on the breathless hope of securing her mother’s throne for years to come.
Shadows glimmered and twitched around her, sinking deeper into her skin as if they’d drink up the failing pool of witchpower from which Belinda drew. She allowed herself one last shaking sigh, a sound of desire that men would count themselves fortunate to earn from her, and straightened herself, letting go of powerful wishes in order to maintain her hidden presence a few minutes longer. She quested outward, careful exploration of nearby emotion, riding that as strongly as she dared. She wasn’t yet ready to try influencing those emotions, but every experience of another’s mental state would help her when that time came.
Javier was easier by far than Eliza, Belinda’s hours with him helping her to read him even without the witchpower. She let her eyes lid, wetting her lips as tendrils of golden power threaded outward, settling around Javier and testing him, seeing what she could read without giving herself away.
The prince cast a wordless prayer in the guise of a glance at the heavens, leaning wearily against the bridge railing. His quiet pleasure at escaping the honour guard was still there, though muted beneath wry frustration at Eliza. She, like Sacha and Marius, could forget the guard, so long as they lingered at a semi-respectful distance. Javier himself never forgot. It made the few stolen hours when he shook them off all the more precious. Spending them arguing, even with a beautiful woman, was far from his preference.
Eliza held her mouth in a pinch, eyes guarded, though at least she listened. Belinda felt almost nothing from her: faint challenge, angry acknowledgment. After a few seconds she let her sense of the other woman go; Javier was the more important of the two to understand. Eliza’s voice was low and cutting, distorted by distance as Belinda severed the faint link of power she’d held to the dark-haired woman. “Don’t you trust her?”
Javier groaned and looked to the sky again. Thin clouds, pale against the blackness, blocked out patches of stars, and his breath steamed to wash away another handful of nighttime diamonds. Belinda’s own gaze flickered upward, half expecting the stars to be blocked by the shadows that wrapped her. Instead, a handful of them glittered hard, picking out the form of a dragon in the sky.
It brought with it memory, a cold winter night when Belinda was a child, so clear that for a moment it overrode the discussion held by the two she watched. Robert had stood beside her, his warm arm around her shoulders to ward off the night’s chill as he’d picked out figures in the stars. A lion here, a bear there, a hunter presiding. A dragon, his spray of fire a scattering of stars across the night sky. Belinda had turned a dubious look on her father, insisting, “The others are real. Are there dragons, then, Papa?”
Robert lowered his hand from the stars to study her with a grave expression. “There are, Primrose.”
Belinda’s eyes widened until cold crept into their corners, a chill of ice lacing through her vision. “What are they like?”
“Nothing like you would imagine, Bella. Nothing like you would imagine.” He’d picked her up then in a rare and unexpected hug, and carried her back into the house to warm up over a cup of mulled wine and sweetmeats left out by the cook. Belinda smiled at the stars in thanks for the memory, then brought her mind back to the conversation she spied upon.
“I trust her,” Javier had already murmured. “But my judgment may be clouded.”
Eliza laughed, sharp in the chilly air. “What confession, my lord prince! How much did that cost?”
“More than I’d like.” The impulse to snap was there, to draw himself up and wield insult like anger, cowing the woman into her place. It was an easy trick, a thoughtless flexing of the witchpower he carried inside himself. It was, to Eliza and the others, a mark of royalty, a sign of position he held over them. Javier could not remember the last time he had knowingly used the witchpower