The Pretender's Crown (62 page)

Belinda sat back, expression stiffening with offence. “Surely you have more faith in me than that, Father.” Beneath bubbling insult, she wanted to laugh: she was supposed to be vexed at the idea she might lose, but the emotion was real, ready to strike Robert down for his audacity in doubting her. Even the fact that she intended on losing did nothing to assuage her pique, and the contradictions struck her as funny in a moment when she should be entirely focused on performing the role she needed to. “You might rally the men yourself,” she went on, still rigid with indignity. “But no one knows you're graced with the witchpower, and there are already channels laid in their hearts and minds to lay down their lives for the queen of Heaven made manifest.”

“But the war must go on a while yet, my Primrose. We've had no time yet to push forward with the developments I want.” Robert lifted his chin and looked out over the battlefields as Belinda's stomach plummeted, a chill running over her skin. “Perhaps it'd be best for you to return to Aulun. Lorraine's perturbed at your absence as it is.”

“If you've a pinch of kindness in you, you'll at least let me take my glory ride before sending me back to that convent,” Belinda said as drily as she dared. Her hands were steady and her breathing
calm, but her voice wanted to tremble. She had not thought of how she might go forward should Robert refuse her suggestion. To act without his blessing was to strike out on her own far more than she'd intended. It would tell Robert her mind was her own, and that her goals lay at odds with his. Beatrice Irvine had been impetuous, but Belinda Primrose, in all her life, had rarely been. She cursed that for the first time: had she been in the habit of breaking rules and following her own fate, she might now go against Robert's wishes without stirring concern in his soul. Then again, had she made a lifetime of that sort of boldness, she would never have come this far.

Robert chuckled. “I'd rather face your wrath than Lorraine's, my Primrose. No, we've too many plans to advance to risk defeating them now, and I fear you're right: you leading them into battle would bring about the utter destruction of the Ecumenic army. Go back to sleep and dream of glory but keep that pretty head safe for its golden crown.”

“Yes, Papa.” Belinda got to her feet as Robert did, and dipped him a curtsey as he walked away into the night. Darkness took him after a few steps, and she was left watching where he'd been, a clarion thought in her mind.

Robert Drake had not made ritual of his order. There were words so ingrained in her she doubted she could stand against him, but they'd gone unspoken: he had not murmured,
this is how it shall go, Primrose. Heed me well
. He had not locked her into that path with a phrase so familiar it might well have been a witch's spell cast to bend her will.

Carefully, carefully, Belinda stepped back into her tent, and knelt in its darkness to prepare herself to go against Robert, Lorraine, Aulun, and the life she had known.

4 July 1588
†
Brittany; the Gallic camp

It will be dawn in an hour or two, and Rodrigo should be sleeping. The morning is all too likely to bring the devastation of his army, and there is nothing he can do about it. A week has passed since
Javier brought the broken Cordulan army together into one, and that they've survived this long seems more luck than any blessing on God's part. Rodrigo would be grateful if an archangel would roar down and sunder the Aulunian alliance, and in so doing show His hand of approval for their war. As it is, it's easy to lose faith; Javier's witchpower kept the fight roughly even for a day or two, until Belinda returned fire. It took only a day of that onslaught for the Cordulan allies to fall back, and then again, and now Rodrigo stands at the centre of a storm, his army sleeping around him in what may be their last night together.

There's still a stiffness in his ribs where the long shallow cut has not yet fully healed, and a part of him is phlegmatic about it: as the days pass it seems ever more unlikely that he'll live much longer to worry about it. Still, Akilina has offered daily to tend the wound, and he's politely rebuffed her: he might yet survive the war, and would rather not be obliged to fight for his life against his wife's tender ministrations.

Rodrigo shakes himself, and steps away from his blind watch of the quiet front lines to duck into his tent. A map is spread across a table there, the same map that used to grace Javier's tent, but in honour of both his marriage and of losing Marius, the strategy sessions have been moved away from the young king's room and into the older prince's. Akilina, only a few months longer a bride than Eliza, is piqued by this, but the generals and officers of the army are not inclined to bow to her whim. She's been evicted from the sessions, even when they run late into the night, because no one trusts her, not even her husband.

Eliza has been a blessing there, has played a diplomatic part as though she was born to it. They have a small thing in common, the pregnancies beginning to swell their bellies, and while it hasn't made friends of them, it's given them grounds on which to build a camaraderie. While Rodrigo and Javier retreat to argue policy and strategy, the women sit and talk, perhaps sharing their hopes for their children, though Rodrigo imagines Akilina has some loathing for that topic, especially as she's still sick and pale, where the Gallic guttersnipe seems strong and healthy.

The Gallic
queen
, Rodrigo reminds himself: he crowned her
himself. And he likes Eliza, likes her quick tongue and her sharp mind. He thinks there's a pragmaticism in the young woman that Javier needs, and if she caught him by falling pregnant, perhaps it's all to the best. Gallin needs an heir, though if this war goes on the way it is, its heir will be Lorraine Walter's bastard daughter.

Bugs crawl over Rodrigo's skin at the thought. No: Akilina and Eliza will be sent to Lutetia, though Isidro is safer still. But either gives them some chance of bearing their children in safety, and one of them, at least, must.

That Akilina will never agree to go is beside the point. Within another week the heart of the Cordulan camp will no longer be safe. Looking at his maps, at the streaks of colour that are Khazar and Aulun's alliance, and the small retreating bands that are his own army, he wonders if he should wait so long as a week, or just have them sent away now.

“Prince! Essandian prince! I have words for you!” For all that it's the middle of the night, the gondola boy bursts into the tent, wide awake and pleased with himself. Rodrigo can't remember the boy being anything other than pleased with himself, yet still, in the midst of war, to see his shining face and bright confidence is worthy of mention every time.

The child's Gallic has improved far more rapidly than his care to use it correctly has: he still speaks like a water rat, and frequently in Parnan, trusting that the people to whom his messages have any importance will understand him. He is, of course, correct, which means he'll never learn to have a properly civil tongue in his head, but perhaps to have one would diminish his exuberance, and that's a price Rodrigo might consider too rich to pay.

He ruffles the child's hair and gets a dour look for it: the boy clearly considers himself too old for such treatment, and not too low to scold royalty. “The lady Eliza will make me cut it if you keep making it fall into my eyes, Essandian prince.”

Rodrigo, trying not to laugh, says, “My apologies. I thought I was clearing it away from your eyes. You have a message?”

“Oh!” The boy draws himself up, affront to his hair forgotten. “There is a man here to see you, prince, a very old man with mules and carts and a look about him that you do not want to argue with.
I know,” he said with great solemnity. “I have seen men like him before, and have been thumped by them.”

“A man with mules and carts,” Rodrigo says with some astonishment. “Here, in the heart of the camp?”

“Sí, signor prince. He is outside your tent, feeding his mules. One of them likes wine in his water, but the man says he never gets drunk.”

“The donkey doesn't get drunk, or the man?” Rodrigo asks, bemused. “How did he—” Nevermind: the boy won't know. Someone will answer as to how an old man with a supply train of any kind has come unchallenged into the heart of the Cordulan camp, even in the small hours of the morning, but it won't be the gondola boy any more than it might be Rodrigo. “Very well,” he says after a moment's consideration. “I suppose I'd better see this man of yours.”

“Yes, or one of us will get thumped.” The way the child says it suggests it won't be he who feels the weight of a thumping, and Rodrigo grins as he follows the child. Had he been able to guarantee a boy like this one, he would have wed with a fair mind to breeding heirs, instead of reluctantly and near the end of what any man might consider a long life.

The man with the mules puts paid to thoughts of his own long life so abruptly that Rodrigo's grin broadens. He's silver-haired and rheumy-eyed, carries a stick taller than he is, and leans heavily on a donkey who slurps at a trough full of pale pink water. He—the man, not the donkey, though the donkey's seen innumerable years himself—looks to be ninety if he's a day, and seems to have been carved out of already-gnarled wood over which a brightly-coloured sackcloth has been thrown. It's possible that not even Rodrigo would have stopped him from trodding through camp, because despite the gondola boy's warnings of thumpings, the visitor looks as though he's unlikely to keep his feet without the support of both staff and beast.

Indeed, he leans toward Rodrigo with a wobble bordering on the dramatic, and squints at him with those blue rheumy eyes. “King's man,” he says unexpectedly, and in such a heavy mountain dialect it takes Rodrigo a few seconds to translate it into clear Essandian.

Then he blinks, too nonplussed to take offence. “Prince's man if any, grandfather. I—”

“Pah!” The old man waves his stick like it carries a banner; indeed, Rodrigo's gaze snaps to its top for an instant, looking for the flag that would give this old man such confidence. “Prince's man, sure enough, but ‘king's man’ has more strength in its sound. King's man, man's king, doesn't matter anyway, you're losing this war, king's man.”

Now offence does win out, bitter ashy taste in Rodrigo's mouth. It's not that the old man's wrong; it's that admitting it openly in front of a gathering crowd of curious, sleepy-eyed troops is not to be done. But before he can give a diplomatic answer—before, thankfully, the gondola boy can give a less diplomatic response—the old man waves his stick again, this time all but under Rodrigo's nose. “I've brought you a gift, king's man. I've brought you a toy to turn the tide.”

While Rodrigo is still looking for something to say, the old man steps back and with a flourish, tears the canvas from his wine-drinking mule's cart to expose the new way of the world.

That's what Rodrigo thinks when the canvas comes back to reveal a shining gun on heavy wheels:
this is the new way of the world
. It is clearly a weapon, and clearly not a cannon, though it's the size of one. But rather than a large barrel it has many smaller ones set in a circle, and at its arse-end, where a cannon fuse might be lit, there's a large box with slanted sides. Rodrigo's moving, climbing the cart wheel, staring at the gleaming monstrosity with an excitement that turns his knees weak and makes his breath come short. In a half-century of life, he's never met a woman or a man who had such an effect on him: if he had, he might have fallen prey to a marriage bed or mortal sin long since. But his eyes are for the weapon, and there's a crank within reaching distance; Rodrigo spins it, sending the barrels rattling in a circle.

Now he understands the box on top, or almost: he feels like a child exploring a hidden passageway as he climbs inside the cart and looks into the angled box; into the hopper that will feed bullets into a half-dozen barrels. His heartbeat is so fast his vision
swims, and it's all he can do to stop from crowing as he spins the crank again and listens to the empty barrels chatter. “How quickly does it fire?” Oh, God
is
listening, God is concerned for the Ecumenic army's fate after all, and has sent an angel of war to Gallin in the form of this rickety inventor and his drunken donkey.

“Six hundred rounds in a minute,” the old man says, “and there are five more like it. The trouble is making enough bullets, king's man. Set your men to it, if you want to win this war. A single man can only do so much.”

“We'll need a whole new way of making them.” Rodrigo kneels by his terrible gun, smoothing a hand down one of its long thick barrels, and when he looks along its line, he sees a future that didn't exist only minutes ago. He feels as though his mind's been opened, as if curtains he never knew were there have been drawn back to let sunlight in, and it makes him giddy. He's an embarrassment to himself, and he doesn't care. “Men can't keep up with that rate. Perhaps if we build a line to pour moulds, to quench the shells in water and have men pour gunpowder in at the end. The line could be run on a waterwheel and by men with bellows to heat the metal. Yes.”

He might have done as much to make any bullet: that thought strikes him, and fades away without rancour. This opening of his mind is a gift, and if he looks backward there's no shame in having only thought as ordinary men did. But now, faced with a mechanised gun, the possibility of its components being created with the same efficiency as it would fire them seemed vivid and obvious. “How did you think of it?” he whispers.

The old man snorts dismissively and in so doing shows his plea sure. “Old doesn't mean foolish, king's man. A cannon's slow to load and gets too hot to use, and pistols are worse. But the two together, and put on a crank to keep the barrels cool, now that was a bit of cleverness.” He leans on his staff, age-lumped hands wrapped around it, and looks satisfied. “A forge and patience in the mountains, that's what it took, and a few dead cattle when I was wrong about how far the bullets would go.”