The Pretender's Crown Read Online Free

above yourself?”
    “I do not think so, your majesty.” Her response was soft, but golden witchpower flared with outrage. Jaw set, Belinda quelled it, holding back its petulance with a willpower that was beginning to slip. She was not
above herself in
mingling with a prince and his fellows; they were of no better blood than she, and only the necessity of preserving Lorraine's reputation kept Belinda from standing beside Javier as an equal. Even more, his witchbreed blood whispered that Javier was not the son of any man his mother had married. Only Sandalia's reputation kept him in line for the throne, and to face the truth that the prince of Gallin was as illegitimate as Belinda herself, yet held a place of respect, tasted bitter as almonds.
    Her own witchpower cried that it was unfair, and that, at least, was so absurd as to allow Belinda to quash it without remorse. Nothing in the world was fair or unfair; those were expectations born of a belief that things should be easy, and nothing was, not even for a queen. Belinda thought of Robert, and thought,
perhapsmost especially, not for a queen.
“I am trained for something else,” she murmured. “My place is not on a throne, and I have never set my ambitions so high.”
    “Have you not?” Lorraine's question startled Belinda. Its asking gave substance to the truth of her birth, a topic about which she, by all rights, should know nothing. Lorraine couldn't possibly know that Belinda's memories stretched back so far, so clearly; that she remembered bloody curls and thin grey eyes, remembered a regal voice then worn with exhaustion, even remembered her mother's swollen belly rippling with afterbirth in the brief seconds before her father had taken her away.
    They had shared a moment, mother and daughter, twelve years later, just before Belinda had murdered a man to protect Lorraine's safety. There had been endless things unspoken in that instant, a weighty nothingness, and in that nothingness Belinda had found everything. Her reason for existing, her strange aching pride in being an unrecognised secret; it had all been there, in what she did not see in Lorraine's grey gaze. She had imagined that Lorraine, too, had seen that admission of silence, and that it had bound them in a way that logic defied.
    That the queen should ask such a question now gave credence to Belinda's childhood whimsy, though that light word belittled the strength of emotion that had overtaken her that day. Usually quick with an answer, Belinda stayed silent, gauging what she might and might not say, and at the end, settled on a truth sufficiently unpolished as to discomfit her. “No, your majesty. I have known what I am since I was a girl, and have taken a sort of pride in it. Playing this recent part…”
    She pushed out of her curtsey without having been bade do so, and turned toward the small room's round walls. Stone of a lighter shade suggested a window had once broken the unrelenting solitude, and she spoke to that brighter spot rather than dare Lorraine's countenance. “Your majesty has looked through old glass, has she not? Thickened and wavering, distorting all that lies beyond it? So the part I have played has seemed to me: a thing lying on the wrong side of that glass, unrecogniseable and uncomfortable in all ways. I have never looked to stand beyond the glass. I have never neededto. I have loved my place on this side of it, and hoped for nothing more than to serve my country and my queen as best I could.”
    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