Free The Queen's Bastard by C. E. Murphy Page A

if he did it would surely be with handsome recommendations. The others’ alarm lifted the hairs on Belinda’s arms, making her run a hand down one as she pursed her mouth. There would be chaos for a day or two while the estate was reordered. Most pressing was the matter of Ilyana: if she left off her cries of witchcraft, Belinda would stay. She lifted her eyes to consider the blond girl, who seemed to sense the look, and turned on her.
    “It’s your fault! Whore! Witch! You charmed him and did him to death! Been here no time at all, and now the lord is dead! It’s your fault!” Shrieking, Ilyana pitched herself at Belinda, who fell back, catching the other woman’s wrists more clumsily than was her wont, but with more ease than Rosa the serving girl might have done. Anger fueled by fear rose up in her, and she let them both show through: the coachman had been right after all, and no one should have been as calm in the face of an accusation of witchcraft as Belinda had been.
    “Did him to death, did I?” She shoved Ilyana backward, throwing the smaller girl to the floor. A part of her sang with the truth of it: yes, she had done the count to death, but it had not been witchery, simply a stupid man more interested in showing his prowess than conserving his strength. That, and the arsenic, and perhaps a touch of lucky fate when she’d looked for nothing of the sort at all.
    And beneath that, far beneath it where she barely allowed the thought to form, she wondered in terror and hope if Ilyana was not somehow right, and she had pulled a killing power from within herself. She had hidden in shadow once, as a child, and had been forbidden that talent by her father’s interference. If it was witchcraft, if she was born to a dark art, he might have done well by her to hide it. If this was its maturity, the ability to murder a man by her will alone…what a gift that would be, and what horror.
    Belinda thrust those thoughts away, refusing to linger on the possibility or the fear or the hope, and instead plucked her partlet from around 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.

S ANDALIA , Q UEEN AND R EGENT
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