A Crown for Assassins

“Sophia, what is it?” Kate asked.

“I… I had a vision,” Sophia said. “A vision about my daughter.”

“What kind of vision?” Lucas asked.

“I don’t understand it,” Sophia said. “I saw her, and half the time she was doing these beautiful, wonderful things, and the rest… it was so cruel, so evil.”

Show us, Kate suggested.

Sophia did her best, sending across the images of the vision to both of them. Even like this, she didn’t feel as though she got the full sense of it across to them. She couldn’t convey how wonderful and how terrifying it felt, how powerfully real it all was, even compared to the other visions she’d had.

“May I touch her mind?” Lucas asked, when Sophia had done it.

Sophia nodded, guessing that he was checking for any sign that her daughter wasn’t what she appeared to be. After what Siobhan had tried to do, trying to take over her unborn form, the prospect of it was terrifying.

“She’s still herself,” Lucas said, “but I can feel the power there. She’s going to be stronger than any of us, I think.”

“What do the visions mean, though?” Sophia asked them. Her daughter looked so perfect in her arms. Sophia couldn’t imagine her ever stalking through a battlefield, sucking the life out of people the way the Master of Crows might have with his birds.

“Maybe they’re possibilities,” Kate suggested. “Siobhan used to talk about looking at the strands of the future, picking out the things that would make other things happen. Maybe these are two ways that her life could turn out.”

“But we don’t know what makes the difference,” Sophia said. “We don’t know how to make sure that the good things happen.”

“You raise her with love,” Lucas said. “You teach her well. You help her to move toward the light, not the dark. Little Christina will have power, whatever you do, but you can help her to use it well.”

Sophia recoiled at the name. It might have been her mother’s, but after the vision, she couldn’t give it to her daughter, she wouldn’t.

“Anything but Christina,” she said. She thought about the flowers that she’d seen her daughter weaving together in the street. “Violet. We’ll call her Violet.”

“Violet,” Kate said with a smile, holding out a finger for the tiny baby to grab. “She’s already strong, like her mother.”

“Like her aunt, maybe,” Sophia replied. Her smile faded a little. “Don’t tell Sebastian about all of this, please, either of you. He shouldn’t be burdened with the knowledge of this. With what she might become.”

“I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to,” Lucas assured her.

“Me either,” Kate said. “If anyone can raise her to be a good person, it’s you, Sophia. And we’ll be there to help.”

“We will,” Lucas said. He smiled to himself. “Perhaps I’ll have a chance to play Official Ko’s role and pass on some of the things he taught me.”

They seemed so certain that things would turn out all right, and Sophia wanted to believe it. Even so, a part of her couldn’t forget the things she’d seen. Her daughter smiled up at her in perfect innocence. Sophia had to make sure it stayed that way.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Henry d’Angelica, eldest son of Sir Hubert and Lady Neeme d’Angelica, had what he suspected was the hardest job in the kingdom right then: trying to mollify his parents regarding everything that had happened in the kingdom in the last few weeks.

“Ianthe is distraught, of course,” his mother said, through her tears, as if it was news that his aunt would be upset about the death of her daughter.

His father was better at anger than at sadness, bringing a wrinkled fist down on the wood of the fireplace. “The things those barbarians did to her… do you know they put the poor girl’s head on a spike?”

Henry had heard that rumor, along with a hundred others, mostly repeated by his parents. The house had been consumed by little else since the invasion. Angelica had been falsely accused of treason. Angelica had been torn apart by a mob, or hanged, or beheaded. The invaders had run through the streets, slaughtering anyone in royal colors. They had sided with the son who had murdered the old queen…

“Henry, are you even listening to us?” his father demanded.

In theory, Henry shouldn’t have flinched. He was nineteen, a man grown. He was tall and strong, a fine swordsman and a better shot. Yet there was always something in his father’s voice that made him just a small boy again.

“I’m sorry, Father, what did you say?” Henry asked.

“I said that something must be done,” his father repeated, with obvious bad grace.

“As you say, Father,” Henry said.

His father gave Henry an angry look. “Honestly, I have raised a vapid shell of a man in you. Not like your cousin.”

“Now, my love…” his mother began, but in the halfhearted way she usually did.

“Well, it’s true,” his father snapped, pacing before the fireplace like a guard before a castle gate. Not that a man as important as Sir Hubert would have appreciated the comparison. “The boy can’t stick with anything. How many tutors did he go through as a child? Then there was the commission with that military company I had to buy him out of, and the business with joining the Church of the Masked Goddess…”

Henry didn’t bother pointing out that all of that had been down to his parents. There had been so many tutors because his father had a habit of firing them whenever they taught anything he didn’t agree with, so that Henry had mostly educated himself in the house’s library. Equally, his father had been the one to decide that a commission in a free company was no place for his son, while the business with the church had even been the old man’s idea, until he learned that it would mean that Henry would never be able to give the family the heirs it required.

“You’re daydreaming again,” his father snapped. “Your cousin wouldn’t be. She made something of her life. She married a king!”

“And almost married a prince twice over,” Henry said, not able to stop himself.

He saw his father go white with anger. Henry knew that expression, and knew what it portended. So many times when he was growing up, he’d seen that expression and had to stand there, not flinching at the slaps or the switching that had come next. He steeled himself to do the same today.

Instead, as his father lashed out, Henry found his hand moving up almost automatically to catch the arm, squeezing hard enough to bruise as he held his father’s wrist in place, looking at him evenly. He stepped back, letting his father’s arm drop.

Sir Hubert rubbed his wrist. “I want you to leave my house! You are not welcome here anymore!”

“I think you’re right,” Henry said. “I should go. Please excuse me.”

He felt oddly calm as he left the room, heading upstairs to the room he’d had since he was a child. There, he started to collect things together, working out what he would need, and what he would have to do next.

Henry only had only known his cousin a little when she was alive. There were those who said that with his golden hair, deep blue eyes, and handsome features he actually looked a little like her, but Henry had never been able to see it. Perhaps it was just that Angelica had always been the standard against which he had been found wanting. She was more intelligent, or able to get on with people better, or more successful at court.

Henry wasn’t sure that any of those things were true. Typically, before his father had been rid of them, his tutors had been surprised by how quickly Henry learned, and he’d always had a knack for getting people to do what he needed. His lack of success at court had mostly come from a lack of interest.

“That will have to change,” Henry said to himself.

He had heard the rumors about his cousin, but he had also been clever enough to seek out his own information, paying men for what they knew and drinking with travelers at the local inn. From what he could understand, his cousin had been put aside not once, but twice, by Sebastian, the son who was rumored to have murdered his mother. Angelica had then sided with Rupert, probably to make sure that she got to the throne, only to find that Sophia Danse’s invasion turned anyone connected with the ruling family into a target.

“And it got her killed,” Henry muttered as he fetched clothes and money, pistols and his old dueling rapier.

He had no doubt that Angelica had engaged in plenty of nefarious practices to get where she’d ended up. A part of Henry wished that he didn’t understand how these things worked, but he did, and even someone like her didn’t rise to be queen by accident. She’d always been quick to cheat or lie in games as a child, whenever it seemed it would gain her an advantage.

Yet the things the rumors accused her of… those sounded more like someone’s revision of history to make themselves sound innocent. They were an excuse to have her killed, clearing the way for power.

If he were like his father, Henry would rage in impotent anger at that. If he were like his mother, he would break down at the horror of it while simultaneously spreading gossip. He wasn’t like either of them, though. He was a man who did what was needed, and he needed to do this.