Cortes had nodded, then lifted insubstantial eyebrows. “There's something more you should know. Rumour, fed by Lord Drake's precipitous departure from Aulun and his abrupt arrival in the Gallic court, claims the woman who died was Drake's adopted daughter whom he'd gone to rescue. It's a story without purport as those close to Lord Drake know his adopted daughter joined a convent a decade since.”

Bemusement had darted through Belinda, chasing the shock of her own death away. It would return, but she was grateful for a brief respite. “The girl was wise enough to accept God's embrace rather than risk her majesty's well-known jealousies?”

“Indeed.” Cortes had dismissed her with a promise that all the news she bore would be brought to Lorraine's ear.

Barely a day later stories of Sandalia de Costa's death swept Alunaer. In the week since, Belinda had waited to be called on, and in waiting found herself turning again and again toward Gallin, where she had died. Gallin, where she had found in Javier de Castille a soul as lost as her own, and betrayed him.

Dignity, it seemed, was no longer hers to court. Belinda permitted herself a snort of disgust and turned away from memories of Gallin and Javier alike. Turned toward what she had awaited since leaving Gallin; toward what she had awaited, in any meaningful way, every day since she had been eleven years of age and had realised she was the natural-born daughter of Lorraine Walter, unwed and so-called virgin queen of Aulun.

When Belinda permitted herself to dwell on that thought, she enjoyed the blunt unforgiving words: the queen's bastard. They meted out her place in the world with raw boundaries, admitted she was a secret and a shame in one breath and conceived of daring and drama in the next. There was no better way to describe the unknown child who had grown up to be her mother's best-hidden and loyal assassin.

Boldness had driven her to an indulgence: rather than the formal, strait laced gowns of Aulunian fashion, she wore a Gallic gown, one of the impetuous, flirtatious designs by Javier's friend Eliza Beaulieu.