The Queen's Bastard by C. E. Murphy

Belinda’s waist as they both swayed dangerously on the tabletop. Belinda leaned on Ana and squinted at her own feet, alarmingly distant.
    “Was the table this crooked before?” she asked in a low voice. Ana snorted laughter.
    “You haven’t spilled a beer tonight, have you? There’s a terrible puddle at the end of the table. A drunk man built these.” She nodded, exaggerated, and slung an arm out, lifting her voice into a bellow. “Hey! You there! Me and Rosie, we’re going to sing you a song!”
    Three-quarters of the bar’s patrons turned expectantly. Belinda elbowed Ana’s ribs. “Hold your tongue! I told you, I can’t sing!”
    “So what’ll it be then? Do you know ‘Era Nato Poveretto’?”
    “God,” Belinda said, “barely. Born poor?” she brazened, then caught her breath, searching for another song. “‘C’è La Luna.’ Will it do?”
    “Well enough,” Ana said with a firm nod.
    Belinda drew in a deep breath, gave Ana one dismayed look, and began to sing.
    “My God,” Ana gasped at the break between verses, “you’d best be able to fuck like a dream, with a voice like that.”
    “I
told
you,” Belinda snapped. Ana snagged her arm through Belinda’s as they began the second verse, starting a jig that made Belinda’s voice even hoarser with breathlessness. In counterpoint, Ana’s voice rose and strengthened, until she was carrying the whole melody and Belinda only croaked out a word or two when she caught her breath. The crowd’s cries blurred from jeers into shouts of approval.
    A hand clasped around her ankle, making her stumble. She looked down to find a cheerily drunken man beaming toothily up at her. “Give us another one, bonnie Rosie,” he begged. “Your voice makes my wife’s sound like a golden harp, and God knows I need something to take away the edge!”
    Belinda shook him off with a kick that missed clipping his temple by a scant inch or two. Then she found laughter bubbling up inside her chest, pressing against her breastbone, and after a moment she let it free. Her singing voice might shame a crowing cock, but her laugh was bright and warm.
    “Oh, so
that’s
how you do it,” Ana said with a knowledgeable and approving nod. Belinda leered at her, flung her own head back, and began to sing the raunchiest song she knew.
    Howls of approving laughter roared up to the rafters, while stomping feet shook the floor as the pub patrons kept time. She couldn’t, perhaps, sing, but she could keep a beat, and now she was caught up by it, consequences be damned. As if sensing her abandonment, even the men who had shouted her down earlier courted her for more now. Torches twitched with exuberance, hopping in their nests and sending puffs of black smoke up to the ceiling. Ana grabbed her arm again and Belinda swung her around the table, slipping in spilled beer. The aroma splashed upward, hops mixing with wood smoke in a rich thick scent that made one part of her mind sleepy even as she reveled in the raw country life of it. Her circumstances allowed her few opportunities for unconstrained play, and her temperament fewer yet. It was a chance, rare in a lifetime of duty, to forget who and what she was, and why. Most of all, why. Belinda drank it in, letting the raucous music she made settle all the way down to her bones, where it might leave an impression. A memory for another time, when she would not be able to allow herself the freedom she had tonight.
    Stolen freedom. The thought flickered through her mind and she banished it again. The coin from the bridge was a common signal from her father’s men. That it had this time been happenstance leading to rough decadence was…
not her fault
would be too strong. Belinda had chosen her path for tonight, chosen to deliberately misinterpret and forget. Her voice broke on a high note and she laughed with everyone else, dropping into a deeper register to try the remainder of the verse.
    Her corsets pressed into her ribs too tightly in