Chapter 3
Anne
As the sun broke the horizon, Anne dressed for death.
She wore a crimson petticoat, the color of fresh blood, beneath a gown of ash gray.
Henry was supposed to have let her burn at the stake—it was the proper punishment for a treasonous woman—but the magnanimous king had shown mercy and brought in one of his best swordsmen to do the job, as though granting her a more efficient murder were some sort of kindness.
Anne would never forget what her husband said to her after the trial: “It is unbecoming to burn a queen.”
“No,” Anne had countered, teeth bared. “It is unbecoming to kill your wife.”
Now Anne was waiting for the first rays of sun to cast their meager light in her room, repeating the cursework over and over again in her mind. It would take two spells for her to walk away with her head intact, and Anne tried, and failed, to ignore her fear of the pain that was to come.
Worse than the blood to be spilled would be to lose her nerve and miss a word or a phrase of her spell.
She’d paid a terrible price once for a curse—she could still feel the emptiness, the loss, the suffocating grief—and she wouldn’t soon forget how horribly magick could go awry.
At least there was a dark comfort in knowing that if she failed, she wouldn’t have to live with her mistakes again.
Intent matters, she reminded herself when she tripped up on the seventh time through her practice.
Magick could be traced back for centuries before anything so “civilized” as Christianity had been known to the world, back beyond the Witch of Endor and the Druids and even the Moirai of ancient Greece.
Curses had survived a hundred different languages, because what counted was power, blood, and will.
And Anne knew she had plenty of all three.
When a rap came at the door, Anne drew herself up tall.
A guard entered, followed by the constable of the Tower of London, a man named Kingston who seemed a bit queasy about the concept of executing a woman, especially a queen.
There was no chance of converting his pity into an escape, but Anne determined she could at least have a bit of fun with his sympathy.
After all, there might not be much time left for fun in this life.
“Good morning, my lady,” he said, bowing despite Anne’s recent drop in social stature.
Anne smiled beatifically. “It is, isn’t it? I couldn’t ask for a lovelier morning for my execution. I’ve always wanted to die in the golden time of spring.”
Kingston gaped at her but quickly recovered himself. He ran a hand over his graying beard and coughed into his fist. “I…I suppose that’s a positive way of looking at things.”
His guard, perhaps even the same one from last night, shuffled back a step.
Anne crossed the room toward them, buoyed by her dark humor. “Indeed. Though I suppose there isn’t a very positive way to think about your head being separated from your body, is there?”
At that, Kingston couldn’t hide his shock. “Well, no, my lady. But it will be over quickly. I’m…I’m sure you won’t feel a thing.”
“I have heard the executioner is the very best,” Anne remarked as she passed through the doorway. She wrapped her fingers around her throat. “And I am lucky to have such a little neck.”
Kingston visibly paled, and the guard moved aside to give Anne a wide berth. Ah yes, she thought. It is good to have a bit of fun after all. Let them find her compliance positively malicious.
The trio made their way down the stairs, and Anne traced her fingers along the cracked, mossy stone.
How different it was from Hampton Court Palace, where she’d lived just weeks before, a former monastery that Henry had converted into the grandest royal residence the world had ever seen.
But perhaps even the Tower was a form of luxury, for Anne had little hope of ever living in any castle, derelict or otherwise, ever again.
Kingston didn’t speak another word as they exited the White Tower and crossed onto the Tower Green, where a scaffold had been erected so the assembled crowd could watch their queen die.
Anne had always marveled at the fact that these supposedly good, Christian people took such pleasure in the spectacle of death.
She’d seen her share of executions at Henry’s side and was always chilled by the jeers and boos of the crowd, the way they would roar their approval when the victim died a grisly death.
Anne was marched onto the scaffold, then flanked between a black-hooded executioner and a black-robed priest. The gathered people were surprisingly quiet, perhaps because they’d never had occasion to see a monarch die and wondered if hurling their usual insults might be out of place.
Beyond them, the concentric walls of the Tower rose high, but not high enough to drown out the commoners clamoring for her head outside the gates nor the rush of the Thames, where another queen was waiting upriver.
Dozens of faces stretched out before her, and Anne found herself scanning the crowd, finding far too many she had once considered friends.
Some stared back. Others looked away, from their shame or her own, Anne couldn’t tell.
Henry had not come, though she had not expected him to.
Conspicuously absent were any of her kinsmen.
George, of course, had been given an execution of his own not far from this spot.
Her sister Mary was far away, something Anne was never glad of but was tremendously grateful for now.
Neither of her parents had come, nor had the Duke of Norfolk. She couldn’t say she missed him.
But there was one face she knew: that of Thomas Cromwell, her onetime ally and the king’s chief minister. His eyes caught Anne’s, and her fingers curled into claws.
Cromwell had made the mistake of thinking Anne would be a puppet, a gentle creature easy to control in his quest for power in the Reformation, but he had been very, very wrong.
Of course she wouldn’t allow the monies from the dissolution of the Catholic Church to go into Henry’s coffers—they’d vanish in an instant to pointless wars and childish tournaments.
Instead, Anne had fought hard to get the funds reallocated to her programs to help the poor and uneducated of England, and Cromwell had seen an enemy rise.
He was all too happy to drum up falsehoods and persecute the queen to an early grave if it meant keeping the king’s gold for himself.
They stared at each other, Anne’s face twisted in a snarl and Cromwell’s painted with a smirk. Oh, the curses she could cast, now that she had her knife. The pain she could cause—
“Do you have any final words, my lady?” the priest asked, dragging Anne back to the moment. She blinked away the haze of her bloodlust, remembering there were bigger things to accomplish today than revenge.
Oh yes, Anne thought. Plenty. But condemning the king aloud, calling out his lies and hypocrisy, would do no good.
She couldn’t convince the people before her of the ridiculousness of her situation—that she’d been accused of adultery and would be killed so Henry could put a crown on a mistress of his own.
Not even the priest would bat an eye, since kings like Henry could change and break all the rules, spitting in the face of all they were meant to uphold.
And besides, a negative word against Henry could hurt Elizabeth.
Anne knew that with the dissolution of her marriage, Elizabeth would lose her title as heir apparent and become just another of the king’s bastards.
The same thing had happened when Queen Catherine had been exiled.
It was Henry’s cruelest act, putting his lust above his own children, and she didn’t dare tempt him to hurt their daughter further.
So rather than scream curses at the sky, Anne just smiled.
“God save the king.” From me.
The priest frowned, as though he could see the feral glint in her eyes, but didn’t press her. “Very well,” he said. “Then I shall lead a prayer before your…” Death seemed to stick on his tongue. “A prayer for your soul.”
When the priest stepped forward to address the crowd, Anne moved back, angling herself behind the executioner’s broad frame, and slipped the bloodletting knife from the pocket of her petticoat.
The superstitious Tower guards had denied her even the dullest of blades, not knowing that her magick was all but useless without a spell-imbued instrument.
Anne could feel the power another witch had once poured into the silver knife in her hand, the thrum of magick pulsing under her skin as her fingers closed around the knife’s handle.
Power, blood, and will. She took a shuddering breath, bracing herself for the pain.
As the priest spoke of forgiveness and sin and the benevolence of their blasted—ahem, blessed king, Anne whispered words of her own, words that would indeed merit her death, at least by England’s standards.
She made a deep cut, a worthy sacrifice to access her power, across the palm of her left hand, and before the first drop of blood hit the wooden platform, Anne felt a sense of…
fading, like watching dye leach from a dress in the laundry waters.
She looked down and found she could only faintly see her feet, her body, her arms. The invisibility curse was working.
All eyes were still on the priest, and she had only moments now to spare. Heart galloping, Anne muttered the second spell under her breath.
And then, with a blade that was steady from pure desperation, she sliced off the smallest finger of her left hand.
Fire raced up her arm, her stomach bottomed out, and Anne very nearly fainted, but she clung to consciousness, knowing her work wasn’t over. She blinked, and when her eyes opened again, a woman stood where her severed finger had landed, a perfect copy of Anne.
That was the curse she had feared to cast. The replica was a bit like a golem—a creature made of earth given life—though this particular construct was more of a marionette, incapable of thought or speech or independent will.
Only a powerful witch could create one, let alone give it any passable semblance of life.
Anne had never considered attempting such a thing, not least of all because she preferred to keep as many fingers and toes as she could.
But it stood there now, eerily motionless and just as eerily alive.
Her relief nearly overwhelmed her pain, and she held back the sob that would have given her away.
Stay, she ordered the replica as she clutched her bleeding hand to her chest and backed away, her footing unsure from pain and her newly invisible state.
All the while, her double stood perfectly still, and no one seemed to notice that the creature neither breathed nor blinked.
If anyone had bothered to look, they would have noticed the trail of blood the real Anne left in her wake.
The priest finished his sermon, and the executioner turned, his hand falling on the shoulder of Anne’s double. She felt it, ghostlike, on her own shoulder, and suppressed the shiver that ran down her spine.
Do as I do, Anne commanded. She hoped the executioner would be quick—she couldn’t hold the spell for long, already feeling the toll of the magick and the blood loss as her vision tunneled and a wave of dizziness rolled over her.
If she bled too much, if she fed too much power into the curse, well, then there would be two dead Anne Boleyns instead of just one.
She knelt on the grass, invisible and bleeding just a stone’s throw away, and her double did the same on the execution platform. She stretched out her neck, and the double sat up a little bit taller. Anne couldn’t watch, couldn’t look away, as the executioner’s sword swung up, up, up…
She could have sworn the blade bit into her real neck. Could have sworn all the flesh and bone and tendons were sliced in two, that her own breath stopped and her own blood pooled around her. But it wasn’t her—it was the double, the being she had infused with just enough life to let it die.
Anne saw her head roll, saw what remained of the body slump lifeless to the ground. It is unbecoming to burn a queen, she thought bitterly, her stomach turned by the gore splattered across the spring grass.
And then she ran.