Chapter Eighteen Cleves #2
“You were the first person to know that I would never marry a woman. And I the first person to know that you would never take a man to your bed. Yet now we bargain for each other’s secrets.”
Her throat is thick. He looks back at her.
“In return you will have everything I can offer, cousin. The loyalty and help of myself, such as it is, and of your mother, and of your sisters, and of your brother.”
“The king himself?” Cleves says. Her brother is a wall of a man, in body and mind. They used to jest that she stole his laughter from him when he was a babe in the cradle.
“If you do not believe it is love, cousin, then believe it is strategy.”
This makes sense to her. If her brother has heard rumours of the truth of Medren and Elben’s castles, then naturally he would prefer his sister to rule the territory of Cnothan outright rather than relying on Henry’s favour.
An image of Boleyn, teetering at the edge of that cliff at Brynd, rises to her mind. Cleves cannot understand why she had to jump, yet she admires that she did. She knew, Cleves realises, and Aragon knows, that one cannot spark a revolution with only a single kindling.
So she tells him everything, from Seymour’s first visit to that strangest of evenings when Medren’s power flowed around her as she danced, to the predicament she and the other queens now find themselves in.
Johana listens in silence, his elbows braced upon his knees, his head bowed in thought.
He stays that way for a long time after she is finished.
“If you should wish to give me that ‘everything’ you spoke of, cousin, now would be an excellent time,” she says eventually.
“I am thinking,” he says. He looks up at her, and there is no trace of the jester’s spark that usually graces his features. “This is far more dangerous than we had anticipated,” he says. “Oh, cousin. What a web you are caught in.”
“I was caught in the web, as you call it, when my father married me to Henry,” she says. How dare he suggest she has been foolish when all she has done has been so considered, so strategic? “All I do now is attempt to destroy both web and spider.”
“And you are set upon this course of action.” It isn’t a question, yet she feels the need to justify herself.
“The bordweal weakens. If it fails entirely, then Elben’s enemies will take it; there is no doubt of that. If we queens reclaim our power, then we can shore it up and Cnothan will remain mine.”
Johana is watching her closely. He shakes his head. “I do not think that is why, cousin. Cnothan and Mathmas are the most defensible castles in Elben. With preparation, you could hold it against any army.”
She throws her hands up. “What do you want from me, Johana? I have not lied to you.”
“I am merely trying to understand why you of all people are setting in motion something that can only lead … well. You know where it ends.”
She does. The throb of war drums and armour is loud in her ears. She cannot hold her cousin’s gaze. So it is worse than they had anticipated: what had they gleaned in Ezzonid? What diluted rumours had reached their spies?
“We used to laugh at the notion that gods would help mankind,” Johana says. In times of war, faith either strengthens to steel or dissipates entirely. Her mother and sister had become fanatics. She and Johana: sceptics.
Her heart clenches. Would her mother be disappointed in her if she knew the truth?
In a small voice, she says, “If you had been at the Moon Ball, you would understand. I felt the divine power, Johana. It flowed around me, through me. And it felt like …”
What did it feel like? She thinks back to that evening, and how the religious ecstasy and the carnal twisted with each other, knotted together until she could not say where one ended and the other began.
“Do you remember the phoenix?” she says.
Johana nods. It had been just before the unrest, when they were still children in mind as well as body.
Their parents had taken them to the cloudy peaks of the Rhozche Forest, where the tree trunks are coated in ice and their uppermost leaves are brown from the relentless sun.
The hunt that the Ezzonidian royal family takes part in just once in a lifetime.
Johana had climbed one of the trees to look for the bird. When he came back down to the forest floor, his tanned face was crisp with sunburn. As they approached it, they heard its song: a melody like hot glass.
To harm or steal from a phoenix is to be cursed.
They had climbed the tree, one by one, to seek the creature’s blessing.
Her father had gone first and returned humbled.
By the time it was Cleves’s turn, her limbs were stiff with cold despite the furs she wore.
As she moved from branch to branch, her face upturned, pushing through damp leaves, she thawed.
The nest was smaller than she’d expected.
The phoenix, too. But oh, though she’d pictured it for months, it was like nothing she could have imagined.
Its feathers were long, crisp and in all the shades of sunrise.
But it was the bird’s face that made her gasp.
It looked at her as newborn and ancient at once, with the wonder and wisdom that sees into a soul.
She had always been an active child, always climbing, riding, running, but in that moment she felt an immense peace, like climbing into a warm bed after a long day outside.
She was supposed to say words of thanks, a rite the whole family had practised in preparation. But all she could bring herself to say was, “Bresn.” The Ezzonid word, its true meaning lost to time, to end a prayer.
She was not granted a feather, but her younger sister was.
The first to be given a phoenix gift in more than a hundred years.
Sybil climbed down from the canopy with the plume tucked into her blouse, her reddened cheeks streaked with tears.
They all wept with her, for such a blessing in their lifetime.
“Keep it with you always,” their mother had told Sybil. “This is life itself. It is priceless.”
They had learned, not five years later, how much life was worth, and how easily it could be spent.
“I remember the phoenix,” Johana says. “How could anyone who has seen it forget such a sight?”
“The feeling. You remember that?”
Johana’s eyes widen. “The divine power is like that?”
“Yes, Johana, yes.”
He does not need to say that he understands. She can see his resolve. If he could feel that way again, she knows he would lay waste to a hundred kingdoms to do so. They all would.
“So,” he says, clapping his hands, all jollity once more. The wispy sentimentality in the chamber vanishes. “Tell me more about the Moon Ball. Therein lies the key to your problem, does it not? For when else have you experienced the divine power?”
Cleves surges from her chair, unable to stay still in her frustration. “I have thought on that, cousin, and all I can conclude is that enough queens were in the same place, doing the same thing, that it brought Medren to us.”
“Then there you have it.”
She clips him around the top of his head as she passes.
“Grolsch. Even if we could gather the queens in one place without attracting Henry’s attention, how could we possibly do so quickly enough to intercept Cecilia’s ship?
And besides that, conjuring the divine power is very different from understanding how to wield it. ”
“Well then, you are all out of time and good fortune,” Johana says. He is sitting back in his chair, his fingers steepled together, with that infuriating smile that says I know something you do not.
“I am going to throw you out of that window,” she tells him.
“Well, it is your window to do with as you wish. But before you do, consider the holy books.”
She is no scholar. “Which holy books?”
“The ones that talk of miracles, for what else is your bordweal but a long-lasting miracle?”
He holds up two fingers and a thumb.
“Your mother has studied the scriptures of every faith. There are three ways to beg a miracle from a god. The first: blood sacrifice.” He lowers his thumb.
“The second: acts of devotion. Let us assume that this was what brought Medren to you at the dance.” He lowers one finger. Cleves stops pacing. There is a flicker of memory: not an image but a feeling, fleeting as an ember. The Moon Ball was not the first time she felt the divine power. Not at all.
“The third—” Johana starts. Cleves holds up a hand. She knows. She remembers.
“Relics.”