Chapter Nineteen Howard
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Howard
Susanna Horenbolt will not be able to help her. Not if Howard continues to lie to her, nor if she reveals the truth. What Howard and the other queens are about to attempt will either bring about their downfall or herald their rise, and Howard cannot do it alone. Not with Henry still at Plythe.
Susanna is an outsider, little likely to risk displeasing her queen by gossiping to the others, even if she had known the truth.
The rest of Howard’s ladies are linked by blood or long friendship or ancient familial allies.
To tell one of them is to tell all. So tell all she will.
Sometimes trust is earned. Sometimes it must be thrown out, like a rope to a drowning man.
Henry spends his mornings hunting in the verdant and richly gamed woods around Plythe, returning for luncheon.
While he is gone, Wolsey and Cromwell generally see to the more mundane business of running a country, taking vittles in their rooms as they work.
But sometimes they will visit her, and she and her ladies will attempt to entertain these men who smile then roll their eyes when they think she is not looking.
If they do visit her receiving chamber, Howard must be plausibly, unsuspiciously absent.
She does not have long to take the women into her confidence.
She sets Goldfoot at the door of her receiving chamber, and feeds him a morsel of honeydragon meat from a pouch at her waist. He makes little huffs of excitement as he gobbles it up. “Guard,” she whispers.
Her ladies are lounging at the window seat, some of them peering out at the cargo boats making their way towards the machinery at Plythe’s base, which will pull them from the water and up into the palace’s gut.
“Look, Legh,” Ursula says, pointing at a vessel. “That one’s from Pkolack. You will have your iced sherbets before long.”
Legh is lying upon the floor, as is her habit.
She holds a lute loosely upon her chest, and Howard stoops to pluck it from her.
The ladies quieten, sensing their queen’s mood.
Can they too hear the bird’s wings beating against her ribcage?
And what do they hold in their chests? Loyalty, or betrayal?
Lady Tylney shuffles along the window seat to make room for Howard, and she perches between her women. She looks around them. They are her friends, all of them, and though they are often unkind, she thinks – she hopes – that there is enough love between them to weather what is to come.
Boleyn must have thought so of her sister.
Howard plucks out the first tune that comes to mind: a ditty familiar to all those who grow up in the territory of Plythe. The words follow a fish as it swims along the Kyttle River, tumbles down the Falls and passes whales and so on out to sea.
But she does not sing. She plucks the strings so that anyone lingering outside may only hear the song. She drops her secrets beneath the notes and hopes for mercy.
It is not Legh or even Ursula, the two most vocal of her ladies, who speak first. It is Lady Tylney.
“So you do not love the king?” she says. It is a strange question, given everything that Howard has just divulged. It is not an easy one to answer either.
“I thought so once. But no, I do not think I do.”
“Oh, thank the god,” Lady Tylney says. She begins to make the sign of Cernunnos – splayed fingers against her chest, like antlers – and then, realising her error, makes a fist of her hand instead.
Legh says, “Is that what you have been doing with all those secret meetings and time by yourself?”
Howard reaches for her. “Yes. I am sorry, sister.”
“I thought you no longer liked me,” Legh says.
“Why would you think that?”
Legh glances at Ursula. “You spent so much time with Voda Kelaverinn, and you know men – they think that our pursuits are silly and stupid. We thought you must feel the same way.”
Howard stops her lute-playing to run one hand down her bodice and gown, which is coated in jewels and embroidered with gold thread. “Do I look as though I think our pursuits are silly?”
Legh laughs. Lady Tylney laughs.
Susanna’s smile is a wound. “You lied to me the other day, Your Majesty?”
“A little. Not all.” Susanna had asked Howard to protect her from the other women when they turned cruel. And Howard will – she will. But she must be sure of their loyalty first – surely Susanna can understand that?
Ursula is last to speak: “I knew it was the truth. I knew it.”
She had been Howard’s attendant at the Moon Ball. She had seen Medren’s power. She had never commented upon it, so Howard had assumed that she was ignorant to what it signified. She has underestimated them, as she herself has been underestimated.
“You can scold me later for keeping this from you, but in this moment I need your help,” she says. She reaches for them all, touching their hands, their cheeks, gathering them towards her.
“You are our queen,” Ursula says. And that is that.
Lady Tylney keeps watch at the window of Howard’s receiving chamber, which offers a view over the hunting grounds of Plythe.
Legh is poised at the palace gates, ready to detain the king and his huntsmen with flirtation.
Susanna tarries outside the courtyard where Howard last lied to her.
“I will be your last defence,” she proclaims, then slopes off to her post with hunched shoulders.
And Ursula cleaves to Howard, insisting on joining her at the spirit stone of Plythe, for “I have been reading all kinds of pamphlets about Medren, and I might be able to help if you have difficulties.”
Howard feels as though she is fighting to keep her seat on a wild horse, without bridle or saddle.
Everything has changed between her and her ladies, and nothing has changed at all.
They vie with each other for her favour, move to place themselves in the right way, and all she can think of is Boleyn and her sister who is soon to be queen in her place. What is Legh going to say to the king?
That is a terror for later. She and Ursula pass into the peaceful din of the courtyard, the Kyttle Falls providing comfort and the concealment of noise.
Howard steps up to the spirit stone, balancing on a ledge, smooth and slippery with water, provided for such a purpose.
The stone woman, her crown almost disappeared, gazes impassively at Howard.
“It is almost midday,” Ursula whispers. She is standing to one side, leaning over the fountain but not daring to touch the woman at its centre.
And there are the bells of Sweillan, marking the height of the sun. Across Elben, the bells in other sanctuaries will toll, and those who heave on their ropes will not know that they provide a signal to four queens about to attempt their greatest feat of rebellion yet.
“Do it,” Ursula says, bouncing on her toes.
Howard takes the stone woman’s hand. The sensation is immediate.
She did not understand the strange kinship she experienced that first time, on her wedding day, but she does now.
She is communing with the echoes of the queens of Plythe.
The fluttering beauty and restless desire of the women who ruled this palace before her.
“Good morrow, friends,” she whispers.
The air around her stills, the bubbling water quietens.
At the edge of her mind, a voice seems to call to her.
It has no words, or is spoken in a language long forgotten and untranslatable, yet Howard understands it.
It is the language of the maid walking alone through a darkened wood.
The language of a mother thinking with despair upon her daughter’s future.
It is the language of the woman who makes excuses not to be left alone with her friend, lest his attentions turn romantic.
It is the language of danger, both known and unknown.
It is a melancholy voice, a nightingale’s voice, like wind in starving trees upon a wild mountainside.
Howard does not know what to say or do to make the spirit stone obey her. They are all of them hazarding Seymour’s safety on a hunch, on a power whose rules none of them understand. Medren came to them at the Moon Ball – surely she will come to them now?
“Please?” she says.
Nothing changes. The strange language continues, a lilting fall of it, chattering like the fountain.
“I am Queen Howard of Plythe,” she tries again.
The voice grows louder, more insistent. She thinks of the other queens, who have probably already bent their spirit stones to their will.
They will be waiting only for her. If she cannot work out what she must do, will their plan fail entirely?
Will Seymour be lost, be taken to Henry and have unimaginable, unforgivable things done to her?
“Is it not working?” Ursula says.
“No,” Howard replies. A tear falls, but she does not relinquish her hold on the stone.
“Make it work,” Ursula says, as though she were the queen and Howard her maid.
“I do not know how. Perhaps if Voda Kelaverinn were here—”
“Oh, fuck your Voda Kelaverinn,” Ursula says. She seizes Howard by the upper arms, bracing her from behind. Is Howard a weapon or a shield?
“Try again,” she instructs.
“I need your help,” Howard says to the spirit stone, her eyes closed, willing every part of her that has ever felt like a queen to rise to the stone.
“You are a queen,” Ursula says. “Act like one.”
There they are. The words Boleyn said to her on their first meeting. Howard did not say then, and she will not say now: I am a queen in name alone. I never deserved the title like the rest of you. Another tear falls.
“Ursula,” she says, half speaking, half sobbing.
Ursula shakes her, her grip tightening. How can such a woman as Ursula, all mischief and flight, suddenly be so fierce?
“I am going to grow angry soon, Your Majesty,” Ursula says. “Queen Seymour is depending upon you. The other queens are waiting for you. Are you going to humiliate Plythe?”
Ursula knows she’s being cruel. They have all heard the taunts: that Howard won her crown on her back. What else does she have to offer? Not Aragon’s mind, Cleves’s heritage, Parr’s heart. She has only ever had her body.
Her body, and her friends.
Strangely, it is the thought of failing Ursula and her other ladies, not Seymour or Cleves or the other queens, that calms Howard. If they are truly risking their lives for her, how can she not succeed?
“Listen to me,” she says, a new steel in her voice.
There is a pause in the chatter, no greater than a breath, before it starts again.
This time, though, the language is a little different.
Now it is the language of whispered knowledge, of women warning other women.
The language of friends walking together through that wood.
The language of breath upon embers, blowing and blowing until the flame licks the hearth and the sparks fly.
Howard has the strangest vision. A kindly woman – her old nurse – holding her hands and whispering the tongue of the Medrenkind.
“Tavast sigorasus. Solinqui gefoelle.” Together we win. Alone we fall.
“Tavast sigorasus. Solinqui gefoelle.”
Howard finds herself repeating those words now, over and over again.
Behind her, her hands warm and steady on Howard’s arms, Ursula takes up the chant.
They say the words until they lose all meaning, until they flow through Howard like the River Kyttle’s inexorable path.
She does not know if they are the right words, but the chatter of the stone falls silent beneath her fingertips.
Her eyes are closed, and all she can conjure before her is Seymour’s face.
In her thoughts, Seymour is shackled. A dark, tilting room, a hard pallet bed.
Something flows through Howard’s fingers, through her hair and her chest and her stomach. She knows it. It is the same binding power that she last felt at the Moon Ball. She knows that were she to open her eyes, her hands would be wreathed in the bruised light of the bordweal.
She smiles, and says, “Go to her.”