Chapter Thirty-One Cecilia
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Cecilia
Her bargain with Seymour and Cleves does not grant Cecilia the freedom she had hoped it might.
She supposes she ought not to be shocked: a treaty does not mean trust, no matter how pretty the contract is or how swirling the sovereigns’ signatures.
Besides, her lie is only one kind of trap. She must make more.
She gets rid of the panther first – she will never be able to gain the beast’s loyalty, and he is too quick and silent.
She cannot move freely around the lodge without him coming upon her at inopportune moments.
She lays in wait for him one morning, clutching a knife from the supper table.
Cleves’s people pounce on her before she can harm him, of course, but harming him was never her intention.
The next day, Seymour sends him away to keep him safe.
Next, she must discover exactly where she is.
“If you keep me inside for ever,” she tells Seymour one morning, “then I will be so empty you will not be able to bargain for me. I will lose my mind, you know.”
She grasps Seymour’s sleeve as she speaks. It is the same ruse she used upon Seymour’s servant, and as with the servant, it works. These weak people and their weak hearts.
That afternoon, Seymour comes to her with manacles, and once they are secured around Cecilia’s wrists, they leave the house.
“We will not walk far,” Seymour tells her.
Cecilia does not care. She casts her face to the traces of sun which make their way through the tree canopy.
She does not need to speak, only to feel the rays upon her skin, to hear the birdsong unimpeded by glass and lead, to smell the bluebells crushed beneath her feet.
Seymour chooses their route well. Once Cecilia begins to take note of her surroundings, she can garner little from them that she does not already know.
They are somewhere in Cnothan, but there is no sound of running water that might tell her which way is inland and which way the sea.
No roads. Not even a rocky outcrop that might speak of the soil’s fabric.
Cecilia is almost ready to turn back, her feet beginning to tire, when she spies smoke curling from above the trees.
She bends their path towards it, hoping that they might stumble across some hamlet or farmstead.
Seymour and Cleves cannot have many loyal to their cause, or they would not keep her so isolated.
The trees open into a little glade. Cecilia halts at the sight in its centre.
A pit has been dug, and from the embers within comes a stench so vile that bile rises in her throat.
She knows that smell. Sometimes the people of Perfugi fall; sometimes they are pushed into the lava which serves for rivers in that city.
She recognises the scent of burning flesh.
Covering her nose, she notices the dregs of a tent, abandoned at one side of the glade. A tent, not a homestead …
“They were Hleaws,” Seymour says, behind her.
Cecilia swirls round. Seymour is standing at the very edge of the glade, unwilling to approach the horror.
“You knew this was here, and you led me to it anyway?” she says.
“I knew it was here. But you led us, Cecilia.”
Cecilia looks back towards the pit. She knows what she is going to see, but she cannot stop herself. She never could. Arrow-shot pheasants; aged hounds that never woke up; even her own wounds. She must always peer at death, or its companion, pain, and marvel at their rotten stillness.
It is a family. Their features are indistinguishable, but their sizes are not. Remnants of cloth remain. One of the children clutches a doll in its charred hands.
“This was done on your brother’s orders,” Seymour says. She has crept closer, but she looks only at the tent – the circular, moveable home favoured by the people of that faith.
“You cannot know that,” Cecilia says.
“It is happening across the island, because he knows that your family’s great deception is coming into the light at last. While the Hleaws were dismissed, he could allow them to survive. But not now.”
“Then it is you and your allies who are to blame,” Cecilia says. Her brother would never order this unless it were necessary. Henry is not like him. Henry despises gratuitous violence. He, of all of them, was always the gentle one.
Seymour laughs.
“Do not dare to mock me or I will strangle you with these manacles,” Cecilia says. She is roiling inside, like the lava of Perfugi.
Head tilted, Seymour says, “It is simply astounding to me how someone as ruthless as you can be so wilfully blind.”
“You knew my brother for a year, girl,” Cecilia says. “I have known him my whole life.”
“You have not known your brother for twenty years,” Seymour says.
“He wrote to me.”
Seymour laughs again.
“And you can know a person only through their writing. You must be an oracle.”
The lava inside her moves slower. She looks back at the charred bodies.
There must be some clue, in that pit, to their crime.
They must have been plotting treason with Seymour and Cleves, and her clever brother learned of it.
He would have wept over their deaths, just as he used to weep over the death of a favourite horse, or the prisoners in the Tower when they were brought to the block.
“Did he ever speak to you of our brother?” she asks Seymour.
“No.”
It is easier to continue staring at the body of that child. What she is about to tell Seymour, she has never told a soul; not even Lorena.
“Our half-brother, really. Well, we are all half-siblings. My mother was the Queen of Plythe, of course, and Henry and our older sister’s mother was the Queen of Mathmas. Arthur’s mother was the Queen of Hyde. A nasty, hidden place for nasty, hidden secrets.”
She risks a glance at Seymour, but the other woman is too interested in her story to be insulted.
“The rest of us visited High Hall often, but Arthur was raised there.”
“Because he was the heir,” Seymour says.
Cecilia closes her eyes. She could never decide whether she despised or enjoyed visiting High Hall. She adored playing with Henry and flirting with his friends. But Arthur would always, always be there.
“I was eight. That means that Henry would have been thirteen, and Arthur fifteen,” she continues. “He came into my room one morning – Arthur, I mean. He was in one of his rages. It was not the first time it had happened, but it was the most violent.”
Seymour steps closer, raises a hand as if about to grasp Cecilia’s arm.
Cecilia moves away. She does not wish for pity.
For some unthinkable reason that Cecilia hates herself for, she needs Seymour to understand that she, Seymour, is mistaken.
That Henry is a good man, no matter what mistakes passed between them as husband and wife. That is the only purpose of her story.
She tries to explain, to make Seymour understand, but the words will not come. It is as if his arm is against her neck, as it was that day, pressing, pressing until her life narrows to his vicious eyes and a blooming pulse through her skull.
“You need not speak,” Seymour says. She presses her hands against Cecilia’s back.
They are gentle at first – a question. But when Cecilia doesn’t move away, Seymour presses harder, and Cecilia leans back against those hands, putting as much of her weight on them as she can.
Her chest, opened, loosens. Arthur’s spectre falls away.
“Henry pulled him off you, didn’t he?” Seymour says.
Cecilia nods. When she can speak again, her voice is thin and childlike. “He stayed close to me whenever we were at High Hall together. He always took the brunt of Arthur’s anger. Always stepped in front of me. Always.”
There is a long silence, but it no longer feels like victory. She is too raw for celebration.
“I can see why you would think him a good man, when he showed such bravery as a boy,” Seymour says at last.
“You are despicable,” Cecilia says. How can Seymour still talk as though Cecilia is in the wrong, after that confession?
Seymour ducks into the Hleaws’ wrecked tent and emerges a moment later. She presses something cold into Cecilia’s hand.
“I do not claim you lie. I merely ask you to think on who Henry might have become, after Arthur’s death.”
Cecilia remembers that day, too. And the day afterwards, when she visited Henry in his chambers and found him withdrawn, not equal to celebrating with her.
She opens her fist. It is a chain, broken next to the clasp, and upon it hang six orbs.
A mark of faith, like Cernunnos’s antlers, or the guirnalda favoured by the Quistoans.
She looks back at the bodies. When they were alive, the chain must have belonged to them. Something is growing in the pit, beside the remains. Cecilia crouches, trying to understand what she is seeing.
In the crook of the dead child’s arm, something fungal unfurls before her very eyes.
It is the pink of flayed flesh and its frills, though delicate, inspire a visceral repugnance.
It spreads even as they watch, an unnatural growth reaching over the Hleaws’ bodies and through the dying smoke, climbing the sides of the pit.
They start back, away from the horror. Cecilia realises that she is clutching Seymour, and Seymour is clutching her.
“Let us leave this cursed place,” Seymour says.
They return in silence, their eyes on the path, their minds darting from the malice of that glade to the malice of a long-dead prince.
It is only when they enter the grounds of the estate that she realises she is still clutching the Hleaws’ chain with its six orbs.
Clutching it so tightly it has left angry marks on her palm.
Cecilia should cast it away. To even be touching it is a show of disloyalty towards Henry. She pushes it into a pocket. She will show it to him when she sees him. He will have an explanation. He must. He must, or what is her lineage but screams and smoke?