Chapter Thirty-Four Howard #2
The queens tuck themselves into a darkened crevice and watch as Cromwell approaches the wall at the far end of the room.
He presses his hand against one of the stones.
Smoke rises from the point, and something else too: a spark of divine power.
Their eyes did not deceive them: somehow, Henry gave part of his own power to Cromwell.
Howard is almost breathless, not just from the heat, but from the trust. For all his talk of love for his queens, he never entrusted even Aragon, his most humble, loyal and true wife, with even the smallest spark of his (their) power.
A deep groan, as if from some tortured giant, emanates from the wall. Its echoes mix with the roars of the Tower dragons, filling Howard’s skull.
A cavity has opened where he touched the wall.
In it sit five boxes, and a space for a sixth.
Howard knows her own immediately – made of iced silver, it is to her mind the most beautiful of the binding boxes.
Cromwell slots Brynd’s neatly between the golden box of Daven and the steel box of Hyde.
He makes the sign of Cernunnos before the cavity, and it closes once more.
Howard grips Cleves’s hand, pressing herself back into the crevice, as Cromwell passes from the room and returns to his business on the upper levels. When he is out of hearing, Cleves shakes her head, smiling.
“What amuses you?” Howard says.
“The arrogance of that man,” Cleves says. “If I were him, I would be far more cautious. We are well hidden, certainly, but hardly invisible.”
“Maybe the luck of the goddess is on our side,” Howard says. Surely this only serves to prove that her rescue of Florin, daring though it was, was not overly foolhardy. Certainly not worthy of the scorn Cleves had heaped upon her.
Cleves sighs. “Let us hope that we have not used it all up, then.”
She listens carefully. “I believe we are safe. Come.”
They dart into the room, coughing through the heat, and approach the wall. Now that she knows where to look, Howard can see the faintest outline where the cavity must be. Cleves produces a knife from her pocket and attempts to prise open the stone. They take turns, their sweat hissing as it falls.
“It’s no good,” Cleves says, wiping her forehead.
Howard will not give up. She was going to be the one to free them all. She cannot fail them now. She digs the knife between stone, pushing and pushing.
“Howard, stop,” Cleves says.
“No,” she cries. She does not know what is sweat and what is tears.
The knife breaks beneath her grip. She and Cleves look at the broken blade on the flagstone floor, then Howard turns and hurls the useless handle into the passage.
Cleves picks up the blade, and then the handle, and returns. “I will not tell you to be calm, because I fear you will stab me,” she says.
Howard closes her eyes and laughs.
“I don’t understand how you can be so calm,” she says. “I feel as though I am always about to trip myself up. I just want all of this to be done with.”
“I know.”
Howard leans back against the wall, letting its scorching heat burn her. Cleves fiddles with the knife’s pieces, not looking at Howard as she says, “In my experience, wars that are begun quickly are rarely ended so.”
Howard frowns. “In your experience?” Thanks to the bordweal, Elben has not seen a war since Queen Isabet. She grows, if possible, even warmer as she realises she does not know anything of the history of Cleves’s country.
“When I was eleven, a distant cousin of my father took a fancy to the throne of Ezzonid. It took five years for the matter to be settled and peace to be restored.”
Five years of civil war. Howard examines Cleves: the sturdiness of her figure, the way she always holds herself so upright despite her apparent cheer.
Five years, and she was eleven when it began.
That would make her the age Howard is now when it ended.
At least the uncertainty of Howard’s own childhood was never marred by violence.
“I am sorry,” she says. She wishes she knew the words to convey the depth of how she feels, which is so much more than sorry.
“Yes, well, I am still smiling, am I not? I still have all my limbs and all my wits,” Cleves says.
Howard would like to ask more, but doesn’t want to upset Cleves. She rests her head against the wall. “What are we going to do about these binding cloths, then?” she says.
Cleves examines the place where the cavity appeared. “We need the divine power, I assume. It is clear that is what Cromwell used to open it.”
Howard looks at her hands. “I have not been able to conjure it since the Moon Ball without my spirit stone.”
“Nor I,” Cleves says.
Howard closes her eyes, thinks of that moment when Ursula took her by the waist and made her believe that she could be a vessel for divinity, instead of simply a vessel for Henry’s desires.
It seems impossible that she, of all the queens, might be able to conjure the power without the spirit stone, without the might of the others bolstering her.
She recalls that moment, out in the courtyard, with the sound of the Kyttle Falls drowning out the tumult of her thoughts.
She recalls Ursula’s solid heft behind her, and the belief in her voice as she commanded Howard.
The sense of her ladies, scattered throughout Plythe and yet all connected to her through a single, invisible purpose.
“Hilareth,” Cleves says. Howard does not know what it means, but the exhale of the word makes her open her eyes. Cleves is staring at Howard’s hands.
Barely visible through the steam of the chamber, barely there at all, is a flicker of bordweal light. It is not only the blue-green-purple of a bruise: it is the orange-red-grey-gold of sunrise too.
“Oh my lord,” Howard says. Something flutters in her chest. She has the sudden urge to dowse her hands in water.
“Quickly,” Cleves says, forcing Howard to stand. Before the power fades, she presses both hands to the place where the cavity opened for Cromwell.
Sharp pain shoots through her fingers and into her bones. She thinks she screams, but perhaps it is only in her head. For there, clear as though he were in the chamber, looming between her and Cleves, is Cernunnos.
She has only ever seen paintings and sculptures of him: the great, antlered god. They have always been stylised. Lashings of gold plating. Swooping strokes to suggest form without being explicit.
The Cernunnos – the real Cernunnos – is both alluring and grotesque. His antlers are honed to cruelty. His body is human but his nails are brutish. His legs are bloated with muscle, and his skin is pale beneath a bruise that covers his whole body; a joyless imitation of the bordweal’s colours.
She thinks her hand may be fused to the wall, fused to this apparition, but then she is pulled away, the skin on her palm tearing, leaving a crisp layer of darkness on the wall, like a water print, that is soon burned away.
Cleves holds Howard’s face between her hands.
“Howard, can you see me?” she says.
“I can see you,” Howard says hoarsely.
“What happened?”
Howard begins to tremble. Cernunnos’s presence is still within her, a scornful rebuke.
“It was not the divine power we needed to retrieve the binding cloths. It was his power.”
Cleves seems to sink. “Of course it would be,” she says. “Of course it would be. That is why Cromwell did not take more care.”
The brilliance of the hiding place reveals itself. Neither they nor any of their followers will be able to access the cloths here, for they can never, will never, wield Cernunnos’s specific power – the power that is his alone, not Medren’s, weaker though it is.
Henry is always cleverer than her, always ahead, even when he thinks her harmless. Howard had thought that, because Seymour triumphed on account of Henry underestimating her, that Howard might be able to triumph the same way. But Henry does not make the same mistake twice.
“What do we do now?” Howard says.
Cleves pats Howard’s arm. “We find another way. We grow cleverer still.”
She cradles Howard’s head as Legh once did. “And we try to learn how you just wielded Medren’s power, you brilliant child.”