Chapter Fifty-One Cleves
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Cleves
Goldfoot finds them more easily over the coming days, and his packages keep them from needing to venture into the realms of man. They remain in the forests of Plythe and flee from any sign of humans. In doing so, they forget that other more dangerous creatures exist in the land of Elben.
“With a full stomach and some luck, we should reach the Heahmores by nightfall,” Cleves tells Seymour one morning. They have just woken and Seymour’s hair is escaping its braid. Lelij yawns loudly, then ambles over to lick their faces. Seymour cossets him, her expression sober.
“You are missing Haltrasc,” Cleves guesses.
“It was for the best – he would be too noticeable on this journey. At least your Lelij is small and easily hidden.” Her voice is bright like glass.
Cleves lifts Seymour’s chin, forcing her to look at her. “You miss him,” she says again.
“Like I’d miss a limb, were I to lose one.”
Cleves pulls Seymour to her feet. “Come, I have a plan to make you smile, my angry queen.”
She thought she had heard it the night before, and she was right. She follows the faint bubble of running water and at last emerges into a clearing through which runs a merry stream.
“Excellent,” Seymour says. “Henry’s dogs will not be able to trace our scent if we travel through the water.”
That had not occurred to Cleves. “Indeed, but I had thought we could use it for the more pressing matter of washing the gargoyle spit from our faces.”
To demonstrate, she pulls her mud-stiffened shirt over her head and then wiggles out of her breeches.
Seymour is not so bold. She takes off her boots and stockings, then wades into the stream after Cleves.
They squeal as the cold water bites their feet, but it is a welcome pinch.
The stream is shallow and the water clear, running over large rocks rather than mud or pebbles.
Seymour splashes Lelij, who gambols on the bank.
Cleves wades out, naked, into a deeper part of the stream, relishing the numbness across her skin.
She watches them in their joy, the woman and the gargoyle.
She did that to Seymour. She put the laughter in her throat.
When Cleves first met Seymour, the other queen never smiled, never laughed.
She has never seen her so happy as when they have been homeless together.
Cleves’s heart tightens and her stomach twists, and she can no longer work out whether it is with love or fear. She is a fixed point. She is a runner. She is a solitary castle. She is unencumbered and content to be so.
Seymour turns to her. Cleves cannot let her see the turmoil within her. She grins, holds out her arms, displaying her naked body, and falls backwards into the deeper water. Seymour’s laughter echoes around the clearing.
“You fool!” Seymour crows. “You will die of cold before we reach Mathmas!”
Cleves flails over to her lover, keeping her body in the water as she skates across the shallower rocks.
“No, my bright star, I shall make you keep me warm,” she says, and with a deft swipe she takes hold of Seymour’s bare ankle and makes a show of trying to pull her into the water with her.
“I am clothed! I am clothed!” Seymour laughs.
“Well, we should do something about that, shouldn’t we?”
In short order, Seymour’s clothes and undergarments are thrown to the bank, where Lelij proceeds to curl up upon them, and Seymour is in the water alongside Cleves.
“Are you shivering?” Cleves says.
“Of course I am shivering – it is freezing and you are mad.”
“Come here.”
Cleves pulls Seymour back to the deeper water and aligns her naked body with her lover’s. They are neck-deep, and where their skin touches Cleves can feel nothing but warmth, and where their skin does not she can feel nothing at all. She tangles her hands in Seymour’s hair, kisses her.
“It should not be allowed, you know.”
“What shouldn’t be allowed?” Seymour says.
“You are beautiful when you smile, when you are sad, when you are angry, when you are joyful. No one should be beautiful all the time.”
“It is not all the time,” Seymour says. She pulls Cleves even closer, and whispers in her ear: “I am beautiful when I am in love.”
They kiss as though they have eternity, as though they have seconds. This is the impossibility of them: that the two of them can fit so perfectly even though it cannot be for ever.
She is so lost in the ecstasy of Seymour’s body against hers that it takes her some time to realise that Lelij is growling. He is facing away from them, no longer curled up on Seymour’s clothes, but front legs and head close to the ground, back legs up, tail whipping from side to side.
“What has he seen?” Seymour whispers.
Cleves swims, as quietly as she can, to the bank and peers over the edge. The light in the clearing almost makes it impossible to see anything beyond the treeline. Almost.
“Gherzst,” she swears under her breath.
Cleves points to the shape moving in the shadows beneath the branches. A shape with tusks, and abnormally long front legs.
A crone.
They could not be more vulnerable. She is a fool to think that Seymour’s smile could be more important than their safety. And now they are both naked, their clothes and belongings strewn on the bank. The only way to retrieve them is to get closer to the crone.
“Why has it not attacked us already?” Seymour whispers.
Cleves cannot answer that. She contemplates their options – they cannot leave without their clothes, or they will not survive the freezing nights in this part of the island. They will certainly not survive the climb into the Heahmores.
She must retrieve their belongings. She tries to think of a plan, one that will account for the crone’s natural behaviour, but her head is too full of the thump of soldiers’ boots.
In any case, the crone is not behaving naturally, or it would have killed them both as soon as it spied them so defenceless in the stream.
That fact gives her hope. Perhaps the crone is not hungry. That has never stopped them before – they are renowned for killing all in their path even when sated – but maybe this one is different.
“Stay there. If it comes for me, swim upstream with Lelij,” she says.
“No—” Seymour starts, but Cleves does not have time to argue.
She slips out of the water and crawls towards the still-growling gargoyle. She tosses Seymour’s clothes behind her, hoping that they will land close enough to the stream for Seymour to grab them. Her own clothes are nearer the trees.
Her existence narrows to the crone and her, just the two of them staring at each other. She is reminded of another forest, another time, when she had risked Johana to please a false king. Then, there was a clear reason why the crone did not attack immediately. Now, there is none. Why?
As she reaches her clothes and gathers them up, she understands why. The crone’s head and front legs are clear to see, but not its hind body. That – the impossibility of it again, so many impossibilities today – is in the ground.
She inches closer. The crone struggles, thrusting its head forward, attempting to impale her on its tusks.
But it cannot reach her. Her eyes did not deceive her: the crone’s body is embedded within a circle of fleshy mould.
As she watches, a waft of decay unfurls from the monster, and as it does so, the mould sprouts.
The crone’s body pulls, agonisingly, up from the ground.
It takes Cleves a moment to understand further: the crone is not embedded in the ground. It is being grown from that mould.
She starts back, pulling on her clothes, cramming the parcel containing Howard’s supplies into her pocket. Seymour is out of the water and dressed, clutching Lelij to her chest.
“Run,” is all Cleves says.
They run for what seems like hours, always north, always seeking the end of the wood.
Cleves would welcome even a soldier, for that would be a monstrosity she understood.
But a beast that is not born, or hatched, but that sprouts from the ground?
She has never in all her long studies of animals heard of such a creature.
They reach the base of the Heahmore mountains long before nightfall. The freshness of their swim is a childhood memory. They are scratched and bruised, and their feet are all blister. Better this pain, though, than waiting to allow the crone to finish its strange birth and catch up to them.
“I think we must stop,” Seymour says, clutching her ribs.
They are on the ascent already, and the path ahead grows rocky.
A chill wind blows from the west, up the incline from the sea, and buffets the mountains’ feet.
Cleves wants to keep going, to put as much space between them and that crone as possible.
She looks back. The wood and its stream are barely visible on the horizon.
She tries to reason with her panic: crones are territorial.
Even with their scent in its nose, it will not leave the trees.
“Very well,” she says.
They find a divot in the rocks – not quite a cave, but not exposed either – and nestle down there. There at last Cleves tells Seymour what she saw, and what it must signify. Seymour covers her mouth in horror.
“I must have seen this too, near Gnottel Lodge,” she whispers. She tells Cleves of the strange pink mould that she and Cecilia found in the burnt remains of the Hleaw camp.
They stare at each other.
She had always thought the crones were unnatural, but now she knows it.
They must be a sickness, a plague. She edges towards knowledge, pondering everything she knows and does not know about the beasts.
Why else would the murder of Medren’s worshippers spawn that mould?
Why else would crones spread so rampantly during Henry’s reign alone, when Henry alone has used Medren’s power so much more voraciously than any of his forebears.
The truth creeps over her like that unfurling mould.
Cleves might not believe it if she did not know something of the strange workings of this island, where slaughter can turn crystal to garnets, and a goddess can break her eye into stones of power.
Elben is Medren’s, and it is corrupted. The crones are that corruption, blooming into rotten existence again and again, until it can be cleansed.