Chapter Fifty-Two Cecilia
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Cecilia
She hears news of her brother’s return to High Hall from listening in to the servants’ gossip.
They whisper of his anger, trade favours to avoid serving him.
She remains in her rooms, waiting for him to visit her.
Surely – surely – he will come to her with a tired smile, fold her in his arms and welcome her home?
She is not merely his beloved little sister, after all.
She is the one who, of all his clever spies and their clever masters, found out that Cleves is in league with Seymour.
She is the one who captured that same traitor queen and brought her back to Elben.
It is not Cecilia’s fault that Seymour bested her.
No one knew that Seymour and Cleves had the ability to wield the bordweal.
But Henry does not visit her. He barely leaves his rooms, if what she overhears is correct. Brother and sister, once inseparable, now separated by three floors, eighteen years and many centuries of secrets.
Eventually, she goes to him. Of course, she has forgotten the protocols of Elben, having lived so long in Perfugi.
High Hall is his: it would not be appropriate for him to come to her.
He has been waiting for her, probably. Probably desperate to see her, but unable to be the one to descend to her rooms. She imagines him starting out on the journey through the passageways and grand staircases of the palace, only to have Cromwell intercede and remind him of the proper way of things.
She must not keep him waiting any longer.
Henry’s rooms, at the apex of High Hall, are empty. A guard hovers in the doorway, too cowed by her to keep her out but not so cowed that they will leave her alone in there without the king.
“Where is he?” she asks, wandering around the space.
“I believe His Majesty is in the sanctuary,” the guard says.
She shivers at the thought of that solemn space just below them.
“I will wait for him to return then,” she says.
The tapestries on the walls here are all religious, featuring the heroic deeds of Cernunnos or Aethelred – she doesn’t know how Henry fucks surrounded by them.
It is very different to when she last visited these rooms, the night before she began her voyage to Capetia, for her marriage to the ageing king.
Back then, Henry was still a young king, and the rooms were still in large part their father’s.
Plain walls and draughty windows. They have been made more comfortable now, but there is still something indefinably familiar about the space.
She cannot put her finger on it until she comes upon a prayer book, very old, left closed on a chest all by itself. She starts back and almost trips over her gown in her haste to get away from it.
“Are you all right, Your Majesty?” the guard says from the door.
She ignores him and, with some effort, makes herself approach the book once more.
With a single outstretched finger, she flips the cover open. Inside there are no pages, or no intact ones at least. Instead of prayers, beautifully illustrated, a little chamber is cut into the parchment. The strength leaches from her body. It is empty.
“I threw them away.” Henry’s voice.
Cecilia keeps her eyes on the book.
“Good,” she says.
As he approaches, she can hear the limp in his gait. Shuffle thud, shuffle thud.
“Did a lioness take a mouthful, brother?”
“Two alley cats, more like,” Henry says.
She turns around then. His face is still youthful, but the way he carries himself is so much older than when she last saw him.
His doublet makes his shoulders seem broader than they truly are, and his beard is wirier than it once was, even though it holds no flecks of grey.
She waits for him to open his arms to her, but he does not.
“You grow old, brother,” she says.
“Is it any wonder, with a sister like you?”
She prods him. “I shall remind you that I am not the sister waging war on you.”
His features cloud further. She feels a familiar tightening in her shoulders. He must catch her expression, for he holds up a hand.
“I am weary, not angry, Cecilia. I am glad to find you alive. It was not what we had thought these last few moons.”
He lowers himself onto a long chair, and she joins him, eyeing his left leg, which is extended stiffly. She despises maladies, the sick, the diseased. It is a distaste she always shared with Henry.
“You are wounded, not weary. What did they do?”
“Prised open an old injury.”
She cannot help but smile. She can admire courage and cunning, even in those she detests. She looks back towards the prayer book. “When did you throw it away?”
He laughs joylessly. “That is what she wants to know. That is what she wants to discuss, after all this time.”
“I know why he was the way he was,” she tells Henry.
“You’ve been talking to Seymour. Of course you know.”
He closes his eyes and leans back. Cecilia has never been the type to comfort. Touch, when it is not accompanied by pleasure or pain, is useless to her. But she feels an urge to comfort her brother now. She grips his shoulder.
“I want Cnothan for my own,” she says. “And in return I will give you all you need to crush your errant queens.”
Henry shakes his head. “I cannot give you Cnothan without my people growing suspicious that I do not fill it with a new queen of my own. They will say the bordweal won’t be strong enough.”
“Then get More and the other bishops to spread a new lie. Say that Cernunnos came to you in a vision and permitted anyone of your blood to take one of the palaces.”
She stands and paces to the window. Why is he not more excited at her offer? His queens have just injured him – him, who should be untouchable – and he seems unbothered.
“Cromwell thinks there is another way,” Henry says. “A way that will allow us to keep things as they are.”
“What other way?” she says. She is only half listening to him.
After all, if he is denying her her palace, then what use does she have for him or his religion?
She may as well have stayed in Perfugi. She may as well have made her bargain with Cleves and Seymour, self-righteous though they are.
Henry drones on about something in Bishop More’s books and a strain of Cernunnos’s religion adopted in certain spheres on the continent.
At any other time, Henry would have considered it blasphemy, but now it suits him, he seems to be listening.
“You tell me of theory but not of practice,” she says. “What exactly is Cromwell brewing?”
Henry shakes his head. “You will see when it is done.”
Cecilia has a notion of starting her own form of religion.
After all, everyone seems to be doing it.
The nobility of Elben may be more likely to follow a woman of Tudor blood than the foreigners and commoners that are the current queens of Elben.
She could do it, only it seems like such a lot of hard work.
Why should she have to be the one to do the labouring?
Just as she is on the verge of getting very angry indeed, and throwing something at Henry’s head, he says, “But tell me what you know, and if it’s helpful I will give you something better than Cnothan. Better than any of the six castles.”
She scoffs. “Are you going to abdicate and hand me your throne, brother?”
He stands, flexing his hands. The divine power prickles on his knuckles, and her eyes dart once more to the empty book of horrors.
Henry approaches her, and she half expects him to throttle her.
Instead, he takes her hands in his and smiles properly for the first time.
He smiles as she had wanted him to when they first saw each other.
“When Cromwell succeeds, I will be more powerful than ever before. I intend to do more than any of my forbears, Cecilia. Elben is the chosen land of Cernunnos. Yet we are small amidst the empires of Quisto and Capetia. Why should we not equal them, or even take them for our own?”
She raises an eyebrow. “Unless you imagine me picking up a sword, which I guarantee I shall not do, I do not see how this could possibly benefit me.”
Henry’s smile is almost a sneer. “Then you lack imagination, sister. I will need loyal lords and ladies, dukes and duchesses to keep the empire under Elbenese control. Why should not you take an entire country for your own dominion?”
The thought takes root in her heart, a little thorn that bleeds victory. She throws her arms around Henry’s neck and holds him there, rocking back and forth in her excitement. “Oh, brother, I knew you would not disappoint me. I’m going to be a queen again!”