Chapter Three #4
The smell arrived first, of dead things left too long in the sun.
The king came next, his bones creaking as he walked, his face as thin and twisted as his limbs.
Then, it was as if a curtain fell over his face: his wrinkles smoothed over, the sparse patches of hair filled out, his yellowed teeth shone like fresh snow.
He appeared formidable with ermine fur draped over his shoulders, no longer diminished.
A sweet scent of persimmons and citrus settled over the rot.
Roland’s smile was strained. He ignored the ladies’ hopeful glances, his focus solely on the king staggering up to the queen’s four-poster bed.
When the king stumbled, he hurried over to help him up.
Cecily played her part well. She threw her arms around the king and kissed his cheek, whispering in his ear and giggling, pulling his ring-stacked fingers across her body.
I imagined such hands on me and shuddered, thinking perhaps this girl had more strength than all of us here combined. Maybe Roland’s magic aiding the king’s appearance was for her. An act of mercy, of kindness.
All of Cecily’s ladies knew their cue. They filtered out of the bedchamber and settled by the fire, followed by Roland.
“I’ll wait in the hall,” he said. “Tell me when it’s done.”
Shoulders visibly sagged with disappointment. One maid of honor stepped forward boldly. “We were playing cards. Join us for a hand?”
“Not tonight.” His gaze roamed across us, then snagged on my face like a knot. I knew I should flinch, but I held his gaze. Held it until he was the one to look away. His brows knit together. “Bess Hampton, aren’t you meant to be attending my guest?”
I nodded. “Yes, Your Grace. I was.”
“Come.” We all curtseyed again, and then my arm was in his, and he’d tugged me into the hall. He leaned his head against the stone beside a flickering brazier. Running a hand across his face, he shook his head and laughed. “You almost fooled me.”
I cursed. “What gave me away?”
“The eyes again. The color is right, but she doesn’t look quite so interested in everything as you do.”
“Did you expect me to stay in my rooms?”
He rolled his eyes. “Yes. I did. Or I thought you’d be lurking about as a cat as you used to.” A quick gesture to the door. “Now, at least, you see what I must endure.”
“How do you stand it?”
“At first, it made me sick. I’d come out here and heave my guts out from guilt. Even now, as I’m speaking to you, I’m trying to hold his face in place, to maintain the mask.” His eyes jumped to mine. “How did you stand it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your patron, Gregory. How could you bear to make a terrible man so exceedingly rich?”
I had no answer to that. Gregory had been kind enough.
It was his wife who despised me—for the crime of her husband’s eyes always tracking me across the room.
I told him whenever she was envious, that he should at least attempt to appease her, but I concealed most of my other Moonborn gifts.
My shapeshifting, my ability to taper their anger.
This was my small rebellion: Gregory and his wife never understood the depths of the magic I possessed.
“I hid myself,” I admitted.
Roland’s stare lingered, searching for something. Then he nodded, and when his jaw flexed and the light fled his eyes, I wondered what he could possibly be thinking about that would fill him with such sadness.
“The magic you cast on the king is affecting you,” I observed.
He stepped toward me. Harsh shadows carved him into a stranger. “Notice everything, don’t you?”
“Yes. How long does the magic last?”
“It might hold for days. Weeks, at most. If only he were a dulled jewel, I could make him shine forever, and it would take but an instant. But a living thing, or—” A hand flung out. “—whatever he is? An almost-dead thing? That requires much more effort.”
“And when you shoved Cecily before him, did you make her look more desirable too?”
He merely shrugged and leaned back against the stone, crossing one ankle over the other.
“It isn’t so much her beauty as her temperament he likes.
Gertrude and Eleanor were dull and serious.
Cecily stirred his blood. Or so he told me when he said he wanted her.
I think she reminded him of Alice Seton. ”
“But you instructed her, surely?”
A click of his tongue. “You’re catching on rather quick. To the king, it’s love.” He rested a hand on his chest for emphasis. “An arrow pierced his heart.”
“But the arrow came from your bow.”
He nodded. “And if only I had your power, then perhaps I could tame his moods.”
It was not the first time I’d felt a stab of Roland’s jealousy.
Our magic was similar in many ways. Desire and emotion were threaded together, knotted tight.
But emotions were vast, while desire could be particular.
I could sense the sadness within a child; Roland knew she longed for the toy she’d dropped in the river.
I could see the rage boiling within the king; Roland only knew the moment he wished to strike.
Even if he imbued the king with a desire to be calm, the body might resist. The king might struggle, his heart beating rapidly, thoughts still thrashing.
But I could run a gentle hand across his mind and soothe him in an instant.
From inside Cecily’s bedchamber, there was sudden murmuring. Fabric shuffling. Roland glanced at the door, then back to me, lowering his voice to a bare whisper. “They’ve finished now. Go quickly. Your maid is returning from the dancing, and then there will be two Besses walking about.”
I hesitated, but he was right. As I lifted a torch from its sconce and began down the hall, he stopped me with a hand on my waist. “Be careful around your maid, Mouse. She’s a Guildford spy.”
I shrugged him off. “I know.”
“Do you? Mind who you speak with in front of her, who you—” He wavered, torn. “If you take someone to your bed, Cecily will hear of it.”
“I don’t intend to take anyone to bed,” I said, lifting my torch higher. “And you’re the one I must mind myself around. At all hours. Not Bess.”
He scratched his neck, a grin playing on his lips. “All hours? You’re paying very close attention, aren’t you?”
As I glared at him, who did he see? That same little girl, chasing after him? A nuisance, sticking her head into tight places where it would get caught?
And yet—I couldn’t resist. Only an hour later, I weaved through shadows as a white cat, trailing Roland and the king.
He limped, clung to Roland for balance. I hid behind tapestries, hopped over bars of torchlight.
They entered the king’s chambers together, heads bent close.
The king was spitting with frustration, and Roland was taking the brunt of it.
I could feel the panic in his mind, feel the axe pressed to his throat.
Cecily was to be the third queen in as many years, and everything, absolutely everything, seemed to depend upon this latest effort.
I turned the corner and found myself in an abandoned gallery. Once, many portraits had hung here. Now there were only a few. I imagined the lost subjects now, hovering as ghosts, heads dangling from their necks.
Queen Gertrude, Hal’s mother, had loomed imposingly in a frame above the staircase.
Her badge was a trove, drawn or stitched as heaps of gold in a mountain cave.
When she was first married to the king, she was called the Dragon’s Treasure.
Hal swore it was true of her personality: She hoarded her favorites in her rooms, forming a separate court entirely while the king dined with his mistress Alice.
That humiliation, and the death of her son, left her mean and isolated.
By the time she was beheaded, all her allies had abandoned her.
She had only one maid who was ordered to stay by her side at the Tomb.
Hal had her golden-brown hair, but not her grim mouth, and the court said she’d birthed all the warmth out of herself and given it to him when he was born.
Then, Alice, the hawk. The king’s most beloved.
Where had she hung? I couldn’t recall. But when the king had ordered his mistress painted, the court muttered for days.
Wry-mouthed Alice. Laughter was her wake.
Laughter, and the king. Always the king trailing after her.
I remembered that most, how she walked before him, or else they walked arm in arm, or rode together in the same saddle.
I remembered their arguments spearing through the great hall, and how the next day they would be murmuring soft endearments, bent close over a shared plate.
I could see where Eleanor Guildford’s likeness must have been because the frame was recently removed, the space left behind not yet gathering dust. Eleanor, the dove.
Solemn and grave, she despised magicians, Prospero in particular, because she believed her connection to the planets was purer.
A magician was a window, she argued. She wanted to see the divine light without the distortion of glass.
She lived on a higher, loftier plane than the rest of the court, and was often in prayer.
The new queen hung near the window. Fingers of moonlight grasped for her throat.
Cecily Guildford, the fox, with her auburn hair and flirtatious brown eyes.
Eleanor’s little cousin. What kind of woman chose for her personal symbol an animal her husband adored hunting?
What kind of woman wanted to be the soft fur he wrapped around his neck?
So much death. When I had called this court home, there had been so much life.
For hours I stared out at the gardens, watching the night retract, thinking of the dead.
I licked the soft pad of my paw. I’d forgotten how much I loved this form until Roland reminded me. How much I preferred to see clearly in the dark.