Chapter Four #2
When Tom nodded, Roland ran a hand over his face, smiling. The sun leapt through the trees and illuminated them, in their grace and youth, standing like river gods on the bank. Here was the court in its true glory—not the king, but the beauty he adorned himself with.
Roland shrugged off his jerkin and furs, then his doublet, folding it all carefully on a boulder. He grasped the hem of his linen shirt and tugged it over his head. Folded that, too.
Droplets immediately shattered across his broad shoulders, his thinly muscled chest.
The carved arrowhead of his hips.
“That poem was a trick!” Roland lunged to splash his friends in turn, and then Wyatt and Tom were ganging up on Roland, hauling him underwater.
He emerged breathless, flinging his hair back. He was dunked yet again. Spray flew in perfect, glistening arches.
My mare was still happily chewing on her clovers. I tapped her with my heels to get her attention, then guided her across a shallow part of the stream and into the forest. The deer’s trail was stronger here.
“Where are you going?” Roland called, holding Wyatt off.
“Yes, don’t worry about the hunt,” Wyatt insisted. “We never catch anything. Others do that for us.”
“Chasing is very well and good, Wyatt, but you haven’t bedded Agnes Bryer after two summers of trying.
” Roland shook out his hair and jogged onto the banks.
He rolled his loose shirt back over his head and shoulders, tucking it into his soaked breeches.
“How about a game, Mouse?” he taunted. A slant of sunlight escaped through the trees and cut across his chest. I spun my mare around again. She was exasperated with me now.
Whenever someone asked if I wanted to play a game, I lit up inside. It couldn’t be helped.
He grinned at my predictability. “If you find the stag first, if you’re so sure it’s that way, Wyatt will tell you who you’re paired with in the first round of the tourney tomorrow. Wyatt loves to hand out advantages. Don’t you, Wyatt?’
Wyatt shrugged. “Only for those deserving.”
“And if you find the stag first?” I asked Roland.
“Hmm.” He bit his lip as he thought. “You withdraw from the tournament.”
Tom was watching the two of us carefully. Beads of water hung from his dark curls.
I hesitated. “What about a favor instead. A secret?”
“But you’d just lie.”
“Yes, most likely,” I conceded.
“At least you’re honest about that.” Roland licked his thumb, scrubbing dirt from his boot, a habit I remembered well.
Roland worried over a mess almost as much as illness and plague.
He’d been that way since we were children.
If anyone in the palace so much as mentioned the sweat, he sequestered himself for days.
He avoided sickly Fulke Roet entirely. And he liked his linens smoothed a certain way, his garments hung in the wardrobe just so.
Hal and I would run muddy hands along his clothes whenever he irked us.
We’d cough onto our plates or eat with our mouths open, twirling food on our tongues while he stared in horror.
I wrapped the reins tight around my knuckles. “Fine,” I agreed.
“Excellent.” Roland effortlessly leapt onto his horse. “Have something lovely waiting for me,” he added, pointing to Tom’s loose sheets of parchment. His ink pot, still tipped over.
“Oh, we will.” Wyatt wiggled an eyebrow, then tackled Tom into the water.
Their laughter evaporated in the forest. The crooked-finger mist curled over itself, beckoning us closer.
No sunlight here, just ever-darkening shadows, yet I could sense the mind of the deer, its desperation so terribly human.
Our horses leapt over moss-clothed logs and trampled through streams, and whenever light managed to filter through the canopy, it appeared as if we were inside of an emerald, so green and sharp-edged was the wood.
“This way.” Roland pointed toward a charred, fallen trunk.
“No. He doubled back here.” I guided my horse in the opposite direction, and Roland made a face but followed me regardless. I could hear the hounds in the distance, and Roland sighed once he realized I was right.
We emerged in a glade. For a moment, in the gentle sunlight, I wondered if I’d stepped into my own childhood again, if Hal might emerge through the trees at any moment.
Across the meadow, the stag perked his head up from the clump of weeds he’d been feasting on.
Roland carefully nocked his crossbow, but I nudged the fear in the stag’s mind, and he leapt into the forest as soon as he saw the movement.
Roland stared after the stag for a moment, then his elbow dropped. “How did you track it so well?”
I shrugged and jumped down from my mare. She flicked her tail happily, bending down to wrench a patch of grass with her teeth.
Roland noticed where we were, and his eyes widened. In late spring, it was shaggier and wilder than it was when I last saw it. This clearing, swaying with bluebells and violets, was where Hal was said to have died almost three years ago.
Yet—no blood, no bones. No remnant of horror. The forest would have grown over him if his body still lay here.
I took a shaky breath, then another, running my fingers along the tall grass and the petals of wildflowers, lifting my face to the sun. Hal loved it here. He came here when he wanted to get away from his father’s councilors. He came here when he wanted to breathe.
Why did death taint everything that came before it? This place was beautiful once.
My hand stilled on the grass, and I rose to find Roland staring into the canopy, his cheekbones caressed by the sun. “Why do you want me to forfeit the tournament?” I asked him.
“Because it’s dangerous.” There was an unfamiliar edge to his tone.
“Is it not because you’re afraid I’ve grown more powerful than you? Or that I’ve always been more powerful than you?”
“You don’t care about the tournament.” He turned to peer down at me, and the sun fell in a new pattern over his face.
“I’d know it if you did. You’re here because you want to know if someone killed him.
If I had a hand in it.” He laughed to himself.
“Strange that the stag led us here, to this exact spot. Perhaps he knew you had more accusations. So go on. You accused me of Prospero yesterday. Is Hal today?” A step closer.
“Go on.” His breath hot against my brow now. “Ask.”
“Did you play any part in Hal’s death?” I whispered.
“No,” he seethed. “And I’ll swear it before that ridiculous Sunborn truthteller you’re so fond of. I tire of your suspicion. Do you imagine I colluded with the Lionesse to murder him? What would I have gained? The entire court descended into chaos.”
I gestured to him. What he’d become—how he’d risen since.
“I’ve turned it over and over. Why would he have been out riding alone?
You’d like to believe the story. It makes it cleaner.
But I know he wouldn’t have gone out without a retinue.
The king wouldn’t have allowed it. He never let Hal go off anywhere by himself. ”
“You knew him so well, did you?” he said coolly.
“Well enough to know he loved you more than you deserved.” I stabbed a finger into his chest. “He would twist your actions until they made sense to him. While you were away, he convinced himself your silence wasn’t neglect.
Said you must be preoccupied, learning the secrets of Venusborn magic.
But I knew better. I’d try and convince him otherwise, but he was resolved to love you. ”
“If you were so close to him while I was in Lionesse, then why did he hardly mention you in his letters?”
I raised my chin. “Because you never asked about his life. You only spoke of your own, if you wrote at all.” I took on Roland’s sensual voice.
“Dear Hal. Today I slept and ate and enjoyed a show. Only the show was in my bed, and what I tasted was between legs, and when I slept it was in a pair of arms.” I smiled up at him.
My Moonborn memory was piercing in its clarity.
When it came to Hal, it was more devastating than it was useful. “Familiar?”
His eyes narrowed in fury. For a moment we stared at each other in silence as a hawk wheeled above. “Hal’s death set everything in motion,” I added quietly.
I did not need to show him the history; he lived through it.
Three years ago, shortly after I had been sent away to the Staffords, it had begun.
Many called it the Parade of Death. Alice Seton, accused of treason and executed.
Gossip had reached the king that she had taken a new lover and planned to marry him, tired of the king’s empty promises. It was weeks of tempest when he heard.
Hal’s death, a supposed accident, only months after Alice’s.
Suddenly, the king had no mistress, no heir.
The false charges were brought against old Queen Gertrude, the axe was swung again.
The crown was lowered onto Eleanor Guildford’s head.
The king had a pretty young bride, a new vessel for his heirs.
Then the king raged again: All of Eleanor’s babies were in shallow graves in the palace graveyard, too small to live outside her body.
Why was he denied another son? Someone must be at fault.
Eleanor and Prospero were both arrested.
Eleanor, for the failure of her body. Prospero, for the failure of his counsel.
Again, the axe, the red spray, and two more people the king claimed to love were dead.
Why couldn’t Roland see a map in the blood?
The answer arrived as quickly as the question did: The way it had spread was to his advantage.
I tucked unpinned hairs into my crescent hood, starting to pace.