Chapter Thirty-Nine Cleves
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Cleves
Knocking wakes Cleves from her slumber. Seymour stirs in her arms, and shivers. The fire has gone out.
“I have not kept my promise,” she murmurs, reaching for the nearest piece of fabric – Cleves’s own gown – and wrapping it around her lover’s shoulders.
The knocking comes again, more urgent this time.
“A few moments!” she shouts.
“I’m sorry, Your Majesty, but it’s your cousin. He has been … and the lady …” It must be one of the servants. There is real terror in their voice, a terror that seeps through the door, across the hall and into Cleves’s bones. Cleves sees that Seymour is blearily awake.
“Something has happened,” she tells her.
Silently, Seymour rises and the women hurry to pull on their apparel, lacing each other into their bodices with a haste they did not have last night.
When they open the door, the servant is pulling at his doublet in distress.
“Show me,” Cleves says.
The servant’s words make no sense. Johana has been …
what? Restrained, perhaps, or injured? He is not clumsy but perhaps he took a fall.
The other words – and the lady – hover on the edge of her mind, but she will not entertain their meaning.
If something truly dreadful had happened, she would have heard it.
She would have sensed it, even through the delirium of last night.
The stairs are steep, the gallery long, and all she can hear as she follows the servant is the beat of her hurrying shoes in time with her heart.
They reach his room and the servant steps aside, unwilling to enter. There is a lump on the floor. Discarded clothing, she thinks. Thoughtless.
She stops in the doorway. The servant, next to her, looks away.
Someone’s hand rests upon her shoulder.
“Cleves, I’m so …” Seymour says.
Cleves shakes her away and stumbles into the room, her knees landing hard on the coagulating ooze seeping from Johana’s body.
She bends over him, putting her cheek very close to his mouth. She closes her eyes so that she does not have to look at the gore spilling from his stomach.
Was that? The faintest warmth, there and then not, there and then cold.
“He lives,” she says.
“Fetch a physician,” Seymour tells the servant.
“Is that …?” the servant says. Though her eyes are still closed, Cleves can hear the unfinished question – is that safe? Is that allowed, given we are all of us traitors in your presence, Queen Seymour?
“Here,” Cleves says roughly, reaching into her gown’s pocket and pulling out a purse of coins. The servant takes it. It is enough to buy the physician’s silence, and the servant’s risk, too.
“Hurry,” Seymour says.
Two sets of footsteps then – one hurrying away, one towards. She smells Seymour’s scent: heart smoke and cloves.
“I am here,” Seymour says.
No. Cleves cannot admit joy, not now.
“Johana?”
It takes him an age to muster the strength to answer. His speech is more breath than words. “I’m sorry.”
“She is gone,” Cleves says.
“Mmm.”
Seymour rises again, and instructs another servant to ride out after Cecilia. Maybe they can intercept her before she finds civilisation.
“Can you hear them?” Johana says. His hand finds Cleves’s.
“Hear who?”
“Them.”
He could not have conjured that night better with a thousand words. The intonation could be nothing but the nightmare of their childhood, one that pursues them from country to country, castle to castle.
The soldiers.
She does not want them to be the last thing he hears. “No, I do not hear them,” she lies. “This is what I hear.”
She hums the lullaby of their childhood, one that she has not heard since before the unrest. It is a lilting tune that winds like the courtyards of Cnothan in circles and steps, climbing to a sweet point.
How weak he looks. Her cousin, who can match her barb for barb. He smiles. His teeth are blotted with crimson.
He mouths something.
“I cannot hear you, cousin,” she says.
His hand edges from the wound on his stomach.
“Cousin, no,” she says. “Save your strength.”
She presses her own hands to the injury. Blood pulses slowly through her fingers. Surely she is strong enough to hold him together? Surely she could scoop the gore up and push it back inside him? Build him again, plaster over the cracks of his wound?
His hand comes to rest next to one of the legs of his bed. He taps the wood.
“I cannot reach,” Cleves says.
Seymour is there in an instant, stepping over the raised floorboard from which Cecilia must have taken the key to the lodge. She peers underneath the mattress, then turns her attention to the frame of the bed. Johana watches her, his breathing light and laboured.
Cleves has never minded silence before, but this is intolerable.
“Where is the physician?” she roars.
“I think I have found something,” Seymour says, feeling with one hand inside the bed frame. “There is a hollow in the wood.”
She pulls out a velvet pouch, the vivid orange of Ezzonid. She brings it to Cleves, and without another word presses her own hands to Johana’s wound so that Cleves can look inside.
The velvet’s sunset umber turns scarlet in her hands. The parcel is light and strangely warm. From it, under Johana’s glassy gaze, she pulls a cushion containing a dozen golden dress pins.
To the unknowing eye they are no different from any royal dress pin used to secure a frontlet or a veil, a ruff or a collar. But Johana would not have hidden them if they were not important. She holds the cushion up to the light, and understanding washes over her like dawn.
The head of each pin is adorned with a molten sliver of phoenix feather.
She never knew what became of Sybil’s gift.
She assumed it was secreted in a vault, like the binding cloths beneath the Tower of High Hall.
But she knows, the way she knew when she laid eyes on the bird as a child, the way she knew when she communed with the bordweal, that she holds the deepest, most precious magic.
Johana tries to speak. She bends over him.
“You were always very good at staying alive, dear cousin,” he breathes. “Promise me you will never stop being good at it.”
“I promise,” she says. Her throat is tight.
He closes his eyes.
“Keep running,” he whispers, though she can hardly hear the words.
She and Seymour stay there, hunched over him, as his chest rises fainter and fainter, and the pump of blood through Seymour’s fingers ebbs. How can one so sharp die so quietly? How can her cousin, who has survived so much, be felled by a petty princess? It is not right. It is not just.
At some point, Seymour rises. Cleves is aware of her talking to the servants and, presumably, to the damned late physician. In one hand she cups Johana’s cooling cheek. In the other she holds the cushion. The feathery pinheads make dots of warmth on her palm.
“Cleves,” Seymour says, kneeling beside her once more. “Cleves, we must flee. Cecilia has still not been discovered.”
“Yes,” Cleves says, but does not move.
“She has my sunscína too,” Seymour says.
Of course she does. Cecilia has played them both for fools. At least they had enough foresight to conceal the other queens’ part in their treachery.
Strangely, it is the thought of those other queens – of Howard, really, and her determination to place herself in the greatest possible danger in order to benefit them all – that brings Cleves to her feet.
She turns to the servants. “Wrap his body. In Ezzonid it is customary to bury our dead in the Desa Savalis, but we will not be able to ship him back to my homeland.”
She cannot bury him in the Lake of Souls, but she can find another body of water for him to rest in.
“Take him to the Dreomere,” she tells them.
The mere is the largest of Elben’s lakes, and bridges the territories of Cnothan and Hyde.
It does not hold the religious significance of the Desa Savalis, but perhaps it will be enough for his spirit to find peace.
Next she must think to the future. Always ahead, for insanity lies behind. Perhaps, on some level, she has been preparing for this ever since she committed to toppling the King of Elben. She can see the events that will undoubtedly follow.
“If Henry is at High Hall, then we have a day at least before he could bring an army to Cnothan,” she says. She runs a hand through hair still tangled from her night with Seymour. That night feels like moons ago, and also so very close – her body still bears the marks and heat of their lovemaking.
There seems only one thing to do. “I must return to Cnothan and raise the drawbridge,” she says. Seymour’s head snaps up. “Why?”
“It is one of the most defendable of the castles. It is my home.”
“But you won’t be able to leave. We have only just committed to our plan for the binding cloths,” Seymour says, crossing her arms.
“You would have me simply hand over my castle?”
“It is only a castle.” Seymour surges forward and takes Cleves’s hands. She kisses the knuckles. “You could keep Cnothan and never defeat him, or leave Cnothan and stand a chance of overthrowing him.”
“You underestimate my cunning, my Lady Seymour.”
“Why are you so afraid?” Seymour says.
“Just because you decided to destroy your safety for the sake of a grand statement does not mean I am a coward for not doing the same.” She wishes Seymour could understand that she must consider her position as a royal not only of Elben but of Ezzonid.
She may be considered eccentric, but she must uphold her royal duty.
An eccentric with a castle has power. An eccentric without a castle has nothing.
Seymour’s eyes glisten. “I do not understand what you can hope to gain from your course of action. It is short-sighted.”
Cleves turns away.
“I must make arrangements,” she says. She must get out of that cursed room.
She never spent any time in her own bedchamber, so her belongings remain packed in their trunks, ready to be returned to the carriage. It will be a blessedly quick escape.
Seymour trails behind her. “Let us discuss this a little longer, Cleves,” she says.
“You can come with me back to Cnothan, and I will protect you, or I will give you a horse and the means to get you to Mathmas, or wherever you choose to go.”
Seymour grabs her arm, forcing her to stop.
“I do not require your help,” she says. She shakes Cleves’s arm, her grip unforgiving.
“If it comes to it, Clarice can take me to Mathmas. I am telling you that you have a choice to make. A choice between your old way of life, safe and lonely, and the promise of a new life, dangerous but full of possibility.”
“No, I have a choice between my home and belongings and status, or being homeless and alone and in danger.”
Seymour’s face goes blank. “It is a shame, given what has passed between us, that you think you would be alone.”
How dare Seymour attempt to make last night more significant than it really was. They were both lustful. Cleves has been wanting Seymour since their first meeting, and Seymour was probably lonely and in need of satiation.
She says, “Well, at some point I will stop making you angry, and then what will we have, my angry queen?”
She has set it up nicely for Seymour to quip back, You will never stop making me angry.
“You are grieving. You are not thinking clearly,” Seymour says.
“Come with me, at least as far as Cnothan,” Cleves replies. “We can argue all the way, I promise. When we arrive, you can decide whether you are going to stay with me, or whether I am going to deliver you to your Clarice and their ship.”
Eventually, Seymour nods. Cleves leads her down to the waiting carriage, hands her in and climbs in beside her. She pulls the curtains across. “Go!” she commands the driver, and the carriage springs away.
Inside, Cleves turns her attentions to Seymour. It is so much easier to lose herself in a fine woman’s mouth and breasts and neck and stomach than to think on that blood-drenched lump on the floor of Johana’s room. But Seymour stops her.
“I will hold you, and no more,” Seymour says.
She kisses Cleves on the mouth, then folds her in her arms. It is not what Cleves would have chosen to do, but there, with her head resting beneath Seymour’s chin, all of her frantic purpose rushes from her.
They sit like that in silence as the carriage bumps along the scrind road, and all the while the cushion and its beautiful cargo warms her thigh, where it rests in her pocket.
Well, Cleves had one night with Seymour. One night, before she walls herself off from the world and Seymour makes her escape. She must be satisfied.
One particularly big jolt throws them from their seat. They land on the floor of the carriage, arms and legs tangled.
“What is it?” she calls, as Seymour struggles to extricate herself.
The voice that answers her is not the driver’s. It is a voice she has not heard since the Moon Ball.
“Well met, wife.”