Chapter Forty-Two Cleves #2
The divine power floods his skin, as if someone has lit a flame upon his body.
If Cleves thought the pain in her wrist was bad, the full-bodied agony that follows eclipses it.
Beside her, Seymour curls over, collapsing on the floor, her arms clutched to her stomach.
Cleves manages to stay on her feet by clinging to one of the bedposts.
The light around Henry is blindingly beautiful: blue-green-purple, it ripples across him, drawn to the place where Seymour stabbed him.
It floods the wound, healing it from the inside out, knotting sinews back together, regrowing flesh and skin.
And Cleves feels every movement because the power is coming from her, drawn out of her like hair tugged from its roots, like nails pulled from their beds.
She feels blindly for Seymour’s hand as she says, “You cannot take us both.”
Henry snarls. “I have no desire for either of you. I am no rapist.”
From her position on the floor, Seymour laughs wildly.
Henry’s gaze snaps to her. “Is that the tale you tell yourself, Lady Bitch, to justify what you have done?” He kneels next to her, and his voice is low and ferocious.
For a moment, Cleves thinks he might bite Seymour’s ear off.
“I truly loved you. If you had ever said no, I would have stopped. But you didn’t.
Because it suited you to use me, to make me think you loved me too. ”
He believes it, too. There is little more dangerous than a righteous tyrant.
From her angle, leaning on the bed, she sees something, though.
Despite the pain he is inflicting on them, he is not totally healed.
She thinks of the festering wound on his leg, the one Boleyn left there before she tumbled to her death.
Then she thinks of his power that is truly hers, and the way the queens wielded it together to bring down Cecilia’s ship.
She wonders if they can do so again, just the two of them.
Cleves drops to her knees as Henry continues to whisper vicious nothings into Seymour’s ear.
The pain is lessened now, but Henry does not seem to have noticed that he is no longer draining her – perhaps he is too focused on Seymour, for she remains curled, like an urchin.
Cleves drags herself towards her lover, until she is within reach of Seymour’s leg.
“I’m going to make an example of you,” Henry is whispering to Seymour.
“I’m going to tie every one of your limbs to a different horse and whip them until they froth.
You will feel them pop out of their sockets, one by one, and then the flesh and sinew will tear too, until the horses finally pull you apart. ”
Cleves grasps Seymour’s ankle and tries to drown out his voice, reaching instead for that small, quiet part of herself that was waiting for her to call upon it when she used the spirit stone.
She does not know if it will work without the stone, but she hopes that the Moon Ball, and the divine power that danced through the queens then, will come to her once more in Seymour’s presence.
She thinks of their lovemaking the previous night, not of the act itself but of the feeling of communion, oneness, rightness that filled her.
“And the delicious part is that I will make sure you live through it all. No easy death for you, my little lying queen.”
Seymour’s ankle twitches in Cleves’s grasp. Does she understand what Cleves is trying to do? Has she felt some spark that Cleves has not?
“You think it’s your power, do you? Well, let’s see how much it feels like yours when I use it to keep you alive while your limbs are ripped from your fat body.”
It starts as rage – for how dare anyone speak to her angry queen like that?
– but then it blossoms into something new, something dangerous.
It is the kind of anger she saw in Seymour when they first met.
The kind of awe she felt when she danced with the other queens beneath dragons at Brynd.
It is the kind of emotion she has always tried to mask behind jollity, because anything else in a woman as contrary as her would be threatening.
Too much, they would say. She is too much.
Well, tonight she will be overflowing with her muchness. She will crack the walls and let the flood in.
The feeling, fulsome and hot, fills her body. A flame of blue-rose-green flickers across her hand and up Seymour’s ankle. Seymour goes still. The flame flickers back up Cleves’s arm and grips her by the throat, where it seems to scream, Release me.
“No,” Henry says, watching the light. There is alarm in his eyes. He focuses his own power and she feels hers begin to wane. She does not know how to hold on to it yet. She must act quickly.
“You cannot take it from me,” Henry says, and there is something pitiful in his voice.
“Not yet, perhaps,” Cleves says. “But soon.”
Before the power ebbs from her entirely, she uses one final burst of anger to fling herself upon him.
She aims not for his eyes or his heart, but for his leg.
She feels along the limb until he gasps in pain, and then she digs her finger into the wound, sending the bordweal down her arm not to heal, but to poison.
Henry roars. The door bursts open, Henry’s bodyguard taking in the scene – two queens, one a traitor, somehow in his king’s chamber.
“Run!” she shouts to Seymour, and Seymour pushes to her feet.
Cleves gives Henry’s wound one final dig, wedging her finger in until it meets something ungiving and Henry makes an incoherent gasp, like he had forgotten what pain was until that moment.
Then Cleves is taking Seymour’s hand and the two women are running, running, pushing past the bodyguard and streaking down the passage, out of the castle and into the bleak night of homelessness.
They run across the courtyard to the stables, shoving past servants who do not know whether to aid or hinder them.
Seymour fumbles with the bridle, and in the torrent of her emotions Cleves almost shouts at her, until her stewardess appears.
There is a moment of suspense, where Cleves and her servant look at each other, unsure how this is going to play out, and then the stewardess is slipping the bit into the horse’s mouth, and Seymour is tightening the girth, and they are mounted within moments.
To this point they have been almost silent. Cleves is grateful that she has never seen fit to shoe her horses, preferring to ride them with care instead. It will make their escape all the quieter.
But then a cry of an altogether different kind rips the air, somewhere between a cat’s mewl and a bird’s call of danger.
“Lelij!” she says.
The gargoyle had been slumbering in her chamber, on the other side of the castle. The commotion should have been too far away to wake him, and yet that gentle creature knew, even in sleep, that his mistress was distressed.
He erupts through the castle’s doors now, a scattered, unwieldy beast with legs and neck too long for his body.
Henry’s guards are not far behind him. Some appear on the ramparts and take aim at him with crossbows.
He pauses, confused, as arrows skitter across the cobbles around him.
The dear, silly creature will be killed if he does not move.
“Cleves!” Seymour shouts, urging her horse towards the drawbridge.
“I will follow!” Cleves shouts. She steers her horse towards Lelij. She throws herself sideways, gripping her mount’s body with her thighs and calves, steering it with one hand as the other reaches for her gargoyle. And then he is in her arms, scooped into her chest and still cawing.
“Quiet,” she hisses, labouring to right herself in the saddle while turning her horse. Lelij muffles his calls of fear in her chest, and she covers him, bending low over her steed’s neck to avoid the arrows.
Another cry goes up from inside the castle, as if the very stones of her home have turned against her.