Chapter Forty-Four Cleves
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Cleves
The race from Cnothan is a blur. They ride through the night, hardly knowing their direction, hardly speaking, but always they keep the coast in sight.
Seymour glances that way often, until Cleves realises that she is looking for Clarice’s ship, or any vessel bearing the mark of the Feorwa Isles – the crescent moon emblazoned on its sails.
“They cannot come to shore,” she says, more harshly than she intended. When they were only suspected of aiding Seymour, Henry authorised raids upon the isles. If they were seen taking both traitor queens on deck, he would slaughter their entire people.
Seymour nods and does not look that way again.
When the sun is up fully and they risk being seen on the road, they slow to a trot and steer their horses into the cover of the fields and copses of western Elben.
Cleves’s mind frays, snippets of long nights and longer days crouching and running and fleeing through Ezzonid mixing with the journey through Elben. She starts to think as she did then.
“We should lay false trails,” she says. Her throat is scratchy from disuse.
“How?” Seymour says. She leads Seymour towards the sea, dismounting as the soil gives way to sand dunes.
“Careful,” Seymour says, nodding towards a party of cockle pickers who are scouring the beach a little distance away.
Both queens are dressed in men’s weeds, which in itself is not too unusual for the working women of Elben, but Cleves’s cropped red hair is conspicuous.
She rips one of the sleeves of her blouse and wraps it around her head like a turban.
They wander together down the beach, away from the cockle pickers. Seymour picks some seaweed that has washed up in the shallows. They chew on it, trying to ignore the grit stuck in the fronds.
“There,” Cleves says, pointing to a small boat anchored just offshore.
Seymour baulks. “That is someone’s livelihood.”
“It could throw them off our trail,” Cleves says.
Seymour shakes her head, and Cleves falls back on her usual levity. “You did not seem to mind about your household’s livelihoods when you consigned Hyde to the ocean.”
Seymour looks as though she’s been slapped.
“That was …” She peters out before she can finish her empty statement. Different.
“Very well, show me what to do,” Seymour says. They wrench a hole in the wooden boards and push the boat out towards the ocean.
“If all goes well, it will sink a few miles out,” Cleves says. “The owner will think it was stolen and if Henry’s people come to hear of it, they will wonder if we left Elben entirely. It would fit with your past behaviour. With any luck, they will look for us in Ezzonid or Perfugi.”
They return to the horses in silence and continue their journey, but that small act has given Cleves back some of her mind. For now, at least.
They come to the outskirts of Gem?res, straddling Cnothan and Plythe, at dusk of the third day.
So much has occurred since Cleves was last here that she can scarcely credit it.
Then, she feared that Howard would be the queen to reveal their treachery to Henry.
She chuckles to herself: she thought so much of her own cleverness that she could never have foreseen that she would be the one to be discovered first.
“Should one of us enter the town to buy bread?” Seymour says.
“It would be too dangerous,” Cleves replies. “Gem?res is well-connected. They will have heard the news already. Better for us to find vittles in one of the hamlets to the east, where travellers rarely venture.”
Just as they start to look for somewhere to bed for the night, the peals of the town’s church bells reach their ears. Usually, such sounds make Cleves smile, for they are normally signals of celebration, but this is a warning. She looks at Seymour and sees her own tightness mirrored there.
“Do you think that’s for us?” Seymour says.
“It would be too much to hope that Elben has been invaded, so yes, I think it must be for us.”
“Two traitor queens on the run.”
“Not even Queen Isabet could do as much,” Cleves says.
They smile at each other – it is the first time they’ve done so since their night together.
The memory rears between them, and Seymour shifts.
Cleves looks away. “We should keep moving. Travelling through the night is difficult, but it will help us evade notice. We can sleep during the day.”
Seymour looks at her quizzically. “You know a lot about evading capture for a queen born of royalty, my lady. I thought this was supposed to be my area of expertise.”
“Have you not heard? I am the strange queen. I know all manner of things I should not.”
They stray further from the road, trusting the guidance of the moon and the constancy of the lyssa star, shining low in the sky.
When their horses are dragging their hooves and Lelij is mewling softly in complaint from his saddle bag, they come to a long row of liftathen flowers.
Even in moonlight, they are all bright reds and oranges, like dragonflame.
“This is the border of my territory,” Cleves says.
Other territories are more nebulous in their boundaries, but the romantics of Plythe have for many hundreds of years marked their first loves by planting these flowers at the border of the territory as a declaration of affection.
The flowers live for several decades, but do not seed by themselves, the particular fairy that once spread them having been hunted to extinction many years ago, so it is possible to know exactly which flower belongs to which couple.
Stones, carved with the couple’s initials, litter the ground, each one set beside a flower when its seed was planted.
“How lovely,” Seymour says when Cleves explains the tradition to her.
“For something as fleeting as youth and love, we do spend a lot of time attempting to make both eternal, don’t we?” Cleves says.
“You do not believe love can be eternal?”
“Death does rather get in the way, does it not?”
They find an accommodating oak, the trunk large enough to cradle them both, and huddle together in a crook between its exposed roots. Seymour throws her cloak across them both, and looks up at the spidery outlines of the tree’s barren branches.
“Sometimes I like to imagine what trees like this have seen,” she says. “How old do you think this oak is – one hundred, two hundred years?”
“Three at least,” Cleves replies. Her throat is tight again.
“Just think of all the kings and queens it has survived. All the wars. Can you imagine, it would have lived through the Hydden Uprising, and the Battle of Kywsa. It might even have lived through Queen Isabet and the Massacre of Pilvreen. Imagine how vast these roots stretch out beneath us, probably so much further than the branches we can see. Probably down to that stream over there in the distance.”
Cleves closes her eyes, leans her forehead on her knees. Seymour’s words worm their way into her mind as she strains to open her throat, as if her body is inhaling thoughts instead of air.
“Sometimes, when I was abroad and alone, I would wonder whether what Boleyn and I did had all been for nothing. I couldn’t see how to bring everyone together.
And I got to thinking about those roots.
The way that the first queens were buried in that cave where others could find them and learn the truth.
Then how Queen Isabet acted upon that truth, like a sapling sprouting from the roots of those buried queens.
She was cut down, but the roots remained for us to find.
So even if we are cut down before our tree flourishes, I have hope that our roots will remain, unseen but strong, and the sapling of our rebellion will sprout again one day. ”
It is only when Cleves feels water on her cheek that she realises she is weeping. Seymour shifts beside her.
“Cleves?” she says gently, then, more urgently: “Cleves? Speak to me.”
Cleves cannot talk. Her throat is utterly closed, her body like a rock, her arms locked around her knees. Seymour places the back of her hand on Cleves’s cheek, feeling for fever.
“You are safe,” she says. “Cleves? You are safe. This will pass.”
She does not attempt to prise Cleves’s hands apart, as others have done in the long distant past. She settles in front of her and rubs Cleves’s arms in long, slow strokes, up and down, up and down.
Gradually, Cleves’s sparrow-like breaths slow to match the movement.
Her throat opens, and all Cleves is left with is a bone-deep weariness.
“What do you need?” Seymour says.
What Cleves truly needs is to taste Seymour, and to know that she can still arouse her. But to ask that would be to use Seymour. She shutters herself. “Nothing. I am tired.”
She closes her eyes and curls up inside the cloak. A moment later, Seymour settles with her back against Cleves’s.
“Thank you,” Cleves whispers, half hoping that Seymour will not hear it, will not understand that Cleves is now in her debt.
“I am not the only angry queen here tonight,” Seymour says. “I wish you realised that.”
Cleves thinks then of Johana. He never looked for love in his lifetime either. Death was far too near. It feels near tonight, too.