“There is no life for an unwed princess with child.” Her lips puckered, as if she were swallowing something sour. “My life has always been these rooms and these walls.”
I looked at the trees around us. Their trunks still weak with youth. I was trying to make sense of it, of being here in this walled garden, in the construction of the garden itself, when Hemma might have just been sent away to a summer home. “Why are they not just giving it away, your child? Why will they pass it off as Elin’s child? Why keep it in the royal family?”
“It is royal.” She stared at me.
“But—it will appear to be the firstborn child, the heir to the kingdom.”
“Yes, exactly.” Hemma watched me closely and looked, for the first time, unnerved. She shook her head. “Elin is your daughter? You are here for her?”
“Stepdaughter.” I nodded, feeling, again, the sensation of trying to wrap my arms around a boulder.
“And you say we are alike?” Hemma glanced worriedly at the palace windows. “Have you not wondered why Simeon would agree to take a wife so abruptly? Why a future king would stoop to such levels?”
“Stoop?” I repeated, offended. “He must care about you, greatly, to go to such lengths. Or your mother does, and he is doing as she wishes. But I cannot make sense of—”
“Stop,” she demanded, frustrated by my words.
I agreed with my silence and Hemma held my eyes, trying to say so much with her own.
“Who got you pregnant?” I asked, stupidly, because I knew a second before she said it. I was sorry to make her say it aloud, but it was too late.
“My brother.” She didn’t look away.
“Simeon?” I was still stunned by the confirmation.
“King of the beasts,” she confirmed. Her whole body tense.
“You two are—”
“No,” she whispered.
“You did not want—” I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence.
“No, I did not,” she confirmed, with less vehemence, her shoulders falling.
“He preyed on you?” I asked, appalled. I could not help but think of my girls. Mathilde’s scar. The twin braids. The freckle on a calf. How easily all the world’s children become your own.
She shook her head and whispered, as if frightened: “Not just me. Not only me.Alsome.”
The wall around the garden felt, suddenly, monstrous and suffocating. Not only a snake—a constrictor. “You are his sister.” I did not want to believe her. I did not want to accept her story. But—I thought back to the wound I had seen on Simeon’s arm, the day of our picnic. His apologetic smile. His haste to dismiss it. The sleeve pulled down. The lesion had had a distinctive pattern. Semilunar and curved: It followed the crescent shape of human teeth.
Hemma was quiet. “Woman first, sister second.” Then she looked up and held my eyes. “She deserves to know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
There was not time to examine Hemma’s story. To get every detail. To compose the questions that were swirling, half formed, around my mind. But did thehowor thewhenor even the why really matter in the face of thewhat? No amount of information changed thewhat. And I could barely stand to make the princess—drained by bats, her brother had said—recount it all. I did not blame Hemma for her haste to dispel me from her chambers. She wrote a servant’s commendation for Morwen on a short scroll of parchment, and I was sent back out into the service passageway. I locked her door behind me, leaving Hemma in her gilded cage.
As I felt my way forward in the darkness, my thoughts were jumbled and indirect. The harm of one child always calls to mind the possibility of the harm of your own.
As a mother, you must accept that death and its partners—pain and anguish—are coming for your children. Fear is the steady little hiccup that drives you, wakes you in the night, stealing sleep and forcing extra kisses at each goodbye. You hope, beyond all measure, that when death or anguish come for your children, it will be peaceful, late in life, andlong after you are gone. What a contradiction: to have to accept that your entire role—giving life—was impossible, short-lived, fleeting. But it was not unjust.
Cruelty was different than fatality. Cruelty was not a necessary condition. And no matter which way I turned it—rushing through that dark passageway, losing count of the doors—cruelty was not something a person ever should, or could, make peace with.
I felt reckless. I was lost. I did not wait to listen at the lit rectangle of the next door I saw, but pushed forth into the nearest room. Acid-turquoise walls and drapes. Gold mirrors. I had no idea where I was.
I should have waited. I should have gathered my thoughts. Lessened the heat of my emotions. But I was a mother, and I could not help it. I found a footman at one of the doors and approached him. He looked up at me in surprise, and I told him, lacking no confidence, feeling, in that moment, entirely certain: “I am here to see the queen. I’ve gotten lost looking for the water closet. Take me to her at once.”
I was led back outside, across a different part of the gardens—low boxwood mazes, conical evergreens—to a hothouse filled with orange trees. Inner warmth fogged the windows, but as soon as I stepped inside, I could see: Sigrid was having breakfast with three ladies-in-waiting, each at one side of the table.
