“Give me a few hours. You may wait here. I’ll have my nephew fetch you some food.”
Cleves and Seymour sink into the chairs beside the table as Syndony leaves with Elizabeth. The dragon, Urial, nuzzles Cleves’s hand, perhaps remembering that it was she who bred him, perhaps simply recognising a lover of animals. Lelij chirrups again from Cleves’s lap, warning the dragon off from his mistress.
The silence stretches out between them until the blacksmith appears with cheese, a pot of honey still on its comb and some hard wafers studded with seeds and herbs. Their hunger overcoming all else, the women smother the wafers with soft goat’s cheese and drizzle honey on top.
Cleves takes a bite and leans back in her chair.
“Well,” she says, trying to lighten the mood, “I had to give you something to be angry at me about, or what would happen to us?”
“Why do you do that?” Seymour says.
“Do what?”
“Turn everything into a jape? Act as if nothing matters?”
Cleves does not have an answer.
“Not everything has to be serious,” she says.
Seymour throws her hands up in frustration, wafer seeds spilling to the table. “There is so much that is going on in your head and you will not tell me even half of it.”
“You may have my body and my desire, but to lay claim to my thoughts is too much, my lady,” Cleves says. How dare Seymour try to prise her open, to lay bare the innermost workings of her mind, when she has revealed nothing of her own heart?
“Why is it too much?” Seymour says. “Do you not love me?”
Cleves loses her breath. She flounders and Seymour, seeing this, presses her point. “Well? Do you, or not?”
Cleves will not lie to her, but she cannot admit the truth either. So she says the worst thing she could say: “Well, you do not love me, so …”
She does not know what point she is trying to make, only that she absolutely must divert the conversation. Damn her obsession, damn that moment Seymour tore her skirt with the crone’s tooth and tore through Cleves’s defences at the same time. Seymour has gone very still, and very soft, as though someone has punctured her.
“If that is what you believe, then I do not know why I am here,” she says. She stands, gathering one final wafer and a large slice of cheese.
“Where are you going?” Cleves says.
“To find Syndony,” is the terse reply. Seymour pauses at the door. “For all that you claim to despise her, you and Cecilia Tudor are very alike. She too will do anything rather than admit the truth of her heart.”
“Just because I am wise enough not to declare my weaknesses for all to see does not make me like that woman,” Cleves says.
Seymour smiles sadly. “It is a weakness, is it?”
If Cleves thought she could not feel smaller, she was wrong. She wants to kiss Seymour, she wants to press her against that doorway and make her never leave. But most of all, Cleves wants to run. Thethud thudof the soldier’s steps is thumping through her head so hard that she barely hears Seymour’s parting words: “I think I am cursed to love women who can never love me back.”
The next moment, she is gone, the door closing gently behind her.
Cleves closes her eyes, tightening and loosening her hands until the thumping recedes. When she has control of herself again, she shrugs, smiles ruefully, though no one can witness it. Well, it had to end when they reached Mathmas anyway. They will be friends by and by. It is for the best. She deposits Lelij on the floor beside her, stretches her legs out, pulls a blanket over her lap, and takes another wafer. Syndony will be back soon, and they will visit Parr and finalise their plan. This is what is important. They will defeat Henry, kill him, and she will go back to Cnothan and continue her life as she always has. Perfectly content.
She does not notice that she is crying until she tastes salt in the honey.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Cecilia
Cecilia never ventures into sanctuaries unless she cannot help it. They have always made her uneasy, even when she was a young girl when her only god was her father and the law of his word. They are too full of judgement; they make her want to shout merely to hear something. They are empty, and they make her worry that there is an emptiness inside her.
But once Henry has promised her a throne of her own, she finds she must know precisely how he is planning on securing it for her. And that means spending time with the man who has her heart, and who she no longer seems to know at all.
“Your knees will be ground to dust,” she says, as she strides into the sanctuary and finds More, predictably, praying before Cernunnos’s altar. She holds her chin high, daring the god to strike her down.You hold no fear for me any longer,upstart and interloper. She thrills at even thinking the blasphemy.
