“Give it to me, sister,” Henry says, his eyes alight.
Cecilia spins the knife. It is very slender. Not so different from a needle.
She pounces. Howard screams as Cecilia pins her down with one arm and with the other holds the knife to her throat.
“Shall I do your blood ritual for you, brother?” she asks Henry.
He prowls. She and he are the same in so many ways. She does not know how to feel about that. It once would have thrilled her.
“He will never give you your crown,” Howard says, struggling against Cecilia’s grasp. No divine power surrounds her now. Cecilia glances around the hall. Most of the courtiers have scattered, blocking the entrance as they flee. Mary Boleyn and her children are nowhere to be seen. The remaining queens are surrounded by royal soldiers. Seymour stands before Cleves like a shield.
They should be on their knees, but there is no hint of surrender in their stances. Instead, they are surrounded by light. It gathers like a storm around them. It is the bordweal, flocking to protect its true mistresses.
“It is time,” Henry says not to Cecilia, but to Charles Brandon, standing to her right.
Brandon grimaces. “Your Majesty, we have not—”
“It. Is. Time.”
Henry flexes his fingers, and a little of his remaining power glows around his fists. Cromwell disappears through the door behind the dais.
“Even if you kill us, people know the truth now,” Howard says.
Henry sneers at her. “An old truth is nothing. You want a new religion, little rose? Then I will give you one.”
The doors behind the dais open. Cecilia spins around, bringing Howard with her, and witnesses the most monstrous being she has ever seen loping across the threshold, its eyes red, its teeth bright.
The beast is as big as two men, and though its shape is human, little else about it is. Its arms are too long for its body, and they end in claws sharp as knives. It is covered in rusty scales, patched and painful, raw as though it once had skin that has flaked away. Along its spine several horns erupt, bone-white and tipped with poisonous green. The face is the most unsettling part of it: it has the muzzle of a brute, but its ears are shell-like, human. It roars again, that same sound she heard the night More sacrificed himself. The roar of the crone.
She knows those eyes.
“What have you done?” Cecilia whispers.
They have forged a crone from the bones of the man she once adored. But this is a different kind of crone. They will need to find a new name for this horror.
“Kill the women,” Henry shouts. Not the queens. The women.
The beast that was More surveys its targets, its eyes coming to rest upon Cecilia and Howard. The creature bares its teeth and snarls.
In some part of her, Cecilia has known how this will end since the day she found Arthur’s book – with the space inside for his favourite instruments of torture – inside Henry’s rooms. She knows what she must do.
She pushes Howard away and flings herself at her brother. They topple together to the floor.
It is not Henry she grapples with. Not the beloved brother who protected her, day after day. It is the other one, the older one. The one who liked to pull her hair out and burn her toys.
Their tussle is frantic. All around them courtiers flee the monster that was Bishop More, and the plight of their king is lost in the pursuit of their own survival. If she tries hard, she can imagine they are children once more, play-fighting in the nurseries of High Hall.
He bears down on her, his mouth pursed with effort. His hand closes around her wrist and slams it against the oak floor. Pain shoots up her arm, but she does not let go of the knife. She knows pain, and she can bear it. She is a woman, after all.
She brings her leg up hard against his groin.
His weight slacks, and she uses the momentum to swivel them over, so she is on top. She kneels upon his chest. It is obscene. She likes that. She likes that this final humiliation should be so shocking.
“Sister,” he says. She pauses. Is her Henry returned? But no – from the corner of her eye, she spies him reaching for a cudgel, dropped by some panicked guard.
He thinks to use her heart against her? Oh, what a foolish boy he is.
The knife slides into his neck, between his spine and the tender hardness of his gullet. For a fleeting moment, she sees the boy he once was. Then he is gone, and all she sees is Arthur’s hatred.
