She knows she must not make a sound, must not display weakness or fear or knowledge, but her organs are being wrung out. She has felt this once before: at the Moon Ball, when she was the chosen victim of Henry’s wrath. Then the other queens had used their combined power to defend her. She has no such saviours now.
“Your Majesty? Are you all right?” a voice is saying, a hand on her shoulder.
“Yes. Yes,” she whispers, trying to make it so.
“Let me help you,” the voice says. Culpepper.Let me help you.
“Wine,” she whispers.
He returns within an instant with the wine, and helps her to straighten. Their fingers feather against each other as she takes the goblet. His hands hover, close to her agony but not touching. Respectful.
“Are you all right, wife?” Henry says. She didn’t see him return.
The dragon is barely alive, slumped in a heap upon the ground. Culpepper steps back.
“Our entertainment is tired,” Henry tells him. “Take it away. It will be healed by my next visit, and then we can enjoy more sport.”
Culpepper does as he is told. She watches him whip the dragon to its feet. Its neck is angled strangely as it stumbles from the arena.
“Did you enjoy my power, darling?” Henry says.
“Mmm,” Howard replies. He holds her chin. Makes her look at him.
“I said, did you enjoy my power? I did it for you, after all.”
He laughs at her confusion. “Did I drive your memory from you with my fingers, sweetheart? You wagered, remember? That I could defeat any creature in that arena?”
It is a test. The other queens had warned her that he would do this. She slips into the Howard he wants her to be. It is as easy as slipping beneath warm sheets in winter. Her hand plays with the patch of darkened silk, drawing his eyes.
“You did, my king. Do I win?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Cecilia
Not even Cecilia’s threats can prepare a ship speedily. It takes weeks for her new stewardess – a pinprick of a woman given by an amorous Perfugian noble, tight bodice and tight mouth – to commission a crew willing to work for Cecilia.
“I am told that there was an incident on your last voyage,” she says, curtseying deeply on the alabaster floor of Cecilia’s receiving chamber. Her ashen hair is wound in tight braids around her head. The fashion is not for hoods in Perfugi, not since so many women were lost to fainting when the city was first established. From her throne, Cecilia eyes a curl that has escaped its plait. She wonders what sound the woman would make were she to pull it out at the root.
“That was twelve years ago; surely they cannot still remember,” Cecilia says.
“Your Majesty is memorable.”
Cecilia herself can barely recall the voyage that brought her from Capetia, where she had briefly been a young queen to a dying king, to Perfugi. She had recently buried her royal husband, but had refused to wear the expected mourning weeds. Black does not suit her complexion. Could that have been why? She dimly recalls an altercation. One of the sailors had looked at her in a way she did not like. Did she skewer his eyes and then stab the men who came to his aid? Yes, it seems more likely that this was the offence.
How tiresome.
“Offer them more money,” Cecilia tells the woman. She refuses to learn her name: she will not be taking her to Elben, so their acquaintance will be brief.
“I will do my best,” the woman says, rising but not meeting Cecilia’s eyes. Good. Lorena was far too free with her looks. As she leaves, Cecilia says, “Fetch the boy.”
Florin is not so attractive now that Lorena is gone, for half the fun lay in watching his sister’s reaction to her bedding him. But he still has the virulence and stamina of youth, and his guilt poses a challenge.
She sews as she waits, lounging in her throne, the hem of her silk dress pulled up over her knees for coolness. Her receiving chamber is an airy space made entirely of ancient dragon bone and marble. When she came to Perfugi, a new, wealthy widow, she could not find a palace worthy of her ancestry, but the Gallool dragons that had once lived upon and within the mountain and whose bones alone could provide shelter from the heat of the lava had long since been hunted to extinction. She had Lorena pay the poorer families of the Fisilis quarter, high upon the mountain’s slopes, for their old houses’ walls and roofs. They could hardly refuse. The Fisilis district is the poorest and oldest of the Perfugian neighbourhoods, built more as a refuge, using the lava as the Elbenese might use water in a moat for protection against attackers. They scrape a living scooping molten rock and harvesting the fire weeds that grow there. With the money Lorena paid them, they could leave Perfugi, if they wished, or find a nicer home in a better district. Cecilia liked to remind Lorena that she could have simply had them killed and their homes ransacked for materials at less expense. She could be merciful. She could even be charitable.
So her receiving chamber was built to her design. A show of opulence and wealth the like of which was not seen elsewhere in the city. Where other nobles and royals masked the walls where they could not afford dragon bone with diamonds or gold, she had no such spaces. All was bone, and all of it was on display.
The boy takes longer than is acceptable. When he arrives, there is none of the flamboyant worship that she enjoys. No eager display of his hardness.
