He gasps for air. She is about to pull him into her again – he should be able to hold his breath for longer by now – when she realises: the worm is crying once more.
“I’m sorry,” he says. She puts her foot on his face and pushes him away. Down to the floor, her foot on his cheek. He is weeping openly, the tears wetting the soft fabric of her slipper. How much force would it take to crush the worm? If she put her full weight on it, would the skull give way?
“I love you. I’m sorry,” he sobs.
The urge passes. She pushes him off the dais with the same foot.
“I am tired. You may go,” she says.
If he tries to grovel, she will choke him. He doesn’t. Head down, he leaves drops of salted water on the floor as he crawls backwards out of the chamber. Once out of her sight, she hears him rise and run, footsteps echoing in the bone hallways. Running, running away.
She will reel him back in. It will not take much. When she brings him to Elben, he will know no one and have nothing but her. His goddess.Damnation, where is her ship?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Cleves
Cleves is dreaming of her again. They are dancing, eyes locked, beneath a dome of bordweal power conjured by their own bodies. The tingling, powerful sensation that she had when she joined with Cnothan on her wedding day courses through her. Courses through her and into Seymour and back again, between their eyes, their hands, Cleves’s fingers gloved in Seymour’s, music ephemeral and all around them like an embrace.
I think it must be quite something to be loved by you, Cleves had said on their first meeting. In her dreams, it isn’t something. It is everything.
As they dance beneath the bordweal dome in the hall at Brynd, Seymour’s hand moves up from Cleves’s waist and begins to untie the laces of her bodice. Cleves looses Seymour’s hair from her hood. Then they are kissing, Cleves’s hand pulling Seymour’s head to hers, the other hand running along that bone at the base of the neck that has always fascinated Cleves, always been her undoing.
She can never get past that point, always waking before the delicious ritual of the undressing begins. So it is today. She wakes with the dawn, just before the sky lightens but with the birds chittering from their roosts in the castle roof. The promise of Seymour’s nakedness is tantalisingly close, if only she could slip back into her dreams and manoeuvre them just so. But once Cleves is awake, she can rarely return to sleep.
Still, it takes her a moment to realise that she has not woken naturally. Someone is loitering outside her door – she can hear the shuffleof their footsteps. She swings out of bed, pulling on a bodice and a pair of breeches, and retrieves a short dagger from one of her practical belts. With the dagger in hand, she tiptoes to the door and pulls it open, hoping to take whoever is beyond by surprise. The loiterer straightens, startled, and Cleves covers the jolt in her stomach with a stiff smile. “Clarice, is it not?” she says.
The Feorwan bows their head. “Your Majesty. My apologies for coming to you like this.”
Cleves ushers Clarice into her chamber. “Did any of my people see you?”
“No, I made sure of it.”
Seymour’s old servant is almost as hunted as Seymour herself, and the people of the Feorwan Isles have born the brunt of Henry’s anger over Seymour’s betrayal, suffering raid after raid and several punishing taxes that have brought the formerly prosperous isles to famine. There is no shadow of starvation about Clarice, though: their face is round and healthy, their figure as sturdy as Cleves remembers.
“One of your butterflies found me,” Clarice says.
It has been a sennight or more since she sent her coded message into the void, care of her most innocuous carrier hawk.
“Where is your mistress?”
“Queen Seymour is in Perfugi. Or she was when I fled.”
Cleves goes very still.
“Fled?”
“The dowager queen of Capetia has her.”
Cleves swears, a long string of Ezzonidian words that have no direct translation to Elbenese.
“Quite,” Clarice says.
“Henry’s sister is holding her? You are certain?”
“I saw her taken. Her and the panther.”
“And you did not help them? I thought you were supposed to be her protector.”
