“What are you doing?” he says.
She kneels beside his leg. Delicately, she takes the hose from his hands and pulls it back down.
“Howard—”
The bandage is covering the injury now, and she truly does not want to look at it again. A thick odour of sour milk and iron emanates from beneath the fabric. But she cannot hold her breath, or he will see. Before she doubts herself, she unties the knots and lets the bandage fall away.
It is worse than she could have imagined. There is no blood, no muscle or bone, only a roiling twist of divine power, as if Henry hadconsumed the bordweal and robbed it of its bruising colour, turning it so purple it is almost ebony.
“It hurts you, my king,” she says, trying to breathe through her mouth.
“It’s blasted agony.”
She frames the opening in her hands, dips her head and licks it. It coats her tongue in bitter rot.
“Howard,” Henry says again, half wonder, half repulsion.
She stays there, nose and tongue inside him, for as long as she can bear. It is not so different from when men have held her head over their cocks and pushed them down her throat. At least this time she is the one doing the penetrating. She almost smiles: this is savagery. This is a kind of veiled vengeance.
When she can be sure she will not retch, she pulls back and looks up at her husband. The taste of him is still in her mouth, and she wonders whether her face is coated in the deep purple of his flesh as well.
For a while, it feels as though the two of them are frozen like that. The supplicant and the divine, neither knowing which is which.
“It is your god,” Henry says. She hears the true question. It is always the same question. Her father asked it too, with different words.Do you forgive me? Do you still love me? Does the cruelty of my body not repulse you?
“Yes,” she says. Prickle. Prickle.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Howard
She emerges from Henry’s chamber like a peacock. Her gown is the colour of the bordweal, her headdress a fan of diamonds, perched atop her curls. Goldfoot balances on her shoulder, his claws digging into the stretch of muscle there. The bird inside her is quiet now. Quiet; not slumbering or cowed as it usually is in such moments, but watchful.
This certainty is a rare and passing gift, and she grasps it tightly.
Her ladies are gathered already. She comes upon them in her receiving chamber, kneeling as if at prayer around the expanse of silk she chose for Mary Boleyn’s wedding gift. She pauses in the doorway, watching them. Ursula, quietly stealing pearls from Lady Tylney’s pile, waiting for her to notice the prank. Her half-sister Legh, the girl she grew up alongside; both chain and anchor. Lady Tylney, older than the rest of them, yet somehow more fragile than all. And Susanna Horenbolt, the watchful artist, richer in mind and poorer in upbringing.
The distance between her and them feels almost insurmountable, just as it does between her and the other queens. Do they feel it too, with each other? They do nothing but talk all day, and yet Howard realises, in this moment, that she hardly knows them at all.
Goldfoot takes flight. He arches across the room and lands with a mewl beside Susanna. Without looking up from her embroidery, she scoops him into her lap and continues her work. They are an idyll ofdomesticity. Goldfoot peers at Howard from between Susanna’s arms. He has answered the question Howard had been asking herself.
“Susanna, I must talk with you,” she says. The women look up in unison.
“Me, Your Majesty?”
“Come.”
The silence becomes a living thing as Susanna tidies away her thimble and needle, her thread and her little silver scissors. The other women go back to their work, studiously not looking at each other. There will be whispers as soon as Howard and Susanna are out of earshot. If a king’s whisper is a threat, a queen’s favourite is a hleope, a piece in a game of oferhlep, to be jumped over or, better yet, eliminated.
Goldfoot, twisting in sunstruck dust, leads Howard and Susanna across the gallery and into a courtyard nestled in a horseshoe of rooms at the centre of the palace. In its middle is an unassuming fountain: a woman in a gown of ancient fashion, standing in the midst of the four famed sounds of Plythe – a whale, a litharbird with its coral feathers and honey song, a selkie and a pyttelwyrm. From each of them spouts a perfect arc of saltwater, pumped up from the river below. If she had not been brought to that very spot on her wedding day, she would not have known that this is, in truth, the heart of Plythe, for the woman’s cupped hands are crafted from the spirit stone of the palace. Four years later and she still finds extraordinary peace from remembering that communion of flesh and rock.
Howard bypasses the fountain and goes to a slender stone balcony, its struts decorated with birds and fish. She leans upon it, inhaling the spray from the Kyttle Falls below. Susanna stands, hands folded upon her kirtle, at a distance.
“I need your help,” Howard says, quietly so that Susanna is forced to come closer.
“Mine?”
Howard takes one of Susanna’s hands in her own. She draws the lady closer, and despite the rage of the falls whispers in her ear, “At midday I am going to be in the music room. I need you to ensure that no one knows that I am there, and that no one disturbs me. Not even the king himself. Do you understand?”
