“She is quite dedicated to crafting protections for our family. She is a very knowledgeable woman, you know, cousin. She has taught me much these last moons.”
Cleves goes still, keenly aware of Johana’s probing gaze. Is he trying to tell her that he can help her? That he has the knowledge she requires? She opens her mouth, but the only sound that comes out is a laugh. He may be willing to help her now – her kingly brother, too – but at what price? And what danger would she place Johana in if she were to confide all in him?
Best to attempt it by herself. No confessions.
“And what exactly did my mother teach you?” she says.
Johana shakes his head as he turns back towards the stairs. “No, no, dear cousin. I do not accept scraps, remember?”
One day
Her horse master leans in the doorway of her study, his arms crossed. “A Perfugian ship has been sighted a day’s sail from the bordweal, Your Majesty,” he says.
“I see. Probably a trade vessel. Any others?”
He shakes his head and she dismisses him. Her people are accustomed to her asking strange questions and making unusual requests. He did not show the slightest curiosity when she asked him ever so casually to let her know what vessels were passing close to her territory. Eccentricity makes for an excellent disguise.
If only it made an excellent teacher, also.
None of them have made headway in their pursuit of knowledge about the bordweal. The lack of cyphers sent by pyttelwyrm confirms it, for even sending the smallest of dragons is risky and they cannot afford to communicate unless they absolutely must.
Her thoughts stray to Johana. He wants to be her confidant. If he truly has the knowledge she needs – if her mother did find more than empty relics and thin superstition – then she has a choice: risk her secrets for a chance to save Seymour, or protect herself and let Seymour die.
She sneered at Aragon for even asking the question. Is she, Cleves, as cold, as selfish as the Queen of Daven?
The thump of blood, of soldiers’ armour, throbs through her as she summons a servant and tells them to fetch Johana. He arrives too quickly, as though he has been waiting nearby. It suggests that she is predictable, and predictability when one is plotting treason is a hangman’s noose.
They sit opposite each other, and wait for the servant’s footsteps to recede.
“Everything?” she says at last.
“A full meal, cousin. A feast.”
“And in return?”
He leans back and looks away from her, towards the wall where their family crest is painted in stately fashion: a castle upon a green field rampant.
“You were the first person to know that I would never marry a woman. And I the first person to know that you would never take a man to your bed. Yet now we bargain for each other’s secrets.”
Her throat is thick. He looks back at her.
“In return you will have everything I can offer, cousin. The loyalty and help of myself, such as it is, and of your mother, and of your sisters, and of your brother.”
“The king himself?” Cleves says. Her brother is a wall of a man, in body and mind. They used to jest that she stole his laughter from him when he was a babe in the cradle.
“If you do not believe it is love, cousin, then believe it is strategy.”
This makes sense to her. If her brother has heard rumours of the truth of Medren and Elben’s castles, then naturally he would prefer his sister to rule the territory of Cnothan outright rather than relying on Henry’s favour.
An image of Boleyn, teetering at the edge of that cliff at Brynd, rises to her mind. Cleves cannot understand why she had to jump, yet she admires that she did. She knew, Cleves realises, and Aragon knows, that one cannot spark a revolution with only a single kindling.
So she tells him everything, from Seymour’s first visit to that strangest of evenings when Medren’s power flowed around her as she danced, to the predicament she and the other queens now find themselves in. Johana listens in silence, his elbows braced upon his knees, his head bowed in thought. He stays that way for a long time after she is finished.
“If you should wish to give me that ‘everything’ you spoke of, cousin, now would be an excellent time,” she says eventually.
“I amthinking,” he says. He looks up at her, and there is no trace of the jester’s spark that usually graces his features. “This is far more dangerous than we had anticipated,” he says. “Oh, cousin. What a web you are caught in.”
“I was caught in the web, as you call it, when my father married me to Henry,” she says. How dare he suggest she has been foolish when all she has done has been so considered, so strategic? “All I do now is attempt to destroy both web and spider.”
