Ursula shakes her, her grip tightening. How can such a woman as Ursula, all mischief and flight, suddenly be so fierce?
“I am going to grow angry soon, Your Majesty,” Ursula says. “Queen Seymour is depending upon you. The other queens are waiting for you. Are you going to humiliate Plythe?”
Ursula knows she’s being cruel. They have all heard the taunts: that Howard won her crown on her back. What else does she have to offer? Not Aragon’s mind, Cleves’s heritage, Parr’s heart. She has only ever had her body.
Her body, and her friends.
Strangely, it is the thought of failing Ursula and her other ladies, not Seymour or Cleves or the other queens, that calms Howard. If they are truly risking their lives for her, how can she not succeed?
“Listen to me,” she says, a new steel in her voice.
There is a pause in the chatter, no greater than a breath, before it starts again. This time, though, the language is a little different. Now it is the language of whispered knowledge, of women warning other women. The language of friends walking together through that wood. The language of breath upon embers, blowing and blowing until the flame licks the hearth and the sparks fly. Howard has the strangest vision. A kindly woman – her old nurse – holding her hands and whispering the tongue of the Medrenkind. “Tavast sigorasus. Solinqui gefoelle.” Together we win. Alone we fall.
“Tavast sigorasus. Solinqui gefoelle.”
Howard finds herself repeating those words now, over and over again. Behind her, her hands warm and steady on Howard’s arms, Ursula takes up the chant. They say the words until they lose all meaning, until they flow through Howard like the River Kyttle’s inexorable path. She does not know if they are the right words, but the chatter of the stone falls silent beneath her fingertips. Her eyes are closed, and all she can conjure before her is Seymour’s face. In her thoughts, Seymour is shackled. A dark, tilting room, a hard pallet bed.
Something flows through Howard’s fingers, through her hair and her chest and her stomach. She knows it. It is the same binding power that she last felt at the Moon Ball. She knows that were she to open her eyes, her hands would be wreathed in the bruised light of the bordweal.
She smiles, and says, “Go to her.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Cecilia
The tenth morning at sea brings the sight of the bordweal. Florin spots it first, and his shout of excitement brings Cecilia up to the deck. Many of the servants on board have never left Perfugi, so they crane over the side of the balustrade, pointing and blabbering.
Cecilia stands apart from them, watching the way the dome that surrounds Elben morphs, flickering from grey to black to silver, as though a permanent thunderstorm blankets the island.
“Will it hurt when we go through it?” one of the ladies asks those nearby.
“Only if you wish to conquer Elben,” a sailor replies, grinning at her as he passes. As others who have crossed the bordweal describe the play of bruise-like colours that can be viewed from inside the dome, Cecilia turns to the captain.
“I am going to view it from above.”
The captain’s eyes widen. “From the scoop, Your Majesty? It’s dangerous for someone not used to climbing.”
“Then I suggest you don’t permit my court to follow me.”
She places one boot carefully on the netting that leads to the top of the sails, then another, wiggling her hips to get her gown out of the way of her footing. Once she has climbed into the scoop, far below the captain shakes his head and turns back to the helm. She inhales, enjoying the vertigo. She looks out at the horizon, at the bordweal, and remembers the last time she saw it. The eighteen-year-old Cecilia hadclimbed up to the scoop back then, too, although she had been more interested in looking back than forward. She had watched the shores of Elben recede, the ugly spires of Cnothan the last things to fade behind the winter fog, and then she had turned to face the barrier that would divide her youthful life as a princess from her adult life as a queen. When they had passed through the barrier, she had closed her eyes and laughed at the sensation – like being bathed in stars. When she had opened them, the blue-green-purple she had known had turned to steel.
It is not as solid as it was all those years ago. It eddies and flows, revealing misty shapes beyond. Cecilia squints, sure she sees movement just behind the barrier. The silhouette of a ship, five-sailed, like the ships of the Feorwa Isles. She may be wrong (she isn’t) but the ship does not appear to be moving either across the bordweal and out into the open ocean or towards Elben. It is almost as if …
“Someone is waiting for us,” she tells the captain as she jumps down from the netting. “Ready the cannons.”
“My crew are not soldiers,” he says, running his hands through his scraggy hair, following her as she skips across the deck towards the stairs that lead down to the cabins.
“A precaution,” she says over her shoulder. “Maybe they merely wish to greet us.”
She does not return to her cabin, but takes the narrow stairs down to the hold. A wave tips the ship starboard and Cecilia leers into the wall, scraping her arm. She hopes that her curse will not have alerted Seymour to her presence. Her velvet shoes are soft on the floor, the natural creaking of the ship’s bones covering the creaking caused by her step as she finds the whorl that permits her a view of Seymour’s cabin.
Seymour is sitting on her pallet bed, still clutching that curiously hard patch of her gown’s hem. Cecilia has thought long about how to find out what it is she is holding. Once they are on land, she will send a lady to take the gown by force. If it were the linen shift Seymour was clutching, Cecilia could have a laundrywoman steal it, but gowns, which do not need to be washed, are not so easy.
The ship tips again and Cecilia braces herself. The sound cannot have been so great, but Seymour starts, her hands moving across the object in her gown with increasing energy. The ship tips once moreand a shout goes up from the deck. Seymour springs to her feet, looking up as though she can see through the ceiling. When Seymour smiles, Cecilia runs.
Her court are fleeing down the stairs.
“What is happening?” she asks them, but none answer. They push past her, ignoring her outrage. Florin grabs her and hauls her back down with him.
