“It is not court that has done this to you.”
Cleves turns away from him. She must test the strength of the mægencord before fetching her servants to cage the beast.
“They did not hurt you,hiwi,” he says, using the Ezzonid endearment for a family member. Cleves does not reply. No, they did not hurt her body. That is true. She was spared that at least.
“People are always hurt in a war,” she says quietly. “No one truly escapes unscathed.”
Above their heads, the crone sends up a cry; a keening call of fury that sends the woodland birds spiralling into the sky.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Howard
An idea, perhaps too daring for Howard to execute, flickers on the periphery of her mind. She is scared to look at it directly. As is usual for her, she may be too late, but the thought only came to her when she realised how quiet Plythe is in the absence of Henry’s court. It is not the absence of busy noise she notices so much as the absence of whispers. The slight glances and slivering shifts in loyalty; the intrigue conveyed through looks rather than language, every bit as indecipherable as a foreign tongue. They follow Henry everywhere he goes, leaving fruitful information in their wake.
What if she could harness those whispers?
Howard finds herself in the music room, where her harpsichord sits. She raises the lid, heart pounding. Her ownsunscínais set into the lid of the instrument. It is a beautiful thing, a polished sheet of material that mirrors, when it is not showing her the other queens, the light of the windows and the playful reflection of the Kyttle Falls. If her plan does not work, she will have destroyed an artefact of ancient beauty and power for nothing. But if her plan does work, she may change the course of their endeavour entirely.
She may even make the other queens like her.
Howard tries to prise thesunscína’s settings apart, but the wires are too delicate, and her nails make little mark. She casts around the room for a tool. A decanter sits on a low table next to the window. It was a gift from Lord Wolsey, if she recalls, made of finest crystal mined fromthe mountains below Mathmas. The rock is carved with roosters and waning moons: symbols of fertility. Always, she is a vessel: empty but for the king’s thoughts, the king’s seed.
She weighs the decanter in one hand, building her courage. Then, with a force she did not know she was capable of, she smashes the decanter against thesunscína, shielding her face with her free hand. Glass shards embed themselves in her arm and hair. The keys of her harpsichord are covered in crystal … and tiny slivers of polishedsunscína.
The stone has cracked like a sun, rays reaching from the centre to the very edges. It is not a stone, not really – it is the eye of a goddess, and it has never looked more so than in this broken state, the fractures radiating outwards like flecks from a pupil. Is it not strange, how divinity is so often partnered with the tangible? How immortality can be carved up and plucked out to be shared like a suckling pig on a platter? If she were a goddess, she would make it a point to keep herself whole.
“Oh,” she says, a single high note of discovery. Goddesses can afford to be beneficent with their bodies, for they own them outright, and their power is not diminished by disfigurement. Howard has been called a goddess by many men, her husband included. But what they meant was:you make me feel like a god. You are a goddess by right of belonging to me.
She wants to own herself. She deserves to own herself.
Howard plucks the silver headdress from her curls and uses one edge of it to prise two shards from the harpsichord – one large, one small. She weighs them in her palms. She knows from Seymour’s trick with her brokensunscínathat whichever piece she keeps with her will still work. The question is, will the other?
A servant knocks on the door. “Your Majesty? We heard a crash.”
“You may enter,” she replies.
The girl’s eyes widen at the sight of the shattered instrument. The servants at Plythe know more about the history of the palace than any of the nobility; they will know that this harpsichord was commissioned by the first queen of this territory, many hundreds of years ago. Elswyth was a famed beauty of Elben, too. Howard wonders whether she would be pleased that this is the only fragment of her life remembered by her country’s descendants. Howard does not doubt that there was more to her than a clear complexion and rounded cheek. Would Elswyth be pleased by her shimmering, insubstantial legacy? Or did she, in life, strive to peel back her skin to reveal the woman beneath?
“There was an accident,” Howard tells the servant, putting on her best queenly voice. “Clear the crystal. Collect the pieces. I will find some other use for them. We will order a new glass frontage for the instrument’s lid.”
Once the girl has vanished, Howard flees the room, stowing thesunscína’s pieces in the folds of her sleeve. She finds her ladies in the rose gardens, which are verdant at this time of year, an orchestra of petals, from violet to dusky pink to yolk yellow. They are cutting the flowers to dry, wrapping their stems over and over in blue ribbon that has been bathed in the sap of the sereklin tree, which is said to have healing properties. They will give the posies to the almshouses and the leech houses, for the curing of the poor’s maladies.
Howard approaches them with the unsteady energy of a foal. She is pleased to see, as she gets nearer, that Susanna is in the midst of them, rather than on the periphery.
“Well met, Your Majesty,” Lady Tylney says, the first to spy her.
Ursula Askew studies her with the intensity she always seems to reserve for Howard. “Are you plotting?”
“Hush,” Howard says, then flurries the final few steps into their company and pulls them to the ground with her. It is the afternoon and the sun blankets them in warmth, but the grass is still damp, as it always is here with the spray from the Kyttle Falls. The humidity thickens and the women lean in as Howard displays her broken treasure upon her lap.
“Yoursunscína! Oh, Howard,” Legh says. “You always were clumsy.”
“It was no accident,” she tells her sister. “I wish to see if I can use it for something more than its intended purpose, and I need your help.”
There is delighted laughter and the chitter of conspiracy as Howard lays out her plan.
“We ought to test that it works first,” Lady Tylney says, ever practical, ever the eldest.
