It is a family. Their features are indistinguishable, but their sizes are not. Remnants of cloth remain. One of the children clutches a doll in its charred hands.
“This was done on your brother’s orders,” Seymour says. She has crept closer, but she looks only at the tent – the circular, moveable home favoured by the people of that faith.
“You cannot know that,” Cecilia says.
“It is happening across the island, because he knows that your family’s great deception is coming into the light at last. While the Hleaws were dismissed, he could allow them to survive. But not now.”
“Then it is you and your allies who are to blame,” Cecilia says. Her brother would never order this unless it were necessary. Henry is not likehim. Henry despises gratuitous violence. He, of all of them, was always the gentle one.
Seymour laughs.
“Do not dare to mock me or I will strangle you with these manacles,” Cecilia says. She is roiling inside, like the lava of Perfugi.
Head tilted, Seymour says, “It is simply astounding to me how someone as ruthless as you can be so wilfully blind.”
“You knew my brother for a year, girl,” Cecilia says. “I have known him my whole life.”
“You have not known your brother for twenty years,” Seymour says.
“He wrote to me.”
Seymour laughs again.
“And you can know a person only through their writing. You must be an oracle.”
The lava inside her moves slower. She looks back at the charred bodies. There must be some clue, in that pit, to their crime. They must have been plotting treason with Seymour and Cleves, and her clever brother learned of it. He would have wept over their deaths, just as he used to weep over the death of a favourite horse, or the prisoners in the Tower when they were brought to the block.
“Did he ever speak to you of our brother?” she asks Seymour.
“No.”
It is easier to continue staring at the body of that child. What she is about to tell Seymour, she has never told a soul; not even Lorena.
“Our half-brother, really. Well, we are all half-siblings. My mother was the Queen of Plythe, of course, and Henry and our older sister’s mother was the Queen of Mathmas. Arthur’s mother was the Queen of Hyde. A nasty, hidden place for nasty, hidden secrets.”
She risks a glance at Seymour, but the other woman is too interested in her story to be insulted.
“The rest of us visited High Hall often, but Arthur was raised there.”
“Because he was the heir,” Seymour says.
Cecilia closes her eyes. She could never decide whether she despised or enjoyed visiting High Hall. She adored playing with Henry and flirting with his friends. But Arthur would always, always be there.
“I was eight. That means that Henry would have been thirteen, and Arthur fifteen,” she continues. “He came into my room one morning – Arthur, I mean. He was in one of his rages. It was not the first time it had happened, but it was the most violent.”
Seymour steps closer, raises a hand as if about to grasp Cecilia’s arm. Cecilia moves away. She does not wish for pity. For some unthinkable reason that Cecilia hates herself for, she needs Seymour to understand that she, Seymour, is mistaken. That Henry is a good man, no matter what mistakes passed between them as husband and wife. That is the only purpose of her story.
She tries to explain, to make Seymour understand, but the words will not come. It is as if his arm is against her neck, as it was that day, pressing, pressing until her life narrows to his vicious eyes and a blooming pulse through her skull.
“You need not speak,” Seymour says. She presses her hands against Cecilia’s back. They are gentle at first – a question. But when Cecilia doesn’t move away, Seymour presses harder, and Cecilia leans back against those hands, putting as much of her weight on them as she can. Her chest, opened, loosens. Arthur’s spectre falls away.
“Henry pulled him off you, didn’t he?” Seymour says.
Cecilia nods. When she can speak again, her voice is thin and childlike. “He stayed close to me whenever we were at High Hall together. He always took the brunt of Arthur’s anger. Always stepped in front of me.Always.”
There is a long silence, but it no longer feels like victory. She is too raw for celebration.
“I can see why you would think him a good man, when he showed such bravery as a boy,” Seymour says at last.
