“What more can we do?” Howard says. “Tell me and I will help.”
“I have it in hand.”
Howard grows hot. She is still bruised and aching from her adventure, and yet she is here and the others are not.Shehas done something, at least. Yes, it may have been rash, but at least it wassomething.
“Are you not lonely?” she whispers. “Are you not so terribly lonely, sister? Because I am.”
Cleves stares at her.
“I know what you all think of me,” Howard says. “I know that none of you enjoy my company. But you said something to me at the Moon Ball. Do you remember?”
Cleves nods. “I remember.”
“Your words – they altered my life’s path. Without your words, I would not be here. I would not have joined the dance that night, and I would not have joined Boleyn. But ever since that night, you have disappointed me, sister.”
The smile that is never far from Cleves’s lips falters. Any jest she had been about to make falls away. Her walls are built and are crumbled in the same moment. Then it is back, that dancing smirk.
“I disappoint many people,” Cleves says. “And yet somehow I have learned to live with myself.”
“Do you? Or do you stagnate?”
Howard should not be talking in this way.
“A fiery queen,” Cleves says, and whistles.
“Stop that,” Howard says, and the frustration is so great that she stamps her foot. “Stop throwing me crumbs of appreciation that mean nothing!”
The two queens stare at each other, an impasse reached. Howard realises that she is crying. Of course she is, child that she is. But the tears keep coming.
Into the silence, Cleves presses a hand to thesunscína. “We must find the binding cloths,” she says. She is gentle, but firm, ignoring the fact that Howard is openly weeping.
“Why?”
“I believe they hold the key to freeing us from Cernunnos’s control.”
Of course. Now that Cleves has said it, it seems obvious. It is the one ritual that tied the queens to their king. If the cloths are destroyed, then perhaps the bond will be also.
“They are kept at High Hall, are they not?” Howard says.
“They are, sister. But we have little hope of finding where unless …”
They smile at each other. Cleves has left the sentence unfinished for Howard: “Unless the king intends to marry again.”
She and Ursula follow the path into the woods near Plythe that afternoon, telling the guards that they are hunting for fresh blackberries. A girlish hunt.
But they do not find blackberries. Instead, they find a woodsman’s ruined hut, and a boy upon a truckle bed. The hut is little more than four cragged walls, the thatch roof and its timbers having succumbed to rain and rot long ago. Florin is shivering inside it, but he is alert, and he makes an attempt at a bow when he sees them.
“I will leave you alone,” Ursula says, raising her basket to indicate that she will look for fruit by herself.
Howard looks towards Florin, feeling suddenly uncertain. Cleves thinks she has been stupid.
She knows it is a risk, of course she does. But something beyond her ability to put into words tells her it was a risk worth taking. That it is a risk Boleyn would have taken.
And look where that led Boleyn.
“I think you’re a good person,” she says, more to herself.
He frown-smiles. “Is that a compliment or a question?”
