“Is that …?” the servant says. Though her eyes are still closed, Cleves can hear the unfinished question – is that safe? Is that allowed, given we are all of us traitors in your presence, Queen Seymour?
“Here,” Cleves says roughly, reaching into her gown’s pocket and pulling out a purse of coins. The servant takes it. It is enough to buy the physician’s silence, and the servant’s risk, too.
“Hurry,” Seymour says.
Two sets of footsteps then – one hurrying away, one towards. She smells Seymour’s scent: heart smoke and cloves.
“I am here,” Seymour says.
No. Cleves cannot admit joy, not now.
“Johana?”
It takes him an age to muster the strength to answer. His speech is more breath than words. “I’m sorry.”
“She is gone,” Cleves says.
“Mmm.”
Seymour rises again, and instructs another servant to ride out after Cecilia. Maybe they can intercept her before she finds civilisation.
“Can you hear them?” Johana says. His hand finds Cleves’s.
“Hear who?”
“Them.”
He could not have conjured that night better with a thousand words. The intonation could be nothing but the nightmare of their childhood, one that pursues them from country to country, castle to castle.
The soldiers.
She does not want them to be the last thing he hears. “No, I do not hear them,” she lies. “This is what I hear.”
She hums the lullaby of their childhood, one that she has not heard since before the unrest. It is a lilting tune that winds like the courtyards of Cnothan in circles and steps, climbing to a sweet point.
How weak he looks. Her cousin, who can match her barb for barb. He smiles. His teeth are blotted with crimson.
He mouths something.
“I cannot hear you, cousin,” she says.
His hand edges from the wound on his stomach.
“Cousin, no,” she says. “Save your strength.”
She presses her own hands to the injury. Blood pulses slowly through her fingers. Surely she is strong enough to hold him together? Surely she could scoop the gore up and push it back inside him? Build him again, plaster over the cracks of his wound?
His hand comes to rest next to one of the legs of his bed. He taps the wood.
“I cannot reach,” Cleves says.
Seymour is there in an instant, stepping over the raised floorboard from which Cecilia must have taken the key to the lodge. She peers underneath the mattress, then turns her attention to the frame of the bed. Johana watches her, his breathing light and laboured.
Cleves has never minded silence before, but this is intolerable.
“Where is the physician?” she roars.
“I think I have found something,” Seymour says, feeling with one hand inside the bed frame. “There is a hollow in the wood.”
