Page 10 of Six Wild Crowns

Their lovemaking in the Holtwode had been too intimate for much noise – any screaming would have broken the spell between them. But there can be no hope of intimacy here.

“You have caught me, my king. What are you now going to do with me?” she says, loud enough for the room to hear. She rakes her nails down Henry’s back as she pulls him on top of her. She’s still wet from his earlier ministrations.

“You have bewitched me, my queen,” Henry says, as he goes very slowly, very deeply, inside her. They are languid and loud in their tussle. Other brides might shrink in the face of spectators. Boleyn is not like other brides. She fills the chamber with her presence, because Henry is hers and she is his and together they are unstoppable. When she is close to ecstasy, he finds the spot to send her over the edge and sends a pulse of magic through her, making her scream and writhe, overwhelmed. No one can doubt his potency, or her desire.

“You did not need to do that, last night,” she remarks the next day as Henry shows her the rest of Brynd, his hands and lips never far from her waist and hips and neck.

“Do what?”

“You know what. I was close anyway. You did not need your magic.”

She lets him lead her through stone hall after stone hall, her new dragon, the gift from Cleves, playing with Henry’s dogs at their feet.

“I wanted to make sure you were satisfied, my love,” he says.

A suspicion flicks through Boleyn’s mind: if a woman is satisfied, she is more likely to conceive. Perhaps their lovemaking last nightwas not about them but about the heir that Elben needs. She doesn’t know why the thought shakes her. She intends to be the queen to give Henry his son. She was more than satisfied. Why is she being mulish?

Perhaps it’s because she’s disappointed at how stark Brynd is. Last night she had felt attuned to the castle and the savage glory of its lightning turret, but in daylight she can see how neglected the building has been under the Dowager Queen’s management. As the strongest fortress on Elben, the only one built for attack rather than defence or beauty, it is stubbornly thick-walled and austere. The household – the servants and gardeners and cooks that she’s inherited – are clothed in grey wool, with faces to match. When Mary and George arrive, she decides, they will begin the transformation. The castle will be unrecognisable by the following autumn, when she will take her place as host of the Moon Ball. She will make it a ball to remember, a ball to make all others jealous. She may have proved herself a queen worthy of Henry’s love. Now, she must prove herself worthy of her people, and her country.

CHAPTER SIX

Seymour

The Palace of Daven always seems to lie beneath a rosy sun. The peach stone absorbs light during the summer months and reflects it outwards in the winter. At night-time, the palace itself can be used as a beacon, peeking out from the bay that shelters it from the ocean’s tempests. The sailors coming across the seas from the northern wastelands of Pkolack, their ships laden with cold spices and desert berries, use its distant glow as they would a star. Seymour has always loved that about the palace, thinking as she does of Daven as a sanctuary from her family’s tumults. Her rooms, in a building on the edge of Daven’s grounds, are more home than Seymour’s childhood estate ever was. Seymour’s insignificance at court means that she is permitted a chamber far away from the intrigues of the palace’s more popular ladies-in-waiting, who are all housed more centrally. After a childhood of her brothers’ machinations, she is glad to have some respite.

Even with the speed of the scrind road, she arrived too late to see Queen Aragon immediately, and was told to wait for the morning. When she wakes up, the sun is high – the excitement of the wedding and the long journey has exhausted her. Seymour lies in her bed and looks up at the beams for the last time. She has been one of Queen Aragon’s ladies for a year, and in that time she and Clarice have madethese rooms into a haven. Every seat is covered in furs to ward against the night-time chill, and every table is adorned with trinkets Clarice has picked up on their travels or brought from their homeland – unusual shells, puzzle boxes, broken clocks and embroidered motifs stretched across ivory frames. The only items truly belonging to Seymour are three dolls that were once her mother’s and which she has owned since childhood, which sit tattered on a corner table.

The door opens and Clarice pulls an empty trunk into the room. They notice that Seymour is awake and brandish a strip of parchment at her.

“I’m to measure you for your new gowns,” they say.

Seymour stands obediently, raising her arms as Clarice pulls the parchment around her waist and marks it off with a shard of graphite.

“What am I doing, Clarice?” Seymour sighs.

“Feeling sorry for yourself again, my lady?”

“Do you ever think that I would have been better off as a servant, and you as a noble? You’re so much better at ordering people around than me.”

Clarice shrugs, the graphite held between their teeth.

“Maybe we could play that game again,” Seymour pushes. “You remember?”

“I remember,” Clarice says, taking the graphite from their mouth and marking off the length of Seymour’s arms. When they were children, just after Clarice had taken up their role as Seymour’s servant, they used to exchange clothes. Seymour would curtsey to Clarice, and Clarice would make her perform increasingly strange tasks. A few years later, their games became altogether more daring. Clarice averts their eyes as they pass the paper around Seymour’s back and over her breasts. Seymour blushes, wondering whether Clarice, too, is remembering a time when their eyes would not be so averted. She thinks of Clarice’s teeth on her nipple, Clarice watching her reaction to see how hard they should bite before the pleasure seeped from the pain.

“There, all done,” Clarice says. Seymour wishes she was clever enough to break through this barrier that grew between them, seemingly overnight, even if they will never again be lovers.

“I suppose I had better see if the queen is well enough to receive me this morning,” Seymour says.

“Maybe try to act a little more pleased to be serving her, my lady.”

“I only learn from you, Clarice.”

It’s a pleasant walk along a sandy path, verged with hawthorn and star-lilies, to reach the palace itself. The air is tangy with salt, blown in from the sea and from the salt mines a little further along the coast. By the time Seymour reaches the palace, her face is coated in fine, white granules.

Daven’s vast vestibule is dominated by a tree planted in the very centre of the space. The trunk is as thick as four men and almost entirely hollow, housing as it does agealgenadragon, a lithe wyrm that feasts on the sap and soft innards and in return keeps the tree alive with fire and loamy vomit. The tree’s ancient roots push up the floor tiles in waves that ripple outwards. At the ceiling, the tree bursts into an explosion of terracotta leaves. The walls of the hall are set not with pillars but with ladders, so that the queen’s gardeners can climb up to the ceiling for pruning.

For such a sprawling building, the heart of Queen Aragon’s palace is compact. Seymour only has to cross the hallway and she’s inside the queen’s suites. A mill of courtiers and ladies-in-waiting flirt in the outer receiving chamber. Seymour gives her name to the man guarding the door to the inner room, and retires to a corner. Usually people deem her too boring to pay attention to, but everyone knows that she was the queen’s ambassador, and they’re eager for gossip about the new consort. A handful of ladies detach themselves from the courtiers they’d been entertaining and accost her.

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