Page 12 of Six Wild Crowns

“You have heard of the Oracle of Evenesis, Lady Seymour?” Queen Aragon says, ignoring Dizir’s chirps.

“Yes.”

The royal oracle lives on an island in the seas north of Daven. It can only be reached for a few months each year, when the hurricanes that surround the island quell. The oracle only permits royalty to receive her prophecies.

“The princess visited the oracle on her coming of age. What she was told troubles us greatly.”

“I’m sorry, Your Majesty.”

“The remedy lies in your hands.”

“Mine?”

Queen Aragon dismisses the servants loitering at the edges of the room. When the door has closed behind the last one, she nods to her daughter. The princess takes Seymour’s hands, lifting her to her feet with an authority beyond her fifteen years. Even though they are alone, but for the queen, she leads Seymour to the window, where only the whispering sea might be able to hear them. The five faceless statues stand impassively at Seymour’s back, and she has to force herself to concentrate on the young woman before her rather than the sense of being watched behind.

The princess begins.

“This is what the oracle said to me:From the storm, a blossom. From the blossom, a tree. Tallest of all, strongest of all, to cast Daven’s seed into shade.”

Even Seymour can understand this riddle. A blossom from a storm, and the storm is, must be, Boleyn. The princess tries to keep her voice even, but she can’t quite disguise the hurt that anyone would feel when told that they are doomed to be outshone by a half-sibling.

“Do you know what I am asking you to do, Lady Seymour?” Queen Aragon says. “Do you understand the debt I would owe to you if you did this for me?”

Dizir’s chattering grows louder. He swings from his mistress’s arms across the room, perching on one of the statues and looking past Seymour, towards the distant sea.

A blossom that will cast Daven’s seed into shade. Queen Aragon will not let her daughter be overshadowed. And Seymour must be the one to make sure of it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Boleyn

It amazes Boleyn how quickly the two of them – people who delight in surprise – fall into a routine. They break their fast together, discussing the reports that have reached Brynd overnight from Henry’s spies across the kingdom and abroad, then they go hunting with Boleyn’s family through the orchards and woods around Brynd. Boleyn’s hunting dragons, their bellies and wings mottled green to blend with the trees, whisk above the treetops in search of unsuspecting prey. Their afternoons are given to strategy or games. These are the times that Boleyn treasures the most, even more than their nights together. These times show her that Henry trusts her mind. That she is more than the wife and broodmare lesser men might take her for.

She knows it cannot last for ever. Henry has matters of state to attend to. He must visit his other queens. More than both, he has a war to wage against Alpich. But she thinks she might keep him with her for a fortnight at least. Yet only six days after their wedding, a messenger gallops over Brynd’s drawbridge and rips through the idyll.

“Something has happened,” Boleyn says from her viewpoint closest to the window. She returns her bread to its plate, still smothered in sage butter, and discards a report on the hunting of a cronein the Holtwode. Henry doesn’t look up from his book. “It’s probably my sister Cecilia making a nuisance of herself again.”

“I think not, my love,” Boleyn says. She tells Syndony to fetch those advisors who are still loitering at Brynd: Lord Wolsey and Cromwell. She likes neither of them but knows that they are men who won’t suffer exclusion from important discussions. She wonders whether she should tell Syndony to retrieve a map of Alpich’s terrain as well, for it seems likely that the news is about the war.

“It’s Hyde,” Henry tells her when he reads the messenger’s letter.

“You told me the rumours were false,” Boleyn says, thinking both of the rumours of an ailing Queen Blount and the Gkontai ships that are supposedly amassing beyond the bordweal, in the Agassa Ocean.

“They were. They’re not any more.”

“Blount…?”

“The physicians are worried.”

Boleyn goes to him. He may not love Blount as he loves her, but she knows he’s fond of the Queen of Hyde.

“So the vultures are amassing,” she says.

“A dozen ships and twice as many war dragons, bearing the Lothairian crest.”

“Lothair? Surely they know they cannot match our strength.”

The kingdom of Lothair, nestled in the middle of Quisto’s empire, is perpetually bankrupt and passively bitter. Boleyn pores over the report, trying to find Lothair’s motive. Syndony shows Wolsey and Cromwell into the room, and a moment later fortifying wine and cheese are laid out for them. When the servants are gone, Henry tells his advisors what has happened.

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