Page 42 of Six Wild Crowns

“Why? Do you think she’s too fragile to handle it?”

Mary catches up with her as she changes into her travelling clothes.

“What are you playing at, sister?” she says, throwing herself onto the bed.

“Get off my bed. We’re not children any more,” Boleyn says, throwing her muffler at her and rather undermining her point. Mary flounces over to the window seat instead.

“Well? I know you don’t want to spend time with her.”

“Nonsense. I’m enjoying discovering her hidden depths.”

Mary snorts.

Seymour barely speaks on the journey, barely even looks at Boleyn, although she answers her questions politely enough. Boleyncan’t make her out at all. There must be thoughts happening in that unremarkable head, but what sort?

They stop at the market in Pilvreen to purchase two bone mugs of perry, warm and frothed and sprinkled with nutmeg. As they sip their drinks, Oswyn approaches the carriage.

“Is all well, Master Oswyn?” she asks the top of his bowed head.

“Oh yes,” he replies. He darts a look at Seymour, and Boleyn shakes her head infinitesimally. They cannot speak freely.

“My workers think they’ve found… what you were looking for. They’re trying to break through to it, but the rock’s putting up a fight.”

She passes him a gold coin, aware of Seymour watching the exchange. It would not do for Seymour to catch wind of any hidden chambers in the mines, especially not chambers that may hold the secret to fortifying Henry’s divine magic, if she has deciphered Bishop More’s old book correctly.

“The eternal quest for more garnets,” she tells her companion as the carriage drives on. Seymour nods, pacified.

At some point Boleyn must doze, because a particularly sharp jolt from the carriage flings her from dreams of crystal, eyes wide awake to a landscape of rock and heather. They must have passed through the Holtwode already and left the scrind road. This must be the slow, sloping path up into the mountains.

There are shouts from above and the guard outside the window draws his weapon.

“What is it?” she asks Seymour.

Seymour is tense.

“A crone,” she says, and points out a distant silhouette. Far above them, a tall, spindled figure makes its way across the ridge of the mountainside. Boleyn shivers, despite her many layers. There’s something about crones that elicits the same reaction in her as spiders do in others. The way the front legs are so much longer than the back, the protrusion of the empty udders, just behind the front legs, and the long, lank hair of the beast’s head that is a mockery of a lady’s. Then she sees that this crone has something in its mouth.

“What is that?” Seymour asks.

The guards don’t answer. A moment later, Boleyn understands why. The creature is holding a human arm, severed at the shoulder.

“Should we kill it, Your Majesty?” the guard says.

Boleyn considers the figure. Either it hasn’t seen them or it is sated for now. Seymour’s knuckles are clenched on the window as she waits for her mistress’s verdict. It’s almost enough for Boleyn to sayyes. But to fight a crone would likely end in at least one of their group dying.

“No, leave it alone as long as it doesn’t follow us.”

“Very good, Your Majesty.”

The guard doesn’t try to disguise his relief.

The carriage winds up and up a corkscrew road. As the hours tick on, the soft heather transforms into ashy soil. The sun is low in a sky of ombre oranges and pinks when they finally come within sight of the Font of Cernunnos. It’s uglier than Boleyn had imagined, not in keeping with the other royal estates, which are either elegant or impressive. The building that houses the font is squat, dwarfed by the mountain it sits atop. Long fingers of blackened lava streak down the rock, incongruous in the rest of Elben’s landscape. The air is unnaturally cold here, too, and the road turns icy. Once or twice the horses slip on the smooth surface, and the carriage topples alarmingly. They stop for the grooms to attach ice shoes to the horses’ hooves, and then they’re off again, climbing more steadily now to the very top of the mountain.

The font is made of the same ice and lava that runs down the hillside: hewn into bricks and laid in alternating patterns to create zigzags and diagonals of ivory and charcoal. The path from the carriage is so slippery that the grooms create a makeshift palanquin to carry first Boleyn and then Seymour into the safety of the building, where the floor is rough lava.

The Keeper of the Font, a monk bearing the antlered headdress of Cernunnos, greets them at the entrance. With him are six nuns, wearing stylised headdresses to emulate the ears of a doe. The nuns lead Boleyn and Seymour into an antechamber, where the steam from the font warms them as they undress. Seymour hunches asshe removes her clothes, her back to Boleyn. Even in the dim light of the chamber, Boleyn’s eyes are drawn not to the bandages on Seymour’s hands, but to the thin, raised lines across her thighs. She thinks of the rumours that swirl around Edward Seymour, and assumes the scars are his doing. She wonders whether she, too, would be a mouse if she had such a brother. She likes to think she would have more spirit than that. That Edward would sport a few scars of his own.

“I hear the waters are cloudy,” Boleyn tells Seymour. “Shall we hide ourselves in their warmth?”

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