Page 61 of Six Wild Crowns

Seymour throws her hands up. “For Cernunnos’s sake, Clarice, what do I have to do to get you to stop sulking?”

Clarice crosses their arms. “You truly want to know?”

“Yes. I truly do.”

Clarice pauses a moment, then whips the towel from Seymour’s body and pushes her back into the rock pool. Seymour scrambles for purchase. She screams and takes in a mouthful of saltwater. This is it – this is how she dies, at the hands of a treacherous servant.

“Stop panicking and kick your legs,” Clarice shouts.

“What?”

“Legs!”

Seymour beats her legs, frog like, and her face rises above the waves.

“Now move your arms like this,” Clarice says, demonstrating. Seymour copies them. Clumsily, she makes her way across the pool. Clarice pulls her out and wraps her again in the damp towel.

“That’ll do for a start,” Clarice says.

Seymour glares at them. “Is that how you all learn to swim in Feorwa?”

“Learn to swim before we learn to walk,” Clarice replies.

Seymour supposes that makes sense for a seafaring tribe scattered across a dozen tiny islands in the middle of the Ajassa Ocean. She herself has never needed to learn. Still, it might be useful, living in Hyde. She remembers the feeling of power when she kicked her legs.

“All right, you can teach me,” she says. “Now help me get changed into dry clothes, I want to spend some time alone before I eat.”

“Of course. You must be worn out from all the socialising you’ve just done with the fishes.”

With her hair still damp, Seymour settles herself in a chair in her bedchamber, looking out to sea. But it is not the fishes or the seals she is looking at: it’s one of the hexagonal panes that constitute the dome of her bedchamber.

To most people, it looks like any other window. But this particular shape is not made of glass. The difference is infinitesimal – the pane slightly thicker, slightly warmer, than its companions, and it has a sheen that suggests it is not quite dry. It bulges outwards, as if the press of the sea has rounded it, and casts an odd light on the floor: a tinge of green and purple, colours she associates with magic, thanks to the bordweal. She would not have noticed it if she had not received Boleyn’s letter, asking her to search. When she first found it, she pressed a hand against it and reeled back at the transformation that occurred. Two faces appeared suddenly: one very familiar, one less so. Queen Aragon, her chamber at Daven sketched behind her, and another woman with shoulder-length, rich brown hair and skin a little darker than Seymour’s, whose portrait Seymour has seen at High Hall – Queen Parr. They had both started back as well, and the pane had turned blank a moment later. In the days that followed, Seymour made sense of it. Every child in Elben had heard of the fabled lostsunscína, and many had tried to find them.

Seymour has waited beside thesunscínaevery day since writing to Boleyn, longing to drink in her features. She has almost given up hope of seeing her, but she’s come to find a certain peacefulness in retiring to her chamber at noon and pressing her hand against the glass.

This time, though, thesunscínamorphs almost instantly into the vision of a wood-panelled room covered in tapestries. Boleyn is there.

“I’m so happy to see you,” Seymour says.

“And I you,” Boleyn replies. She doesn’t look happy, though. The pregnancy has rounded her face, but there’s something pinched about her. For once, Seymour feels the switch in their positions – this timesheis the contented one.

“May I introduce Queen Howard?” Boleyn says, and a second face appears. She reminds Seymour of a fledgling bird that has only ever known a cage. Seymour has met her once before, at her wedding to the king, but she doesn’t expect Howard to remember that. That wedding was a quiet, flittering sort of affair. Howard’sgown had been made entirely of golden tulle, so she looked like a fairy, fragile and ready to be snapped.

“It is so good to see you again, sister,” Howard says. “This is truly wondrous.”

“We are in Howard’s music room,” Boleyn explains. “Thesunscínais on the inside of a harpsichord.”

Seymour nods, studying Boleyn’s face, looking for hints to her mindset, to her feelings for Seymour, to this new friendship with Queen Howard.

“Isn’t this perfect?” Boleyn says. “Here we can be honest without fear of someone spying on us. We can drop this tiresome pretence that we despise each other.”

She holds up a handful of letters, and Seymour spots her own handwriting on one of the papers. The coded lines they wrote to each other over the last several weeks, undoubtedly pored over by Wolsey, Cromwell, perhaps even the king. It is an unspoken rule between all of them that they must uphold the game of the queens. The game that separates them from each other – not only must they be spread across Elben physically, they must be enemies too, or at least not friends. They must promote their own factions, their own causes, and they can never overlap.

But for all Boleyn’s pretty words, Seymour knows already that she will not get what she needs from this conversation, not with Queen Howard hovering at Boleyn’s side. She fiddles with the sun locket as they talk of inconsequential matters – of the fabled history of thesunscína.

“Have either of you told our husband about them?” Howard asks.

Boleyn and Seymour don’t look at each other. Seymour finds this curious. She knows why she has not mentioned thesunscínato the king. But Boleyn loves him. Prides herself on the meeting of their minds. Why would she hide this?

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