Page 74 of Six Wild Crowns

“The babe is stuck. It cannot get out. We need to get you help.”

“No. I must give birth here, now.”

“I don’t know if I can get this child out safely without aid.”

Boleyn thrashes, no longer at one with the sea. Urial, from his position at the edge of the water, sends up a plaintive roar. Seymour sees that something is wrong. She throws herself into the water with ungainly strokes. When Syndony tells her, she takes hold of Boleyn’s shoulders.

“Boleyn, listen to me. The baby could die if we don’t find a physician.”

“This is not what I want,” Boleyn says.

“I know, my love. I know.”

Boleyn pulls away from her, searching for the voice that told her that this is what she needs. She cannot lose this child. She would rather die with it than lose it. But this is not what she wants. Her child is not meant to come into the world on a stale mattress with its mother curled on her back like a stranded turtle.

“Boleyn? Are you ready?” Seymour says.

“We must go now,” Syndony says. “Or it won’t just be the babe we lose.”

It is only seeing Seymour’s fear at those words that Boleyn recognises her own. Another surge comes over her. This isherbody.Hers. She will do this the way that feels right to her. She screams, long and loud and furious.

The storm clouds hover, and the sea screams back.

The roar cannot be heard by the naked ear, but is felt in the water that eddies around the women. It is a roar not of rage or malice, but of hunger.

Shapes appear through the waves, dipping and rising throughthe froth. They move like fish, but their faces are of a different beast entirely. Kelpies. They skim towards the women, their horse heads fierce and fanged.

“Sweet gods,” Syndony whispers. “What do we do?”

“Wait,” Boleyn says.

As the kelpies reach them their faces morph, the muzzles shrinking, the seaweed manes condensing. Their front legs become arms. From the waist up, they are women, green-skinned, still fanged. They dart in and out of the water, their hands massaging Boleyn’s belly. They chatter to each other in their own language. Boleyn, Seymour and Syndony wait, poised in the water, holding each other against the wonder of it.

At last, one of the kelpies rises. She holds Boleyn’s face in her hands, and she utters a single cry. It is time.

Boleyn takes Seymour’s hands, and Syndony holds her hips from behind, and steadied by the kelpies she begins to push. Her screams echo off the cliffs, and the kelpies scream with her, enveloping her in the strength of their noise.

She labours until the storm clouds break and the sky meets the sea. She is at once not of herself and entirely herself, more than she has ever been. There is only her and her strength and the knowledge of her body.

When the baby is free of her, she reaches between her legs and pulls it from the water. Syndony and Seymour hold her as she stares at her creation. The child, bloody and wet, blinks half-closed eyes. A daughter fit for a prophecy. A wild daughter of the sea.

“You did it,” Seymour whispers, kissing Boleyn’s shoulder.

The kelpies approach mother and daughter, crooning in their alien tongue at the sight of the child. Gently, they cut the cord with their teeth, and press their green, calloused fingers into the girl’s flesh, and then the pack of them is gone, turned back into horses, darting through the flotsam and back into the depths of the ocean.

Syndony and Seymour help Boleyn to swim back to the cave, the baby pressed to her chest. She is heavy after the weightlessness of the sea. Urial cleans and warms the baby with his tongue as theycover themselves with dirty gowns. Together, they hobble back through the mines, towards the sound of hammering, brutal after the water’s embrace.

The miners drop their tools when they see the women. Oswyn rushes towards Boleyn.

“We must make sure she does not catch fever,” Seymour mutters, over and over.

“Your Majesty, will you allow me to carry you?” Oswyn says, wrapping his dusty shirt around her and the baby. He lifts them as gently as though they were made of the finest porcelain, following Urial through the passageways and out into the forest, where rain finds its way through the leaves and cleans the dust and salt from Boleyn’s upturned face.

“What will you name her, Your Majesty?” Syndony asks, one hand on Boleyn’s as they move.

Boleyn thinks of all she has learned, and she thinks of the traitor queen who, she is beginning to suspect, was not a traitor after all. She cannot name the child Isabet, but she can come close. A baby born into storms, in the territory of the queens of truth.

“Her name will be Elizabeth.”

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