Page 92 of Six Wild Crowns

Far from prying eyes and ears.

“I’m looking forward to exploring your territory,” Seymour says.

They drink to secret talks and the cover of the countryside.

Clarice wakes Seymour early.

“Queen Cleves is waiting for you,” they tell Seymour, pulling the covers from Seymour’s form. Seymour groans. She is still bleary from the long journey and the late banquet. She peers out of the window – only the merest hint of dawn mars the charcoal sky.

“Does she not require sleep?” Seymour complains.

“Now you know what it’s like for your servants,” Clarice says pointedly.

“What do you make of her?” Seymour asks them as she hauls herself out of bed and permits Clarice to pull a gown over her head.

Haltrasc mewls in his sleep from the corner of the room, and his paws tremble. Maybe he’s dreaming of those castle goats. Clarice laces up Seymour’s cuffs and then pulls a white paste over her hair, before pinning a black silk veil to cover the hair and neck at the back. They pull out a plain tawny frontlet, but Seymour pulls away.

“Not that one,” she says. “That will look awful against the gown.”

Clarice gives her an odd look, before presenting her with some options. She picks a salmon frontlet, to match her gown, and Clarice pins it to her headdress with an annoying little smirk. Seymour stares at herself in the mirror, trying to work out if the embroidery on the frontlet is too fussy against the plain satin of her gown.

“You look beautiful,” Clarice says softly. “Go and have fun.”

The salmon gown was a mistake. Seymour realises it as soon as they leave the castle walls and Cleves nudges her horse into a gallop. Seymour follows suit, and soon they’re pounding through puddles that spray mud up onto her legs and dress. By the time they dismount on a hillside, the castle a doll’s house in the distance, her dress has an uneven brown hem.

Cleves’s clothes have fared little better. She is wearing a dark blue woollen dress in the Ezzonid style – it has no sleeves, so Cleves is wearing a thin white cotton blouse beneath it, with billowing sleeves that show off the silhouette of those exquisite arms.

Cleves examines the mud spattering her dress, shrugs, then pulls the hem up and hooks it to her belt at the front and back.

“I wish I’d thought to bring my own belt,” Seymour says. “I’m afraid I wasn’t entirely awake, and my servant isn’t used to dressing me for outdoor pursuits.”

“You don’t like the outside?”

“I like it well enough. But I’m not a hunter.”

Cleves begins untacking her horse, resting the saddle against an accommodating branch and hooking the bridle over it. She gives her horse a round smack on the rump, and it trots off to look for richer grass.

“I am not either. Come.”

Seymour quickly takes off her own horse’s saddle and slips the bit from his mouth. She doesn’t want to take the bridle off entirely because she’s not certain she knows how to put it back on again, and she doesn’t want to look even more of a fool.

Cleves leads Seymour further up the hillside, towards a grove of silver birch that grow like swords. As they approach the copse, a growing sense of unease fills Seymour. She does not want to approach those trees. It seems to her as though something is watching her from the shadow of the branches. Something that reminds her of nights spent with the king, or days spent with her brother.

“I told you that those lambs lost their mother to a wolf,” Cleves calls back. “But that wasn’t quite the truth.”

She points at a dark patch, just at the treeline. Against her better judgement, Seymour approaches and kneels to examine it, unsure what she’s supposed to be looking at. The grass has withered away. The nearby trees, too, are not as magnificent as she’d thought. Something has gnawed at the bark, leaving ugly rivulets of sap and broken wood along the trunk. The raw wood is flecked with blood and, about halfway down, something is sticking out of the wood. At first she thinks it’s a splinter, but it’s far too large for that. It’s a tooth, as long as Seymour’s finger.

“What manner of creature did that belong to?” she whispers.

“A crone,” Cleves replies.

“Are you certain?”

“There are more of them in Elben of late,” Cleves says, her eyes flicking towards Seymour. It is an oddly furtive look for someone who has been so open until now. Cleves runs a hand over the wood, over the blood, then tugs the tooth from its place.

“Have you found the beast?”

Cleves shakes her head. “Not yet. I hear your friend killed one though. Single-handedly by all accounts.”

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