Page 94 of Six Wild Crowns

“Speak of you?” Seymour says, leaning forward.

“To talk of me in a way that would make the king worry for his reputation were he to bed me. He’s the kind of man who cannot stand humiliation, especially sexual humiliation. He overheard them laughing at the idea of anyone being able to bed an ugly lump such as me.”

“But you’re not ugly at all,” Seymour says. With the light glancing on Cleves’s skin, taut and muscular from all her time spent outside, Seymour is not sure she has seen anyone more beautiful. She catches on the thought, on the betrayal of Boleyn it entails.

“I know,” Cleves says. “And Henry knew it too. But, at that moment, what heknewdid not matter. He heard three virile men discuss me as a thing not to be touched. He thought that if he were to display any interest in me, he would be mocked.”

“Didn’t you care?”

“Of course not.”

Seymour takes a lemon cake and lies back on the grass, staring up at the sky. There is one very bright star clinging valiantly to the sky, despite the midday sun. Seymour thinks it must be the Lissa star, the apex star of a constellation of six that together, forms the shape of a heart.

An emptiness fills Seymour’s chest. Emptiness and wonder, at this woman’s cunning, wrapped up in the guise of someone so straightforward.

“Go on,” she says.

“He made his new advisor, Cromwell, ask me to call off the wedding. I told Cromwell, no, I wanted Cnothan, but I would accept us consummating our marriage in darkness, so that the protections around Elben were secured, and I would not expect him to visit my bed after that night.”

Seymour sits up. “So you had his mistress bed him in your place.”

“Yes.”

“But then as far as you knew, Cernunnos’s protection of Elben would be voided.”

“What do I care for the protection of Elben? It is not my homeland. Cnothan is easily defended. Once it was mine, I knew I’d be able to keep it, no matter who took the throne.”

Seymour doesn’t understand why this thought bothers her so much. She knows now that the king has nothing to do with the bordweal’s strength. So long as Cleves bonded with the spirit stone of Cnothan, the bordweal remained intact.

“How old were you when you married him?”

“Twenty-five. Why?”

So Cleves was four years younger than Seymour is now when she hatched this plan. She had more knowledge, of herself and others, at twenty-five than Seymour has at nearly thirty. She glances at Cleves again. She thinks the wedding was six, maybe seven years ago. They should be on an equal footing with each other, but Seymour is once again the dullard.

Cleves peers up at the sun, then stands, brushing off her gown. “We had better get you back, or your Clarice will think I have kidnapped you.”

Seymour stands too, the tooth still in her hand.

“Is that your answer?” she says. “You’re happy as you are?”

“For now. I will meet your Boleyn at the Moon Ball, and we will talk some more, and then I will decide.”

The silent howl crawls up Seymour’s throat. She has failed at the first hurdle. Failed Boleyn, failed herself. She grips the crone’s tooth with a trembling hand and digs it into her gown. She doesn’t understand the urge that’s come over her, all she knows is that she needs to destroy something. She tears the tooth through the satin, above the line of mud at the hem, and saws and saws at it until the muddied bottom comes away in her hands. She casts it on the ground, then stands, spent.

“There. Now I can walk freely.”

She marches over to the horses. Cleves catches up with her, and Seymour can feel the woman’s eyes on her all the way back.

“What?” she says.

Cleves overtakes her and walks backwards, staring at her still, an infuriating grin on her face. Seymour wants to grab her: to pull her towards herself or to shove her over, both are appealing.

“What?” she says again.

“Are you angry with me, Queen Seymour?”

“No.”

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