They wander together down the beach, away from the cockle pickers. Seymour picks some seaweed that has washed up in the shallows. They chew on it, trying to ignore the grit stuck in the fronds.
“There,” Cleves says, pointing to a small boat anchored just offshore.
Seymour baulks. “That is someone’s livelihood.”
“It could throw them off our trail,” Cleves says.
Seymour shakes her head, and Cleves falls back on her usual levity. “You did not seem to mind about your household’s livelihoods when you consigned Hyde to the ocean.”
Seymour looks as though she’s been slapped.
“That was …” She peters out before she can finish her empty statement.Different.
“Very well, show me what to do,” Seymour says. They wrench a hole in the wooden boards and push the boat out towards the ocean.
“If all goes well, it will sink a few miles out,” Cleves says. “The owner will think it was stolen and if Henry’s people come to hear of it, they will wonder if we left Elben entirely. It would fit with your past behaviour. With any luck, they will look for us in Ezzonid or Perfugi.”
They return to the horses in silence and continue their journey, but that small act has given Cleves back some of her mind. For now, at least.
They come to the outskirts of Gem?res, straddling Cnothan and Plythe, at dusk of the third day. So much has occurred since Cleves was last here that she can scarcely credit it. Then, she feared that Howard would be the queen to reveal their treachery to Henry. She chuckles to herself: she thought so much of her own cleverness that she could never have foreseen that she would be the one to be discovered first.
“Should one of us enter the town to buy bread?” Seymour says.
“It would be too dangerous,” Cleves replies. “Gem?res is well-connected. They will have heard the news already. Better for us to find vittles in one of the hamlets to the east, where travellers rarely venture.”
Just as they start to look for somewhere to bed for the night, the peals of the town’s church bells reach their ears. Usually, such sounds makeCleves smile, for they are normally signals of celebration, but this is a warning. She looks at Seymour and sees her own tightness mirrored there.
“Do you think that’s for us?” Seymour says.
“It would be too much to hope that Elben has been invaded, so yes, I think it must be for us.”
“Two traitor queens on the run.”
“Not even Queen Isabet could do as much,” Cleves says. They smile at each other – it is the first time they’ve done so since their night together. The memory rears between them, and Seymour shifts. Cleves looks away. “We should keep moving. Travelling through the night is difficult, but it will help us evade notice. We can sleep during the day.”
Seymour looks at her quizzically. “You know a lot about evading capture for a queen born of royalty, my lady. I thought this was supposed to be my area of expertise.”
“Have you not heard? I am the strange queen. I know all manner of things I should not.”
They stray further from the road, trusting the guidance of the moon and the constancy of the lyssa star, shining low in the sky. When their horses are dragging their hooves and Lelij is mewling softly in complaint from his saddle bag, they come to a long row of liftathen flowers. Even in moonlight, they are all bright reds and oranges, like dragonflame.
“This is the border of my territory,” Cleves says.
Other territories are more nebulous in their boundaries, but the romantics of Plythe have for many hundreds of years marked their first loves by planting these flowers at the border of the territory as a declaration of affection. The flowers live for several decades, but do not seed by themselves, the particular fairy that once spread them having been hunted to extinction many years ago, so it is possible to know exactly which flower belongs to which couple. Stones, carved with the couple’s initials, litter the ground, each one set beside a flower when its seed was planted.
“How lovely,” Seymour says when Cleves explains the tradition to her.
“For something as fleeting as youth and love, we do spend a lot of time attempting to make both eternal, don’t we?” Cleves says.
“You do not believe love can be eternal?”
“Death does rather get in the way, does it not?”
They find an accommodating oak, the trunk large enough to cradle them both, and huddle together in a crook between its exposed roots. Seymour throws her cloak across them both, and looks up at the spidery outlines of the tree’s barren branches.
“Sometimes I like to imagine what trees like this have seen,” she says. “How old do you think this oak is – one hundred, two hundred years?”
“Three at least,” Cleves replies. Her throat is tight again.
