“There,” she says. “You do not look like yourself at all.”
Does she feel like herself? She no longer knows. The Cleves who was a fixed point would not be in this position. She once prided herself on being unapologetic. Yet – was that her, or was it her armour? Is this Cleves, the one who feels so raw, so open and so wounded – was this the real Cleves all along?
There is one more thing she must do.
Seymour’s tent is on the other side of the encampment, and there is still a candle burning inside. Cleves stands outside it for what seems like an age, listening to the other woman moving around inside. It is only when the bells of High Hall toll midnight that Cleves summons the courage to approach.
“I hardly recognise you,” Seymour says when she sees Cleves.
“I want to tell you something,” Cleves says, her back stiff, her face stiffer.
Seymour moves aside for Cleves to enter. The tent is bare except for a travelling bag and a thin mattress that can be rolled up and secured on the back. A lone candle flickers in one corner.
“What do you wish to tell me?” Seymour says, securing the tent shut and sitting on one end of the mattress. There is space for Cleves on the other end, but she has not been given permission.
Cleves is used to saying whatever will swing the balance of power in her favour. She has a quip or a soft little barb for anything and anyone, king or commoner. But that’s not what she must do here. If she wants Seymour – and oh, how she wants her – then she must hand that power over to her, willingly, in gilded paper.
“There is something that I did not tell the others at the Sanctuary of Litavis,” she says.
“I know,” Seymour replies. “You went to a memory, at the end, and your face shuttered.”
Cleves’s shoulders curve inwards.
“I have never spoken about this with anyone. Not even my siblings or my parents or Johana.”
“I understand.” Seymour is giving her permission to speak or be silent.
To speak would expose her soul, stabbed and bleeding, and invite further injuries. To be silent would strengthen the wall, fix her cement. Stand, or leap?
“One night during theTilhepf, we were not quick enough to flee,” she says. She holds Seymour’s gaze; a reminder of why she is doing this. “The duke’s soldiers came upon the house where we were staying and rounded up my family in the banqueting hall. I did not know it at the time, but my father’s troops were on their way. He only needed to buy us time. The soldiers taunted him and Mother, telling them how they were going to kill my sister and me in front of them.”
Seymour takes Cleves’s hands and kisses her knuckles. Cleves wants her to tell her not to go on.
“My father laughed at them. He told them that my sister and I were worth nothing to him. My mother joined in, made some comment about having girls that made the soldiers laugh. Soon, they were exchanging quips – barbed, still dangerous, but the soldiers were less likely to kill us. They said they would wait for the duke to arrive and give them orders. It bought us enough time.”
“So the soldiers did not …?”
“Not to me,” Cleves says. She does not mention the other bargain her mother made with the soldiers, or the sounds Cleves was forced to hear from the antechamber next to the banqueting hall, and how shegrew to understand what they meant as she learned about the different violences that people could enact upon one another. That is not Cleves’s anguish to share.
“It was all a ploy, of course,” Cleves says. “But it worked. My parents told us, once we were safe again, that it was an act. That act saved our lives that night. It was a lesson to me, and I have never forgotten it.”
Seymour smooths a stray lock of hair away from Cleves’s face. She kisses the teardrop clinging to Cleves’s eyelash. “I am not a soldier,” she whispers.
She kisses Cleves’s cheek. “I am not going to hurt you.”
She kisses Cleves’s mouth, long and soft. “If you want me, I am yours. But if you want me, you must be mine too.”
Cleves makes a sound in the back of her throat, her hands tightening around Seymour’s waist. She starts to cry in earnest then, great wracking sobs that she cannot hide. Seymour cradles her head to her chest. Cleves is making Seymour’s bodice wet, but she cannot stop. Twenty-five years of tears are pouring out of her, and she cannot find the right joke to make them subside. All she can do is bury her face against the woman she loves, like a drowning sailor clinging to driftwood.
Seymour lets her cry until she feels wrung out. When Cleves can command her words again, she wipes her nose on the back of her hand and says in a thick voice, “My apologies. I felt the lake outside was looking a little dry.”
Seymour chuckles. “You are doing it again.”
“Well, we cannot both be angry queens.”
“Not all the time, no.”
Cleves looks up at the woman who has endured so much hardship and yet is still able to hand her heart to another so freely, knowing that it might be crushed. Cleves runs a hand down Seymour’s beautiful, beautiful cheek, her brown skin peppered with darker freckles.
