Her chest grows hot as the monsters strike.
No more running.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Howard
Howard made a promise, and she intends to keep it. She and Parr heave upon a feral Seymour, entreating her to come with them. Howard blocks out the sound of the creatures beyond the doors. The sound of claws upon stone, of teeth against flesh.
The night air is cool and busy. Courtiers are scattered across the grounds, like sheep stranded on a mountainside. Some of them, incapable of accepting what is happening, attempt to continue the festivities, picking at the exotic fruits hanging from fake trees, or dipping goblets into canals of wine. Others scramble to find carriages. Howard even spies some scurrying from the queens’ wings with stolen silverware and candlesticks. She can hardly blame them. They all may need a little extra wealth in the turmoil to come, for even Howard can see that the monsters that were More, Cromwell, Wolsey and Brandon will not permit the queens to assume the rule of Elben without a battle. Perhaps one day, perhaps soon, she will learn how to wield the divine power properly, and alongside her sisters will crush the beasts utterly. But not now.
Their carriages are waiting in the same courtyard from which Boleyn had fled High Hall – Howard’s courtyard. The drivers are fending off courtiers jostling to commission them.
Ursula looks down from her place on top of the foremost carriage.
“Move aside!” she says, kicking a nobleman as she jumps down. She pushes through the crowd to Howard and Seymour, her eyes taking in the lack and looking to Howard for the answer.
“She stayed,” Seymour sobs.
“She gave us a little time, but not much,” Howard adds.
Ursula hustles Seymour into the carriage. Princess Tudor leaps out of the second vehicle and helps her mother in.
“Wait,” Seymour says, her arms braced against the open door of the carriage.
“We cannot wait,” Howard says.
“Wait.”It is a command as if from Hyde itself. Seymour ignores the chaos around her, her eyes fixed upon the doors into High Hall.
In the palace, there is a great wrenching of metal and wood, and the roars of four beasts who were men echo into the night. Howard swings herself up into the carriage, sitting next to Ursula. She made a promise to Cleves, but she will not sacrifice herself to it. She no longer has anything left to prove, to them or to herself. She has lost her best friend, her little loyal dragon. She will not lose herself as well. Not again.
Seymour is frozen, listening to those roars. They all know what it must mean.
“I gave them back,” Seymour says. Her stiff arms wilt. “I gave them back,” she says again.
Parr steps out of the second carriage and catches Seymour neatly as she crumples. Without a word, she lifts Seymour bodily into the carriage and closes the door upon her wails. She looks up at Howard and Ursula. “Drive,” she says.
The carriages spring away down the long road towards the coast. Howard will take Seymour to Plythe. Parr will go to Mathmas, and Aragon from there to Daven. While they may not have been able to take High Hall immediately, there is now no longer a living Tudor male. The queens have demonstrated their power. The truth will spread. It cannot be stopped. And while there will be battles ahead, she can see her way to winning the war.
She thinks of the bordweal flowing into her as Henry grappled with her body. She was equal to him. Of course she was.
Dawn breaks over Elben as Ursula urges the horses onwards, towards the blistering gold. Howard looks to the sky. The bordweal is barely visible, still muted grey. The dawn has not touched it yet. When it does, she thinks it will be the colour of Cleves’s power. A tribute.
Something moves in that grey. For a moment her heart soars, for the movement is so akin to Goldfoot’s flight that she thinks it must be him, that the goddess has brought him back to her. But it is no dragon. It is a murmuration.
The swallows twist like ribbons in the cool air of a new day. They soar, rising points and falling waves. Her chest opens, and the little bird inside flies free to join them.
EPILOGUE
The dream takes the queens one by one, creeping across Elben like a cloud’s shadow. It takes Aragon in her royal sheets, and she cries out, waking Princess Tudor who has been slumbering on a cot at the foot of the bed. Parr is thrown from deep dreams of movement in shadows into the tempest of the nightmare. Seymour, curled in her grief, eyes and heart raw, falls from doze into the vision. Howard, cocooned in Florin’s arms, the wash of the Kyttle Falls outside her window, twitches. And in a darkened dungeon, cold and shivering, a lonely woman, gown studded with priceless pins, thinks she has passed from waking nightmare into insanity.
This is what they see.
The procession is maudlin as it trundles inevitably up the icy mountain paths and comes to a stop outside the royal baths. Cloaked figures emerge from the bath house as though they have been expecting the procession’s arrival. The large, low carriage at the centre of the train is secured, and six men in the cambric of minor courtiers scuffle to pull something from inside. Cromwell, his skin covered in the scars of welts, barks orders. Wolsey, huddled in large fur coats and looking very, very ill, says nothing but only watches through pale eyes.
A stretcher carrying a large bulk swaddled in velvets and silks is conveyed into the bath house. It is unmoving, but the queens have a sense of malice rearing from that bulk, that prone shape. Howard thinks of stifled songbirds; Seymour of her dying and desperate brother. Theprisoner thinks of the soldiers’ drumbeat. Aragon thinks of her first husband, the cruel boy and his stonelike father; Parr is reminded of nothing so tangible, only the sickbeds of her first two spouses, and the knowledge of the mercy of their deaths.
The dream takes them into the baths, where the steam whirls and eddies around so many shapes. Cromwell talks in a low voice to the keeper of the baths, a short, austere man wearing the headdress of Cernunnos. They look together at the nuns, all six of them in their doe-inspired hoods and simple gowns of white linen.
