She is no scholar. “Which holy books?”
“The ones that talk of miracles, for what else is your bordweal but a long-lasting miracle?”
He holds up two fingers and a thumb.
“Your mother has studied the scriptures of every faith. There are three ways to beg a miracle from a god. The first: blood sacrifice.” He lowers his thumb.
“The second: acts of devotion. Let us assume that this was what brought Medren to you at the dance.” He lowers one finger. Cleves stops pacing. There is a flicker of memory: not an image but a feeling, fleeting as an ember. The Moon Ball was not the first time she felt the divine power. Not at all.
“The third—” Johana starts. Cleves holds up a hand. She knows. She remembers.
“Relics.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Howard
Susanna Horenbolt will not be able to help her. Not if Howard continues to lie to her, nor if she reveals the truth. What Howard and the other queens are about to attempt will either bring about their downfall or herald their rise, and Howard cannot do it alone. Not with Henry still at Plythe.
Susanna is an outsider, little likely to risk displeasing her queen by gossiping to the others, even if she had known the truth. The rest of Howard’s ladies are linked by blood or long friendship or ancient familial allies. To tell one of them is to tell all. So tell all she will. Sometimes trust is earned. Sometimes it must be thrown out, like a rope to a drowning man.
Henry spends his mornings hunting in the verdant and richly gamed woods around Plythe, returning for luncheon. While he is gone, Wolsey and Cromwell generally see to the more mundane business of running a country, taking vittles in their rooms as they work. But sometimes they will visit her, and she and her ladies will attempt to entertain these men who smile then roll their eyes when they think she is not looking. If they do visit her receiving chamber, Howard must be plausibly, unsuspiciously absent. She does not have long to take the women into her confidence.
She sets Goldfoot at the door of her receiving chamber, and feeds him a morsel of honeydragon meat from a pouch at her waist. Hemakes little huffs of excitement as he gobbles it up. “Guard,” she whispers.
Her ladies are lounging at the window seat, some of them peering out at the cargo boats making their way towards the machinery at Plythe’s base, which will pull them from the water and up into the palace’s gut.
“Look, Legh,” Ursula says, pointing at a vessel. “That one’s from Pkolack. You will have your iced sherbets before long.”
Legh is lying upon the floor, as is her habit. She holds a lute loosely upon her chest, and Howard stoops to pluck it from her. The ladies quieten, sensing their queen’s mood. Can they too hear the bird’s wings beating against her ribcage? And what do they hold in their chests? Loyalty, or betrayal?
Lady Tylney shuffles along the window seat to make room for Howard, and she perches between her women. She looks around them. They are her friends, all of them, and though they are often unkind, she thinks – she hopes – that there is enough love between them to weather what is to come.
Boleyn must have thought so of her sister.
Howard plucks out the first tune that comes to mind: a ditty familiar to all those who grow up in the territory of Plythe. The words follow a fish as it swims along the Kyttle River, tumbles down the Falls and passes whales and so on out to sea.
But she does not sing. She plucks the strings so that anyone lingering outside may only hear the song. She drops her secrets beneath the notes and hopes for mercy.
It is not Legh or even Ursula, the two most vocal of her ladies, who speak first. It is Lady Tylney.
“So you do not love the king?” she says. It is a strange question, given everything that Howard has just divulged. It is not an easy one to answer either.
“I thought so once. But no, I do not think I do.”
“Oh, thank the god,” Lady Tylney says. She begins to make the sign of Cernunnos – splayed fingers against her chest, like antlers – and then, realising her error, makes a fist of her hand instead.
Legh says, “Is that what you have been doing with all those secret meetings and time by yourself?”
Howard reaches for her. “Yes. I am sorry, sister.”
“I thought you no longer liked me,” Legh says.
“Why would you think that?”
Legh glances at Ursula. “You spent so much time with Voda Kelaverinn, and you know men – they think that our pursuits are silly and stupid. We thought you must feel the same way.”
Howard stops her lute-playing to run one hand down her bodice and gown, which is coated in jewels and embroidered with gold thread. “Do I look as though I think our pursuits are silly?”
