They smile uncertainly at each other.
“You look like you need a weapon more than I do,” Howard says. The boy laughs.
“That is true. You seem very capable. I definitely am not.”
Howard feels a little drop in her stomach. It occurs to her that this is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to her, and then it occurs to her that that’s a rather sad state of affairs.
The door rattles again. They will need to move quickly or more will arrive, and then they will stand even less of a chance than they do at present. The boy hefts the candlestick. Howard notices a pile of wood next to the fireplace. She takes the longest lump she can find and thrusts it into the flame. Common firewood would take far too long to light properly without kindling, but this is ambawood, treated with oils from Pkolack, and it catches immediately.
“Ready?” Howard says.
“One question,” the boy says. “It is a strange question.”
“Is now truly the time for strange questions?”
“When I inevitably shout your name as we rush through this house, or as I am stabbed to death, what would you like me to call you, since I assume I cannot call you Queen Howard?”
Howard hesitates. “Katheryn,” she says. It’s the name she’d always have wanted to be called, if she hadn’t been the oldest daughter of her absent father.
“Thank you, Katheryn. And I am Florin.”
They smile at each other, and then, as if reading each other’s minds, shove the chest aside, pull the door open and charge forth, candlestick forward, flame bright.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Cecilia
Her bargain with Seymour and Cleves does not grant Cecilia the freedom she had hoped it might. She supposes she ought not to be shocked: a treaty does not mean trust, no matter how pretty the contract is or how swirling the sovereigns’ signatures. Besides, her lie is only one kind of trap. She must make more.
She gets rid of the panther first – she will never be able to gain the beast’s loyalty, and he is too quick and silent. She cannot move freely around the lodge without him coming upon her at inopportune moments. She lays in wait for him one morning, clutching a knife from the supper table. Cleves’s people pounce on her before she can harm him, of course, but harming him was never her intention. The next day, Seymour sends him away to keep him safe.
Next, she must discover exactly where she is.
“If you keep me inside for ever,” she tells Seymour one morning, “then I will be so empty you will not be able to bargain for me. I will lose my mind, you know.”
She grasps Seymour’s sleeve as she speaks. It is the same ruse she used upon Seymour’s servant, and as with the servant, it works. These weak people and their weak hearts.
That afternoon, Seymour comes to her with manacles, and once they are secured around Cecilia’s wrists, they leave the house.
“We will not walk far,” Seymour tells her. Cecilia does not care. She casts her face to the traces of sun which make their way through the tree canopy. She does not need to speak, only to feel the rays upon her skin, to hear the birdsong unimpeded by glass and lead, to smell the bluebells crushed beneath her feet.
Seymour chooses their route well. Once Cecilia begins to take note of her surroundings, she can garner little from them that she does not already know. They are somewhere in Cnothan, but there is no sound of running water that might tell her which way is inland and which way the sea. No roads. Not even a rocky outcrop that might speak of the soil’s fabric.
Cecilia is almost ready to turn back, her feet beginning to tire, when she spies smoke curling from above the trees. She bends their path towards it, hoping that they might stumble across some hamlet or farmstead. Seymour and Cleves cannot have many loyal to their cause, or they would not keep her so isolated.
The trees open into a little glade. Cecilia halts at the sight in its centre. A pit has been dug, and from the embers within comes a stench so vile that bile rises in her throat. She knows that smell. Sometimes the people of Perfugi fall; sometimes they are pushed into the lava which serves for rivers in that city. She recognises the scent of burning flesh.
Covering her nose, she notices the dregs of a tent, abandoned at one side of the glade. A tent, not a homestead …
“They were Hleaws,” Seymour says, behind her.
Cecilia swirls round. Seymour is standing at the very edge of the glade, unwilling to approach the horror.
“You knew this was here, and you led me to it anyway?” she says.
“I knew it was here. But you led us, Cecilia.”
Cecilia looks back towards the pit. She knows what she is going to see, but she cannot stop herself. She never could. Arrow-shot pheasants; aged hounds that never woke up; even her own wounds. She must always peer at death, or its companion, pain, and marvel at their rotten stillness.
