“Are we returning to Gnottel Lodge, cousin?” he asks her.
“Why?”
He looks ostentatiously at their surroundings. “Perhaps because we took the turning to the Gealdrum Forest instead of the road to Cnothan a full half-hour ago?”
Cleves looks around sharply and realises that he is right. Idiot.
“Why did you not say at the turning?” she says.
He shrugs. “I assumed you were thinking on a certain queen and were eager to reach her.”
She pulls her hand from his and taps him on the knee. “I like you at present, cousin. Don’t become presumptuous again.”
He laughs and holds up his hands in surrender.
“I simply think that you should do what is necessary to remove her from your head. Kiss her, sleep with her, be done with her. That was ever your way, was it not?”
“It was,” she says. Then again, softer: “It was.”
She has not played fair with her lovers. She, who has always considered herself a person of integrity. Has she been selfish to treat them so, even if she was always honest about what she had to offer?
She shakes her head.
“What thought has turned you so serious?” Johana asks.
“I am wondering whether a castle can ever change its foundations,” she replies.
Johana throws his head back, staring at the sky as he considers this. “Yes, I think so,” he says.
“Truly?” She licks her lips. She does not like the way her body feels – like it is floating, untethered.
“Certainly. If one is willing to pull down the rest of the castle and rebuild it stone by stone.”
Her breath hitches. “But then it would be a different castle entirely.”
“Would it?” He does not look at her, only at the road ahead. “If it was the same stone, the same design. Would it be a different castle, or simply one built on surer foundations?”
He nudges his horse closer, so that his boot touches hers.
“Are you thinking of redesigning Cnothan alongside your plan to overthrow your husband?” he says. “Or do we talk of a different castle?”
She is about to respond with a witty deflection, but the softness of his enquiry merits the softness of honesty, inasmuch as she is able to give it.
“The phoenix,” she says.
“Yes?”
“I think that was the happiest, most extraordinary moment of my life.”
“Mine too.”
She can see Gealdrum Forest in the distance now. Its dense canopy – ash, sweet chestnut, poison yew and needle holly – is a line of soldiers on the horizon.
“In some ways I think I have spent my whole life seeking that same happiness,” she says.
“And in others?”
“Running from it.” She gulps. She had never realised before. She has pursued small, immediate pleasures – reading in solitude, a tumble with a pretty woman, the soft nuzzle of a loving dog – and thought that she could build them, brick by brick, stone by stone, into a greater happiness. A phoenix happiness. But she is starting to see that there is a greater happiness to be found, not in the strong walls of a castle, but in the silent rage of the tidal wave. Who would not run from such a wave? Only those who do not fear to drown.
