“I must make arrangements,” she says. She must get out of that cursed room.
She never spent any time in her own bedchamber, so her belongings remain packed in their trunks, ready to be returned to the carriage. It will be a blessedly quick escape.
Seymour trails behind her. “Let us discuss this a little longer, Cleves,” she says.
“You can come with me back to Cnothan, and I will protect you, or I will give you a horse and the means to get you to Mathmas, or wherever you choose to go.”
Seymour grabs her arm, forcing her to stop. “I do not require your help,” she says. She shakes Cleves’s arm, her grip unforgiving. “If it comes to it, Clarice can take me to Mathmas. I am telling you that you have a choice to make. A choice between your old way of life, safe and lonely, and the promise of a new life, dangerous but full of possibility.”
“No, I have a choice between my home and belongings and status, or being homeless and alone and in danger.”
Seymour’s face goes blank. “It is a shame, given what has passed between us, that you think you would be alone.”
How dare Seymour attempt to make last night more significant than it really was. They were both lustful. Cleves has been wanting Seymour since their first meeting, and Seymour was probably lonely and in need of satiation.
She says, “Well, at some point I will stop making you angry, and then what will we have, my angry queen?”
She has set it up nicely for Seymour to quip back,You will never stop making me angry.
“You are grieving. You are not thinking clearly,” Seymour says.
“Come with me, at least as far as Cnothan,” Cleves replies. “We can argue all the way, I promise. When we arrive, you can decide whether you are going to stay with me, or whether I am going to deliver you to your Clarice and their ship.”
Eventually, Seymour nods. Cleves leads her down to the waiting carriage, hands her in and climbs in beside her. She pulls the curtains across. “Go!” she commands the driver, and the carriage springs away.
Inside, Cleves turns her attentions to Seymour. It is so much easier to lose herself in a fine woman’s mouth and breasts and neck and stomach than to think on that blood-drenched lump on the floor of Johana’s room. But Seymour stops her.
“I will hold you, and no more,” Seymour says. She kisses Cleves on the mouth, then folds her in her arms. It is not what Cleves would have chosen to do, but there, with her head resting beneath Seymour’s chin, all of her frantic purpose rushes from her. They sit like that in silence as the carriage bumps along the scrind road, and all the while the cushion and its beautiful cargo warms her thigh, where it rests in her pocket.
Well, Cleves had one night with Seymour. One night, before she walls herself off from the world and Seymour makes her escape. She must be satisfied.
One particularly big jolt throws them from their seat. They land on the floor of the carriage, arms and legs tangled.
“What is it?” she calls, as Seymour struggles to extricate herself.
The voice that answers her is not the driver’s. It is a voice she has not heard since the Moon Ball.
“Well met, wife.”
CHAPTER FORTY
Cleves
Many people assume that Cleves enjoys chaos. She does, after all, keep a menagerie of animals and likes to surprise others. What they often miss is that her animals are meticulously well-trained, and when she is the one enacting the surprise, she is in control. There are few people who have given Cleves a pleasurable surprise. One of them is Seymour, with the way she sawed through her dress with that crone’s tooth, a simple act of rebellion that made Cleves’s heart leap.
No, she does not like surprises in the least, and she has taken every measure possible to ensure that they do not occur.
The carriage’s curtains are still closed. The driver is talking loudly to the king. Cleves hurries to make herself presentable, her heart hammering in her throat and her chest and her stomach all at once. Seymour curls herself in the furthest corner of the carriage.
Cleves pauses, her hand on the carriage door. She reaches for her lover.
“I will protect you,” she mouths.
Seymour is trembling, her eyes wide. Cleves knows this feeling. She had many such experiences in the years since the soldiers came. She knows that Seymour needs peace, needs her to hold her as she gains control of her body.
The fact that she cannot give Seymour what she needs makes her fists clench.
“Queen Cleves? Are you stuck in there?” Henry calls.
