Cleves opens the carriage door and steps out.
Henry is riding a fine grey stallion that seems, like his master, to look down upon her. Cleves drops a curtsey.
“Your Majesty, what an unexpected and pleasant meeting.”
Henry grins, all his teeth showing. “Forgive me for not warning you of my arrival. I took it into my head to surprise you, but it turned out better than I could have devised, meeting you on the road like this. I hear you have come from one of your hunting lodges?”
There’s an edge to his voice she knows well. Her mother used to use the same voice when she wanted her to guess the source of her displeasure.
Cleves surveys Henry’s train. She spies only a few armed men. This is a guard, not an army. He cannot know yet. He and Cecilia must have missed each other on their dual journeys. She recalculates how much time she has: Cecilia may be reaching High Hall by now, and that means that a messenger, riding swiftly on the scrind road, may reach Cnothan by dawn. There is time. There is time.
She has been silent for a little too long. Henry and his court are staring at her. She realises that her fingernails are still crusted with Johana’s blood, and clasps them behind her back.
“I am honoured to receive you at our shared home,” she says, allowing her Ezzonidian accent to become more pronounced. It is a reminder that she is royalty even without her Elbenese title. She has the backing of a royal house.
Henry smiles genially. “Forgive me, my queen. I have been lax in paying my attentions to you lately. I felt it only right that I should rectify that error.”
She calls for her horse and swings into the saddle. As she settles there and gathers her reins, Henry joins her side. “Don’t make me the cause of your discomfort,” he says. “If you wish to travel in your carriage, please continue.”
She thinks of Seymour.
“And miss a rare opportunity for my husband’s company?” she says. Better that he think her desperate for his affection than that there is anything in that carriage to warrant her attention.
“I would not mind,” he says. “A carriage is sometimes more appropriate for a woman, I think. Too much horse riding changes the physique.”
He glances at her arms, visible through the thin silk of her blouse. She wants to laugh, because she loves her arms, and their strength. Ifhe wished to needle an insecurity, he could not have chosen a poorer area.
“I am fond of an active physique,” she says blithely. He shifts uncomfortably in his saddle, and she notes the bandage around his leg. So the injury that Boleyn had caused him does not seem to be healing. “Perhaps it is you who requires a carriage?”
She is banking on his pride preventing him from acquiescing. It is undoubtedly a risk, but easier for her to take him and his men out by surprise should he see Seymour before they reach Cnothan. She wants to bait him, but she does not want to initiate violence unless she must.
Henry forces a laugh. “Quite right. You are far more able than I at present. My other queens are too demanding for my current state. I rather hoped you would provide me with your excellent company and formidable advice while I recover.”
Cleves has to admire the manoeuvre. In a single sentence he has been outwardly gallant to her, while making it clear to their company that he finds her repulsive and is desired by his other queens. She has spent so long cocooned in her own cleverness in tricking him into never having lain with her, that she must not forget that he is still a dangerous opponent.
They ride into Cnothan, the people of the town pointing in wonder at the sight of their king in their very own territory, in the company of their poor, strange, abandoned queen. Before long, shouts of joy ripple through the town. Her subjects rush from their houses to see their monarch, doffing their hats, kneeling, offering babies for him to bless with his divine power. He is magnanimous. Cleves, at his side, thinks her smile will dry there and become a fixed expression.
Once they reach the castle, it is a scramble to find suitable rooms for her guests. Unlike the other queens, she has never cared to keep any ready for the king and his people. After all, he has so rarely visited her, there did not seem to be any point.
Her servants hurry like fine horses, all upright and prancing, to prepare everything in a manner that does not appear panicked. They must be wondering what has caused this visit. The people of Elben may not know all that passed at the Moon Ball, but any fissures in the brittle authority of royalty have a way of trickling down the ranks in any country. It is like a stone thrown into a pool. The effects are being feltmost fully in High Hall, but that does not mean that even the lowliest worker in the furthest reaches of the Heahmore mountains does not feel some of the anxiety of a country on the brink of turmoil. It exhibits in strange ways: great shows of patriotism, or more willingness to risk all for the silliest of perceived riches. In her people, who are used to balancing the warring attitudes of loyalty to their absent king and loyalty to their strange but present queen, it mostly exhibits as an overwrought yet surly deference to Henry. Her maidservants curtsey deeply and offer cakes warm from the kitchen with the impatience of a dog doing a trick under duress. The grooms remain in a permanent bow in Henry’s presence, yet they reserve their warmest smiles for Cleves.
She thinks of Seymour, the woman who travelled through half a dozen foreign countries as a hunted exile. The woman who broke a condemned queen from the most feared building in all of Elben. The woman who has been spy, assassin, lover, leader – cowering in Henry’s mere presence.
Then she thinks of the bloodied shell of her cousin.
The whole family is a canker.
She visits the kitchens to inspect the food preparations. A dozen cooks sweat over wide metal pans that rest in a long stone counter, beneath which are lit a dozen fires. From the pans rise the aromas of spiced chickpeas, bread soaking in sugared milk, and pottage. Children barely out of their weeds take turns to rotate spits laden with capons, pigs and one of Cleves’s prized honeydragons, slaughtered as soon as news of the king’s arrival reached the kitchens. Cleves’s eyes skate over all as she nods along to the head cook’s hurried list of dishes. The king’s taster walks slowly behind every cook, lifting lids and dipping a finger into every sauce and oil before transferring the finger into his mouth and sucking it clean with a pop.
“Is it good, Your Majesty?” the cook says, wiping their brow on their apron.
Pop. No poison, then.
“It is more than I deserve,” Cleves says.
She can delay no longer. She returns to her banqueting hall, where Henry is already seated at the high table, in the seat that Cleves usually claims for herself. When he spies her, he rises and bows, all gallant in that way she has learned means he is at his most dangerous – it isthe gallantry he showed to Boleyn the day before he sentenced her to death.
She takes the seat on his right. The air is thick with expectancy. It blooms throughout the hall from the whispers of her nobles, the not-glances of her household. She and Henry barely speak to each other as the servants fill the tables with dishes: dressed piglet and roasted swan accompanied by breads as white and fluffy as snow for the humans, and grain and offal for the animals lined up at long troughs at the sides of the hall.
