Page 39 of Six Wild Crowns

Mary takes the bundle and extracts the ermine. “He’ll be angry if you return it all. You have to learn to play the game. Anyway, you might as well get something for your efforts.”

Once Clarice has returned the remaining gifts to the king and Mary has left her alone, Seymour realises how clever her play was. The ermine, the symbol of purity, is the one item Seymour has kept. She is telling the king that she accepts his attention, but that she is too pure for his other presents. It sets her apart from Boleyn, who revels in her husband’s generosity. She wonders where Mary learned such game-playing, and why she is not furious on her sister’s behalf.

Seymour doesn’t have to wait long before Clarice returns.

“He wants to see you,” they say, eyebrow raised.

“Don’t,” Seymour says. She doesn’t need or want Clarice’s judgement. Clarice doesn’t understand how she’s stuck between her family, Boleyn, Aragon and the king.

She pulls on a simple gown of thin, soft wool and drapes the ermine around her neck. Time for the next move.

She finds him in the rose gardens, a maze of high brick walls sitting between the herb gardens and the orchards. Brynd’s gardeners have been very clever, planting summer and winter roses in alternating patterns, so that the garden is filled with perfume and colour in every season. Winter roses, from Pkolack and the colder deserts of the vast Uuvek empire, are pastels and sherbets, and their scentsare subtler than their more vibrant summer counterparts. The king waits for her at the maze’s entrance, looking very gallant in hunting gear. If she were to stand straight, she would match his height. He offers her his arm and leads her into the maze, discreetly followed by his guards.

“You’re not like my other queens,” he says.

“I’m not a queen, Your Majesty.”

“But you want to be.”

“My brothers want me to be. I have no such ambition.”

That’s a misstep. He struggles to word his next sentence: “You don’t want me?”

Seymour almost laughs, the wounded pride is so obvious. But something tells her that she mustn’t laugh. That’s not the role he has allotted to her. Boleyn is allowed to laugh at him because she so clearly adores him. But for someone more reserved, like Seymour, laughter would be humiliating. She strokes the ermine.

“I only mean that I never dreamed you would notice me.”

He tilts her chin up with a gloved hand. His eyes are blue like lapis lazuli, like the clothing only people of the royal family can wear. They are flecked with something of the bordweal, purples and greens swirling in their depths.

Yes, she can understand why Boleyn fell in love with him. Why so many women do – he is the ultimate contradiction. A man of power and good looks and intelligence, but with all the vulnerability of the boy who watched his brother sicken and die, who took up the king’s mantle in a time of war and threat, who was raised being told that he alone can save the kingdom, but only if he marries the right six women.

“If I deem you worthy of my love, then you are worthy. Do you understand, Lady Seymour?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

He offers her his arm once more. Even though they are deep in the maze now, she feels a hundred eyes watching her from Brynd’s windows. Below the crunch of their feet on the path, she can hear the hum of the castle’s beehives at the centre of the maze.

“My people tell me you’re skilled at needlework,” he says. It’sflattering, she supposes, and it’s meant to be flattering – he, the king, has enquired about her.

“I enjoy it; I’m not sure that’s the same thing though.”

He laughs. “Like me and my grasp of languages. No matter how much I study them, I never feel as though I am making much sense to the natives.”

“I’ve heard you speak to the Capetian ambassador. No one would ever have thought you wanting.”

“Except the Capetian ambassador.” He grins.

They turn a corner, into the centre of the maze. A dozen skeps are nestled in the circular space – straw wound tightly into a dome. A beekeeper in a wide hat and long veil lifts one of the skeps and cuts some honeycomb into a clay bowl. The bees buzz around him, ineffective. Seymour wonders if they feel the loss of that honeycomb, won with such labour.

“Your family has an interesting heritage,” Henry says. “Your ancestor was the architect of the Tower, I believe?”

“We owe everything to the throne,” she agrees. The first Lord Seymour designed the gaol at High Hall, in which the most high-born prisoners are kept before their executions. It is a source of shame and pride to her family: when he was in a bad or drunken mood, her father used to show her the old blueprints, revealing all the machinations of that terrible place. But to be descended from a glorified tradesman is not something to admit to in highborn company.

“Another thing you have in common with Boleyn,” he says. She assumes he’s referring to her battle strategy suggestion.

“Will you ally with Capetia?” she asks.

He plucks one of the winter roses from its stem and turns to her, tucking the flower tenderly into the hair above her ear. The silver petals feel silken against her cheek.

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