Page 52 of Six Wild Crowns

The king shows Seymour how to place her hand just so on the gargoyle’s head, and she welcomes the rush of companionship that fills her body, so different from the pain of her binding to the king in High Hall’s sanctuary.

As Seymour’s new household unpacks her belongings, she is shown around Hyde itself. The palace has long been regarded as one of the marvels of the known world, the old magic that keeps its vast underwater rooms watertight unfathomable, even to Elben’s kings, who wield the power that made it. Seymour has grown up proud to be part of a nation that contains such wonders, but to see it with her own eyes – more than that, to nowlivehere as the mistress and keeper of such a place – is dizzying. It is the kind of soul-lurching feeling she had when she first saw the bordweal, or when she felt her mother’s fever and understood she was going to die.

The upper vestibule, the only part of the palace that lies above sea level, is lit by hundreds of candles, even during the daytime, forthe space only has a few windows on the courtyard side. Leading from the vestibule are dozens of staircases that plunge into the rest of the palace, built against and beneath the might of the ocean. It is a rabbit warren, but made of glass so that it never feels claustrophobic. One staircase leads to the glass dome of Seymour’s private chambers – a gathering of smaller rooms set around her bedchamber; one leads to a modest banqueting hall hewn from the remnants of an underwater crater; a natural cylinder of rock with a man-made glass roof set over it to keep it watertight. The remaining wings house guest suites, offices and rooms of state. Every room has wide walls of glass that look out to the ocean – even the kitchen’s ovens watch over shoals of herring, while long pipes whisk the smoke into the open air, high above them. Seymour knows that once she is alone, she will happily wander the corridors for days, simply watching the play of light through sea and glass, or the play of fish and seaweed just beyond her reach.

“It is nearly sunset,” Seymour’s steward says, once they have completed their tour. Like the rest of Seymour’s household, he’s softly spoken, and moves like waves on a summer’s day. His tanned skin speaks either of many a year spent on a ship, or a Quistoan or Uuvek heritage. She cannot imagine how he or anyone here gets anything done. Surely it is impossible to grow accustomed to the flickering strangeness of this palace.

“We should go to my chamber then,” Seymour says, hoping she sounds more even-keeled than she feels. She only has to endure a sennight, and then Henry must return to war and she will be blissfully alone.

They take a hurried dinner in Seymour’s receiving chambers, which are in a low-ceilinged room with a view of a crumbling, underwater wall – presumably the remnants of an older part of Hyde, or of a village lost to the sea. A series of mirrors and crystals fractures candle and firelight across the walls and their faces. Then Henry leads Seymour down into her bedchamber. She can’t help herself – she stops at the doorway, her body screaming at her to run. The chamber is full of people, nearly all of them men. She recognises some of them – Wolsey, More, Cromwell. Her brotheris there too, so eager not to miss a moment of his family’s ascension that he galloped his horse ahead of the carriage.

“It’s all right,” Henry says gently, easily, like a trainer calming a horse. Seymour steps over the threshold.

This room is full of windows, all of them submerged. Like most of Hyde, they look out onto shoals of small, darting fish and the eels that are a common cuisine in this part of Elben. She focuses on the fish as she steps towards the four-poster bed. Two maids, the only other women in the room, draw the curtains to hide her modesty. Silently, they undress her shaking body. Through the curtains, Seymour listens to Henry getting undressed, joking with his courtiers, with her brother. She wonders how Aragon bore this kind of humiliation, but then she remembers that Henry was much younger when she and he were married. According to him, he was as nervous as Aragon was. Then her thoughts slip to Boleyn, and how she stomached it. She probably got undressed outside the bed and made as many jokes as the men. Seymour supposes she must at least be thankful that Henry’s advisors checked when her monthly course was due before arranging a wedding date. The additional mortification of bleeding over her kingly husband in front of all these men would have been too humiliating to bear.

“Wait,” Seymour says, as one of the maids tries to unclasp the locket. “Would you mind giving me a moment?”

The maid steps away, and a moment later the other girl goes too, taking Seymour’s wedding gown with her. She is entirely naked now, except for the sun locket. Checking that no one’s watching, she unlocks it, careful not to spill the contents. Inside are three little pink pills, and a tiny note.

For enjoyment, the handwriting on the note reads. It’s Boleyn’s writing.

Without thinking, Seymour puts one of the pills on her tongue and downs it with a swig of the wine left on a table beside the bed. Then she unclasps the necklace and hides it beneath one of the pillows. She can’t risk Henry seeing it.

The effect is instantaneous. A pleasant fog fills her brain. Hershaking calms and her heartbeat slows. She is at the doorway to dreaming when Henry parts the curtains and climbs onto the bed. Through her fog, she admires his muscled stomach, the hair across his chest.

“Very pretty,” he says, running a hand down her body. The divine magic flickers from his skin to hers, a cool balm. She closes her eyes. He is not using her. She is using him. It’s strange that it only occurs to her now, when Boleyn’s drug is coursing through her veins, but she is the one who’s been in control of this courtship, this wedding, all along. She has been steering it. And she’s not going to secede control now, not tonight.

With a strength surprising to both Henry and her, Seymour pushes him back on the bed and climbs on top of him, to jeers and hoots. She leans down and kisses him hard, slipping her hand beneath the pillow to retrieve Boleyn’s gift. Then she rears back and closes her eyes again, the necklace hidden in her fist. She lowers herself onto him, and she thinks of her, her, her, her,her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Boleyn

Boleyn knew, when she decided to attend Seymour’s wedding to Henry, that she would shock people. It’s not right – not tasteful – for a Queen of Elben to witness her husband declaring his love for another woman. Boleyn had never questioned this before, and that bothers her, now she thinks about it. She has always regarded herself as naturally curious. She wants to understand how a heart pushes blood through the body. She wants to decipher the strange Pkolack alphabet. She loves an experiment, loves testing people as well as things. As a child, her parents were infinitely patient with her constant stream ofwhys.

So why has she never before questioned this tradition? It suggests a shortcoming in her. It follows that she must remedy that shortcoming. She is no ordinary woman. She is a rebel, a free thinker. Thus: she will attend the wedding. She will deliver the gift to Seymour in person.

She had told herself that Henry would enjoy seeing her there. Her contrariness is one of the reasons he loves her, after all. But she can’t shake the knot that has sat in her stomach since the moment he spotted her in the pews. His face froze. Like the rivers around Brynd in winter, all icy impassivity hiding a churning current. He did not find her act of disobedience charming, orlovable. He did not so much as look at her as he left the sanctuary with his new wife.

The journey from the sanctuary to her own chambers at High Hall is fraught with whispers. The wing that belongs to her and her guests is in the north-east of the palace, and like all the queens’ apartments, it is on the third of the hall’s six levels. She still isn’t familiar with the quickest way to reach her rooms – each storey is set around a series of courtyards, balconies and indoor gardens, and each courtyard is overlooked by myriad rooms. Bedchambers, antechambers, laundry rooms, pantries, garderobes and private kitchens, offices, watching chambers and dining chambers and guard chambers. Then there’s the etiquette of which staircases Boleyn is permitted, as queen, to move through, for some routes are reserved for the servants alone, to allow them to get quickly and discreetly from space to space.

Boleyn is used to such palaces – after all, the Capetian court where she spent her formative years is far grander than High Hall – but she has yet to familiarise herself with its routes the way she has at Brynd. Another failing. She must come to court more often. She must be seen here. She is beginning to realise that it would be foolish to rely solely on the king’s love.

The court is awash with colour. The songbirds in their cages, dangling from every oriel window, glitter gold, red, yellow and turquoise. Lap dragons wind around their mistresses’ necks, shimmering green. Then there are the people. Queen Aragon’s supporters, dressed in violets – the closest to royal blue they are permitted to wear – keep their distance from Boleyn, as do Parr’s supporters with their white gowns, hose or handkerchiefs. Queen Howard’s allies, sporting clothing of silver, bronze or gold, are warmer towards Boleyn. Perhaps they feel that she, like their own queen, is being unfairly maligned by rumour. Boleyn doesn’t spy any of Cleves’ supporters, which isn’t entirely surprising, but a few courtiers drift past her wearing the bright yellow that Seymour has chosen as her colour. These are the people who skirt her, smirking as though their new queen has won a great game against Boleyn. Boleyn clenches her fists inside her sleeves and raises her head still higher.

“Your Majesty?”

Boleyn pauses. A thickset man wearing a black cap and the red robes of an advisor stands, panting a little, in the doorway she’s just come through. Cromwell. The last time she saw him was just after her wedding, and she doesn’t think she made a good impression. She’s surprised, then, to spy a square of deep green fabric pinned to his doublet.

“Master Cromwell?”

“May I accompany you to your rooms?”

She nods her acquiescence. Cromwell is taller than her by some way, but despite his stature and build, there’s something insubstantial about him, as though the bulk of his being lies in intellectual rather than corporal matters.

“How wonderful of you to support your former lady-in-waiting today,” he says as they pass through a doorway and into an orangery filled with ripening grapevines.

“I’m glad you think so. I fear you may be alone,” she says.

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