The Kingdom of Little Wounds (43 page)

Here it is, the first moment I think to protect the Lump. Such a moment!

When if the thing be seen, I will surely to be murder, for some one will swear I witched the Queen in to monstrous birth.

The drumming come now for executions. The first ones shall begin, this is all ways the sign. I know Arthur must be sharpen his stylus to write events upon his tablet of wax. With his apprentice-boys all around, repeating words so to endure beyond this night.

I want to endure. I want my Lump and I want my life.

Isabel sleeps, like any woman after childbed. Deep and still a-bleeding.

So I wrap the monster in a fur and put him in a chest, that way he will not be cold. I think this as if he be alive and dead at one time. (But he cannot be alive, no such thing could live.) I tuck the mother-cake beside him, it is so small as a sheep’s kidney.

May be I can hide every thing. For a time at least, a time I shall have with the Lump.

I clean the Queen as much I can. I wash and wash. I burn the linens wet with blood. It takes a long while, first they must dry behind the fire and then be pull to the front and I watch them go. Wispy smoke of blood, the stains and also the broideries upon the edge. All in flowers of ash, smell of meat.

Isabel wakes up. I think it be the drums,
bumpbumpbumpbumpbump.
“How much?”

I show seven fingers, I do n’t know what she meant exactly but this baby were inside her so many months.

“Too much,” she says, and, “I must not eat more fish.” She fade to sleep again.

That much be true, she were ever fond of fish and ate a dolphin entire at one meal. May be this explain the baby shape.

Now panic. I need water. I have used all in here, and all the wine, and every other wet thing I could find to make Isabel as she were this morning. Yet there is still blood between her legs, and in time Reventlow will return from watching deaths to report on real Elinor, and then she will inquire about this blood. She will summon Krolik to search the signs that Isabel have been a mother once again. And then I will be witched.

I open a shutter to gobble air. Down the yard, beneath the window, that muddy witch-bed bubble and beckon.

“Elinor!” Isabel whine awake, a-drafty.“Elinor, come here!” She have her Queen ways again, the command in the voice and the anger if her thoughts be not anticipated. “The Prince and I grow cold.” Her waxen boy.

This is my choice, death below the window or a life above uncertain, with a great secret and madness but one step away. My choice which I have faced recently with what should have been death in the bottom of a salve jar — but even then I faced not real choice but fate, for the Lump would not depart.

“Elinor! Come, the Prince needs reswaddling. He mustn’t soil his overdress. Is it not pretty?”

That soft thing that Ava Bingen sewed quick as a shroud so she could depart our strangeness. It is pretty, yes, a little velvet sack for the sorrow-child I helped create.

“And close that shutter!” she finish. “You know moonlight’s dangerous for a newborn.”

I close it loose and I return. I slide in to the bed beside her as she like me to do. I hold my Lump and fuss with her lump’s dress. I am glad now for the Queen’s madness. She have accept the wax child for the real one and do not ask about her stillbirth.

“You are so warm,” she tell me happily. “Like a coal in a fire. Put your arms around us.”

I do this. I worry I may melt her sorrow-child, but for now I am content to clutch some flesh. I am afraid and even one mad woman be company for me.

“Ah, dear Elinor.” Happy at last, and she goes to sleep.

I lie while the Lump bubbles up my belly. He tickles my throat and say he is not going to leave. He want to make me speak for him now if not for my self.

He tell me,
You are Elinor.

I jump from the bed and return to that burning.

I have noted before that while serving my time as a scrub maid, I discovered one important object, a magic talisman that renders the bearer invisible. A bucket. Whether it is made of wood or leather, whether it holds water, slops, or simply brushes, no one looks beyond the bucket to the person carrying it. To be truthful, no one really looks at the bucket, either; the mere fact of its presence works some enchantment to create an unseeable space, especially in the beautiful rooms where courtiers are playing their lutes and sniffing their pomanders, flirting in the window nooks and generally pretending that filth does not exist. The dwarfs notice only when a careless bucket is about to strike them in the head, and then they’re likely to upend its contents on the bearer’s skirt.

None of these people, of course, are present as I march grimly toward Queen Isabel’s chambers, gripping the bucket in which I have stowed her new nightdress. The gorgeous rooms are all but empty, as everyone from slave to dwarf to duchess has gone to witness first the betrothal ceremony, then the executions that are now following it. Only a few dozy guards remain, and they lounge on the otherwise forbidden benches. Their armored eyes barely blink as I pass.

But the tapestries sway lightly. The woodwork of the ceilings braids into a net waiting to drop; the gods painted among it point and chide. The palace is gathering itself against me.

I am doing a terrible thing.

Yes, I chose my father over Queen Isabel, even considering that many more might die as a result. I am about to kill the Queen. What other choice, really, does a daughter have?

I am a murderess. A regicide. But not a patricide.

The night cracks open my wishes.

I still hunger for the beautiful part of the story, the part with the wedding or the wealth or the lover un-beasted, the family restored, before the trials and sadness that follow into another story. I want the life of the princess just starting out on her adventures, the kind of tale I used to tell when it was my turn to speak at night in the seamstresses’ dorter, or while we were at work in the needle room. I want to save my father and then to be reunited with my vanished love . . . or at the very least to gain independence, with a shop and a house of my own. And I still, even now, I
still
think I might earn these things, if I complete a few more trials correctly.

Far off, I hear cheering, and I know a prisoner is being brought out. Then there is the slowing
bump-bump-bump
of drums; then silence, during which Nicolas might make a speech and a priest might take final confession. I imagine Grammaticus (once my suitor, later my lover) writing all this on a tablet. Then more cheering — I believe the ax has fallen.

As I have noted, persons of the highest status are executed by losing their heads. Those lower down are hanged. I wonder which will be my father, noble or humbled — that is, if he dies, which will happen if I don’t finish my task: to kill quickly and in the most royal way, with poison.

And here is the Dowager’s outer chamber, which I have cleaned so often and so thoroughly that the dirt of it still stains the cracks of my hands. Today the room bristles with more than the usual number of guards; as I walk in, they stand straight and gaze sternly ahead of themselves, rattling their various weapons.

I tremble, sure I’m sweating out guilt in waves; but I’m surprised. Either the bucket truly is magical or Nicolas and his angel army have already given orders, for the guards let me pass without question. I simply walk (trembling) up to the door of the inner chamber, grasp the cold iron handle, and push against the tapestry flap. Then I am within.

If being able to enter was a surprise, being inside is a shock.

The odor of blood is strong here, despite the cold air pouring through a half-opened shutter. Maybe the blood of prisoners is already so thick in the military yard that any crack will let in a slaughterhouse reek. I imagine blood flooding the stones outside, the nobles first slipping in it and then, as it thickens and freezes, stuck in place like statues.

But there’s no time for fancies. Something has gone direly wrong right here, I can see it at once. Midi Sorte crouches by the fire with a wild look in her eyes, hair burst out of her ladylike headdress and skin shining with sweat; and Queen Isabel, a mound of a woman gone so pale as to be translucent, snores amid disordered bedclothes.

I set my bucket down. Then pick it up again — I’m here for a purpose.

“I — does the Queen need a change of linen?” I ask. Then force myself to be firmer: “I was sent with . . .”

Midi doesn’t seem to hear me. Still crouching catlike, she wipes at the sweat running into her eyes. I get the impression she’s about to spring.

My own sweat turns to ice. “Wh-what are — What is wrong?” Witches can sense thoughts, substances, everything: Midi must have detected the poison in the nightdress. I expect her to kill me straight out, right now, as my father is approaching the executioner. I regret the kindness I showed her when she was ill with the first weeks of pregnancy. No one is fiercer than a woman protecting her young.

Midi puts her finger to her lips, ordering me and my thoughts to be silent. Then, as if they operate with a separate will, the two parts of her tongue creep out around that finger and lick the sweat from her lip.

She growls. Her hand stretches toward me.

I
T is a slow business, execution. Who would have expected so much ceremony? Certainly not Christina-Beatte, sitting stiffly (as she must, because of her unforgiving silver-bay gown) in a gilded chair on the carpeted dais facing the platform that has been erected so that sparkling courtiers may watch the grubby prisoners die, in a few weak hours of light on a January afternoon.

Why must there be so much
confession
? Each one to be killed has his moment with the priest, and his moment of offering forgiveness and a coin to the black-draped executioner. And then, only then, comes the heavy thwack of the ax and the thump as the head drops away. There is more slow ceremony, too, in the way the guards collect the body and the head and carry them away, as if these corpses deserve as much honor as any other dead.

Thus far, there have been only two deaths: a manservant accused of helping to poison her sister Sophia, and a girl said to be his lover. Neither one said anything memorable, and Nicolas shielded the girl’s eyes at each actual death blow, which was most annoying.

Christina-Beatte barely remembers Sophia, for whose sake these people are officially being punished. She is tired and hungry. But there is a whole prison left to go, and she is the royal Lunedie who commanded all this bloodshed, so she endures.

She schemes.

The next one, she will watch. She will slip from Nicolas’s hand, peel her eyes open, and see everything.

In a moment of gleeful anticipation, Christina-Beatte takes time to pity the last sister who remains to her. Poor little Gorma, back in the nursery, missing the day’s riches! How jealous she’ll be when Christina-Beatte describes to her, in gruesome detail, just how each one perished!

That selfsame tiny princess, meanwhile, leans into her pillows and listens to the drums. The cheering courtiers. The various noises that accompany history as it pushes forward into her sister’s reign.

Gorma picks at the flakes around her nails, then digs inside her nose. She repeats the process, thinking of her sister and Count Nicolas. Married now, or all but married. In the smoldering amber cathedral, they promised to be as one body forever and ever and ever, amen. Someday.

Gorma wonders when she will be well enough to join them at events like the one in progress. Christina-Beatte is only five years older, but she forbade the youngest princess to attend the rest of the day’s events. Only for adults and those of highest rank, she said. Showing off her older-sisterliness, her queen-apparentness. But Count Nicolas gave Gorma several kindly looks as she stood in the cathedral propped up among the ladies-in-waiting, and once he even winked.

Gorma wonders if someday he might marry her as well. When the nurses tell their stories, his is always the face Gorma imagines for a dark and handsome man.

And now, as if she’s summoned him, here comes the
shuffle-shuffle
of leather-clad feet and the
stir-stir
of heavy cloth.

But it is not Count Nicolas. The
tink
of glass, the smell of pain.

It is the physician, the young one, Doctor Dé. He looks so sad lately, with brown eyes that puff underneath. He carries a box of vials and powders and beakers and fleams.

She shrinks from him into the feathery pillows, as if they are wings to enfold and protect her. Wings — how she longs for the public bed in the shape of a swan! So many little nooks in a swan, so many places to cling and elude grasping hands. (Has she only imagined that some of those hands were black? The gentlest hands, with the gentlest lips whispering,
“Shhh, shh, sh.”
) Ever more frightened, Gorma slides toward the far side of the bed, which is just inches from the wall.

She is trapped, and she knows it.