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CHAPTER EIGHT

Seymour

A ssassins are supposed to be quick and stealthy, skilled at either magic or knives.

Seymour is none of those things, yet here she is – on her way to murder a royal.

She had always imagined that assassins would feel powerful, but Seymour only feels like a puppet in a travelling show.

Her strings are being pulled by too many people – her brothers, telling her to use her time at the palace to seduce the king.

And now Aragon, telling her to kill Queen Boleyn before she falls pregnant.

In her final weeks spent at Daven, waiting for her new uniform to be cut and sewn and tailored, she spent a lot of time pondering her dual masters, and which of them should command most loyalty.

Mostly, she considered which of them would be more dangerous should she refuse to obey them. She never did reach a conclusion.

The Seymour family taught a curious form of survival – a dogged continuation, rather than the vivid lust for advancement that Seymour sees in the more ambitious courtiers.

Her father always regarded ambition as distasteful while possessing entirely too much of it himself, and she and her brothers imbibed that view, were entangled in it.

When Thomas came of age and pursued diplomacy, lobbying for greater and more prestigious foreign positions, their father railed against him.

Called him upstart . And Edward and Seymour were caught in the middle, knotted up in stagnant intelligence, notions of old blood, and resentment of the new favourites.

Maybe that’s Seymour’s problem – the strings controlling her are tangled, and have been for some time.

The journey from the Palace of Daven to Brynd Castle takes three days by carriage.

Ordinarily, Seymour would have returned inland to High Hall itself before travelling out to Brynd – quicker by a day thanks to the scrind magic.

It was what Queen Aragon had expected her to do.

But Seymour recoils at the thought of taking the instruments of her assassination into that hive of courtly politics.

She feels sure that someone would discover the leaves, tucked neatly into a blank envelope at the base of her smallest trunk.

So she takes the harder road: one that covers less distance – for there is barely one hundred miles between Daven and Brynd as the dragon flies – but takes much longer.

It is only commoners, after all, who travel between the six territories.

There is no need to maintain their roads.

The nobility of Elben choose a queen and cleave to her.

Any switch of loyalty is performed in the centre of the kingdom, at High Hall.

The road joining Daven and Brynd is made more impenetrable by the Mearcdyke – a canyon that slices deep into the island, an unnaturally straight line across the landscape reaching from the coast almost to High Hall itself.

The canyon is wide and the rapids in its depths are too dangerous and deep to traverse by boat.

The only road that crosses it winds down the side of the canyon in a series of sharp turns, littered with rockfall, before reaching a bridge at the bottom.

On the other side of the canyon, the weather thickens. After the dry cold of Daven, Seymour finds the humidity of Brynd an unwelcome change. Seymour’s clothes are not made to cope with it.

The carriage, emblazoned in fresh paint with her new mistress’s storm cloud emblem, jostles her and Clarice over the uneven surface until their hips and arms ache.

The interior of the carriage has yet to be refreshed, and the seat cushions are threadbare.

Seymour suspects that Boleyn has instructed the driver to tarry, because they stop at every opportunity and the three-day journey ekes out to four.

Seymour reminds herself at every roadside inn that at least the horses will be happy.

Still, even though she is in no hurry to reach Brynd, where she will need to follow Aragon’s orders or face the consequences, she is relieved when they spot the town of Pilvreen, which serves the castle of Brynd.

They pass the barrows first – mounds topped with stone antlers, marking them as ancient mass graves lining the road.

Then, in the distance, they see Pilvreen’s neat little rows of thatched houses, like a family of bristling urchins.

They make one more stop, the driver claiming that the horses need feeding.

Clarice jumps down from the carriage and cracks their back.

Seymour chooses to remain inside despite her discomfort – to get out here would feel like an unfair invasion of Boleyn’s territory, even though she knows that’s ridiculous. She peers out of the open door instead.

They have stopped on the edge of the town’s market.

Two inns, busy but not unruly, do business on either side of the square.

The one next to her carriage is marked with the swinging sign of a heart, skewered and bleeding.

Seymour reaches out further to see the sign above the more distant inn.

A woman’s disembodied head, her crown still atop her curls.

Seymour shivers. Pilvreen may be famous for two things – its mines and its massacre – but she doesn’t see why it needs to revel in the latter.

But then how can they forget, Seymour thinks, when reminders of the massacre surround them?

Through the middle of Pilvreen flows a stream, but no washerwomen crouch on its banks, for either by the volume spilled or some old magic in the bones of Brynd, the water still runs red with ancient blood.

Even from this distance she can hear the chisels and flame from the forest. The final and most potent reminder of the massacre: the garnet mines.

How can a place throw off its dark history when so much of its wealth is derived from that blight?

For the garnet mines did not exist before the massacre.

The Pilvreen garnets are the finest jewels in the known world, and they were forged from blood.

Before that time, Pilvreen sat upon a rich vein of clear crystal instead.

Blood infects many things on the island of Elben: family, power, even the soil and the rocks.

It has been many, many generations since Queen Isabet of Brynd betrayed Elben, opened the bordweal to foreign powers and permitted them to slay her people in her quest to kill the king.

Many, many years since she was executed for treason after the invasion failed.

What good does it do to dwell on the gore of history?

“What are you grimacing about?” Clarice asks from outside.

“My own hypocrisy,” Seymour replies. Of course she doesn’t want to dwell on treason and death – she is about to become the deliverer of both.

Clarice shrugs, never one for entertaining Seymour’s self-pity. “I’m starved. Do you want me to buy you anything?”

Seymour gives Clarice three silver marks.

They disappear into the bustling market stalls and return with two steaming pasties.

Seymour watches the gravy dripping down Clarice’s chin.

When they were younger, she would have reached over and wiped it off, and Clarice would have turned to her and licked the juice from her fingers.

She bites into her own pasty and recognises the meat inside as hunigwyrm .

Honeydragon. Undoubtedly poached from the Brynd estate, for no commoner should have access to such fine meat.

It speaks to the locals’ disloyalty to their queen that the merchant is secure enough to sell such food publicly.

“What did you discover out there?” Seymour asks, as Clarice climbs back into the carriage. Clarice has a knack for being able to make friends quickly. It’s a talent they learned from their childhood spent on trade ships, sailing from port to port.

“She’s being very free with money. Seems as though she’s employed half of Pilvreen and Garclyffe.”

“That’s admirable, isn’t it?” Seymour says.

Clarice shrugs.

“I suppose she’ll have the king’s permission,” Seymour says.

“Of course she does, while he thinks she can give him what he wants.”

To say what it is the king wants out loud – a son – would be tasteless, but it hangs in the very air of High Hall.

It is in the taste of loneliness and disappointment at Daven.

The safety of Elben relies on an heir, and in the twenty years since King Henry inherited the throne, his five wives have not been able to supply him with a surviving male child.

Maybe his sixth will do better. Seymour thinks of the statues in Queen Aragon’s antechamber, each one a reminder of a life grown and then lost. She thinks of the oracle’s prophecy – From the storm, a blossom.

But not if Seymour is successful in her task.

Seymour hands Clarice the remains of her pasty. “You finish it. I’m no longer hungry.”

In another hour, Brynd bounces into view, all bleak towers against a bleaker sky.

The stonework is covered in wooden scaffolding, and workers clad in leather overalls, tools swinging from belts, clamber across the vertical surfaces like insects.

In one area, they scrub at the stone until it is burnished like a dark jewel.

In others, they slather mortar between crumbling rocks.

Seymour had heard that the Dowager Queen Huntlye had let the castle fall into ruin in her dotage, but she thought the rumours might be malicious court gossip. Clearly they were true.

The carriage crosses Brynd’s moat and draws into a cobbled courtyard. Two women emerge from the castle. One of them is the queen’s sister, Mary – plump where Boleyn is scrawny, but sharing her easy sensuality. The other is Boleyn’s sister-in-law, Lady Rochford, who is hard lines and harder-mouthed.

“You’re late!” Mary says jovially as Seymour climbs down and stretches her back out at last.