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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Seymour

F or someone who cannot swim, Seymour finds an inordinate amount of peace in living in an underwater palace.

If Boleyn is Brynd – all storms and lightning – then Seymour is Hyde – muted, lilting.

Seymour spends her days exploring her new abode.

Her household is still depleted after Queen Blount’s passing, and she intends to keep it that way for as long as possible.

She does not need elaborate feasts or hundreds of craftsmen.

There is a solemn beauty in the silent galleries and dilapidated rooms, mottled with sea brightness.

This place is hers. It is a place of splintered beauty, the kind that makes one weep silently. She doesn’t want to share it.

Seymour’s favourite place is reserved for her alone.

It is reached through a glass tunnel that leads along the seabed from a hidden door in her private chambers.

Walking through it at sunrise or sunset means that the sun refracts through both water and crystal and lends the tunnel a dreamlike quality, like a rainbow seen in a mirror.

The tunnel ends in a set of steps that leads up to the surface of the water, and the side of a natural rock pool that erupts in the middle of the sea.

The local folk tales call this formation the “Selkie’s Pool”, but if it was once the home of the seal people, they have all been hunted into oblivion, or tricked into becoming the brides of mortal men.

But there is something strange and wonderful about the pool.

It is a literal circle of calm amidst the ocean’s heaving currents.

Seymour spends long hours in her bathing dress, clinging to the side of the rock and either looking out towards the endless horizon, or back towards the submerged domes and low, terracotta grooves of Hyde.

She finds it easier, here, to hear her thoughts.

She finds it easier to live with the decisions she has made. There is peace in the torrents.

Clarice is the only person who knows where Seymour is when she goes bathing like this, and Seymour resents even that.

Ever since Seymour’s hands were doused in the Queen’s Kiss, the distance between them has grown further.

Seymour isn’t entirely sure who instigated the rift: Clarice, or her.

She does know that whenever she looks at the soft skin on her new hands, her heart twists.

She knows that the childish trust she once placed in Clarice is damaged.

And yet, she relies on Clarice for so much. She resents that too. She’s pondering this in the pool when Clarice climbs up the tunnel steps to tell her that it’s nearly time for luncheon. Seymour clings to the rock as she makes her way round to Clarice.

“I could teach you to swim,” Clarice says. “Then you wouldn’t need me to help you.”

“I’m a bit old to learn now, don’t you think?” Seymour replies.

Clarice shrugs, and attacks Seymour with a towel as soon as she’s sitting safely on the steps.

“Is my brother joining us again?” Seymour asks.

“He’s giving the cook instructions on how to roast porpoise, so I imagine so.”

Seymour pushes Clarice away, wrapping the towel around herself. With the pool empty, a seagull dives into it and comes to the surface, a fish in its beak.

“Do you want to visit your family for a while?” Seymour says. She always used to dread Clarice’s periodic trips to the Feorwa Isles where they were born, but now she thinks it might be nice not to have a servant constantly judging her.

“If you like.”

Seymour throws her hands up. “For Cernunnos’s sake, Clarice, what do I have to do to get you to stop sulking?”

Clarice crosses their arms. “You truly want to know?”

“Yes. I truly do.”

Clarice pauses a moment, then whips the towel from Seymour’s body and pushes her back into the rock pool. Seymour scrambles for purchase. She screams and takes in a mouthful of saltwater. This is it – this is how she dies, at the hands of a treacherous servant.

“Stop panicking and kick your legs,” Clarice shouts.

“What?”

“Legs!”

Seymour beats her legs, frog like, and her face rises above the waves.

“Now move your arms like this,” Clarice says, demonstrating. Seymour copies them. Clumsily, she makes her way across the pool. Clarice pulls her out and wraps her again in the damp towel.

“That’ll do for a start,” Clarice says.

Seymour glares at them. “Is that how you all learn to swim in Feorwa?”

“Learn to swim before we learn to walk,” Clarice replies.

Seymour supposes that makes sense for a seafaring tribe scattered across a dozen tiny islands in the middle of the Ajassa Ocean. She herself has never needed to learn. Still, it might be useful, living in Hyde. She remembers the feeling of power when she kicked her legs.

“All right, you can teach me,” she says. “Now help me get changed into dry clothes, I want to spend some time alone before I eat.”

“Of course. You must be worn out from all the socialising you’ve just done with the fishes.”

With her hair still damp, Seymour settles herself in a chair in her bedchamber, looking out to sea. But it is not the fishes or the seals she is looking at: it’s one of the hexagonal panes that constitute the dome of her bedchamber.

To most people, it looks like any other window.

But this particular shape is not made of glass.

The difference is infinitesimal – the pane slightly thicker, slightly warmer, than its companions, and it has a sheen that suggests it is not quite dry.

It bulges outwards, as if the press of the sea has rounded it, and casts an odd light on the floor: a tinge of green and purple, colours she associates with magic, thanks to the bordweal.

She would not have noticed it if she had not received Boleyn’s letter, asking her to search.

When she first found it, she pressed a hand against it and reeled back at the transformation that occurred.

Two faces appeared suddenly: one very familiar, one less so.

Queen Aragon, her chamber at Daven sketched behind her, and another woman with shoulder-length, rich brown hair and skin a little darker than Seymour’s, whose portrait Seymour has seen at High Hall – Queen Parr.

They had both started back as well, and the pane had turned blank a moment later.

In the days that followed, Seymour made sense of it.

Every child in Elben had heard of the fabled lost sunscína , and many had tried to find them.

Seymour has waited beside the sunscína every day since writing to Boleyn, longing to drink in her features. She has almost given up hope of seeing her, but she’s come to find a certain peacefulness in retiring to her chamber at noon and pressing her hand against the glass.

This time, though, the sunscína morphs almost instantly into the vision of a wood-panelled room covered in tapestries. Boleyn is there.

“I’m so happy to see you,” Seymour says.

“And I you,” Boleyn replies. She doesn’t look happy, though. The pregnancy has rounded her face, but there’s something pinched about her. For once, Seymour feels the switch in their positions – this time she is the contented one.

“May I introduce Queen Howard?” Boleyn says, and a second face appears.

She reminds Seymour of a fledgling bird that has only ever known a cage.

Seymour has met her once before, at her wedding to the king, but she doesn’t expect Howard to remember that.

That wedding was a quiet, flittering sort of affair.

Howard’s gown had been made entirely of golden tulle, so she looked like a fairy, fragile and ready to be snapped.

“It is so good to see you again, sister,” Howard says. “This is truly wondrous.”

“We are in Howard’s music room,” Boleyn explains. “The sunscína is on the inside of a harpsichord.”

Seymour nods, studying Boleyn’s face, looking for hints to her mindset, to her feelings for Seymour, to this new friendship with Queen Howard.

“Isn’t this perfect?” Boleyn says. “Here we can be honest without fear of someone spying on us. We can drop this tiresome pretence that we despise each other.”

She holds up a handful of letters, and Seymour spots her own handwriting on one of the papers.

The coded lines they wrote to each other over the last several weeks, undoubtedly pored over by Wolsey, Cromwell, perhaps even the king.

It is an unspoken rule between all of them that they must uphold the game of the queens.

The game that separates them from each other – not only must they be spread across Elben physically, they must be enemies too, or at least not friends.

They must promote their own factions, their own causes, and they can never overlap.

But for all Boleyn’s pretty words, Seymour knows already that she will not get what she needs from this conversation, not with Queen Howard hovering at Boleyn’s side. She fiddles with the sun locket as they talk of inconsequential matters – of the fabled history of the sunscína .

“Have either of you told our husband about them?” Howard asks.

Boleyn and Seymour don’t look at each other. Seymour finds this curious. She knows why she has not mentioned the sunscína to the king. But Boleyn loves him. Prides herself on the meeting of their minds. Why would she hide this?

“I… have not,” Boleyn says. “Sometimes it’s important for a woman to have something small for herself, is it not?”

Something small, like a magical artefact of myth and fable. Yes, very small, Boleyn.

“I don’t know if I can lie to our husband,” Howard says. She’s an incessant fiddler, scratching and pulling at something in her hair, and Seymour wishes she could reach through the sunscína and still the girl’s hands.

Seymour laughs. “Everyone can lie, sister, if the consequences are great enough.”

There’s an awkward pause, and then Howard speaks again. “Maybe he already knows about them. There might be one at High Hall, in his chambers.”

The thought sends a shiver up Seymour’s spine.