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CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Boleyn

B rynd has a small mooring of its own, separate from the port town some way down the coast. The jetty, at the base of the castle, is large enough to receive the royal flotilla, or any important foreign emissaries wishing to bypass the commoners at Garclyffe.

Boleyn keeps several boats and barges at her disposal at this jetty, and one day, before the morning mist has cleared, she sets out in a small, high-prowed barge with Mary.

“This reminds me of stealing the fishmaster’s boat back at home,” Mary says, her voice muted in the fog and strained with the effort of rowing.

“ What have you done with my trout?! ” the sisters say in unison, the memory of childhood summers at Hever rising from the waves like smoke. Boleyn remembers the rancid smell of the stolen vessel, made bearable by the crime itself.

They manoeuvre the barge away from the jetty and, at Boleyn’s direction, along the cliffs, right beneath the lightning tower of Brynd.

Perhaps it’s only the nostalgia she’s conjured playing tricks on her, but Boleyn thinks Mary looks younger out here, especially now that she’s no longer wearing her mourning dress. She rows steadily.

“Do you think I was right not to bring George and Rochford and Mark?” Boleyn asks.

“I don’t know, dearest,” Mary says.

“I want to tell them. Well, I want to tell George. It’s only that Rochford has been acting strangely of late.”

Mary shrugs. “She’s curious. We all are.”

Boleyn turns to face the front of the barge, calculating how far they still have to go.

Now that she has made up her mind to pursue the truth, she is desperate to do it.

Immediately after Elizabeth’s birth, the thought of admitting that everything she’d been raised to believe was a lie was insurmountable.

But at High Hall, listening to Wolsey treat her daughter like breeding stock and Henry talk of conceiving a son, Boleyn knew she could not ignore it.

Not on her own account, but Elizabeth’s.

This magic could be her birthright. Who are Wolsey and Henry and Cromwell to seek to strip her of that?

There is no hint, beneath the water’s surface, of the creatures that came to her aid when she was in labour. Boleyn could almost tell herself that everything that happened – the kelpies, the cavern – was a fever dream, born of hysteria, except that Seymour and Syndony saw it as well.

She spies what looks like a waterfall in the distance, flowing out of the forest on the cliffs above. There is something broken about the geography here – as though a giant had clumsily carved away a chunk of land, leaving the trees and stream to simply end.

“Over there,” Boleyn says. They drop anchor as close to the waterfall as they can. So close to Brynd, so easy to reach from the royal jetty: it makes Boleyn wonder whether another queen might have made the same journey, many years ago, in search of answers. Isabet. The traitor queen.

“What now?” Mary asks her.

Boleyn dips a hand in the water and closes her eyes. She has had the strongest sense, since returning to Brynd, that the power she met in the caves is waiting for her. That the right call will summon it. But here, all is empty.

“I’m going into the caves,” Boleyn tells her. “If you want to find out what happened that day, come with me.”

She strips off her gown and dives into the sea.

Her body, still more cumbersome than she’d like, welcomes the iciness.

It numbs the red, flaking skin on her arm and the cramps that accompany her first course since giving birth.

A few moments later, she hears Mary join her.

Together they swim beneath the waterfall and emerge inside the cavern.

The ghosts of their shared childhood are strong, and were they anywhere else they might have laughed.

But the power of the cavern is stronger still, and they shiver silently in that crystal space.

Nothing has changed since Boleyn was last there, except for the cement that blocks the way out through the mines.

Even the old miner’s blanket that Seymour had used as a makeshift bed is still spread out, like a beached sea creature.

Boleyn had worried that Oswyn might have been tempted to tell the king or the bishop or Cromwell about the cavern, even if he does not know what it contains – for anyone’s loyalty can be bought for a price.

Mary spies the sleeping queens, their upright bodies encased in crystal crypts, and she steps back, her honeysuckle scent enveloping Boleyn as she reads the carved inscription.

While we lived

The Font of Medren

Flowed through Us

“Medren?” Mary says.

“The Hleaws worship her,” Boleyn says. Then, the magic of the cave making her bold: “She saved Elizabeth.”

Mary’s hand goes to the belt clumsily tied around her shift, and the bag attached to it. She pulls a handkerchief from the bag and presses it to her mouth.

“Do you feel it as well?” Boleyn says. She means the energy in the chamber, a glittering, feminine vigour.

Mary grips Boleyn’s arm. “This is dangerous, B. This is blasphemy.”

Boleyn had known that her sister might not wish to accept the truth.

Since before they could walk, they have been raised in the religion of Cernunnos.

Their society is founded on the belief that the Kings of Elben are blessed by Cernunnos, the one god, and that his power is channelled through his six queens for the protection of the kingdom.

The very notion of a goddess, or of six queens with no need of a sovereign king, is anathema to every truth they have ever learned.

Boleyn takes her sibling’s hand and presses it to the crystal, over the queens’ hearts.

“Listen,” she says. They listen to the ocean supping on rock, the cry of a solitary seagull, the distant blows of the miners’ hammers, felt through their bare feet. And beneath it all, that peculiar silence, pregnant and aware, filling the cavern.

“Are you there?” Boleyn whispers.

We are here , the reply comes. Mary makes the sign of the antlers with the thumb and pointing finger of her free hand.

I need to know the truth , Boleyn thinks.

The cave seems to inhale, the stalactites elongating strangely.

Mary shouts incoherently.

Boleyn follows her gaze to the faces of the queens.

One of them is now staring, unseeing, from eyes that were closed only a moment ago.

She has brown skin and tight curls tipped with copper.

She is taller than Boleyn, and stouter. She stares straight ahead, as though seeing into the future, or the past.

What truth do you seek, Queen of Brynd?

The voice doesn’t come from her mouth. It comes from the pools at Boleyn’s feet, using her body as a conduit. Mary closes her eyes, as if shutting out the sight will shut out the voice too.

“Am I speaking to a Queen of Elben?” Boleyn asks.

You are speaking to Me through one of my gifts.

“Goddess?”

Yes.

“Are you saying that these are – what – the first queens?” Mary says.

They were chosen by the people of Elben – six women, fierce and strong and free – to be blessed by my power.

They were anointed in the Font high in the blessed mountains, and when they emerged my magic flowed through them.

They each took a stone from the Font – from me – and used them to build the six castles of Elben.

Boleyn remembers the moment she touched the spirit stone of Brynd, and the way she felt connected not only to every queen that had ruled that castle but to a deeper, older power too.

She should have questioned, even then, that she felt nothing of Henry or his forbears. The goddess is speaking again:

Those queens protected my kingdom for many years, and when they passed away, my power was passed on to their chosen heirs. They were interred in this chamber. The vein of crystal that has always enriched this part of my island took on some of my power.

“This is the only crystal; the rest is garnets,” Mary says.

“There were no garnets before the massacre of Pilvreen,” Boleyn says, thinking aloud. She had always thought it strange that the blood of the massacred transformed into gems, for usually such transformations do not take place without the presence of magic.

Yes, the magic of mine that runs through this rock met the blood of your people and turned crystal to garnet.

“This is all wrong. The six consorts were a gift from Cernunnos to King Aethelred,” Mary says, sounding like a petulant child.

You were lied to. My queens were sovereigns in their own right, wielding my power to protect the land that I created.

“So there was never a king?” Boleyn asks.

Never. The sovereigns ruled as a parliament.

Boleyn remembers a snippet of history her mother once told her: that before it was turned into a palace, High Hall was a crossroads where the great of Elben could meet and exchange ideas.

Back then, it was not called High Hall. That name is a bastardisation of its original name: the Hive. A place ruled by queens.

Something else occurs to her.

“You said you gave the queens your power in order to protect the island. Protect them from whom?”

“From Capetia and Quisto,” Mary says, her eyes still closed.

From the upstart Cernunnos. He was always a lesser god, but greedy, and envious of my vast powers. He craves glory and worship above all else.

“What did he do?” Boleyn asks. Mary extricates her hand from Boleyn’s grasp and paces to the other end of the cavern. She doubles over, retching against the cement that now blocks the passage to the mines.

Cernunnos took one of his followers, a man who was wed to one of the queens of Elben, and he taught him a trick, so simple that I didn’t see it until it was too late. He taught Aethelred how to persuade the world that women could not rule alone. That they needed a man to govern them.

Once Aethelred had persuaded the people of Elben, the sovereigns were forced to capitulate. Cernunnos taught Aethelred how to twist the magic that I had placed upon the spirit stones and the women who ruled them, so that their power strengthened him as well as protecting the kingdom.

“And you were forced out. Cernunnos won.”

Yes.

A hiss whispers around the cave. Boleyn can’t be sure if it’s an echo from the mines nearby, or an expression of the goddess’s fury.

The space makes it impossible to hear where it’s coming from.

She has so many questions. Did Queen Isabet find the cave too?

If she did, was that the cause of her uprising?

Was she executed for treason, or because she had discovered the truth?

How much does Henry know? And most importantly, how can Cernunnos’s hold over Elben be broken?

The hiss turns into a rumble.

“Boleyn, we have to go,” Mary says.

“You go then,” Boleyn replies, trying to sift her thoughts.

“ We have to go. Boleyn, something’s not right.”

The ground is vibrating, and Boleyn realises: this is no witching. It is gunpowder.

“ I think a mine’s collapsing,” Mary says.

“Wait!” Boleyn cries. “I need to know…”

You must run.

Mary is pulling her away from the wall, shouting her impatience.

“How can I talk to you again?” Boleyn says, clawing for purchase on the crystal.

You will come to me, at the end.

At last, Boleyn allows her sister to pull her out towards the sunlight.

The waves envelop them as the cavern splinters inwards.

The silence that had surrounded the goddess’s presence is broken.

The cliff face crumbles, the earth crying out.

The siblings paddle desperately towards the boat, the water around them peppered with shards of rock and garnet and crystal.

Then a great wave overcomes them, pushing them under.

Boleyn is lost beneath the silent rage of the ocean. She reaches for Mary through the murk and finds her hands. Together they kick upwards, and at last they surface, coughing up water and inhaling salted air. They haul their soaked bodies onto the barge, where their clothes wait for them.

The explosion rumbles on, the water continues to heave and rock dust covers their arms and hair as they row away from the devastation.

“Stay close to the cliff,” Mary says. “I don’t like how easy it is to see us from up there.”

Boleyn lets Mary take control. She cannot stop shivering, no matter how hard she rows.

She can still see the cloud of dust, bloody from garnets, billowing out over the sea.

It clears slowly, revealing a crevice where the cave of queens once was.

Pieces of mining machinery protrude from the debris.

Of the queens and the crystal, there is no trace.

The cave is utterly destroyed, and the truth it cherished is gone for ever.