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Seymour quickly takes off her own horse’s saddle and slips the bit from his mouth. She doesn’t want to take the bridle off entirely because she’s not certain she knows how to put it back on again, and she doesn’t want to look even more of a fool.

Cleves leads Seymour further up the hillside, towards a grove of silver birch that grow like swords.

As they approach the copse, a growing sense of unease fills Seymour.

She does not want to approach those trees.

It seems to her as though something is watching her from the shadow of the branches.

Something that reminds her of nights spent with the king, or days spent with her brother.

“I told you that those lambs lost their mother to a wolf,” Cleves calls back. “But that wasn’t quite the truth.”

She points at a dark patch, just at the treeline.

Against her better judgement, Seymour approaches and kneels to examine it, unsure what she’s supposed to be looking at.

The grass has withered away. The nearby trees, too, are not as magnificent as she’d thought.

Something has gnawed at the bark, leaving ugly rivulets of sap and broken wood along the trunk.

The raw wood is flecked with blood and, about halfway down, something is sticking out of the wood.

At first she thinks it’s a splinter, but it’s far too large for that.

It’s a tooth, as long as Seymour’s finger.

“What manner of creature did that belong to?” she whispers.

“A crone,” Cleves replies.

“Are you certain?”

“There are more of them in Elben of late,” Cleves says, her eyes flicking towards Seymour. It is an oddly furtive look for someone who has been so open until now. Cleves runs a hand over the wood, over the blood, then tugs the tooth from its place.

“Have you found the beast?”

Cleves shakes her head. “Not yet. I hear your friend killed one though. Single-handedly by all accounts.”

“Boleyn? How did you hear that?”

Cleves hands Seymour the tooth and strides back to her saddle, undoing one of the bags strapped to it.

Seymour follows her back into the sunlight, away from the darkness and stench of the trees.

As Cleves removes vittles – cheeses, bread and fruit paste – Seymour turns the tooth over in her hand.

One side of it is smooth, like a common knife.

The other is jagged and stained yellow. The side used for killing, or for sawing up its meat.

It must have been sharpening its teeth on the bark.

“Tell me about Queen Boleyn then,” Cleves says, as Seymour settles on the grass next to her and accepts a truncheon of bread smeared liberally with butter and soft, salty goats’ cheese.

“You seem to know enough about her already,” Seymour says. It feels wrong to talk about Boleyn with this woman, although Seymour can’t place why.

“I know that people seem to either love her or despise her. I think you are in the love camp, no?” Cleves says. She lies on her stomach, propping herself up on her elbows. A flush spreads up Seymour’s chest and neck.

“You don’t know her or me,” she says.

“So enlighten me. Is she wonderful? Is she as wild and beautiful and clever as she likes to appear?” Cleves grins again, kicking her feet up behind her.

“You can judge for yourself at the Moon Ball.”

Cleves laughs. “You are exactly right. I will make my own mind up. That is always my way. I never do anything just because my friends want me to.”

Seymour puts down her untouched bread. “Do you know why I’m here?”

“Your letter said you were touring. Is that not the case?” Cleves says, her eyes telling Seymour that she knows perfectly well Seymour has an ulterior motive. Seymour kneels, and indicates that Cleves should do so too – what she has to tell her is not fit to be heard lying on a blanket.

Seymour’s visit to Cnothan and, afterwards, Plythe, was only arranged with a few days’ notice.

Boleyn had returned from the oracle with a fire in her eyes that Seymour could decipher even through the sunscína .

It had all been arranged in an instant – Seymour would visit the two castles closest to her, while Boleyn would travel to Daven to reason with Queen Aragon and, through her, her ally Queen Parr.

Boleyn believes that they need five queens to rebel against the king, to wrestle Elben from his and Cernunnos’s control.

Three queens to persuade with something as strange and simple as the truth.

The thought of uniting five queens of Elben, queens who have been guided to enmity throughout their rules, seems impossible to Seymour.

But, as always, Boleyn persuaded her that this was their only chance at true freedom.

“And so Queen Boleyn wants my alliance,” Cleves says when Seymour has finished telling her of the cave, and the lie of the bordweal.

“We both do.”

Cleves smirks. “Is that so? I do not follow blindly, either the king or anyone else.”

“I am not blind,” Seymour says.

“No? Then why are you doing it? Your friend seeks power for her daughter. You do not strike me as ambitious, though.”

“I…” How can Seymour explain, to this woman who seems to have found so much peace and happiness in her lot, the silent howl that consumes her?

How she might be able to smile and curtsey and say yes on the outside, when inside she wants to take her brother and husband and rip them apart in the same frenzy that the crone used to kill the mother of those lambs? How could Cleves possibly understand?

Cleves reaches for Seymour’s hand in a rare moment of seriousness. “It is hard for you when he visits. Yes?”

Seymour nods.

“I never had to undertake it,” she says. “Or I too would have lost myself.”

Seymour is slow to understand what she means, it seems so outlandish. “You mean, you and the king, have never…?”

“No, but he does not know that. There. I have given you one of my secrets, so you can trust me with yours.”

The fact that the king doesn’t currently sleep with Queen Cleves is well broadcast across the country, but to find out that it was by her design?

“How?”

Cleves looks towards the castle. The sun is at its zenith, and the sky is clear. In the far reaches of the horizon, Seymour can make out the isles of Feorwa, Clarice’s homeland, lying in the crook between Elben, Quisto and Capetia.

“I never desired the attentions of men, but I spent my childhood at their mercy. I wanted freedom. When I arrived at Cnothan, I knew it was going to be my home. It was as if it had been built just for me.”

“I feel the same way about Hyde.”

Cleves nods. “But I also knew that I could not live with myself being visited by the king, or any man.

I had a week to settle at the palace before the wedding.

I spent that week getting to know my household and getting to know Henry.

And on the day before our wedding, I put my new-found knowledge to use.

“Henry has mistresses. You know this, yes? One such mistress was very much in love with him, and she was about my size and shape and age. She agreed to my plan, and I paid her handsomely. Then for the second part of my deception. I paid three men of my territory – minor nobility wishing to rise through the ranks, you know the like – to speak of me in the king’s hearing. ”

“Speak of you?” Seymour says, leaning forward.

“To talk of me in a way that would make the king worry for his reputation were he to bed me. He’s the kind of man who cannot stand humiliation, especially sexual humiliation. He overheard them laughing at the idea of anyone being able to bed an ugly lump such as me.”

“But you’re not ugly at all,” Seymour says. With the light glancing on Cleves’s skin, taut and muscular from all her time spent outside, Seymour is not sure she has seen anyone more beautiful. She catches on the thought, on the betrayal of Boleyn it entails.

“I know,” Cleves says. “And Henry knew it too. But, at that moment, what he knew did not matter. He heard three virile men discuss me as a thing not to be touched. He thought that if he were to display any interest in me, he would be mocked.”

“Didn’t you care?”

“Of course not.”

Seymour takes a lemon cake and lies back on the grass, staring up at the sky. There is one very bright star clinging valiantly to the sky, despite the midday sun. Seymour thinks it must be the Lissa star, the apex star of a constellation of six that together, forms the shape of a heart.

An emptiness fills Seymour’s chest. Emptiness and wonder, at this woman’s cunning, wrapped up in the guise of someone so straightforward.

“Go on,” she says.

“He made his new advisor, Cromwell, ask me to call off the wedding. I told Cromwell, no, I wanted Cnothan, but I would accept us consummating our marriage in darkness, so that the protections around Elben were secured, and I would not expect him to visit my bed after that night.”

Seymour sits up. “So you had his mistress bed him in your place.”

“Yes.”

“But then as far as you knew, Cernunnos’s protection of Elben would be voided.”

“What do I care for the protection of Elben? It is not my homeland. Cnothan is easily defended. Once it was mine, I knew I’d be able to keep it, no matter who took the throne.”

Seymour doesn’t understand why this thought bothers her so much. She knows now that the king has nothing to do with the bordweal’s strength. So long as Cleves bonded with the spirit stone of Cnothan, the bordweal remained intact.

“How old were you when you married him?”

“Twenty-five. Why?”

So Cleves was four years younger than Seymour is now when she hatched this plan.

She had more knowledge, of herself and others, at twenty-five than Seymour has at nearly thirty.

She glances at Cleves again. She thinks the wedding was six, maybe seven years ago.

They should be on an equal footing with each other, but Seymour is once again the dullard.

Cleves peers up at the sun, then stands, brushing off her gown. “We had better get you back, or your Clarice will think I have kidnapped you.”

Seymour stands too, the tooth still in her hand.

“Is that your answer?” she says. “You’re happy as you are?”

“For now. I will meet your Boleyn at the Moon Ball, and we will talk some more, and then I will decide.”

The silent howl crawls up Seymour’s throat.

She has failed at the first hurdle. Failed Boleyn, failed herself.

She grips the crone’s tooth with a trembling hand and digs it into her gown.

She doesn’t understand the urge that’s come over her, all she knows is that she needs to destroy something.

She tears the tooth through the satin, above the line of mud at the hem, and saws and saws at it until the muddied bottom comes away in her hands.

She casts it on the ground, then stands, spent.

“There. Now I can walk freely.”

She marches over to the horses. Cleves catches up with her, and Seymour can feel the woman’s eyes on her all the way back.

“What?” she says.

Cleves overtakes her and walks backwards, staring at her still, an infuriating grin on her face. Seymour wants to grab her: to pull her towards herself or to shove her over, both are appealing.

“ What? ” she says again.

“Are you angry with me, Queen Seymour?”

“No.”

Cleves laughs throatily. “A spy. A rebel. A traitor. But she cannot hide when she is angry. I think it must be very wonderful to be loved by you.”

Seymour remains silent as they saddle up.

“Maybe I should ask Queen Boleyn, when I see her.”

Seymour finishes tightening her girth, then walks over to Cleves.

She holds up the crone’s tooth, right to Cleves’s neck.

For the first time since their meeting, Seymour is the one in control.

Cleves’s back is to her horse, one of those toned arms splayed against the animal’s shoulder, the other raised in a half-surrender.

“This may be a game to you, sister ,” Seymour says. “But it is not to me or Boleyn. You might not be our ally, but if you betray us I will destroy you. Do you understand?”

Cleves’s neck is taut against the pressure of the crone’s tooth. Her mouth is inches from Seymour’s.

“Oh yes,” she says. “I think it must be very wonderful indeed.”

Cleves looks up and catches sight of the Lissa star.

“We always say that stars are beautiful, don’t we?” she says.

“They are.”

“I sometimes wonder – are they beautiful? Or are they simply out of our reach? Maybe if we were to come close to them, to touch them even, we would discover that they’re just a simple being holding a bright lantern.”

“Don’t patronise me.”

Gently, Cleves takes hold of Seymour’s hand, the one holding the tooth, and lowers it.

“Then pick up your own lantern, my angry, angry queen, and shine.”