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CHAPTER SIX

Seymour

T he Palace of Daven always seems to lie beneath a rosy sun.

The peach stone absorbs light during the summer months and reflects it outwards in the winter.

At night-time, the palace itself can be used as a beacon, peeking out from the bay that shelters it from the ocean’s tempests.

The sailors coming across the seas from the northern wastelands of Pkolack, their ships laden with cold spices and desert berries, use its distant glow as they would a star.

Seymour has always loved that about the palace, thinking as she does of Daven as a sanctuary from her family’s tumults.

Her rooms, in a building on the edge of Daven’s grounds, are more home than Seymour’s childhood estate ever was.

Seymour’s insignificance at court means that she is permitted a chamber far away from the intrigues of the palace’s more popular ladies-in-waiting, who are all housed more centrally.

After a childhood of her brothers’ machinations, she is glad to have some respite.

Even with the speed of the scrind road, she arrived too late to see Queen Aragon immediately, and was told to wait for the morning.

When she wakes up, the sun is high – the excitement of the wedding and the long journey has exhausted her.

Seymour lies in her bed and looks up at the beams for the last time.

She has been one of Queen Aragon’s ladies for a year, and in that time she and Clarice have made these rooms into a haven.

Every seat is covered in furs to ward against the night-time chill, and every table is adorned with trinkets Clarice has picked up on their travels or brought from their homeland – unusual shells, puzzle boxes, broken clocks and embroidered motifs stretched across ivory frames.

The only items truly belonging to Seymour are three dolls that were once her mother’s and which she has owned since childhood, which sit tattered on a corner table.

The door opens and Clarice pulls an empty trunk into the room. They notice that Seymour is awake and brandish a strip of parchment at her.

“I’m to measure you for your new gowns,” they say.

Seymour stands obediently, raising her arms as Clarice pulls the parchment around her waist and marks it off with a shard of graphite.

“What am I doing, Clarice?” Seymour sighs.

“Feeling sorry for yourself again, my lady?”

“Do you ever think that I would have been better off as a servant, and you as a noble? You’re so much better at ordering people around than me.”

Clarice shrugs, the graphite held between their teeth.

“Maybe we could play that game again,” Seymour pushes. “You remember?”

“I remember,” Clarice says, taking the graphite from their mouth and marking off the length of Seymour’s arms. When they were children, just after Clarice had taken up their role as Seymour’s servant, they used to exchange clothes.

Seymour would curtsey to Clarice, and Clarice would make her perform increasingly strange tasks.

A few years later, their games became altogether more daring.

Clarice averts their eyes as they pass the paper around Seymour’s back and over her breasts.

Seymour blushes, wondering whether Clarice, too, is remembering a time when their eyes would not be so averted.

She thinks of Clarice’s teeth on her nipple, Clarice watching her reaction to see how hard they should bite before the pleasure seeped from the pain.

“There, all done,” Clarice says. Seymour wishes she was clever enough to break through this barrier that grew between them, seemingly overnight, even if they will never again be lovers.

“I suppose I had better see if the queen is well enough to receive me this morning,” Seymour says.

“Maybe try to act a little more pleased to be serving her, my lady.”

“I only learn from you, Clarice.”

It’s a pleasant walk along a sandy path, verged with hawthorn and star-lilies, to reach the palace itself. The air is tangy with salt, blown in from the sea and from the salt mines a little further along the coast. By the time Seymour reaches the palace, her face is coated in fine, white granules.

Daven’s vast vestibule is dominated by a tree planted in the very centre of the space.

The trunk is as thick as four men and almost entirely hollow, housing as it does a gealgena dragon, a lithe wyrm that feasts on the sap and soft innards and in return keeps the tree alive with fire and loamy vomit.

The tree’s ancient roots push up the floor tiles in waves that ripple outwards.

At the ceiling, the tree bursts into an explosion of terracotta leaves.

The walls of the hall are set not with pillars but with ladders, so that the queen’s gardeners can climb up to the ceiling for pruning.

For such a sprawling building, the heart of Queen Aragon’s palace is compact.

Seymour only has to cross the hallway and she’s inside the queen’s suites.

A mill of courtiers and ladies-in-waiting flirt in the outer receiving chamber.

Seymour gives her name to the man guarding the door to the inner room, and retires to a corner.

Usually people deem her too boring to pay attention to, but everyone knows that she was the queen’s ambassador, and they’re eager for gossip about the new consort.

A handful of ladies detach themselves from the courtiers they’d been entertaining and accost her.

“So? What is the new queen like?” Lady Ginori asks, her voice flecked with the remnants of her Perfugian accent.

“I heard she’s this close to the ambassador of Capetia,” Lady Rkelen says, gesturing suggestively.

“She’s very arresting,” Seymour manages. She doesn’t understand how all these people want her to give an opinion on someone she’s barely spoken to.

“You’ll have to do better than that when you speak to the queen,” Lady Ginori says.

As though hearing her desperation to escape, the guard bangs his pole and calls out “Lady Seymour for Queen Aragon.”

Ginori and Rkelen return to their side of the chamber, heads together as they discuss what paltry information Seymour has given them.

Queen Aragon’s chamber is an ode to Quisto.

Lush, heavy textiles and statues of reclining sphinxes or chimaeras baring their fangs.

Behind the great throne, in the bay windows that look out over the beach, five smaller humanoid statues are lined up.

A young lady wearing a black gown and hood, her back to Seymour, polishes each one with a velvet cloth.

Queen Aragon’s throne is hewn from the same sandstone as the palace itself, although it is hidden beneath cushions and throws.

Seymour has only met her a handful of times in her year-long service, and she has never seen her standing.

Nevertheless, she can tell that the queen is a short woman, but makes up for it with impeccable posture.

She wears the beads of her religion – her guirnalda – around her neck, so that when she shifts in her seat they jangle hypnotically.

Her skin is tanned, a little darker than Seymour’s.

Seymour’s grandmother was from Quisto, a family distantly related to the royals – hence her place in Queen Aragon’s court – and there is some resemblance in their features.

The austerity in their cheekbones; the way their mouths automatically lean to displeased.

But there the resemblance ends. Where Seymour’s hair is straight, Aragon wears hers in elaborate braids that are just visible beneath her hood, which shimmers like iridescent fish in the sunlight.

Curled around Queen Aragon’s neck is her pet monkey, Dizir, uncharacteristically silent for now.

“Lady Seymour,” Queen Aragon says in a voice clipped and proper, from years of studying Elbenese. “How did you find my husband’s wedding?”

Seymour sinks into a curtsey and repeats the platitudes she practised on the journey here. “Your Majesty. It was nothing compared to your—”

“No. No no no, Lady Seymour. I am told you are devoid of artifice. Do not disappoint me.”

Seymour stalls. Is this the answer to the question she’s asked herself every day since Queen Aragon told her she was gifting her to Boleyn – why her?

Did Aragon choose her as ambassador because she’s apparently incapable of lying?

It’s not a compliment. Not in any court beneath this sun.

No one gets far without being a good liar.

Seymour is glad her brothers aren’t here – they would be incandescent at such a description of their sister.

But can she really tell the queen the truth?

She’s already blundered her way through the gift-giving.

Aragon is watching her shrewdly, a smile hovering around her mouth. Even the lady-in-waiting has paused her polishing duties, back still to Seymour.

“You have more to fear from flattery than you do from honesty,” Aragon says at last. It’s not enough to settle Seymour’s nerves. She grew up with Edward and Thomas, after all, who delighted in tricking her into saying the wrong thing and then punishing her for doing so.

She decides to tell Aragon the facts: the cut and length of Queen Boleyn’s dress, the people present, the tokens she chose. When she mentions the obsidian storm cloud, Queen Aragon shifts. Seymour peters out.

“Go on,” she says. “What can you tell me that others will not?”

Seymour struggles to breathe. She’s not equal to this.

She might find it hard to lie, but she also finds it hard to tell a hurtful truth.

Aragon rests a hand on the table beside her throne.

On it is a curious hand mirror: a silver frame, like the ones passed down in noble houses from mothers to their daughters.

But the mirror itself is made of an odd kind of convex glass that refracts light strangely on the queen’s face, like water in a pool.

Seymour focuses on it as she speaks what may very well be her final words.

“I believe they love each other very much, Your Majesty. Queen Boleyn is striking and alluring. She’s trying too hard to play the part of queen, and I don’t think people will like her for it. But she has something about her. I can see why the king married her.”

She waits, head lowered, to see if the queen orders her immediate execution or banishment.

“That is what I feared,” Aragon says at last. “Do you think his love will continue?”

“I don’t know, Your Majesty. I don’t know the king.”

“If you did, you would know that the answer to that question is always going to be no .”

Her face and voice are impassive, devoid of bitterness. She has known the king the longest. She was his first queen. If anyone knows him, she does.

“Well,” she continues, “thank you for your honesty. Do you think Queen Boleyn will like you joining her household?”

“No, Your Majesty,” she says.

“No. I would not either. It was cruel of me, but necessary.”

“You wish me to report back to you, Your Majesty?”

“I am no spymaster, Lady Seymour.”

Seymour bites her lip. She’s not built for the court’s quick footwork.

“Come here, my daughter,” Queen Aragon says.

The woman who had been polishing the statues abandons her cloth and moves to the queen’s side.

Seymour realises now that she’s not a lady-in-waiting at all, but the Princess Tudor.

She’s still just a girl, but she’s tall, like the king, and she has his blue eyes.

Her expressions, though, are all Aragon’s.

Seymour is ten years her senior, but beneath the princess’s gaze, she feels like a child.

From around Aragon’s neck, the monkey awakes and, sensing the tension, begins to chatter.

“You have heard of the Oracle of Evenesis, Lady Seymour?” Queen Aragon says, ignoring Dizir’s chirps.

“Yes.”

The royal oracle lives on an island in the seas north of Daven. It can only be reached for a few months each year, when the hurricanes that surround the island quell. The oracle only permits royalty to receive her prophecies.

“The princess visited the oracle on her coming of age. What she was told troubles us greatly.”

“I’m sorry, Your Majesty.”

“The remedy lies in your hands.”

“Mine?”

Queen Aragon dismisses the servants loitering at the edges of the room.

When the door has closed behind the last one, she nods to her daughter.

The princess takes Seymour’s hands, lifting her to her feet with an authority beyond her fifteen years.

Even though they are alone, but for the queen, she leads Seymour to the window, where only the whispering sea might be able to hear them.

The five faceless statues stand impassively at Seymour’s back, and she has to force herself to concentrate on the young woman before her rather than the sense of being watched behind.

The princess begins.

“This is what the oracle said to me: From the storm, a blossom. From the blossom, a tree. Tallest of all, strongest of all, to cast Daven’s seed into shade .”

Even Seymour can understand this riddle. A blossom from a storm, and the storm is, must be, Boleyn. The princess tries to keep her voice even, but she can’t quite disguise the hurt that anyone would feel when told that they are doomed to be outshone by a half-sibling.

“Do you know what I am asking you to do, Lady Seymour?” Queen Aragon says. “Do you understand the debt I would owe to you if you did this for me?”

Dizir’s chattering grows louder. He swings from his mistress’s arms across the room, perching on one of the statues and looking past Seymour, towards the distant sea.

A blossom that will cast Daven’s seed into shade . Queen Aragon will not let her daughter be overshadowed. And Seymour must be the one to make sure of it.