TWENTY-SEVEN

THERE WERE QUESTIONS to be asked, answers Anne needed. And the boy was in her grasp. All she had to do was ride back to her grandfather, say a few words. “Bishop Westlake has most vigilantly set spies upon our enemies, and has captured a traitor.” Credit to Samuel, credit to her, and the bastard curtained in flames, swallowed up in heat. It was a fine threat. With such a threat in her hands, Anne could force the name of her mother’s murderer out of him.

John Claybrook was downstairs when she arrived at Samuel’s house. “My lady Princess,” he said, standing up, “my lord the Bishop will not let me see the bastard.”

“No need to rise, Samuel, thank you,” said Anne, as Westlake prepared to pull himself to his feet. “You did well. You are not to see him unless I say so, my lord John.”

John flushed, closed his hand and opened it as he bowed.

“Have you told your father?”

“My lady Princess?”

“Yesterday I told you not to tell your father,” Anne said. “Have you obeyed me?”

The flush deepened. “Yes, my lady Princess. I did as you bid me and told him I had to visit a sick friend.” John shrugged. “He was most Christian about it. He gave me some wine to take him.”

“Most Christian,” Anne said without warmth. “Where is it?”

“The Bishop brought it upstairs for Henry.”

“I am surprised,” said Anne. “Deepsmen do not like wine.”

“He—is no deepsman, my lady Princess …” John’s face was confused.

“No,” Anne said. “But he is no king either.”

Samuel was waiting for her, but she brushed him aside. “I will speak with him alone today.” Anne headed for the stairs, Samuel limping anxious attendance.

“My lady—”

“I can call you if there is trouble,” Anne said with some bitterness. “That door does not keep in noise very well.”

Samuel bowed. “Your forgiveness, my lady Princess. I am sorry.”

“It cannot be helped,” Anne said. “Did he thank you for the wine?”

“No, my lady Princess,” Samuel sighed. “He barely speaks to me at all.”

“I will have him speak to me,” Anne said, and went up the stairs.

The bottle of wine was resting between Henry’s hands as Anne came in. They had tied one of his legs to a bolt in the wall, and one of his wrists was shackled to it; he could sit up, but not reach the door. The bottle clinked against the fetters as he weighed it. It was a gift from Claybrook, it had to be: John had no cellar of his own. The thought of such a cheap peace-offering made Henry want to smash it, but he restrained himself. Perhaps he would drink it first. Claybrook could give him more later, and he would. Henry would see to that.

The girl stood in the doorway. Henry could still not get over the femaleness of her; land women had been a rare enough sight in his own life, but they had been tall creatures, entirely foreign. This girl, down on his own height, smaller even, with her webbed hands and bent legs, was an aberration. Though he had never seen that blueness of skin on members of his own tribe, he had seen it on others occasionally: tribesmen from colder waters, further to the north where the waters were dark in winter even during the day, tribesmen with strong arms and great lungs, who could dive deep. Meetings with them had been fraught at best: he remembered the displays, brandishing of rocks and shows of strength, the men of each tribe breaking for the surface and leaping high in the air, higher than their competitors; cries to carry across the fathoms: I am strong. Do not trifle with me. Deepsmen did not draw imaginary lines to separate themselves; they judged on territory and kin, and unfamiliar faces were occasions for challenge. He remembered, distantly, the insults and shrieks when unfamiliar tribes came within earshot of each other: Weakling. Ship-follower. Stranger. Not “my son,” not the lame man’s weird courtesies. You did not pretend, in the sea, to be kin when you weren’t, and this girl was no kin to him. Even her dialect, when she spoke their shared language, was not the one he had grown up with; he understood it, but the groan and shrill of her voice fell in alien patterns on his ears. She was a foreigner, this girl. So many years had he spent looking at landsmen that her face, featured like a deepsman’s with her small sharp teeth and black-set eyes, seemed grotesquely alien. He would have liked to defeat her, somehow, beat her down in a fight or make her obey him, to stop her face from troubling him any further. He wanted to eat her tongue.

She came in, hunch-backed and grim, and stood before him. Out of the sleeve of her dress, she drew a knife.

“I wish to know,” she said, “what you know of the death of Princess Erzebet.”

Henry stared up at her, saying nothing.

The girl twitched her knife before him. “You are to answer me,” she said, and there was a fierceness in her voice that made Henry see bared teeth, sharp claws, the sea breaking its currents around her feet. “Tell me what you know, or I shall send you to the pyre today. And I will hurt you before I send you.” She opened her mouth as if to say more, then closed it again. Henry gripped the fetters. If she had said more, he might have thought she was bluffing, working herself up, but she said only what she meant. She meant what she said.

“If you come near me I will fight you,” Henry said. He was not going to show fear to this woman, not for anything. “And I am stronger, and if I hurt you before you hurt me you will suffer.”

She looked at him for a moment, then opened her palm, dropped the knife. It quivered in the floorboards, point piercing the wood. “I can throw,” she said. “Can you catch?”

Henry reached forward in a lunge, the fetters yanking against him as he made for her.

“That was a noise the men will have heard,” the girl said. “I can have them shackle your other arm. I have only to give the word.”

She could, and he would be bound and helpless with her knife before him. Henry wrenched his chains again, sick and unsurprised. He would have begun the threats sooner if he were in her position.

“I have—handled deepsmen.” The girl’s voice was low in her throat, a hoarse throb that cut the air. “And I can manage you, Master Deepsman. You are in my land, and it is me you must answer to.” She reached down and plucked the knife from the floor, wobbling on her staff but steady-eyed. He could see the tension in her fingers.

“I answer to no one,” Henry said. If she came close enough, it would come to bloodlust between them. He could fight. And it would be good to grapple her, force her down and tear the certainty out of her; that measured voice could scream for mercy, he was sure of it, and those pale little arms would feel good gripped in his fists. Wasn’t this what it all came down to, a cry of claim against claim? Mine, her hand was saying. Why else would she so clearly be gasping to plunge in the knife?

“Answer me about the death of Erzebet, or I shall begin by unmanning you.” Her lips dragged over the last words, as if she was unused to saying them, but Henry saw the angle of the blade.

Henry was back where he was born, chest convulsed with dread, and only fury to keep it at bay. So he concentrated on her stupidity until its magnitude made him want to slap her; she was not even asking the right questions. “I know nothing about the death of your Erzebet,” he said.

“Answer me,” she said. Her hand lowered the knife a little, as if testing its edge against the air.

“What do you want of me? She died of a fever. I did not give it to her.” John had told him this, he remembered; he had thought it good news, one less obstacle to the throne. Fevers meant burning skin, hot and painful; it had given him a moment of angry gladness. That moment seemed a long time ago now. Henry clenched his teeth together, to keep from blurting out the insults that crowded inside him. If he berated her for asking the wrong questions, he might point her to the right ones.

Did you kill her? The question came in his mother tongue, and it shook Henry badly. The urge possessed him to grab her face, press his hand hard over that neat little mouth and silence this sea-water call, but he could not reach her.

Henry inhaled, finding himself oddly breathless. He could carry air in his lungs for a quarter hour, but this girl, this fragile ugly girl, was making him gasp as if he had been fighting. She would answer for it later, he told himself; it was a reassuring thought.

I did not, he said. She is a stranger. You could lie in the deepsman’s language, but it was difficult to equivocate with so simple a vocabulary. In the sea you needed only statements and challenges: The prey is there. Do not trifle with me. I want that.

The girl turned the knife in her fingers. “Tell me what you know of her,” she said.

Henry shook his head. “You are foolish, Princess, and you ask me things I cannot answer. I know nothing of this Erzebet of yours. I heard she died of a fever, and I was happy to hear it because it meant one less prince between me and my goal. Do you think I should weep for her?”

“Do not lie to me.” The girl’s voice was quiet, but as she stared at him, she bared her teeth suddenly and the knife went back in her grip. “Do not lie to me, do not lie to me!”

Henry felt an angry pulse of pleasure at the distress in her voice. “A fever took the tyrant bitch before she could burn me,” he said. “I saw what she did to my brother and I know what she would have made of me.”

The girl was blinking now, her voice a hiss. “Do not tell me he was your brother,” she said. “I have been in the sea, and I do not believe you.”

So she was not sentimental. Good. “He might have been,” Henry said, telling the truth. It was an idea he had not told to John, even; he could not tell his laughing friend so weak-minded a thought. “My mother must have liked to fuck landsmen, after all, just like yours. I saw him burn.”

The girl stopped for a moment, stood over him. “My mother did not fuck landsmen,” she said. Her voice caught over the word, as if she were unused to coarse language, and Henry gritted his teeth in satisfaction. “My mother was a prince, not an animal. My mother married an imbecile who cannot go into the water in case he fucks a deepswoman. Do not talk to me of fucking or I will tell you what imbeciles do.”

“I thought you meant to begin by unmanning me,” Henry said. “If you wish to begin by talking to me, that is a lesser threat.” He had not really meant that Erzebet fucked landsmen; if he thought about it, this girl must have been the child of a half-caste, her parents the children of half-castes, back and back, generations of hobbling spiders like her. She had understood what he meant, which was odd in itself; John or Allard would have frowned, made him explain. But the word animal was a strange one on his ears, one he had never thought of. Animals were creatures you hunted, spitted on spears or choked with your bare hands. They were prey. Out of the water, he knew no animals that could threaten him like the creatures of the water: no sharks, no porpoises, no poison fish. Only landsmen, with their swords and their numbers and their incomprehensible rules. He had two languages, and now he was trapped, he was, for the first time in his life, speaking to a person who understood both of them.

There was silence as the girl stared at him. Then, knife still in hand, she dropped to the floor, letting go of her crutch and collapsing into a sitting posture with a suddenness that must have been painful. He saw her face flinch for just a second, but she was still out of his reach and he couldn’t get to her. She sat opposite him, a wasteland of skirts all around her, and fingered the blade.

“What would you do,” she said, “if I gave you this knife and told you to take your choice between self-murder and the pyre?”

Henry looked back at her. “I would take it and wait until someone came close enough to fight,” he said.

Her voice was almost interested. “Do you really think there can be an escape for you?”

“I shall not give up my will.”

She nodded, more to herself than to him. “A king does not speak so bluntly, Master Deepsman.”

Henry shrugged. “If I gained the throne, I would have diplomats to speak for me.”

“Is your name truly Henry?”

He hesitated. John must have made a mistake, let it slip, as he had told it to no one. John needed a sharp warning when he next appeared. But it could betray nothing, and it was strange, somehow compelling, to hear this girl speak his name. “In their language,” he said. “Back in the sea, it was something else.”

“What was it?” Her black eyes looked up at him, attentive.

Whistle, he said. It was like speaking a dream, some lost childhood memory that had sunk and resurfaced, changed with the salt water. “But it has been a long time since anyone has called me that.”

Whistle, the girl said. She sighed. “We have only one name, here on the land. But the deepsmen have names, out in the bay. You cannot explain them to a landsman.”

Henry shook his head. “We are not alike, you and I.”

“No indeed.” Her eyes were on him still. “You have seen the depths. The great waters out beyond the bay.”

He shook his head again. “You do not track them by sight. Everything is blue.”

“That I could have known,” she said. “I do know that.”

Henry braced himself. “Why are you talking to me? Where are your threats? You have asked me only one question, and that one was useless.”

She shrugged. “I am poor in kinsmen, Master Deepsman. Whistle. Do you truly know nothing of Erzebet?”

I don’t know, Henry said. “I only heard she died of a fever.”

The girl curled her legs under herself. Her face was glowing in the indoor shade now, a bright, cold blue. It was a sight he had not seen for so long, a colour of home. On that enemy girl, still, there was something beautiful about it. “She was poisoned,” she said. “Someone put poison in her bath and it stripped the skin from her.” He could hear her take a breath, another one, panting like a landsman.

Henry frowned. Had Claybrook not known of this? He had told Henry she died of a fever, and Henry had believed him. Or had he known, what then? Would Claybrook have knocked out the tyrant that stood between him and victory? If he had done so, why hadn’t he raised an army as soon as she was dead? It was a sudden gulf of ignorance, and at its appearance, he felt the fear coming back. He was lost in weeds, sounds bouncing back and no clear echo to guide him.

He raised the bottle, turned it over in his hands. Perhaps some wine would be good for him.

“I saw my mother die,” the girl said, and Henry realised that it was her own mother she was talking about when she spoke of Erzebet. He had known it, he could have told it, but the word mother meant little to him. Erzebet was a tyrant, a bare-toothed killer of his kind, and this girl was something else. The fact that she would be upset at the loss of Erzebet was not something he had considered. It wasn’t the words she used so much as the fact that she said them at all. She did not seem talkative. Erzebet’s death must have meant something to her, for her to speak of it for no purpose, only to hear herself say the words.

“If you call her a tyrant bitch again,” Anne said, “I will cut you.”

“People die,” Henry said. He had seen plenty of people die in the sea. It had not made them his friends. But the girl had a knife, and he did not say that.

The boy was an animal, Anne told herself. No, he was not an animal. He called her mother a tyrant bitch, he spoke of fucking as if it mattered not at all, as if nothing, none of the things that clasped and crushed her, could touch him at all. He was appalling, but he talked to her, he had seen the sea, he was probably telling the truth when he said he had no hand in Erzebet’s death. He just didn’t care about it all.

What would it be like, to be so unburdened? He had no courts to please, no country to care for, no deepsmen to manage with nothing but quick hands and shut eyes. Men did not bear down on his body; he kept his own space, pretended nothing, no concern he did not feel, no loyalties he did not owe. Even with a gyve on his wrist, he spoke his mind.

She had wanted to cut him, for being so unconcerned with all that mattered to her, for being so distant, so far from home, so isolated. But he was not Philip, she told herself, he was not a deepsman from the bay.

“Do you mean to tell me who hid you all these years?” she asked him. Somebody must have. He cared nothing for her family, but he must have one of his own.

Henry looked at her. “Do you wish the truth?”

“I do.”

He cocked his head. “My—father will notice I am gone, and he will seek for me. If he cannot save me, I may name him to save myself. But I will wait until you push me to that point.”

Anne swallowed. She had tried, she had tried hard to be good all those years. This casual casting-off of his family should have been horrifying. But at the same time, some part of her ran out to meet it, like a figure glimpsed in the distance. The freedom of disloyalty, the safety of solitude. When duties penned you in on all sides, ingratitude could save your life.

“Do you think you could withstand it if I had you put to the question?” she said. If he could think only of himself, so could she. If he was free to owe nothing to anyone, it freed her to owe nothing to him. He did not ask to be a stone around her neck. Something was running through her at the boy’s self-centredness, something she did not expect: an answering pulse of relief.

Henry seemed to consider the question seriously. “I think so,” he said. “Could you withstand it?”

Anne shivered against her will. “If it were easy to withstand, it would not be useful,” she said. “But it would not be me suffering, it would be you.”

“True.” Henry did not smile, did not make it a joke. He simply conceded the point.

“If your father saves you, it will be the worse for me,” Anne said. “Is he your real father?”

“I doubt it,” Henry said. “And perhaps it would be the worse. But if you mean to kill me now, you will have to come close to me to do it. And if you meant to burn me, I believe you would not have hesitated. It is not a thing one can do if one wavers.”

“If one does it with one’s own hands,” Anne said slowly. “But to give an order and have you burned where I cannot see you would not be so difficult.”

He seemed to have no answer to that. Instead he grimaced, and pulled the top off his bottle of wine. It sat in his hand, dark and clean.

“Do you mean to drink that?” Anne asked suddenly.

Henry frowned at her. “Why not? It can hardly matter if I am drunk here.”

People drank wine without checking it all the time, of course. Most people did not have to fear poison. “Do you know who brought it to you?”

Henry shrugged. “The man called John. He said it was a gift.”

Anne nodded. “From his father. Most Christian of him.” The scent of alcohol rose from the bottle, heavy and choking.

A Christian gesture. But Claybrook was not a Christian man.

An English bastard, full-grown, was a serious threat to the throne. People might accept a princess’s marriage to a foreign prince, but an English, clean-blooded, rational bastard to set on the throne—if he could hold it for a few years, he could hold it for ever. Every royal house in Europe would be courting his alliance. And bastard though he was, he was English. Many people would rather have a new English master than an old French one.

Perhaps Claybrook was being wise, playing both ends of the game. Waiting. Making no move on the outcome, sitting on the edge of a battlefield until he saw which side was carrying the day. A gift of wine, a simple enough gesture. And yet …

His son John had come round to talk to Samuel. John had never shown an interest in Samuel in his life.

They were a present family, the Claybrooks.

The memory of him came to her, hard and cold, of Claybrook standing before the door of her mother’s room. Erzebet’s screams had blinded her, blotted out all other impressions. Her ears had always been sharper than her eyes. But Claybrook had been there. Claybrook, who might have been anywhere else in the country, was on hand that day.

Claybrook could have wandered into Erzebet’s bath chamber if he wished, added something to the salt. But Anne thought of the pyre. The heat, the ultimate, fatal threat. Samuel had found no poisons that answered the case. What else could have scorched Erzebet’s skin? Anne had dismissed the idea of boiling water, for who could have wrestled her strong mother into a steaming bath? No one, no landsman, if Erzebet had her wits about her.

But Erzebet sleepy, Erzebet drugged from a harmless cup of wine sent to her through some uninformed servant …

Claybrook was a tall man, long of arm. He could easily have lifted her mother. If there had been something in her wine.

“Do not drink this,” Anne said, clutching the wine away from Whistle. It was a danger to her, to lean in and out, but she was fast and he was not expecting it, and the bottle was in her hand and out of his reach again before he could stop her. “Do not.”

“Why not?” His voice rose, close to a shout; Anne could hear the hoarseness, the strain, under the threat.

“I do not …” Anne turned, struggled for balance. “I wish to test something.”

She went to the door, called for Samuel.

“Tell no one of this,” she said as he came up the stairs, one step at a time. “Do not tell John Claybrook. I wish to send a message to Robin Maydestone at the stables. Tell him I wish for a dog to be sent. He will have dogs, yes? An old dog, one that is sick or turned savage, one that he does not care for.” She thought of Maydestone’s gentle hands on the horses’ flanks, the way he crooned to them. “Not one he loves,” she added. “Warn him he will not see it again.”

“Yes, my lady Princess.” Samuel’s face was bewildered, and he hesitated for an explanation.

“Go swiftly,” Anne snapped. “Take it from him, bring it at once.”

The door closed behind her, and Anne sat down again, leaning against it, careless of her rich skirt crumpling on the floor. Henry sat across from her, his eyes never leaving her face.

“What do you want with a dog?” he said.

“I want to test the wine,” Anne replied. The situation chilled her to the bone, but she almost laughed. “I can tell you are a prince by hope, not by connection,” she said. “If you have never had a wine taster.”

“Do not laugh at me.”

Anne laughed again, her eyes stinging. “I do not trust my lord Claybrook’s wine.”

“Are you going to cry?” Henry said. He sounded less alarmed than interested.

Anne swallowed, shook her head.

Henry said nothing, and neither did she. They waited together for the dog to be brought.

It was a long wait before Samuel returned. “He is downstairs,” he said quietly. “He wished to bring it himself, and I could not dissuade him.”

Anne gave Samuel a sharp frown. “That was ill done, Samuel. I would have thought you could have found something to say that would make him stay.”

Westlake shook his head. “The man is not a fool, my lady Princess. He is fond of you and wished to see you. He would quickly grow suspicious if I argued.”

Anne shook her head. “I must go downstairs,” she said to Whistle. “Do I need to threaten you to make you stay silent?”

Henry looked at her, ignoring Samuel. “You have already done so,” he said. “I wish to see what you mean with this dog.”

Anne and Samuel struggled down the stairs together, to meet with Maydestone, who stood in the door. Under his arm was a hound, scraggly-limbed and sticky-eyed, white hairs clustering on its muzzle like the greying of an old man. He bowed, and the dog whimpered as he shifted his grip. “My lady Princess, the dog you commanded,” he said. Anne remembered the day by the river, the day Maydestone had helped her back onto her horse, and the memory of kindness was so strong that she almost reached her arms up to him, to be carried away, taken to her chamber and tucked in somewhere safe. She pulled herself up.

“I thank you, Master Maydestone,” she said. He bowed again. His eyes flicked behind her, to the room, innocuous enough in appearance. Not plotting, not scheming, but curiosity, no doubt. That was to be expected.

“Master Maydestone, you have done me good service, as ever,” Anne said, getting in the way of his vision. “I shall remember this.” There was a silver bracelet encircling her wrist, and she slipped it off, weighing it in her hand a moment before passing it to him.

“My lady …” Maydestone’s hand dropped a little, as if the bracelet was heavier than it should be. Surprise stretched over his face, almost dismay at the size of the gift.

“Say nothing of this to anyone,” Anne said firmly. Maydestone’s expression relaxed. A bracelet was no price for a used-up old dog, still whining and pawing its feet against the air, tucked under Maydestone’s arm—but for a dog and for silence, that was a different matter. That was understandable.

“As you command, my lady Princess,” he said, bowing again. He set the dog down. For just a moment, he tousled its ears; then he straightened up and shooed it into the room. It walked a few steps, unhurried, then lay down, splaying out emaciated legs behind it.

“I thank you,” Anne said, and closed the door.

Henry heard the voices downstairs. The girl would return. She had threatened him, she had warned him. He no longer knew what to feel about her, except a desire to keep talking. If they kept talking, perhaps he might know what he felt.

She came in awkwardly, carrying a wretched-looking dog. He made no move to grab her as she shuffled over the floor, within his reach.

“Help me feed the dog this wine,” she said. “I cannot do it alone.”

The dog whimpered, scratching a little at the floor, and suddenly Henry’s heart quickened. This was a fox to catch, a creature to hunt. He leaned forward, rolling onto his hands and knees, and crept across the floor, silent as a bird, drawing nearer and nearer. The dog laid its head down between its paws, rheumy eyes closing, huffing a little sigh—and then Henry was on it, wrenching it up off the ground.

Anne was beside him quickly, the wine in her hand. “Pull its head back,” she said, “and open its mouth.”

Henry grabbed the dog’s jaws, forced them open. There in its mouth was the tongue, grey-pink and ready for his grasp—but this was not a killing hunt, he must leave it alone. Already the girl was pouring wine down the dog’s throat. The beast coughed and struggled, its throat convulsing against Henry’s wrist, and Henry gripped harder. The wine trickled down, an unsteady stream, splashing and thinning, foaming pink as it mingled with the dog’s spit.

Anne set the goblet down. “Very well,” she said. “Now we wait.”

It was not a long wait. To Anne, it was no surprise, not really, as the dog thrashed and twitched, paddling at its belly with its hind paws, whimpering out its life on the cold stone floor. Henry sat frozen.

Anne swallowed. “We may not have much time,” she said. “But I would have you tell me what you know of Robert Claybrook.”

Henry looked at her, this girl who poisoned a dog with the wine meant for him. Anger choked him until he could wish for nothing more than a rock to smash her skull. This girl, this black-eyed, blue-faced freak of a girl who had saved him and killed the dog, with wine from the man for whose favour he had waited all his life.

He almost reached to slap her away. It was the sight of water gathering in her eyes that stopped him. What was he to do with a creature so incomprehensible?

“I think you should tell me,” Anne said. “I think—I believe we may have an enemy in common.”