TWENTY-NINE

“HOW DO YOU keep them with you?” Henry had wanted to know. Because Henry had lived in the deeps, had swum with the tribe until it cast him out. It wasn’t his strangeness, he understood now, that had driven his mother to carry him through the waves and shove him up on a beach to die. It had been his weakness. He wasn’t as fast as a deepsman child, he was small, cloven, narrow-lunged, a weight that was slowing her down. And with a sea full of sharks, of dolphins, of whales and currents and easy chances to die, who would keep a burden with them? Who wanted someone you had to save, over and over again?

He had never been allowed to see the ships, had never been taken to meet the kings. But he knew that this weak girl would have no way to impress the deepsmen, no strength to show. All she had was a need to be saved. So: “How do you keep them with you?”

Anne made a gesture. Henry had never known a girl, had lived a lifetime of lonely flesh, but he understood it. John had said there were landsmen women who traded their bodies for money, and though money was something Henry had never handled, he recognised the concept. Even in the sea, a woman struggling to keep up, a woman unable to fight the other women, might dance her way through the water to a stronger man, trade quick hands for a strong arm to defend her. Once or twice, when he was a baby, he had seen his mother do the same thing for men who threatened him. She had protected him, until she tired of it. When John had told him landswomen did likewise, his main emotion had been frustration that John couldn’t bring him one, but smuggling foxes was one thing, smuggling women who could tell others what they had seen was another, and you couldn’t hunt a woman from horseback. Secrecy meant celibacy, little though he might like it. He hadn’t thought of his mother, back then.

Her face was impassive, and Henry studied it. This was the condition of a weakling, a ragged loser struggling for scraps. He would have thought, given that she was reduced so far, she might be less haughty in her demeanour. But something inside him twitched as she moved her hands.

“Would you do the same for me?” he said. The girl was ugly, he thought, but the question was there before he considered it. Whether it was a request, a question, even a political question—she was bartering her alliance, after all—he didn’t think. He asked, and having asked, found he truly wanted to know her answer.

The girl stiffened, her body growing still within her clothes. It was a second before she spoke. “Go out to the bay with me, bring the deepsmen around, come back to land with the deepsmen behind you, and marry me to secure our claim,” she said. Her voice was low, but she spoke steadily. “When you have done that, I will do anything you wish.”

Henry thought of the throne, safety, the girl’s hands. She was a quarry, a prize. For that, he would go in the sea again.

Henry knew he would have to stake his claim to the throne out in the bay. He did not say to Anne that he had not seen a deepsman, had not spoken to one, had not been in the water since he was five years old.

Anne went down to the sea escorted by nobles. Henry went to the sea alone, hours in advance of her, slipping through the field with his face covered. Westlake knew of it, but neither of them, not even Henry, told John.

“What did you mean to do, riding around alone?” Anne asked Henry. “Did you think you would come and kill us all by yourself?”

“No.” Henry heard no anger in her voice as she asked the question. “I only meant to come out of the sea, make myself known. It worked for Angelica, and you cannot tell me she was born speaking Italian. She must have hidden somewhere until she knew the time was right.” He thought of that picture, the flat image of a graceful woman that had hung over him in childhood. “I thought it might be my time.”

When Anne thought of Angelica, she could only see Erzebet, but she was learning to respect strategy. “You know,” she said, “that was not a bad idea.”

Henry slid easily off his horse as he reached the beach. The journey over the sands was not difficult: a simple crawl on all fours, nobody watching, a slow but secure progress across the cold grit and strewn pebbles. It was only when he reached the water that he stopped.

For eleven years, Henry had seen the water in his dreams, remembered it, thought of it, judged the world by its standards. But he had never in his life entered the sea. He had been born into its pushing waters, had swum through it, a grey expanse where light carried only a few feet but sound carried hundreds of miles, a place with forests and mountains you could fly over, a weightless infinity where every direction was possible and freedom to move never came up against a solid surface. He hadn’t known there was another kind of world. Now he was returning to it, entering it like a landsman, ready to take off his shoes and wade in, upright, walking on his legs.

Henry was frightened of the deepsmen. He saw that now, clear and stark, sitting on the damp sand with the waves hissing at him a few feet away. He always had been. His mother had been the solid thing in a fluid world, had dragged him by his hair out of the path of many dangers, and he had been frightened of her. Five years following a woman, struggling in her wake, bleating to keep up. He was weak, had always been weak. He could wrestle a landsman down, but landsmen had kept him prisoner nonetheless, had locked him up and trapped him like a fox the moment he tried to ride out for himself.

A tide of panic overwhelmed him. What was he doing? Taking the word of some girl that he could follow in her wake? Sacrificing himself like a soldier for a princeling whose mother would have burned him alive? John wasn’t here to make him laugh, there were no studious men to take notes or make explanations, there were no women here, proffering comforts they would never provide. He was alone. He recognised the feeling, understood it. It was honest, clean, real. No more lies: he was by the sea, and he was frightened.

Henry reached out a tentative hand to touch the water. The wet sand bucked and glistened as he pressed down upon it, bouncing back into shape as he removed his palm. Then a fizzing spray of water rushed towards him, slapping against his outstretched feet. Had the sea always been this rough? He had known it was, had told himself often enough, but his body had forgotten.

Behind him lay the land, armies and stakes and executioners. Before him the sea, with its harsh giants and tearing teeth. Henry gave a quiet, bitter laugh; caught between fire and water, that was him. It was a division he’d heard landsmen make, fire and water, but it had never made sense to him—nothing could live in fire—until now.

Given the choice, it had to be water. But he was not going to crawl in like some landsman.

His clothes had been a nuisance to him all his life, and Henry peeled them off without regret. There was a line of rocks around the edge of the bay, and above them, a cliff. It was a difficult climb, but once he’d started, he found he could keep going. Clambering had always been easier than walking. Even as the rocks pressed into his legs and hands, Henry felt his spirits lift. He could see a long way from up here. He’d never seen the sea from above. From below, its gleaming ragged roof was a bright, permeable heaven, but from this height, the waves looked solid, iron-dark and heaving with dense, sharp-tipped waves. From above, you’d think a diver would shatter on its surface.

Henry turned on the cliff and braced himself. He was going to fly down like a gull. There was going to be a moment, an instant in his life where he forsook the ground and swam through the air.

He let go of his perch and dived. There was a wild, flashing moment of absolute freedom, and then the water crashed around him.

Cold. Pressure. The light over his head. Henry looked around him disorientated. He had struggled for years to learn how to use his eyes: now, faced with the thick, translucent darkness, light melting into obscurity almost within the reach of his hands, his first instinct was to swim back to the surface and look around. Accustomed to breathing in and out, constantly squandering air like a landsman, Henry found his chest clamping, flexing inwards as he forced himself to keep his throat closed. And the weight of it: wherever he moved his limbs, water smothered round, pushing against him, blocking his path. He had thought he could float, chase along easily, but he was swimming against a path that resisted his every movement. This was exhausting.

Henry closed his eyes and went limp, letting himself tumble through the restless water. This was the dreamland of his childhood, the unthinking dive and sway and bitter-salt purposefulness of a deepsman’s life. He had remembered it for so long; he couldn’t now, all of a sudden, be afraid of the dark in the place he had always thought of as home.

As the cold clasped his skin, Henry thought about opening his mouth and inhaling. Forget about the girl on land with her wild promises and alien loyalties, forget about taking the throne to lord it over a people he’d never met and never cared for, forget it all. It would come to death in the end, one way or another, a fire or a sword or a shark’s maw. Why not get it over with? At least if he was dead, he could stop fearing the end.

It was fear that kept his mouth closed. Henry rolled over in the water, and as he drifted, he could feel his muscles locking down, knotting themselves around his ribs. It was familiar. That was how it had felt in the sea. A tense chest and guarded heart and fear wrapping round you like an octopus, warning you, guiding you, saying to you every moment: Take care, watch out. This will not last, but just at this moment, as long as you can keep it, you are alive.

Henry smiled. He didn’t have a place, but this, this was him. This was what he remembered, land or sea: the instant-to-instant watch and weigh of a cautious animal, hazarding and husbanding and spending its life as wisely as it could, balancing itself over the precipice and managing, instant to instant, not to fall.

He could do this. He could remember this. The deepsmen would be coming; Anne was going to call them. They would be big, and they would be aggressive: it would be difficult. But nothing was easy. And after all, Henry thought, after all these years, it would be satisfying to have something to fight.