by Cynthia Hand
Edward frowned. “But she’s my sister. She’s the eldest. She—”
“She’s a Verity,” objected Dudley. “Mary’s been raised to believe that the animal magic is evil, something to be feared and destroyed. If she became queen, she’d return this country to the Dark Ages. No E∂ian would be safe.”
Edward sat back, thinking. Everything the duke was saying was true. Mary would not tolerate the E∂ians. (She preferred them extra-crispy, as we mentioned earlier.) Plus Mary had no sense of humor and was completely backward thinking and would be no good at all as ruler.
“So it can’t be Mary,” he agreed. “It can’t be Bess, either.” He twisted the ring with the royal seal around his finger. “Bess would be better than Mary, of course, and both of her parents were E∂ians, if you believe the cat thing, but I don’t know where Bess’s allegiance lies concerning the Verities. She’s a bit shifty. Besides,” he said upon further reflection. “The crown can’t go to a woman.”
You might have noticed that Edward was a bit of a sexist. You can’t blame him, really, since all his young life he’d been greatly exalted for simply having been born a boy.
Still, he liked to think of himself as a forward-thinking king. He hadn’t taken after his father as an E∂ian (at least, he hadn’t so far), but it was part of his family history, obviously, and he’d been raised to sympathize with the E∂ian cause. Lately it seemed that the tension between the two groups had reached a boiling point. Reports had been coming in about a mysterious E∂ian group called the Pack, who had been raiding and pillaging from Verity churches and monasteries around the country. Then came more reports of Verities exposing and subsequently inflicting violence upon E∂ians. Then reports of revenge attacks against Verities. And so on, and so on.
Dudley was right. They needed a pro-E∂ian ruler. Someone who could keep the peace.
“So who do you have in mind?” Edward reached over to a side table, where there was always, by royal decree, a bowl of fresh, chilled blackberries. He loved blackberries. They were rumored to have powerful healing properties, so he’d been eating a lot of them lately. He popped one into his mouth.
Lord Dudley’s Adam’s apple jerked up and down, and for the first time since Edward had known him, he appeared a tad nervous. “The firstborn son of the Lady Jane Grey, Your Majesty.”
Edward choked on his blackberry.
“Jane has a son?” he sputtered. “I’m fairly certain I would have heard about that.”
“She doesn’t have a son at the moment,” Dudley explained patiently. “But she will. And if you bypass Mary and Elizabeth, the Greys are next in line.”
So Dudley wanted Jane to get married and produce an heir.
Edward couldn’t imagine his cousin Jane with a husband and a child, even though she was sixteen years old and sixteen was a bit spinsterish, by the standards of the day. Books were Jane’s great love: history and philosophy and religion, mostly, but anything she could get her hands on. She actually enjoyed reading Plato in the original Greek, so much so that she did it for fun and not just when her tutors assigned it. She had entire epic poems memorized and could recite them at will. But most of all, she loved stories of E∂ians and their animal adventures.
There would be no doubt that Jane would support the E∂ians.
It was widely rumored that Jane’s mother was an E∂ian, although no one knew what form she took. When they were children Edward and Jane’s favorite game had been to imagine what animals they would become when they grew up. Edward had always imagined he’d be something powerful and fierce, like a wolf. A great bear. A tiger.
Jane had never been able to decide on her preferred E∂ian form; it was between a lynx and a falcon, as he recalled.
“Just think of it, Edward,” he remembered her ten-year-old voice whispering to him as they’d stretched out on their backs on some grassy knoll, finding shapes in the passing clouds. “I could be up there, riding the wind, nobody telling me to sit up straight or complaining about my needlework. I’d be free.”
“Free as a bird,” he’d added.
“Free as a bird!” She’d laughed and jumped to her feet and run down the hill with her long red hair trailing behind her and her arms spread out, pretending to fly.
A few years later they’d spent an entire afternoon calling each other names, because Jane had read in a book that E∂ians often manifested into their animal forms when they were upset. They’d cursed at each other and slapped each other’s faces, and Jane had even gone so far as to throw a stone at Edward, which actually did rile him, but they had remained stubbornly human throughout the whole ordeal.
It’d been a great disappointment to them both.
“Sire?” Lord Dudley prompted.
Edward shook off the memories. “You want Jane to get married,” he surmised. “Do you have someone in mind?”
He felt a twinge of sadness at the idea. Jane was easily his favorite person in this world. As a child, she’d been sent to live with Katherine Parr (King Henry’s Wife #6), and so Jane and Edward had spent hours upon hours in each other’s company, even sharing many of the same tutors. It had been in those days that they’d become fast friends. Jane was the only one who Edward felt truly understood him, who didn’t treat him like a different species because he was royalty. In the back of his mind he’d been holding on to the idea that perhaps someday he’d be the one to marry Jane.
This was back when it was slightly less frowned upon to marry your cousin.
“Yes, Sire. I have the perfect candidate.” Dudley began to pace back and forth across the room, stroking his beard. “Someone with good breeding, a respectable family.”
“Of course. Who?” Edward asked.
“Someone with undeniable E∂ian magic.”
“Yes. Who?”
“Someone who wouldn’t mind the red hair.”
“Jane’s hair isn’t so bad,” Edward protested. “In some lights it’s slightly less red, and rather pretty. . . .”
“Someone who could keep her in line,” Dudley continued.
Well, that made sense, thought Edward. Jane was notoriously willful. She refused to be pranced around court like the other girls of noble birth, and openly defied her mother by bringing a book to certain court functions and passing the time in the corner reading instead of dancing or securing herself a future husband.
“Who?” he asked.
“Someone who can be trusted.”
This was starting to seem like a very tall order indeed. “Who is it?” Edward raised his voice. He disliked having to ask a question more than once, and this was four times now. Plus Dudley’s pacing was making him feel a bit seasick. Edward pounded his fist on the side table. Blackberries went flying. “Who is it? Blast it, Northumberland, just spit it out.”
The duke stopped. He cleared his throat. “Gifford Dudley,” he muttered.
Edward blinked. “Gifford who?”
“My youngest son.”
Edward took a moment to absorb this information, adding up all of the criteria Dudley had given him: someone from a respectable family: check; someone who could be trusted: check; someone with undeniable E∂ian magic . . .
“John,” he blurted out. “Do you have E∂ian magic in your family?”
Lord Dudley lowered his gaze. It was a dangerous thing to admit to E∂ian blood, even in today’s more civilized age, where you might not get burned at the stake for it. While being an E∂ian wasn’t technically illegal any longer, there were still so many people throughout the kingdom who shared Mary’s opinion that the only good E∂ian was a dead one.
“I’m not an E∂ian, of course,” Dudley said after a long pause. “But my son is.”
An E∂ian! This was too good. For a minute Edward forgot that he was dying and marrying off his best friend as some kind of political strategy. “What creature does he become?”
Dudley reddened. “He spends his days as a . . .” His lips moved as he tried to form the right word, but he failed.
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br /> Edward leaned forward. “Yes?”
Dudley struggled to get the words out. “He’s a . . . every day he . . . he . . .”
“Come on, man!” Edward urged. “Speak!”
Dudley wet his lips. “He’s a . . . member of the equine species.”
“He’s a what?”
“A steed, Your Majesty.”
“A steed?”
“A . . . horse.”
Edward fell back, open mouthed for a few seconds. “A horse. Your son spends his days as a horse,” he repeated, just to be sure he’d got it right.
Dudley nodded miserably.
“No wonder I haven’t seen him in court. I’d almost forgotten you had another son besides Stan! Didn’t you tell us that your other son was a half-wit, and that’s why you deemed him inappropriate to appear in social settings?”
“We thought anything was better than the truth,” Dudley admitted.
Edward scooped a blackberry off the table and ate it. “When did this happen? How did it happen?”
“Six years ago,” Dudley answered. “I don’t know how. One moment he was a boy of thirteen, throwing a bit of a tantrum. The next he was a . . .” He didn’t say the word again. “I do believe that he’d be a good match for Jane, Sire, and not simply because he’s my son. He’s a solid boy—excellent bone structure, able-bodied, reasonably intelligent, certainly not a half-wit, anyway—and obedient enough to suit our purposes.”
Edward considered this for a few minutes. Jane loved all things E∂ian. She wouldn’t have a problem with marrying one. But . . .
“He spends every single day as a horse?” Edward asked.
“Every day. From sunrise to sundown.”
“He can’t control his change?”
Dudley glanced at the far wall, which bore a large portrait of Henry VIII, and Edward realized how foolish he sounded. His father had never been able to control his lion form. The anger would take him and then the fangs would come out, literally, and he would remain a lion until his anger abated, which often took hours. Sometimes even days. It had always been uncomfortable to watch. Especially when the king decided to use somebody as a chew toy.
“All right, so he can’t control it,” Edward acquiesced. “But that would mean that Jane would only have a husband by night. What kind of marriage would that be?”
“Some people would prefer such an arrangement. I know my life would be a lot simpler if I only had to attend to my wife in the hours between dusk and dawn,” said Dudley with a weak laugh.
It would hardly be like having a marriage at all, thought Edward. But for someone like Jane, such a marriage could afford her a sense of privacy and the independence she was accustomed to.
It could be ideal.
“Is he handsome?” he asked. Dudley’s other son, Stan, had suffered the misfortune of inheriting his father’s eagle nose. Edward hated the idea of marrying Jane off to that nose.
Dudley’s thin lips tightened. “Gifford is a bit too easy on the eye for his own good, I’m afraid. He tends to attract . . . attention from the ladies.”
Jealousy pricked at Edward. He gazed up once more at the portrait of his father. He resembled Henry; he knew that. They had the same reddish-gold hair and the same straight, majestic nose, the same gray eyes, bracketed by the same smallish ears. Edward had been considered handsome once, but now he was thin and pale, washed out from his bout with the illness.
“ . . . but he will be faithful, of that I can assure you,” Dudley was blathering on. “And when he and Jane produce a son, you will have your E∂ian heir. Problem solved.”
Just like that. Problem solved.
Edward rubbed his forehead. “And when should this wedding take place?”
“Saturday, I think,” answered Dudley. “Assuming you approve of the match.”
Edward had a coughing fit.
It was Monday now.
“That soon?” he wheezed when he could breathe again.
“The sooner the better,” Dudley said. “We need an heir.”
Right. Edward cleared his throat. “Very well, then. I approve the match. But Saturday . . .” That seemed awfully soon. “I don’t even know what my schedule looks like on Saturday. I’ll need to consult—”
“I’ve already checked, Your Majesty. You’re free. Besides, the ceremony must take place after sundown,” added Dudley.
“Right. Because in the daytime, he’s . . .” Edward made a faint whinnying noise.
“Yes.” Dudley produced a scroll of parchment and unrolled it on the desk upon which all the official court documents were signed and sealed.
“I bet you spend a fortune on hay,” Edward said, finding his smirk at last. He inspected the scroll. It was a royal decree—his permission, technically speaking—that Lady Jane Grey of Suffolk be wed, on this Saturday hence, to Lord Gifford Dudley of North-umberland.
His smirk faded.
Jane.
Of course it had been a fantasy, this notion he’d had of marrying Jane himself. She had very little in the way of political capital—a rich family, to be sure, a title, but nothing that would truly strengthen the position of the kingdom. Edward had always known that he was supposed to marry for England, not himself. All his life he’d had a constant stream of foreign ambassadors trotting out the portraits of the daughters of the various European royalty for him to peruse. He was meant to marry a princess. Not little Jane with her books and her big ideas.
Dudley put a quill in his hand. “We must consider the good of the country, Your Highness. I’ll ride for Dudley Castle tonight to fetch him.”
Edward dipped the quill in the ink but then stopped. “I need you to swear that he will be good to her.”
“I swear it, Your Majesty. He’ll be a model husband.”
Edward coughed again into the handkerchief Dudley had given him. There was that funny taste in his mouth, something sickly sweet that mixed badly with the lingering blackberries.
“I’m marrying off my cousin to a horse,” he muttered.
Then he put the quill to the paper, sighed, and signed his name.
TWO
Jane
“And the blessed event will take place Saturday night.”
Lady Jane Grey blinked up from her book. Her mother, Lady Frances Brandon Grey, had been speaking. “What’s happening Saturday night?”
“Stand still, dear.” Lady Frances pinched Jane’s arm. “We need to make sure these measurements are perfect. There won’t be time for alterations.”
Jane was already holding her book as still as possible, and at arm’s length. A feat of strength for someone who could wrap her own fingers around her upper arm.
“Note the bust hasn’t changed a smidge,” said the seamstress to her assistant. “Probably never will, at this rate.”
In another feat, this one of self-restraint, Jane did not smack the woman’s head with her book. Because the book was old and valuable: The Unabridged History of the Beet in England: Volume Five. She didn’t want to damage it. “All right, but what’s happening Saturday night?”
“Arms down now,” said the seamstress.
Jane lowered her arms, marking her place in her book with her index finger.
Her mother plucked the book from her hand, tossed the precious tome of beets onto the bed, and adjusted Jane’s shoulders. “Stand straight. You’ll want this gown to hang correctly. You won’t be carrying your books during the wedding, after all.”
“Wedding?” Mild curiosity edged into her tone as she leaned to one side to look at her mother around the seamstress. “Who’s getting married?”
“Jane!”
Jane snapped straight again.
The seamstress noted the final measurements of Jane’s hips (poor for childbearing—another of Jane’s failures) and gathered her supplies. “We’re finished now, my ladies. Have a good afternoon!” She fled the sitting room in a flurry of cloth and needles.
Lady Frances pinched Jane’s shoulder. “You’re getting marrie
d, my dear. Pay attention.”
Jane’s heart immediately began to beat faster, but she told herself not to worry. It was only an engagement, after all. She’d been engaged before. Four times, as a matter of fact.
“To whom am I engaged this time?” she asked.
Lady Frances smiled, mistaking Jane’s reaction for acceptance. “To Gifford Dudley.”
“Gifford who?”
The smile turned into a frown. “The younger son of Lord John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. Gifford.”
Well, Jane knew of the Dudleys. Though the family itself was fairly minor as far as noble houses went, known more for the prize horses they bred and sold, there was one other interesting fact: John Dudley was the president of the High Privy Council, the right hand of the king, a trusted advisor and perhaps the most powerful man in England, aside from Edward himself. And some might argue that point, too.
“I see,” she said at last, though she had never encountered this Gifford fellow at court. That seemed suspicious. “Well, I’m sure he’ll be just as wonderful as the other fiancés were.”
“Do you have any questions?”
Jane shook her head. “I’ve heard all I need. It’s only an engagement, after all.”
“The wedding is on Saturday, darling.” Her mother looked annoyed. “At the Dudleys’ London home. We leave tomorrow morning.”
Saturday. That . . . was soon. Much sooner than she’d expected. Of course she’d heard Saturday before, but she hadn’t actually thought about how soon it was, or internalized what that might mean for her.
This wedding might actually happen. Her heart started to beat fast again.
“It is my greatest wish for you to be happily married before you’re too old for it.” Lady Frances didn’t clarify whether “too old for it” meant happy or married. “Anyway, I think you’ll like this one. I hear he’s a handsome creature.”
So Lady Frances hadn’t seen him, either. Jane felt a chill. And with the likelihood of him inheriting the Dudley nose—
Jane recalled the seamstress’s comments about her bust. And the fact that she had unsightly red hair and was so slight of stature that she was sometimes mistaken for a child. Maybe she shouldn’t judge. Looks, after all, should not decide the worth of a person. But that terrible nose . . .
