Sometimes We Tell the Truth

by Kim Zarins

So that’s why she hates me. Well, she started hating me sophomore year when I worked for Cannon’s writing service, even though—except for one short story that I sold, which I admit was a mistake—they were just essays, and who cares about those? And I hardly sell essays anymore, now that Cannon alters grades on the cloud. But after publishing my Morpheus story, she must have figured I got too into myself. I always read Mari’s stories—not like I’d tell her that—but otherwise, I rarely look at The Southwarks, because you want to learn from the best, right? Published authors, not high school students and their homemade stapled and photocopied creative writing journal. And the strategy worked for me, didn’t it?

  But I text back like the coward I am.

  OK, OK

  She’s still glaring murder, so I turn off the phone, semi-naked girl pic and all, and act like I’m paying attention, which is kind of hard because (1) Marcus is not exactly great entertainment, (2) I’m freaked out by Mari’s surveillance, and (3) that image of Nikki is something you can’t not think about.

  Pard takes another bite of his stolen doughnut and watches me like I’m an amusing movie.

  Our story begins with a king.

  Henry was a well-loved monarch: young, attractive, powerful. All that remained was to fulfill his royal duties by finding a wife and siring an heir. He named his wedding day but would not reveal the name of his bride, and no one knew if he secretly had a bride or was still looking for one. Regardless, preparations for the wedding were made, chefs prepared a feast, tailors sewed a gown from delicate fabrics, and invitations to only the most elite in society were extended. But the invitations mentioned no name for the bride.

  In the early morning on his wedding day, dressed to pass unnoticed, Henry waited by the well for the peasant girl to come. Soon he saw her coming down the street, moving gracefully in spite of the bucket she carried. He saw her nod to her neighbors young and old as she passed them by. She wore the calmest, most serene smile that had fascinated him since he first saw it a few months ago, and he could see how much the people loved her and were warmed by her presence. Yet, even as she warmed others, he wondered who or what warmed her.

  Henry could not figure out the woman’s secret. He wanted to know if that smile ever faded—or if it came off like a mask, and revealed the ordinary expressions of women used to backbiting, manipulating, and flattering to get their way.

  He was fascinated by this woman in ways that had nothing to do with her beauty per se, though she was beautiful, too. Breathtaking. Even in her rags her figure showed—slim but majestic.

  Henry wondered if he could love this woman.

  Henry wondered if he could bear this woman’s perpetual smile.

  Henry wondered if he could take this woman apart and see how she ticked.

  “That is a heavy burden for you, Zelda,” he said, slipping from the shadows as she hefted the full bucket.

  Startled by her king’s undisguised voice, she stumbled, and water from her bucket splashed to the paving stones. “My king!” Zelda put down her burden and curtsied to the ground, where she remained. Her smile vanished in the reverent seriousness of a commoner meeting the king.

  Henry, however, smiled hungrily. He had long prepared for this moment. “We meet again,” he said. “Rise. Speak with me.”

  She stood but kept her head lowered, and her brow wrinkled as if unsure what to say. “Yes, my king. We meet again. You were hunting before. The hart.”

  He lifted her chin so that their eyes finally met. She looked surprised, but she did not resist his hand. Touching her jaw like that and locking eyes with her, the king felt her beauty move him carnally. “I am still hunting. For a bride. Today is my wedding day.”

  Color filled her cheeks, and she lowered her eyes, though her chin remained lifted in his grasp.

  Gently, he released her. “I wish to marry you, Zelda.”

  She curtsied. “As it pleases you, my king. If my father consents, it will be so.”

  She agreed so readily, without even a gasp of surprise or a squeal of excitement, that it took him by surprise. Such an interesting woman. He barked a laugh, and then merrily took her arm in his. “Well, shall we walk to your house, then?”

  Leaving the bucket on the ground—upright and mostly filled, as if she’d reclaim it later—they walked to the peasant girl’s humble home.

  The meeting with the girl’s father was short and simple. “I ask for no dowry, for you have none to give,” Henry explained. “But I do ask for something worth more to me.”

  “And what is that?” asked the old man.

  “Her complete obedience.” Henry gazed at Zelda standing behind her father’s chair. “She must obey me in any request I make, no matter how frivolous or strange, and she must obey me without a murmur of complaint, not even a frown. Girl, will you obey me?”

  “I will obey you in everything, my king, whether we wed or not,” she answered.

  And her father gave his consent. “If she is willing, so am I.”

  Henry faced the young woman. “Are you willing? Are you quite sure?”

  “Sire, if Your Majesty wishes for me to be your wife, then it shall be so.”

  Henry cocked his head. The girl seemed to be marrying him to do him a favor, not the other way around. Baffling. Surely she was angling for his power, like all the noblewomen he had danced and flirted and fornicated with over the years. But she did not show any excitement, nor any strong emotion. She stood there calmly, waiting for his command.

  “Very well,” he said. “I have your dress prepared for you, but I do not have it with me. It is at my castle. But no matter. You can walk to my castle to receive your gown. However, you will make this walk in nothing but your shift, for you will bring nothing into this marriage but your own body and virtue. Once at my castle my servants will bathe and dress you, and then we will wed this very day.” He raised a red-gold eyebrow in challenge.

  “I will be there just as you wish, my king,” she said, once again lowering herself in a deep curtsy.

  He bowed his head—he was almost mastered by her perfect obedience. It was a heady feeling. “Then I will ride ahead of you and finish the preparations for the day.”

  “This is sick,” Alison says. “Why would she agree to do anything he asks, and with a bland smile? Never allowed to frown or disagree? That’s not what marriage is all about.”

  “But it’s like My Fair Lady,” Briony snaps back. “You know, he’s going to tutor her into being a fine lady, and they’ll fall in love.”

  Alison crosses her arms and laughs. “No, thanks! I’ll fall in love with someone who doesn’t try to control my face. And why should she have the boring role? Her name is Zelda, after all. Henry’s the guy with the ordinary name.”

  Marcus smiles. “Ah, but Henry is no ordinary guy. He’s Henry VIII.”

  “Nice character reveal!” Mari says, eyes gleaming. “Oh, so Henry’s getting a wife! Or a new wife . . .”

  Everyone weighs in on this new twist that revises history.

  Pard whispers in my space, “I hate Henry VIII.” I look down at his upturned face. The doughnut was one of those gritty ones, and granulated sugar covers his lips. He looks like a happy four-year-old who managed to get more sugar on him than the amount of sugar the doughnut had in the first place. He has only a small chunk of doughnut left. I notice the mess on his hands and lap, and my eyes pull back to his lips.

  “You’re covered in sugar,” I scold, and he just grins like I’d said something sexy. I should correct the error, but I can’t speak, because there’s nothing left of the four-year-old in the slow way his tongue slides across his upper lip. Maybe it’s just his doughnut breath, but I can taste the sugar he’s tasting.

  Okay, this feeling . . . it’s not attraction. Not a lot of attraction anyhow. Anyone would feel some attraction with all this sugar involved, right? If it had been Nikki, I would have felt a lot more attraction. And Alison—a million times more. With him? This is barely anything.

  P
ard holds up his little mangled doughnut to share, like he’ll feed it to me, like he’ll touch my lips with those sugar-dusted fingers. His eyes linger on my mouth. I get that feeling again that he wants to kiss me. Not just wants to, but will. So I snap back my head and brush my sleeves and my face to get Pard’s army of pheromones off, like the sugar is dusted all over me and not on him.

  Mari shoots me a look as if to warn that I’m goofing off again, which is just great. Thanks a lot, Pard.

  I’m relieved to tune into Marcus again, which is totally a first. But a sick story about a megalomaniac’s wedding sounds like just the thing I need right about now.

  Crowds gathered along the main city street to watch Zelda make her journey. She arrived at the castle on bare feet, in her shift, to the blare of trumpets.

  The entire court flocked to the gates to welcome her, and ladies-in-waiting quickly flung a robe over her exposed body. They bathed her and then dressed her and styled her hair.

  Even Henry was shocked when he stood beside the archbishop and saw her enter the private chapel in the great cathedral. He had never seen a woman that beautiful before. He regretted making her walk in her shift on her wedding day, a first test just to see if she’d put up a fight and disobey mere seconds after promising perfect obedience. But she was true to him, and impossibly lovely, and he would treat her like a queen from now on.

  And for a while, he did.

  Soon Henry had a child from her. A girl child, to his disappointment. Zelda was a doting mother and tenderly gave suck to the child rather than turn it over to a wet nurse. She always had a smile for him, but the glow of maternal bliss in her face now made him wonder whom she loved and served best: her babe in arms or her king and husband?

  He decided to test his wife a second time.

  Zelda had just rocked her daughter to sleep when she heard the clang of a knight in armor marching to her chamber.

  The knight entered, his face worn and pale like some horror had occurred, too grim for words.

  She clasped the sleeping babe to her chest. “Good sir, what is the matter?”

  The knight knelt on the stone floor. To her concern, he wept and could barely get out the words. “My lady, my grace, His Majesty the king has ordered me to come to your chamber and . . . oh, but I cannot speak.”

  Zelda’s face was filled with dread, but she bravely lifted her chin. “We must follow the king’s orders.”

  “His Majesty says that you have become an unpopular queen, and that the babe is rumored to be unworthy because she is half peasant. To prevent the people from rising up against the kingdom in rebellion, His Majesty commands me to take the baby and slay it.”

  Sophie gasps, then blushes at drawing attention to herself, but Lupe says, “You’re right. This is one fucked-up dude.”

  Marcus blinks nervously and continues his tale.

  Zelda’s face went white, and for a moment there was no sound except for the clinking of armor as the knight wiped his eyes.

  “My lady, surely we can stage a death. We do not have to do what—”

  “We most certainly will obey our king,” Zelda said. “Take her. All I ask is that you bring her back, so that I can give her a Christian burial.”

  “I am afraid my king forbids you from seeing this child again, not even to bury it.”

  “I see. Then it must be so.”

  After a good-bye kiss and brief prayer, she handed over her daughter to the henchman.

  And she smiled.

  Henry heard a full report from his knight. He did not have his daughter killed. The knight secretly took the daughter to Henry’s sister in the countryside, but no one else knew. Rumors circulated that Henry had his daughter killed.

  Meanwhile, Henry waited to see if Zelda would show any sign of anger or rebellion. But he found none, not even resentment. She was obedient and alert to his needs, as always. She never even mentioned the baby. It was as if the baby had never been born.

  And four years later, she bore a second child, a son.

  “What?” Lupe shrieks. “She’s still sleeping with that dickweed?”

  Marcus blinks nervously.

  “She is one sick woman,” Bryce says.

  “What about him?” Cece thunders.

  “He’s not a sick woman,” Bryce replies, but the girls glare him into silence.

  Briony flips her hair over her shoulder. “It’s not Zelda’s fault. She’s stuck with Henry VIII. She’s totally his prisoner. Good for her for putting on an act.”

  “She should stab him,” Reiko says.

  “He’s probably expecting that,” Briony muses. “I think she’s handling it the best way she can figure.”

  “This story needs to be more like a horror story,” Lupe says. “Like, she cakes on makeup to look cheerful, like a doll, and soon her face changes so she can only smile, and she becomes the doll.”

  Reiko nods with grim approval. “So Henry has to stare into the dead eyes and smiling red mouth of his doll-woman . . . and then she murders him. Death by dolls!”

  Lupe and Reiko cackle like witches.

  “For the record,” Marcus says, palms out in a nervous gesture of peace, “I’m with you all the way that Henry is the villain.”

  Um. Okay, so after the second baby, things went pretty much the same way. Henry sent the knight to deliver a death sentence. The knight took the second child and secretly delivered it to Henry’s sister. So both children are safe, but Zelda believed them both to be murdered. She handed over her son just as obediently as she had handed over her daughter.

  Henry had been expecting an outburst. This was their only son, the son Henry had been waiting for, and the heir to the throne. But there was no emotion from Zelda—just that calm smile that never gave way to rage or even a frown. Zelda must have heard the rumors that he could divorce her or chop off her head for failing to provide him a son, yet obedience mattered more to her, it seemed. He was flabbergasted, to say the least.

  Years passed, and Zelda never raised her voice to Henry, never hinted that they had had two children whom he murdered in cold blood. To him, she was a perfect woman.

  “Hah.” Lupe snorts, and the other girls follow in suit.

  Henry finally settled on one final ploy.

  “Zelda, I find my people do not much care for you as their queen, because of your low birth. You are getting old, and as I need to have children of gentle blood, I’ll need to send you away. I’ve had a divorce approved by the Pope. I am sorry, but it cannot be helped.”

  “As you wish, my king.”

  “You’ll have to go home. Now.”

  Zelda curtsied in farewell.

  “But, first, take off that dress and those jewels. You came in your shift, and you can leave in it as well.”

  So she did. In the rain.

  After Zelda returned home, her father could not stop railing on her terrible ex-husband. But even now—even divorced—she held her tongue.

  “See?” Lupe says. “She’s a doll now. She’s not human anymore.”

  A week later Henry sent for her. She arrived in the tattered dress Henry had not seen since the day he proposed marriage.

  If she had wondered whether Henry had changed his mind about the divorce, he put that to an end.

  “My bride needs your help preparing her for our marriage. Also, our nuptial chamber needs preparing. You are a good worker, so I’ve sent for you. You can start by cleaning the room, preparing the bed. Then you may prepare the girl.”

  “A girl . . . Is she very young?”

  Henry shrugged, like her age was not important. “She’s fifteen.”

  Zelda did her work, but her thoughts distracted her. Not thoughts about Henry—she was worried about the girl and what life this girl would be walking into.

  Henry entered to inspect the room just as Zelda had finished arranging a decorative silk over the bed.

  “Ah, that is well done. And now for the girl.”

  The nervous girl escorted inside was absolute
ly beautiful. Zelda could see why Henry would want to marry this lovely young woman. The two women spoke little, which made sense since they were of two different social stations. The girl did not seem to know that Zelda had been married to the very man who would soon be her husband.

  “Thank you for your help,” the girl said sweetly. This was a girl who smiled because the world would be nice to her if she greeted it kindly. Zelda almost frowned—her, um, doll’s mask barely cracking at the sight of this delicate girl, soon to be marrying Henry VIII.

  Lupe nods approvingly at the doll reference.

  A servant whisked the girl away, and Henry fetched Zelda. “What do you think of my bride?” he asked her.

  “She is loveliness itself. But, my king . . .”

  “What is it?” He leaned forward, eager. This was finally it. She was finally standing up to him. Defying him. He wondered what that would feel like and how he would react to it. Either to chop off her head or to lay himself at her feet, he did not know.

  “My king, the girl is so young, and it is clear that she has been brought up in luxury and ease. Such an upbringing will make her less able to obey some of your wishes. Please, Your Majesty, consider a way to be less demanding of this young wife.”

  “Perhaps,” he said breezily, but his voice faltered. He had expected her to point out how outrageous the wedding was, writhe in jealousy, and condemn his mistreatment of her. He hadn’t expected her to advocate for the girl.

  And yet, Zelda’s affection for the girl made sense on a deeper level.

  “Come,” he said, snapping his fingers for his servants. Including her.

  Zelda, in her plain smock, was escorted to the wedding and given a seat. The service was not in the private chapel but in the great cathedral. No one in the audience murmured complaints about Zelda’s presence in her shabby garb. If anything, heads inclined slightly as she passed.

  The people, noble and poor alike, loved their former queen, and they feared and hated Henry.

  The service began, and Zelda sat with her hands in her lap as she watched Henry prepare to make the same vows with his new wife. He glanced at Zelda, and she smiled.

  Henry held up his hands to command the attention of all gathered.