by Cynthia Hand
“Nevertheless, I am the queen,” she said.
There you go again, she thought, imagining Francis laughing at her. Insisting that you’re queen.
“If I have enemies, the only way to bring them over to my side is for them to get to know me better,” she said, her chin lifting. “And to do that, I must meet and speak with them. Then they will see my merit as their monarch.”
“Perhaps,” James said doubtfully.
“Name one,” she said impulsively.
“Name one what?”
“Name an enemy of mine. Someone nearby, who I could meet today.”
James rubbed at his chin. “Uh, well. There are so many . . . it’s hard to pick just one.”
“Name one!” she demanded.
“All right, all right,” he assented. “John Knox. He really, really hates you.”
“John Knox is in Edinburgh?” Mary suppressed a shiver when she thought of the pamphlet. Even the name of John Knox caused her heart to beat faster. But she forced herself to scoff. “How can he hate me if he doesn’t even know me?”
“He hates the very idea of you,” James said.
“Invite him to the palace this afternoon. I wish to speak with him.”
James shook his head. “That’s a bad idea. I can’t let you do that.”
The Marys cringed. Even Mary herself had misgivings. But now she was committed.
“Invite him,” Mary insisted. “I will win him over. You’ll see.”
John Knox was a tall, gaunt man with the worst beard in the history of bad beards. (We checked this, dear reader, and it’s legit—John Knox had a terrible black beard that smelled of rotten eggs and occasionally had a fly flutter in and out of it, and we don’t want to think about it anymore.)
He definitely hated Mary. He seemed to consider her gender to be the most serious of her offenses.
“I’ve even written a book about it,” he said as he stood before her in the throne room. “I wrote it largely in response to that heretical witch, Elizabeth, taking the throne of England, but it could also be applied to you. It’s called The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Monstrous, of course, meaning in this case, unnatural, and regiment meaning, not a section of armed forces, but ‘rule.’ In other words, women should not be rulers.”
“And why not?” asked Mary stiffly. She’d expected this, but still, it was unpleasant to hear. She rather wanted to have Knox thrown into the dungeon and wash her hands of him. But that would surely not accomplish her goal of winning over the Scottish people.
“God, by order of his creation, has deprived woman of authority and dominion,” he explained matter-of-factly. “The weak should never govern the strong, and everyone knows that women are naturally weaker than men. Their sight, then, in the ruling of a country, is but blindness, their strength, weakness, their counsel, foolishness, and their judgment, folly. They are guided by wild fits of emotion, and lack the ability to reason.”
Mary wished he’d tell her how he really felt. Or not.
“But doesn’t God, as you say, dictate the line of succession? Didn’t God make me the queen?” she reasoned. “And does not your holy book say that you must accept those in authority that God has put over you?”
Knox tutted like she was a silly, ignorant child. “You know nothing about God, being that you are a Verity.”
She rubbed at her eyes. “Is there a different God for Verities and for E∂ians, then?”
“No,” answered Knox sagely. “But the Verities, in denying the sacred animal form inside of all of us, cannot understand the true nature of the divine.”
Mary really, really wished that she could tell him that she was an E∂ian. It would be so easy. She could change, right this instance, into a mouse. But that would be revealing her greatest secret and getting herself into hot water with a whole other group of enemies. Like her uncles, for instance.
“What animal are you?” she asked. She would have guessed something like a badger or a wolf. “Can I see?”
Knox stroked down his terrible beard. “The animal form is, as I said, a sacred thing, not to be flashed about at the whim of a teenage girl.”
She propped her head in her hand. She wanted to point out the way that, earlier that week, his followers had been demanding that very thing of passersby on the roads. But him changing would also mean that he’d disrobe, and she had no desire to see this man without his clothing.
“If there is a sacred animal in all of us,” she said after a moment, “then doesn’t it exist also in Verities, no matter their beliefs? So we are really not different.”
“What we believe is everything,” Knox said, shaking his head. “Verities believe that the animal magic should be suppressed and hidden. Which is against God’s will. Hence all Verities are eternally damned and will burn in hell. I’m sorry, madam, but that also means you. You are beautiful, I find, and well spoken, and witty—”
“Why, thank you,” said Mary. Perhaps he was warming to her.
“But you will still burn. And you should not be ruling a country.”
Mary sighed.
Knox wasn’t done. “As long as you insist upon sitting on the throne, you will be cursed. That is why your mother was struck down, as well.”
Mary stood up abruptly, her face filling with heat. “You have no right to say such things about my mother,” she said.
Knox shrugged. “I have every right. You are the one who has no rights.”
She wished she could have come up with the perfect reply to this—the exact right words that would put this insufferable man in his place. But instead she was overtaken by a wild fit of emotion, which only seemed to prove his point.
She called for her guards, and had John Knox thrown into the stocks for the rest of the day, to remind him of who was in charge of this country and who was not.
“I am the queen,” she whispered to herself. “I am the queen.”
THIRTY-TWO
Ari
Ari walked through a field outside of Paris, a basket of fresh-cut herbs on her arm. It was good to be out of the confines of the palace just for a morning. Ari had been working awfully hard for weeks, brewing away in the laboratory. But she’d given the Embrace Your Inner Animal potion to Catherine yesterday. She was free. The air was cool, but the sun beamed warm on her skin. Even the birds were singing.
Just then, a bird dove at her head.
Ari shrieked and dropped her basket.
The bird dove again. It was a mockingbird. Ari swiped at it with her hands, but it floated up and out of reach. Then it dropped something on her head.
Ari froze. Slowly she reached up and felt whatever was now lodged in her hair.
Oh good. It was just a bit of parchment.
The mockingbird gave one last loud squawk and flew away.
That was weird. Ari stared down at the parchment. It was almost like the bird had deliberately brought it to her.
Like a message or something.
She turned it over, and her heart skipped a beat when she saw her name—just Ari—written on the other side.
It was a message. She tore it open.
We have arrived at our destination safely. I miss your face.
Liv
Ari pressed the parchment to her chest. Then she yelled, “What if I want to write back?” at the trees where the mockingbird had vanished. There was no reply.
But Liv had written to her. She was safe. In Scotland. And she missed Ari. Specifically, her face.
Ari floated on a cloud back to the palace and down to the lab.
“Hello, Papa,” she nearly sang out to her father at his desk. “Hello, Greer,” she said to the guinea pig sitting glumly next to him.
(That’s right, dear reader. It’d been a hard few weeks for Greer. She was currently—and not exactly voluntarily—embracing her inner animal. Which was, appropriately, we think, a guinea pig.)
Greer made a noise that was a cross between a squeal and a whistle.
Ari was in such a good mood. She began to dance around.
“Really, Aristotle,” her father said. “Must you be so jubilant? You’re bound to break something.”
“That’s impossible, Father,” Ari said, mid-twirl. “I know every inch of this laboratory.” She promptly ran into a cart and knocked over a cup of white powder. “Wait, who put that there? No matter—look what I received!” Ari held up the parchment from Liv.
“Aristotle,” Nostradamus said in a sterner voice, and that’s when she realized something was wrong. “You haven’t said hello to our guests.”
Ari whipped around to follow his eyes. There, at the back of the room, stood two armed guards. She hadn’t even noticed them before.
“Oh, hello,” Ari said, her heart now dropping into her stomach.
“Queen Catherine has graciously sent these men to guard us,” Nostradamus said tightly. “It’s for our own protection. From our vast number of enemies,” he read from the cards that came with the guards. “And, most importantly, from ourselves.”
This was obviously bad. Ari’s mind whirled. She had delivered the potion Catherine had requested, on time, and it did exactly what the dowager queen had wished it to. So why were they in trouble?
Greer-the-guinea-pig made a rumbling noise, her tiny body vibrating with the sound. Ari hoped the potion wasn’t about to wear off. She wasn’t sure yet exactly how long the effects would last. She guessed it would be somewhere between a day and a week. But it would be difficult to explain if Greer changed back now.
Ari forced a smile to her lips. “Thank you, sirs, for watching over my father. But I’m here. We don’t need protection.”
The guards just stared at her.
“I suppose I should go talk to the dowager queen,” Ari said.
“Yes, I believe she is expecting you,” said Nostradamus. “But be careful. I’ve seen a long, arduous road stretched before you. It could be metaphorical. Or it could not. Who’s to say?”
Gosh, Ari hated it when her father predicted long, arduous roads, metaphorical or not.
“Yes, Papa,” she said.
“Be well, daughter,” he said as she reached the door.
It sounded ominously like goodbye.
The walk to the queen’s quarters felt long. Ari tried to reassure herself that the guards meant nothing. She and her father did important work in the laboratory. Perhaps they did require protection. Or Queen Catherine simply had a few questions regarding the potion. Surely between last night and this morning, there’d been no time for her to use the potion on anyone. Besides, Ari really hadn’t made that much, so she assumed that it would only be used in case of an emergency. Which couldn’t have happened between last night and this morning. Could it?
Ari knocked on the door. “It’s Ari, Your Majesty.”
One of the queen’s ladies opened the door, and Ari was relieved to see that this lady was most definitely human and not an animal.
“Ah, Aristotle. I’ve been expecting you. Leave us, Jane,” Queen Catherine said.
Her lady left and closed the door.
“Your Majesty, I was hoping to speak to you,” Ari said. “Regarding the guards you sent to the laboratory?”
The queen gazed down at her fingernails. “Yes? What about them?”
“Why did you send them?”
“To protect my investments,” answered Catherine.
Ari gulped. “Are you not pleased with the potion I gave you yesterday? It does work, I assure you.”
“Yes, I know,” said the queen. “That potion worked wonders.”
Ari felt the color drain from her face. “Worked?”
The queen walked over to her desk, where there was a small wooden box with holes punched into the lid. She carefully lifted it, and as she did so, Ari was sure she saw the top of the box vibrate and push against the small gold latch at the side.
She instantly had a bad feeling about this. “What’s that?”
“This is a most precious cargo, and one in which I am entrusting to your care.”
“My care?”
The queen carefully set the box down in front of Ari and then went to her desk, where she opened an intricate wooden chest in which Ari knew she kept many of her own tinctures. She pulled out a medium-sized jar and thrust it into Ari’s hands. “These should be enough.”
Ari held the jar to the light. Through the distorted glass she saw a bunch of tiny black things flying about.
The queen smiled. “You must travel to Calais at once, and you must do it discreetly, and if I were you, I would dress like a boy.”
“Your Majesty, please tell me what is going on.”
“This is our new arrangement. You protect what is mine. And I will protect what is yours.”
Ari’s hands started to tremble. “You mean my father.”
“Yes. That’s how this works.”
This was going much worse than Ari had hoped. “What are you going to do to him?”
“Nothing,” said the queen brusquely. “Assuming you do what I ask.”
Ari felt strangely disconnected from her body. She saw herself nodding. “All right. What’s in the box?”
The queen unhinged the latch. “Ari, may I present, His Majesty, the king of France.”
What? Did she mean Francis? Mon Dieu, what had she done? “That’s the king? But he’s a—he’s a—” She felt a little faint and swallowed down some bile.
“He is,” the queen confirmed. “But never fear. This is for the good of the country. Vive la France!”
THIRTY-THREE
Francis
I’m a what? Francis thought loudly.
No one answered.
What am I? he thought again, but his voice was trapped in his head. No one heard him. Instead, a loud, croaking noise emerged, rattled around him, and echoed inside his box.
He considered jumping over the edge of the box and escaping into the room—perhaps he could find the passages Mary had used in her mouse form—but he had a suspicion that would only enrage Catherine, and that would be bad for everyone.
“Well. This is a most interesting development.” The thunderous voice from above belonged to Ari. It was so, so loud. Not only that, but her face was huge, looming over the entire box. She was a giant.
No, Francis was very small. Puny, one might say. He’d figured that out last night when his mother had fished him out of the folds of his clothes and shut him in this box before he could try to run away. And he would have run away, if he could have, because he hadn’t recognized her at first. His vision was weird, multidirectional, and tinged blue, like something about the very structure of his eyes was different.
As if trapping Francis in a box hadn’t been enough, Catherine had stabbed small holes into the lid, startling him each time. Spears of light permeated the gloom, but Francis couldn’t see what had changed about himself. He couldn’t turn his head to see his body, so whatever he was, it was a complete mystery.
Except . . .
“Watch this,” Catherine said. He was pretty sure that was his mother’s voice, anyway. It had a different quality than before, but he supposed his ears were different now, too. Did he even have ears? He couldn’t feel them.
Metal scraped on glass. Buzzing. Sharp, frantic movement.
Before Francis even realized, something warm and wiggly filled his mouth. Then he swallowed it.
He didn’t know why he’d swallowed the fly. Perhaps he’d die.
The lid settled on the box again, leaving him in the dark except for the spots of light from the breather holes. Their voices were muffled as they continued their conversation.
“Incredible,” Ari breathed. “But why?”
“Why is none of your business. You just do what I tell you to do. For your father’s sake.”
Francis was starting to think his mother might be evil.
“Ah.” Ari sounded uncomfortable, but Francis had bigger—rather, smaller�
�problems to worry about right now.
What am I? he tried to shout, because it felt like the most important thing to know at this moment. He should probably be worried about the whole take the king to Calais thing, but that seemed like a problem for five minutes from now.
“Once you’ve left Paris,” the queen said, “I will announce the king’s untimely demise.”
WHAT? Francis squeaked.
“There, there, my dear.” Someone—Catherine, probably—patted the box. Her fingers boomed against the lid, and her rings rapped like claps of thunder. “It’s for the best. And the funeral will be a grand affair, just as extravagant as any of your father’s parties.” She tsked.
“Your Majesty?” Ari asked nervously.
“This is no time to be squeamish, girl. Your kingdom needs you. And when the news of Francis’s death reaches Calais, you will be just as sad and brokenhearted as the rest of the people. I’ll say that Francis died of an ear infection, which will surprise no one. As a baby, he had ear infections every week. Even now, people see him as somewhat sickly, because that ill-fated portrait. I’ll have the artist flogged again, I think, for misrepresenting my son. But I’ll also thank him, because that image is turning out to be useful.”
“This is all most alarming, Your Majesty,” Ari said.
“Yes,” Catherine agreed. “And poor Francis, taken so soon after my late husband’s departure from this world. But Francis cannot remain king, and in order for Charles IX to ascend to the throne, Francis must be dead.”
And that was why he was trapped as an E∂ian of some sort? Francis had heard that E∂ians (or the religious type of E∂ians, anyway) believed that there was an animal inside of every person, a true representation of who the person was. Francis had always scoffed at the notion. Mary was nothing like a mouse, after all. Her E∂ian form was useful to her—she’d become what she needed to be, to survive.
But this was different. He hadn’t wanted to change. And what the heck had he changed into?
He’d spent all night trying to revert back into a human (with only a slight fear of bursting through the wooden box around him), waiting for that flash of light to surround him again, but no matter how he strained (and oh, he strained—his eyeballs hurt from all that straining), he stubbornly remained a mystery animal. But he tried again now, as his mother and Ari continued quietly talking. And again. To no avail.
