by Susann Cokal
“Just as the goose girl had abandoned all hope, along came a tinker with a magic pot . . .”
I hear more gossip about the future: The Queen is being banished to the country . . . She and Doctor Candenzius are running away together to the Germanies . . .
And when the nurses get particularly weary, the cures most outlandish, they say: The King has lost his senses. He is in Doctor Krolik’s pocket and will do whatever Krolik commands. He is in Count Nicolas’s pocket and will make him a duke. He and Count Nicolas . . . Nicolas . . . Nicolas . . .
Nicolas may have murdered his family. And the Lunedies.
“Is any of it true?” I ask Grammaticus, once I’ve reported every last murmur.
He answers, “What is truth?” He rolls a pen between his blackened fingers, as if he might not care about the answer.
“Truth is what you know.” I thump him on the chest. “In here. It is what you trust.” If you trust.
He steps back from me. “I can’t say.”
“But you have me tell you everything,” I complain — for once again I’ve spent all night in the nursery, watching Midi Sorte swanning about with her red skirt and her white bodice and her secret skill, and though I could drop dead as a stone with weariness, I’ve dutifully come to deliver my findings.
His face assumes a noble expression, each hair of his beard preening like the feathers on a bird’s breast. “I serve the Crown,” he says (words I’ve heard elsewhere). “Discreetly.”
“Tell me something,” I beg. “What is the good of a pact with the King’s chronicler if he doesn’t help me understand my own fate . . .” Which if we marry will be his fate too — but something stops me from saying it.
I face one truth now: if ever I thought of loving Arthur Grammaticus, it was to save my skin and protect me from Nicolas Bullen.
He does kiss me (fast, on the brow) and says I should try to sleep. His mind is elsewhere and has been so for some weeks. I want to wring a promise out of him — but at the same time I feel him slipping from my grasp. Which means I must not grasp; I must go.
He doesn’t embrace me, and I don’t press him to. Instead I go, and I send my deepest wishes into the night sky. Jacob. The sea. A Lutheran city someplace where he may be free and I may be with him. If only I could determine where, I would swim all the way . . .
Walking across stones that retain their daytime heat, past a wheelbarrow full of the season’s last limp greens, I grow practical again. I can scarcely imagine my life without the palace. How could I follow Jacob Lille to a green island, to shiver in the snow and watch pigs trot back and forth across a farmyard? To live apart from my father and his wife, digging in the ground for vegetables while they got on with their perspective glasses and babies? I’ve never even seen a farmyard, except in pictures and tapestries. I’ve dug for vegetables in the soggy clay of our kitchen garden, of course, but I can’t imagine farming. I can’t figure it for Jacob, either — his fingers would lose all the delicacy that let him craft those marvels of amber, including his masterful sphere of eternity. I wonder who has it now: His parents? The guild? Did he take it with him?
I close my eyes and see each webby golden ball holding a smaller one inside, down to a speck of lace so fine, it appears only under a magnifying glass. And even then, the tiniest hint of another sphere inside, trapped by the amber threads that embrace it . . .
Eternity: That was where I had planned to live — with Jacob — soaring past grim endings and into the long arc of blameless forever.
I must find a new place. Again. A dream and a plan.
CHRISTIAN LUNEDIE AND ISABELLE DES RAYAUX
WHEN King Christian announces that he will speak to his wife in private, his favorites speculate as to the reason.
“It’s been nearly six months since they were alone,” says Willem Braj, propped lazily in a window seat of the long gallery that overlooks the bay.
“After so much time, any man must be eager,” says Rafael af Hvas. Upright in the seat facing Willem, he pulls apart a golden pomander and sniffs, then holds the opened sphere out in invitation. “For almost any woman.”
Willem leans in for a deep inhalation. Myrrh. “Even one with a crowd already in her belly.”
An untitled courtier with aspirations adds, “Even in a sleety season.” For outside, the skies are heavily gray, and the rain has slowed to that viscous harbinger of winter.
The three men marvel at the King’s fidelity and speculate that the portly Queen possesses some unearthly allure for him. They contemplate true love and its infamous blindness. They enjoy themselves; there have been few occasions for laughter in recent weeks.
Of course, they fall quiet when King Christian approaches.
Christian scarcely notices these now-minor favorites as he strides to his wife’s apartments. Mating is not his purpose, though he is happy enough to let Willem and Rafael think so.
He is followed by Doctor Krolik and Count Nicolas, also striding purposefully. These two pause in Isabel’s state chamber while Christian goes to her inner one. The ladies and maids are banished to corridors and anteroom. For this conversation, Christian needs privacy.
In the state chamber, old Duchess Margrethe, Isabel’s chief lady, forces her clawed arthritic hands to embroider (long, messy stitches) while she keeps one farsighted eye on the men. Count Nicolas gives her his sly white smile; she shows him her nubbins of yellow-black teeth in return.
In Isabel’s private chamber, Christian avoids looking at the bed, though it is not the one in which he has known his wife. It is nunlike, dun in color, and surrounded by pictures and statues of the Virgin. With the nursery forbidden to her, Isabel has been entertaining art dealers who produce Virgin after Virgin for her to buy. Christian thinks it a relatively harmless preoccupation. He is pleased at least to see that the book of female martyrs he commissioned for her is open on her desk. It’s turned to the story of Saint Ursula, who led ten thousand virgins into slaughter for the Faith. The book’s presence indicates that Isabel might be biddable, or at least that she has examples of biddability and humility close to hand.
Isabel herself is clearly nervous, standing among the statues, though dressed as magnificently as possible in these days of her expanding girth: purple mourning with a violet mantle, a double-crimped ruff and ropes of pearls, with a single pearl in each ear to match Christian’s own. She wears a brown wig in the French style, but even her head has swollen; the wig and her hat seem to skate atop it.
“Your Majesty.” Isabel bends nearly all the way to the ground, her skirts puddling around her. When he tells her to stand, her foot catches and she stumbles toward him, then falls backward into a chair.
Christian regards his wife with distaste. Her lack of grace has become truly appalling these last months. He remembers watching her dance with Count Nicolas (only a lord then) at Sophia’s wedding — the shape of her skirts not entirely inelegant as Nicolas leaped into the air, his slim legs scissoring their way back to earth. And then she tore her gown.
“Wife,” Christian says abruptly, “Countess Elinor Parfis has made a full confession.”
Isabel scratches her ear. She remembers Elinor, a pale presence always at her elbow, missing the last few days. How many days? How sweet Elinor is. Suddenly, through the dimness that has clouded her mind of late, she misses Elinor fiercely.
“Confession.” Her wig wobbles. She settles it askew. “Is it so close to Saint Ruta’s Day? Then I must confess as well. I’ll instruct Father Absolon —”
“No, not that sort of confession. Countess Elinor has admitted to poisoning.”
Isabel blinks innocent brown eyes at him, still scratching her ear. She looks as simple as a cow.
Christian twitches. “Try to understand me. Listen. We know Countess Elinor was poisoning the children. She identified her accomplices as well.”
He feels he hardly needs to say that Elinor swore Isabel had a hand in the poisoning; even Isabel must catch the implication. Anyway, it would not be
true; according to Count Nicolas, secret-keeper, the Countess is the one person who has succeeded in holding her tongue while put to the question. In fact, Elinor’s shards of teeth raked her tongue so hard that even the sternest questioner could not expect her to speak, and her hands were broken so badly that she could not write either. They had to give up on their interview and put her in a tiny oubliette to heal, or not heal, as God would decree.
But Christian knows what he knows. He and Nicolas agree that Isabel and Elinor have colluded against the children — it is the only possibility with a ring of truth. Both of them had opportunity, and both had authority and means. As to motive, Elinor’s crippled husband is fifth or sixth in line for the throne, after the children; she had reason for malice against them.
Why Isabel herself might have designed poisons for her brood, the men cannot say. It must be a sign of her madness. Nicolas opines that she might simply have wanted to feel important — that she felt a rivalry with Christian’s own Majesty and wanted some attention for herself, which she could get (paradoxically) only by making the children sick and pretending to care for them . . . But that is a prideful thought on Christian’s part, and he blushed when Nicolas planted it — knowing himself to be so much less majestic than he should be.
“Do you hear me?” Christian stoops as if leaning over his wife, though she is several feet away. “The Countess is guilty, and she’s told us who shares her guilt.”
Isabel sways as if she might tip out of her chair. It has no arms; she catches herself by clutching the seat.
“Poison?” she says weakly. “Elinor?” Maybe she understands Christian’s more subtle meaning, maybe not.
Very well, he’ll say it, the lie that can only reveal truth: “The Countess named you as chief poisoner. You prepared the unguents and potions; you ordered her to administer them —”
“Stop!” Isabel flings her hands wide in supplication. “I would never — Elinor would never — and she’d never admit —”
Never, never, never. Christian takes note of his wife’s words, especially admit. This is as good as a confession itself . . .
Christian allows himself to sound cold. He will be blunt and brutal. Majestic. “The point of fact is, madam, that the children have been ailing for years under your care, and four of them have died. None of our children have ever been strong, not even at birth. Doctor Krolik has a theory —”
“Theories!” Isabel bursts out. “Your people have a theory that their city was built by witches!”
“It may have been.” He is relieved to make a turn in the conversation; the harsh topic and the need for stern attitude are increasing the pains in his gut. “But what the land has become, since then, is quite —”
“Witches,” Isabel says quietly, and she sounds madder than ever. “And mermaids. That’s where you should be looking. Look for the devil’s work! Poisoning — accusing — like you and all your favorites — Yes, you!”
Christian feels a sharp pain. He doubles over, remembering that the vision of Saint Ursula’s mission came to her in a dream; in women’s secret states, so much may be revealed. “I’ve never hurt the children,” he says.
Isabel sounds perfectly lucid for a moment: “I know more than you may realize —”
“I have always cared for the children.” He stops her fast, before she can speak some words that will spread like a noxious gas in the palace. “My single mistake has been in trusting you with the heirs to my throne.”
She is easily distracted by accusation. “I am their mother. I was at their bedsides every day.”
“All the more reason for the shock — and disgust — any good soul must feel at knowing what you’ve done to them.” He glances again at Saint Ursula. The book’s margins are tangled with bodies, the Huns raping and killing the virgins who’ve come to beg for Cologne’s freedom . . . “Your own children,” he insists. “The kingdom’s children. Isabel, how . . . how could you?”
He is aware of bleating, like that sheep to which he is constantly compared.
Isabel says, “Doctor Candenzius and I devised a cure: He worked the mathematics; I read the Latin herbals —”
“And you killed four children. The Countess has explained . . .”
That lovely white face swims up before Isabel, glowing with light reflected off her too-pale skin . . . and then the face darkens, mottled with blood, as the white eyes bulge and the red tongue swells outward, the skull being crushed like a grape for wine . . . That is the face of confession.
“Horrible!” Isabel whispers. “It is horrible what you have done.”
Christian corrects her. “What you have done.”
“And there will be punishment.” She stares forward.
“Yes,” he says, playing the stern King again, “there will. For you. You will not see the children again. You will stay in your rooms. You will have only a few servants and no access to herbals and powders.”
Isabel doesn’t seem to hear. She sits perfectly rigid, perfectly enormous, absorbed in a mad vision; but the chair gives a fraction of an inch with a loud sound.
Christian feels uncertain.
“You won’t be entirely stripped of honor,” he says on a conciliatory note. “The country still needs its Papa and Maman. You may emerge to wave at the people on state occasions. You must reassure them that all is well. We depend on the baby you are growing.”
Isabel is silent.
“You won’t hurt the baby, will you?” he asks — bleats again, rather.
She says resolutely, “I know your heart’s desire. I know your punishment.”
Christian feels another sudden cramp. “My desire is for the good of the people,” he says tightly. “And that good rests in the children, who will ensure a Lunedie sits on the throne with the best intentions at heart. If you can’t promise to let this baby live — or if you try to visit any of the children again, especially the Crown Prince — you’ll be tied to your bed for the duration of the pregnancy, and the children will be sent into the countryside. The green islands. Is that what you want?”
Isabel repeats in her Ursuline voice of dream and venom, “I know what you really want, Christian Lunedie. I know what lies inside you —”
The ache in Christian’s gut becomes unbearable. As if Isabel is one of the mythical witches she claims to hate and has cast a spell to torment him. He doubles over again, clutching the place where claws are twisting among his kidneys.
“I must go.” Turning hastily, turning the key: “Wife, health to your —”
Isabel shouts, “Sin! Evil! Demon!”
Christian steps into an outer chamber stunned into silence. Every eye is round — brown, blue, gray — all the whites showing. Even Duchess Margrethe is awake, her attempt at embroidery discarded on the floor, her ugly mouth gapped open.
“The Queen needs rest,” he says, while Isabel continues to moan in impotent fury. “She would like her ladies to bring her an easeful cup of wine. You know the appropriate recipe.”
With a bow, Nicolas follows the King to his cabinet.
Another time, there was a wife who wanted a child very badly. She had lost something by marrying her husband, who was kind but had his head in the clouds with his work, for he was a keeper of stars and he loved them more than his own life.
The wife went to the Queen of Elves and asked for a baby. She was assigned three impossible tasks, and upon completing them, she was given a child. It was a child so hideous, so loud and squalling and horrible, that not even a mother could love it.
This was the wife’s only offspring, and she left it in the hearth nook to sleep or scream as it chose.
One day the husband came down from the clouds and said, “Wife, you have brought me nothing I value. I will take a new bride, and it will be the one you keep in a corner.” The wife saw then that the elfin baby had grown into a young girl, pretty if still ill-tempered.
The wife was stricken with despair, for she loved her husband, after all. Nonetheless, she offered to prep
are the wedding feast.
That night the husband and his guests dined on a pie made of flesh so tender, it melted away at the touch of a spoon. “You have murdered my bride and served her to me to eat!” accused the husband, but when the elfin girl was summoned, she appeared — sullen at having to do someone else’s bidding on the eve of her wedding.
Surprised, the husband went to his old wife, who had aged greatly in the last hours, and lifted her skirts. She had cut off her own legs and stewed them for the pie. “My arms will be next,” she said, “and then the rest of me.”
The new bride clapped her hands. She took an enormous slice of pie and went out to howl through the woods with her wild elf cousins.
And so the first wife disappeared, down to the very memory of her. The elf-bride wove her hair into a blanket to swathe her first baby. So is it with mothers and their children.
From time to time, the husband had a thin sensation that his life was not now what it once was, but he decided this was the effect of living mostly in the clouds.
THE HEAVENS
ON a single night in November, the world changes. History, astronomy, religion, and medicine must be made over: A white point has poked through Cassiopeia.
A new star.
A priest sees it first, on his way home from a deathbed; he trips and falls with a splash in a canal, to be retrieved half drowned and babbling about miracles. Twin sisters, daughters of a baker, see it from their bedroom window and feel the pangs of first menses. In a glassblower’s shop where a shutter was left carelessly unlatched, the new light shatters every vessel on the shelves.
Doctor Candenzius notices it from the window of the awful little room he now shares with Venslov and Dé. Trembling with opportunity, he sends a message to the astrologer Stellarius, who later tries to claim discovery, and one to the King himself, who has his men drag a cot and a brazier up to the west tower so that he can study the new arrival too.
