The Kingdom of Little Wounds

by Susann Cokal

  And here is the Dowager’s outer chamber, which I have cleaned so often and so thoroughly that the dirt of it still stains the cracks of my hands. Today the room bristles with more than the usual number of guards; as I walk in, they stand straight and gaze sternly ahead of themselves, rattling their various weapons.

  I tremble, sure I’m sweating out guilt in waves; but I’m surprised. Either the bucket truly is magical or Nicolas and his angel army have already given orders, for the guards let me pass without question. I simply walk (trembling) up to the door of the inner chamber, grasp the cold iron handle, and push against the tapestry flap. Then I am within.

  If being able to enter was a surprise, being inside is a shock.

  The odor of blood is strong here, despite the cold air pouring through a half-opened shutter. Maybe the blood of prisoners is already so thick in the military yard that any crack will let in a slaughterhouse reek. I imagine blood flooding the stones outside, the nobles first slipping in it and then, as it thickens and freezes, stuck in place like statues.

  But there’s no time for fancies. Something has gone direly wrong right here, I can see it at once. Midi Sorte crouches by the fire with a wild look in her eyes, hair burst out of her ladylike headdress and skin shining with sweat; and Queen Isabel, a mound of a woman gone so pale as to be translucent, snores amid disordered bedclothes.

  I set my bucket down. Then pick it up again — I’m here for a purpose.

  “I — does the Queen need a change of linen?” I ask. Then force myself to be firmer: “I was sent with . . .”

  Midi doesn’t seem to hear me. Still crouching catlike, she wipes at the sweat running into her eyes. I get the impression she’s about to spring.

  My own sweat turns to ice. “Wh-what are — What is wrong?” Witches can sense thoughts, substances, everything: Midi must have detected the poison in the nightdress. I expect her to kill me straight out, right now, as my father is approaching the executioner. I regret the kindness I showed her when she was ill with the first weeks of pregnancy. No one is fiercer than a woman protecting her young.

  Midi puts her finger to her lips, ordering me and my thoughts to be silent. Then, as if they operate with a separate will, the two parts of her tongue creep out around that finger and lick the sweat from her lip.

  She growls. Her hand stretches toward me.

  EXECUTION

  IT is a slow business, execution. Who would have expected so much ceremony? Certainly not Christina-Beatte, sitting stiffly (as she must, because of her unforgiving silver-bay gown) in a gilded chair on the carpeted dais facing the platform that has been erected so that sparkling courtiers may watch the grubby prisoners die, in a few weak hours of light on a January afternoon.

  Why must there be so much confession? Each one to be killed has his moment with the priest, and his moment of offering forgiveness and a coin to the black-draped executioner. And then, only then, comes the heavy thwack of the ax and the thump as the head drops away. There is more slow ceremony, too, in the way the guards collect the body and the head and carry them away, as if these corpses deserve as much honor as any other dead.

  Thus far, there have been only two deaths: a manservant accused of helping to poison her sister Sophia, and a girl said to be his lover. Neither one said anything memorable, and Nicolas shielded the girl’s eyes at each actual death blow, which was most annoying.

  Christina-Beatte barely remembers Sophia, for whose sake these people are officially being punished. She is tired and hungry. But there is a whole prison left to go, and she is the royal Lunedie who commanded all this bloodshed, so she endures.

  She schemes.

  The next one, she will watch. She will slip from Nicolas’s hand, peel her eyes open, and see everything.

  In a moment of gleeful anticipation, Christina-Beatte takes time to pity the last sister who remains to her. Poor little Gorma, back in the nursery, missing the day’s riches! How jealous she’ll be when Christina-Beatte describes to her, in gruesome detail, just how each one perished!

  That selfsame tiny princess, meanwhile, leans into her pillows and listens to the drums. The cheering courtiers. The various noises that accompany history as it pushes forward into her sister’s reign.

  Gorma picks at the flakes around her nails, then digs inside her nose. She repeats the process, thinking of her sister and Count Nicolas. Married now, or all but married. In the smoldering amber cathedral, they promised to be as one body forever and ever and ever, amen. Someday.

  Gorma wonders when she will be well enough to join them at events like the one in progress. Christina-Beatte is only five years older, but she forbade the youngest princess to attend the rest of the day’s events. Only for adults and those of highest rank, she said. Showing off her older-sisterliness, her queen-apparentness. But Count Nicolas gave Gorma several kindly looks as she stood in the cathedral propped up among the ladies-in-waiting, and once he even winked.

  Gorma wonders if someday he might marry her as well. When the nurses tell their stories, his is always the face Gorma imagines for a dark and handsome man.

  And now, as if she’s summoned him, here comes the shuffle-shuffle of leather-clad feet and the stir-stir of heavy cloth.

  But it is not Count Nicolas. The tink of glass, the smell of pain.

  It is the physician, the young one, Doctor Dé. He looks so sad lately, with brown eyes that puff underneath. He carries a box of vials and powders and beakers and fleams.

  She shrinks from him into the feathery pillows, as if they are wings to enfold and protect her. Wings — how she longs for the public bed in the shape of a swan! So many little nooks in a swan, so many places to cling and elude grasping hands. (Has she only imagined that some of those hands were black? The gentlest hands, with the gentlest lips whispering, “Shhh, shh, sh.”) Ever more frightened, Gorma slides toward the far side of the bed, which is just inches from the wall.

  She is trapped, and she knows it.

  Ava Bingen, it is all ways Ava Bingen. Wants to make some noise, wants to know some question that can ’t have answer. I tell her to Grrr, grr, gr.

  But she come close any way. “I’ve brought a new garment,” she say. “I don’t think I can put it on her alone. Is she asleep?”

  So slow, I nod. Queen Isabel be snoring in her bed, her sorrow-child inside her arms in the monster-child’s stead.

  Hard to remember that for some this be a day of normal duties. Hard to believe Ava do not recognize some awefulness have happened here in this room and do not run away from it. I want to shove Ava Bingen in the fire place to burn with the rags of sheet.

  Yet when I look close, I see. She does know awefulness, though it be not the awe of this room.

  “I-if you won’t help me,” she stammer, “I will have to order you to leave.”

  I pull my self tall. I am still in the guise of Countess Elinor, though I have left off the pattens and slippers and am some shorter than Ava. My filthy silk make a rustle. My paillettes shine. I will not take any command from a Bingen.

  But I worry about when Reventlow might return and find us.

  In a flash I have an idea. A lightning, a lightening! But I hold it to my self a moment to be sure.

  Ava Bingen say, and her sweat reek of fear, “Midi, I know we have had some — dispute in the past, but you would do yourself a kindness as well as me if you were to leave now . . .”

  I use my idea. I put a finger to her mouth, so she smell the blood there. I pull her sleeve from the fire place to the chest beside it. Her bucket bumps the wood.

  When I take out my key, I am a lady again and unlock the lock and lift the lid. Then I pick up the monster and put him in her arms. I peel away the fur that wrap his face.

  So fast, I clap my bloody hand over her mouth to stop her scream.

  And so I make her my accomplice.

  RESCUE

  THE gasps, the throaty noises as if someone is about to choke — they do not belong in this silvered world of sleep. Isabel open
s her mouth to complain and dismiss, but then it floods with silver too, and she cannot speak.

  She has summoned someone. A hand slides into each of her hands; long soft tresses twine with her own. It is the silver mer-girls, come to welcome her.

  Or is this punishment? For although she makes herself as heavy as she can, they pull her upward with a stroke of their tails, steering the way with their long fingers and pointy mer-noses. Again Isabel tries to speak, to beg them to let her sleep in this beautiful bottom of dreams, but the quicksilver fills her lungs, and though she does not suffocate, she cannot muster the breath to whisper.

  I dropped my bucket.

  That is the first thought I have after a long time of undiluted horror: Dropped the bucket. And thus dropped my task, dropped my mind, let everything else fall away. I dropped my jaw also, and with it all power of speech. For I am holding a demon.

  In this moment, I remember certain things: the messy but relatively easy births of my four brothers, the bits and pieces left over once they were cleaned and my mother emptied. Their bloodless but difficult deaths in the Great Sickness, there in the house with the stone head that belongs to my father. The red splash that fell from my skirts and the stain it left before the church on Helligánds Plads. The howls of the madmen in Helligánds Hospital as if in witness to my sin, the rats and gulls sniffing around that stain as if there might be something left that my stepmother hadn’t scooped into her apron as my father carried me away.

  I think, Evil. That is the smell beyond blood that is baking in the Queen’s inner chamber. Evil born into this world and held in my arms, which are somehow unable to let it go. They have clamped around and will not release, no matter the horror.

  I must explain.

  The little demon bears a sad face, a melancholy one. Its skull is covered in black hairs, like the hairs of the fur in which Midi wrapped it; its single eye puckers half open, one little fist pressed to the hole where its nose and mouth should be. In place of those ordinary human parts, the demon has a mass of red jellied bulbs, not quite eyelike; one of them protrudes farther than the rest and looks distinctly like a leg, complete with tiny foot and toes.

  Midi, holding a candle now, unfolds the fur the rest of the way. I see the body.

  A chest, two arms, and on the stomach, around the stub of cord, a shape that might almost be the real face. It has lips, a nose, and a brow pressing against the skin. Below that, evidence that the creature is definitely male, with a boy’s tackle (or is this another leg?) hung above the thicker single limb that dips in the center and barely manages to distinguish itself into two feet at the end, less well shaped than the one that protrudes from the mouth.

  It is a demon, yes. But is it —

  “Dead?” I ask.

  Midi nods: Yes, dead.

  I hand the thing back to her and spit into my apron. Midi makes a sound of exasperation and puts the creature back in its chest. While I wipe my mouth, holding my apron like a wine sack, she points from the chest to the sleeping Queen. At last, I understand.

  This is the long-awaited heir to the Lunedie throne. This devil, blessedly dead. Of course it could not be Midi’s baby; she is far too early in her pregnancy for that, and this thing is far too pale.

  Oh, Isabel, I think, pitying her. Some terrible magic has been worked against you.

  I shrink from Midi Sorte, though she would hardly have shown me the monster if one of her spells had produced it. Nor would she have much reason to do a similar magic against me, however little she might like me. I don’t even have a belly now, only trickling monthly blood, thank the stars.

  Midi clucks in her throat, pushing some rags into the fireplace flames. Isabel snores, and for a mad moment, the scene becomes almost cozy.

  I wonder if I am still supposed to kill the Dowager, even though the baby is born and is in no way capable to rule. She should be dead already; how could anyone birth that hideous worm and live? I wonder how to convey the news to Nicolas. Through Gudrun, obviously, but I’m afraid —

  And then I realize: I must not tell anyone of this, for the mere fact that I am alone, with the Queen and a black nurse disguised as a countess. We are the only three who have seen and touched this baby, and this fact both involves me in the birth and makes me likely to be blamed for it. Midi and I will be called witches together. We will be hanged or burned, and everything I have lived will become nothing.

  Jacob Lille. My one love, and I never found him again.

  Grammaticus. Lost to both of us.

  These thoughts race through in less than a minute, so fast does my mind work in its panic. I hear the drums far away: another prisoner to be killed. My father? I wonder what to do with my dirty apron. I begin to weep, from fear and frustration and all the plans of everything I was once going to do.

  This is when Isabel awakes. The oaken bed shudders; its linen drapings stir like ghosts.

  Isabel coughs, clearing her throat of some mad dream.

  “Can I trust you to keep a secret?” she asks, looking up at the hole I cut in her bed’s canopy when I was dressing her doll, and then, without waiting for an answer from either Midi or me, “What are we going to do?”

  A secret. I write it here a dozen times to show I know how to keep and how to express: a secret, a secret, a secret, a secret, a secret, a secret, a secret, a secret, a secret, a secret, a secret, a secret. It will keep on the page, and I will hide the page beneath some floorboard or in the hole of some bedclothes or my bodice. It is too big for my heart to hold alone.

  Here be the secret things that happen next:

  Ava Bingen weeps and chatter words in a language that might be her own. Isabel in her bed stay patient as a saint in church, waits for us to end our madness like a saint wait for visions. As if some how she have of a sudden lost her own madness and be wiser than us all.

  I touch Ava on the shoulder to say well, it is all well some how, though I do not know how. I showed her the creature to make her my ally, not my burden. I try drinking strength from her tears. I clasp harder, till I feel her bones inside, and this calm her sobbing. Then I cross to the bed to speak with the Queen.

  By now Isabel have found the waxen sorrow-child in her bed. She holds it to her chest again, but this time as one holds some thing familiar that can provide small comforts, not one that is in its self a being to be comforted. To her it is no baby any more, it is a prayer bead.

  She looks to Ava, who heaves still with the tears that pour over her long white face. Isabel say, “You have come to kill me.”

  Ava wipe her eyes and nod. That is how she confess, so simple. She be too afraid for lies. “I have no choice.”

  Isabel ask, “Poison?” and again Ava wipe. Nod.

  “Count Nicolas?”

  Ava nod one time more.

  Isabel strokes the head of the sorrow-child where we did put the bones of Hendrika (I believe). She gives the head a kiss. “It will happen one way or another, soon enough. I’m surprised no one’s tried before now.”

  I wait for more, but there be no more. Except the awe that a queen can accept such fate. She seem so willing as if she willed it her self. And she do not consider that if she is killed, so shall we others be.

  May be this the gravest maddery of all.

  Isabel point to the pitcher on the table as if she tell Ava, Go on, put the poison there and I will drink it. She does not know that pitcher be empty, I have emptied it in trying to clean away her shame.

  Ava will not look up, just snuffle and scrub at her tears as if she cry for her own death instead, which in fact she shall do soon.

  Those two women, so happy to be murders! I clap my hands to wake them. I have not lived so much to die be cause of this monster-child or the wax one. So I grab the sorrow-baby from Isabel’s arms and hold it away from her. I rock it back and forth, back and forth, in to her dreams and out of them again.

  “You give that back,” she say clear. I think she recognize me. Not her Elinor any more, the dark nursey again. She s
eem so irritated as if I play, not speak in the way that I can. The sorrow-child be my shouting.

  I hold that waxy baby up to the candle. He do not smell of blood like the other, he smell of bees. A drop fall from his head to sputter on the flame.

  Ava Bingen stare as if she be gone so mad as Isabel’s reputation. But she under stand me. She say to the Queen, “You need a baby.”

  And Isabel simples a yes. She will die with out one, she will likely die with one too, but chances are better the other way. She reach for the sorrow-child.

  Ava announce, “I have a baby. A new one.”

  We look to her stomach.

  She put her hands there. “I mean, my stepmother does. In — two miles from here, the glassmakers’ district. She has a baby, or so I’ve heard. A rumor only . . . but perhaps a boy.”

  Isabel sit up alert, of interest and of jealousy. She keep one eye for the sorrow-child, one eye for Ava.

  Cunning Ava Bingen. I feel the hornets buzz my heart and also I feel grateful — be cause may be we have hope.

  “We could . . . switch them,” Ava say slow, for she know she might lose her head for this suggestion as easy as for having part in the monster-child. “That is, we might dispose — respectfully — of the . . . miscarriage, then bring the live baby here.”

  “And you would not kill me?” ask Isabel, as if this be the part of the dream she cannot believe.

  Ava shudder. “N-no . . . Your Eminence.” But this may be her trick.

  When Isabel turn back to the wax child, Ava add, “The baby would be yours. We would present it as your own flesh-and-blood baby. Or we could try, at least. The new king, so Count Nicolas won’t rule through Beatte.”

  Isabel ask with the air of great sense, “But how?”

  Saa. There it is.

  Midi Sorte and I are allies.

  And we are walking outside the palace walls, along the great Skön Kanal of Skyggehavn. Edging our way between shoulders and hips, along the spaces opened up for entertainments. We are together.