The Kingdom of Little Wounds

by Susann Cokal

  It is at this moment that Christina-Beatte collapses into the plate she shares with her almost-husband. Her head wobbles several seconds (measured by the Great Hall clock’s expensive extra hand) under the weight of her tiara, which is tethered to an even heavier wig; and then, waist stiff with the whalebones that have held her up so long, she falls face-first into the assortment of soft vegetables and meats that she and her intended have been slowly depleting. Her tiara upsets a salt cellar. Then, off balance and board straight, her body begins an ungainly slide to the floor.

  Count Nicolas catches the girl before she disappears beneath the cloth. He hoists her upward to prop as if she’s sitting on her own. Ignores the smears of food upon her lead-pale face and behaves as if no one else could possibly notice them, either.

  “My betrothed is eager for her bed,” he declares. “We will rearrange our celebration anon, according to her needs.”

  He is not ordinarily the type of man to use a word like anon; but this is a special night, and anyway he must get accustomed to high verbiage in his new position.

  “The executions will resume after the couchement,” he concludes.

  The courtiers sit still, not sure whether they are meant to cheer for this or not.

  After the slightest hesitation, the dwarfs exchange a flurry of kisses aboard their golden swan ship, and then it is clearly acceptable to applaud.

  I fall.

  On a short bridge all most to the palais, where we hear all ready the voices of more celebration in the street, I trip on Elinor skirt and pitch to a side. I twist to land on my hip, not my belly. Not my Lump. My legs half over the edge. I feel the circles I took from Ava’s glass shop; they crack beneath like bones. Some bones.

  The mama cat have been following us. And she have friends, and they circle my head like if to take my breath. Ava fight through them and with her hand that do not hold her brother, she hauls me to sit. One of my patten fall plunk in to the water.

  Ava rub my wrist between her fingers. “When was the last time you ate?”

  She ask, “Have you slept at all?” and “Have you been careful?”

  Ask, “Does Grammaticus know you’re pregnant?”

  The cats surge against me. How do Ava know? But then the signs be there to any who wish to read them. Even now I feel my bosoms squeeze with ache against my bodice; the stays press my belly, and the smell of filths on the bridge and under it rise fast to my nostrils.

  I turn my head.

  “So it is true, then,” she say, in a tight voice that make me think she clutch her brother the harder. “You are having his baby. Grammaticus’s. Arthur’s.”

  If fortune smile; if it do not kill me. If I have not kill my self all ready. If the Lump belong not to Nicolas.

  Ava reach her free hand to touch my belly, feel it top and bottom. The moon shine on her big brow and she frowns.

  “I had four brothers before this one,” she say. “And it’s too early for yours to sit so low. Have you swallowed anything meant for Queen Isabel?” She sound worried in a true way.

  The two parts my tongue twist tight together, fill my throat. I cannot admit it were my own hand that make me sick and not some accidentish poison. I cannot move my head for yes or no. I let the cats to rub my cheeks.

  “You should tell Grammaticus,” Ava say finally. “He would want to know. Maybe — maybe there’s a way for him to marry you.” But she do not sound hope full or pleased.

  She make me kick away my last patten and walk in filth beside her. With cats.

  SUCCESSION

  ALONE, alive, awake.

  Isabel receives a visit from her children the Wraith Prince and Princesses, whom Sophia has at last persuaded across the water from Saint Peter’s. They’ve tired themselves out with tweaking noses and pressing bladders at their sister’s betrothal feast; after the failure of Sophia’s brilliant plan to smother Beatte with dampening spirits, there was no more fun to be had. And so they have come, as an afterthought, in their afterlife, to see Maman, the gray dame who fed them bitter draughts with words of love on her lips.

  Words of love! Feeling them gather around at the moment of her death, Isabel addresses them all: “I would surrender this child” (she means the ball of wax and relics), “for the chance to touch you . . . even just one of you . . . in the flesh again. If I could have that” (she sobs), “I would never need any other gift.”

  She waits.

  “I am sorry if I made you ill,” she says timidly, or she thinks it. “I had the best intentions. I loved you all — I still love you!”

  She waits again.

  “At least show yourselves to me!”

  She feels them whirl around her. She feels their whispers: Maman, Maman, we love you! Maman, come to us! One of the girls (Is it Hendrika? Amalia?) loosens a shutter and lets it rattle, teasing Maman with the possibility of seeing stars. Others poke at the monstrous brother hidden in the chest and leave bruises where his flawed flesh begins immediately to rot. They sit, all five in a row, astride Maman’s enormous body, and they push the air out of her. If you want to see us, come to the other side!

  Isabel’s breathing grows labored. The waxen lump of sorrow-child congeals as her hands grow colder. No one would recognize it as a baby anymore, but she bears it a strange gratitude. It preserved her long enough to birth the monster and to regain some mind. To realize that this court where she has tried so hard to belong, this court that once seemed her destiny, it is not her home after all. And to know that, one way or some other, she is going to die, and she doesn’t mind, and she has been loved after all.

  The shutter flies open and in wash the stars.

  Maman, come to us! Come now!

  Just as she’s slipping away, into the arms of her eager, naughty, fretful wraith children, Isabel hears the door open. A different kind of light enters, more brilliant than the stars: two women — one pale and wrapped in a shawl, one dark and carrying a candle — step in. They close the door and lock it (though the guards on the other side have the same key) and drop the flap over the opening so that the gray tatters of linen surround Isabel and her children, who start swinging on the strips and playing tricks with the wind.

  Isabel is afraid her little wraiths will fall out the window, that she’ll never see them again. But she’s also curious about what these two women have brought. Her heart begins to beat again; her breasts ache with the return of life.

  The woman with the candle sets it on the table that holds Isabel’s medicines and wines. She lights other candles from its flame, too, and in the swelling glow she seems to grow darker herself. She looks bad — dirty and tired and in need of one of the draughts that Isabel used to prescribe for her children. She even sounds broken, like shards of herself scrape and tinkle on each other.

  Come, Maman! This may be your last chance!

  The other woman approaches. She is pale and tousled but sturdy looking, like all the Elinors born on these shores. She allows the shawl to slip from her shoulders as she draws near the bed. She has her arms wrapped around some bundle and wears an amber bracelet, a set of cheap beads that distract Isabel’s eye as the woman climbs onto a cushion by the bed.

  “Your Highness,” whispers this too-familiar woman, whose sharp features stir a special memory in Isabel’s dying mind. “Your Highness, may I present your son, the King.”

  At first Isabel smiles, just hearing the words “your son.” Then follows doubt. This is the third son in as many days. And finally pure joy, as the sharp Elinor leans in gently to nestle a baby, a real living creature, among the pillows holding Isabel in place.

  A little nose pokes gently in the direction of Isabel’s bosom as the tiny creature whimpers. With the last ounce of her strength, Isabel frees the unused bag of her tit from the blankets, and she fits the swollen grub of her nipple to the tiny mouth.

  He feeds.

  It is the most marvelous, miraculous feeling Isabel has ever experienced, one she’d never thought to be allowed, given her husband
’s insistence on wet nurses. She has milk. The feeding tugs her spine out through her dug and into the ravenous little creature whose bones will now be nurtured with her bones.

  In the mingled pain and pleasure of it, Isabel fails to notice when and how her wraith children disappear. She allows herself to float away on a dizzy river of swelling, miraculous life.

  She wakes, perhaps weeks later, to a voice whispering in her ear.

  “Your Highness, you will have to scream.”

  Isabel blinks. Someone has been waving a vial of terrible-smelling stuff beneath her nose, a salty odor that reminds her of a part of the palace she’d rather forget. The outside. She coughs, and her nipple falls out of the child’s mouth.

  “Scream?” she asks, wondering if one of the others will replace the nipple or if this baby, too, will now be taken away for someone else to feed. She feels a pang of loss for the wraith children.

  “To represent childbirth,” says the woman she now thinks of as Light Elinor. “You have to scream to simulate the pain. If anyone is going to believe that this is your baby — and they have to believe, that’s our plan . . .”

  “But . . .” Isabel thinks the plan is not complete; there is some part or parts missing. “For childbirth . . .”

  “With your permission.” The woman holds up a handful of bloody cloths. They look like the linen strips that Isabel has scarcely ever used, the kind that women need when they aren’t pregnant. “Your Highness, you are still leaking some blood yourself, which Midi — your Elinor — which we can stop once we have the proper herbs. But it is not enough. We’ll spread this along your thighs and rub it on the sheets. We’ll produce these cloths as yours. We have the mother-cake still in the chest from before . . . We can make the birth look real,” the woman concludes with what even Isabel recognizes as doubt that tries to convince itself. “But we will need you to scream.”

  “The baby?” Isabel asks.

  “He’s sleeping, Your Highness.” The woman picks him up, with care for his neck; she runs her finger down his cheek. “His name is Klaus. At least, that has been his name thus far. Of course, you have the right to give him a new one.”

  It is the expression of tenderness on girlish sharp features that convinces Isabel. All at once she remembers the story, the scheme, the possibility that she might save her daughters and herself by embracing this baby. A baby brought from elsewhere, one untainted by any sickness of her own blood. A Lunedie baby. Who deserves her love. Isabel reaches out. She will give that love.

  And yet the woman’s face is troubled.

  “My dear,” Isabel says gently to this Light Elinor, “what seems to be mattering you?”

  And then I do it. In front of Queen Isabel and Midi Sorte, clutching my brother in my arms, I pour out the whole sorry tale of my life, from the Great Sickness and my father’s certainty that if we alone had survived, we must be destined for greatness; to falling in love with Jacob Lille and abandonment and pregnancy, a miscarriage that will always be suspected of being something more.

  “They know I fornicated — they think I aborted — they shamed me . . .”

  And, finally, these last dirty months of doing Nicolas’s bidding, first directly through him, then as commanded by intermediaries such as Candenzius.

  I sob it all out, my disgrace, my horribleness. The way I can’t help feeling little Klaus belongs to me, and yet I cannot figure how. How to claim him and abandon my father. How to justify the life this baby would have as my child rather than the Queen’s. I even confess that, for a while, for selfish hope, I stole a man from Midi and that it was no more fair than anything else that happens under the sun and stars.

  “And I am sorry, Midi, I truly am,” I babble. “Arthur Grammaticus doesn’t love me and I don’t love him. But he is worth a thousand courtiers — even Count Nicolas, with the jewels in his prick.”

  Midi stares at me. So does the Queen. I guess at the cause of their astonishment — or I choose the cause least awful to address.

  “Yes, Count Nicolas has sewn pearls and turquoise and — oh, I don’t remember exactly what else — in his manhood. He says they protect him from disease and give him wealth wherever he goes, in case he encounters a desperate situation.”

  Midi still stares, but Queen Isabel speaks.

  “My dear, are these your sins? All of them?”

  I nod. But then I add, “Until tonight, with the ring that we gave in exchange for my brother. I considered keeping it. So I’m guilty of greed as well.”

  Isabel scratches her ear, looks longingly at the baby. We are all greedy for him; perhaps she thinks she must persuade me to give him over.

  “It strikes me,” she says, not unkindly, “that what you need is absolution.”

  Absolution? I shudder, and little Klaus whimpers. Religion, a priest, a silly ritual — when priests are the worst gossips of all, if they’ve had enough holy wine in them. Absolutism.

  Isabel’s voice pulls my gaze upward. “Forgiveness,” she says, as if absolution must be too complex for my understanding. “You need to be forgiven.”

  “I have never trusted priests.”

  Isabel gestures me closer, till Klaus is in reach. “I have my own confessor, Father Absolon.” She strokes my brother’s skull with fingers drained of blood; it seems a miracle she can move at all. I let her do it. “But I don’t tell him everything. If I were to advise you . . . as I might advise my own daughter . . . I would say a priest might give you penance, but for absolution, you must look within yourself.”

  While I wait, gap-mouthed, for her to continue, she smiles some secret melancholy smile, the kind that says its owner is thinking of her own past.

  Queen Isabel says, “Such things as you describe . . . sad things . . . happen to all of us, you know. They are not part of some great plan.”

  She reaches out for Klaus, and I give him to her, mutestruck. She beams down at him.

  “I don’t believe in Fate,” she says. “After this past month, I’m not sure I believe in sin. How can there be sin in love?” She kisses Klaus. “And disease, even the Great Sickness — our Lord has not devised it as a weapon for meting out justice. It is earthly. It strikes to remind us that we are mortal, not that our sins or our abilities are any greater than someone else’s.” Her voice gathers strength as she speaks; she seems to have contemplated this topic to the fullest. “It makes us humble. It makes us kind.”

  I am transfixed, unable to believe the Queen herself is offering me not just advice but also compassion. And not a Catholic compassion — a new sort that alters every notion I have had of her as rigid, selfish, mad. Has Klaus done this?

  “And as to those other things you speak of,” (she still strokes my brother) “passion and all that — well, we have all dreamed of poetry. And you aren’t the first woman to have lost a child, or to have been blamed for it, or to have acted desperately in order to save herself and the ones she loves.”

  I hear a sound, a growl, from Midi, but I ignore it. Isabel lets her hand fall on that great loose belly. Now I know she’s talking not just of me but of something that to her seems much greater. Perhaps our Queen is a philosopher. Perhaps she never was mad at all.

  Mumbling now, she speaks into the bundle tucked against her breast, “If you are pure of heart, a priest’s absolution means nothing, and neither does general opinion. If you know your heart is good and guiltless, you can grant yourself absolution. I believe the Virgin would say it so. If you fear the father, she has always said, turn to the mother.” Her eyes go to her shrouded paintings.

  She draws a deep breath. “You must decide, I think, where your loyalty lies. Is it to me? To the Crown? Nicolas?” (She can’t keep the loathing out of her voice with that name.) “Or will you be loyal to your . . . self? Your heart’s desire.”

  There comes a long pause that I would call pregnant if the word were not so laden. I look at Midi. She looks back at me, eyes liquid, feeling her own pain. She is crying, silently.

  “Do you u
nderstand?” Isabel asks me.

  Nodding, I wipe my eyes, though in fact I hardly comprehended a word of what she just said.

  She seems to guess this, too. “Bend down a little,” she says. With great difficulty, she lifts the hand that once bulged around the Bullens’ ruby ring. She reaches it toward me until her palm covers my skull.

  “For any crime you intended against me, I forgive you,” she says softly. “You are absolved.”

  I look up, and my eyes meet Midi’s. In the flush of knowing Arthur loves her, I can see in their black depths that she, too, forgives me; just as I forgive her.

  This is how it must feel to dive into the Troll Kingdom and come back dragging their king by the beard.

  I can quite nearly forgive myself now.

  ISABEL

  WITH her hand still on Light Elinor’s head, Isabel gathers her strength. She screams.

  Light Elinor screams too, in surprise. The baby wails. Dark Elinor makes a “Shhh, shh, sh” noise, but there is no time. Of a sudden, after an absolution in which she gave herself forgiveness also, Isabel is desperate to save this baby and the rest of her fleshly family. And herself. So where once she used all her strength to keep from screaming, now she uses all she has to scream as loudly as she can.

  A knock comes on the door, a pounding. “Your Eminence!” shouts some man or other.

  The girls move swiftly. Light Elinor goes to the door while Dark Elinor busies herself between Isabel’s legs, with gestures that feel familiar. Light Elinor murmurs something that Isabel can’t hear above the sound of her own screaming. Boots pound as guards go to fetch something, someone.

  The baby’s cries grow in volume. High, piercing, like needles diving into the Queen’s ears and puncturing her again and again. Isabel clutches him tight. She screams louder, and in her shapeless sounds she is telling him, Hold fast and trust. She screams, You belong to me. She tells him, All is forgiven. All will be well.