The Queen's Truth

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  This was so different a scene from what the boy had faced. This was the way it should be, always. A revolution in the heart could not be far from a revolution in the streets. But Sanditon was a king’s man.

  “I will make you speak, but you will wish you had done it without inducement,” said Sanditon softly, so that only the girl could hear. “Speak. Please.” He did not want to hate himself more than he already did.

  But she did not speak.

  He twisted an arm behind her back, slowly. But it was not she who broke first. It was her mother.

  “Yara!” called out her mother again. “Speak for him!”

  But Sanditon had to make the bone pop before she let out the sound of her voice, pitch perfect, even in pain.

  He let her go.

  She sagged forward, sobbing.

  Her mother broke free from her husband’s grasp and ran forward, pulling her daughter’s head towards her.

  Sanditon had long since let go of her arm, but still she sang that full-throated song of pain.

  “Be a good voice for the king. We’ll come to visit you, aye?” said the mother. “As soon as we can. And you’ll eat ever so well and see the castle and be quite the lady, I’m sure.” In the end, it was the same story the boy’s mother had told him, the same lies. This mother did not believe them, but she said them all the same. What else was there to say?

  “Come with me,” said Sanditon, to the girl. And to the mother.

  He glanced around the village, as the crowd began to move away.

  Sanditon led the way back to the carriage.

  The mother kept a steady stream of reassurances to her daughter.

  Sanditon could see none of the crowd left now. If he put the mother and father and daughter in the carriage altogether now, he could take them all away, to the other side of the kingdom where they would never be known.

  But he was still a king’s man. A monster’s man.

  He opened the door to the carriage and the girl’s mother stepped aside.

  Inside, the boy’s face went wide.

  The girl turned up her nose at the stench of him, combined with the blood.

  “In there?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Sanditon.

  She stepped in.

  Then he held out his hand to the boy. “Come,” he said.

  The boy would not move until Sanditon reached in and pulled him out, and even then he trembled.

  “This is your son,” he said to the girl’s mother.

  She said nothing, gaping at the boy, and then at her daughter.

  “Take him. Keep him safe.” It was his only hope, that this woman could love her daughter well enough that she could love another in his place.

  ‘“He is—”

  “Of no use to the king,” Sanditon said.

  “But—” She looked at her daughter.

  “Your daughter will come with me. Do you understand?”

  The woman looked at the boy. “His name?” she asked.

  “Give him one, a new name,” said Sanditon. “And speak for him, as if you were king and her voice was yours.”

  The mother stepped back, and Sanditon could see the father coming up behind her slowly.

  Then the carriage began to move away from them.

  A king’s man was also a coward, and he liked his chambers at the castle and his food and the crackle of a fire. He liked the touch of a whore against him at night, and he liked the taste of ale. Which was just as well, since he would be drinking a lot of it the next few weeks.

  He wished he had some now.

  The girl sang a little song to herself as the carriage moved along and Sanditon thought how her mother had loved her, and how jealous he was of that. Not of her voice, never that.

  KING BASTARD

  King Bastard II is what the history books will know him as, if they do anything right at all, which I have no confidence in. He was known as the king who had killed his own father, though King Bastard I was no great loss to the rest of us. He was a stupid, selfish bastard, but not the unfeeling, murderous bastard his son became. If he had been a little smarter, he might have survived, but he thought his son was too cowed, the weakest of the four his three wives had given birth to, the smallest, the ugliest, the one who spoke the least and the worst, with a terrible stutter, and was best known for his farting.

  That was in the days he was a prince.

  The Idiot Prince.

  Or sometimes, The Impotent Prince.

  He never had a woman, nor a man, either. And the court was so well-known for its indiscretion that he could never have hid an encounter with anyone, from the cook’s staff to the duke’s catamites, to the horses in the stable, if that had been his inclination. It was not.

  I hated him from the first time I met him. I knew his face from her description, the watery blue eyes, the flushed pink cheeks, the weak chin, the golden-red hair, the slinking way of walking that he must have aped from her.

  I was fifteen. He was a year younger.

  I was the son of the first queen’s younger sister, the Lady Delia. The Lady Deluded, I have named her in my own history. She loved the King since her sister first laid eyes on him, and found many reasons to visit the palace in subsequent years. I think the king was happy to keep her as she was, and my mother, for her part, always believed that one day, the king would be hers.

  “You. What is your name?”

  I know now that he pretended only not to know it.

  “Noel, my lord Prince.”

  “My lord Idiot Prince,” he said, so softly that for a moment, I thought that it was my own mind supplying the epithet.

  My head came up and I stared at him, but his eyes seemed as watery as ever.

  “I don’t like you,” he added.

  “I am sorry, my lord Prince. If I have offended you, tell me how I may repair the misdeed.” The words were sour in my mouth, but I had rehearsed them before, as my mother had insisted all these years. Now they came out, just as she had predicted they would, for they were waiting for me, in my mind, and easier to say than anything I would have had to think of in the moment.

  “You do not beat your man,” said the prince. “You keep your mouth shut when you should. And you can drink more than any grown man I have heard and keep your feet.”

  “You wish me to beat my man?” I asked. I could not see how the prince cared one way or another on this point, unless he was jealous that I was known as a kinder master than he was. But why would he care for that? Any servant who had half a mind in his skull must prefer to be the prince’s man, bruises and all, over being the man of Noel, the son of a mere lord known for nothing and liked for even less.

  “If I say yes, will you beat him?” asked the prince.

  “Never,” I said. And who was the idiot now?

  “Just as well, since I doubt I can command you to drink less well or to speak more often. I think you are a man of few words, are you not? Your blood is from the north, where they can hardly put syllables together, let alone full sentences.”

  I bristled.

  “And you do not even get angry. Are you too much a coward to let your control slip when it comes to your prince?” he asked. He moved his head next to mine. I still remember the feel of his cool lips on my skin.

  I twitched, but I held my place.

  “I could call you out and make sure that you slip in the mud just as my sword swings into your side and spills out all your precious parts. I could call you a traitor and you would never see the sun again, for you would never see a trial if I refused to attend it.”

  I blinked at him, my hand twisting at my side. I had learned well from my mother how to withstand insults.

  “I could say you had touched a woman that was mine and you would be hung from the gibbet there.” He pointed, and paused.

  I was tempted, but did not say anything about how unlikely it would be for anyone to believe I had touched his woman.

  “I could say you had touched me and you would be c
ut into pieces for the dogs to eat,” he went on. “Or I could simply send you on a mission to the Icelands from which you would never return.”

  His teeth were yellow and crooked. I kept that thought in my mind as I held my ground and looked neither to the one side or the other.

  I hated him, but I did not let him win.

  I wonder at times if my mother would be proud of me for that. The gods know she was never proud of me for anything else I did, and she tried to kill me twice herself that I know of, once by strangling when I was but three years old, which I might have forgotten if she had ever let me, and once again by poison when I was twelve, the night the king married again, after her sister died, and she was not the one to stand at his side.

  “I will remember you,” said the Idiot Prince. He walked away from me, and I tried to gather breath. I fell to my knees, then crawled to the nearest midden, so that I could piss out my fear into it.

  I was perhaps the only person who was surprised when, two months later, King Bastard I was found knifed to the heart in his own bedchambers. There was no one who said he did not deserve it, and no one who mourned him, least of all the man who had found him dead that morning, whose face was a map of scars the king had given him with that same knife that killed him.

  Justice.

  The new King Bastard’s unique art.

  There were other murders that year. Some of the court swaggered about, proud of themselves for living, mocking the stupidity of those found dead. It was not long before this talk stopped, as more of the most dangerous men in the court died, by the hands of a new king who was only just fifteen years old.

  There were whispers about who was aiding him. Which of the knights. Which of the guard. Which of the nobility.

  How many assassins had he hired to do his work for him?

  But I knew. He did it himself. Just as he had come to see me for himself, had pressed his own lips to my skin, he would want to put his hands on the bodies of his own dead. To make them his.

  I waited to die.

  There were nights that I could not sleep. I did not even put on bedclothes, or put a blanket over my head. I slept with a sword at my side, trembling because I did not even know if I would dare use it if King Bastard came for me.

  Then my father was killed.

  Oh, there were no wounds on him, but I knew it when I saw his body, and the half-drunken glass of wine at his side. The man could never drink a half glass of wine in his life. I had hated him nearly as much as my mother, until he was dead.

  Then I put a finger to the wine and pressed it to my lips and I remembered what the prince had said to me about the different ways he could kill me, and I longed for it to be over with, so that I could be at peace.

  I went to his rooms, and he would not see me.

  I waited until he held open court and stood to be acknowledged. He would not meet my eyes.

  I sent him a message.

  He returned it with a dead rat, its head nearly cut off.

  A pleasant gift to find waiting for one in bed.

  I watched the others fawn over him, and I swore to myself I would never do the same. I would not pretend that I liked him, if that was what he demanded. He could kill me. He could call me traitor and blacken my name. But he would not have my pride.

  And so it was with us, him at one end of the court and me at the other. Two boys who thought they were men.

  I gathered around me those who hated the king as much as I did. But I did not yet speak treason.

  I hated him still, but he was not the king his father was. I wondered if there might be a way for me to learn respect for him. He had power, and he kept it to himself. There were no favors offered by him. And those who died at his hand were those who truly stood in his way.

  Then came the news that he had murdered his man, the man he had inherited from his father, the one who had always been beaten, and who had found the king dead those years ago. A man who had never shown anything but loyalty and even some bit of warmth to the Idiot Prince, in the days before he was King Bastard.

  I saw the body with my own eyes. I saw the way the head was smashed so that it was hardly recognizable. I saw the hundreds of cuts across the abdomen, and the broken fingers that had gnarled his hands. He had not only been murdered. He had been tortured.

  And for what? For the pleasure of King Bastard who could bear no kindness, who knew only cruelty and would hate any one of us for any reason that he wished, and kill us.

  It was then that I began the rebellion. We rose up against him, in secret. The Earl of Riverend, whose daughter had been sent away from the king’s bedchamber in disgrace when she did not please him, and the priests who were forbidden to burn heretics at the stake, the men who had once served in his army, and were let go.

  He had been right about one thing. I was a man who did not speak when I should not. I could drink until another man would tell me his secrets. I had information that I could hold above the heads of others. I was the kind of man whom others sang with, and clasped hands with.

  But the night before, I went out to the town outside the palace walls to meet with a man who never appeared. I suspected him either dead or turned on us. It meant that the rebellion could not wait. I had to make the signals now, or it would all be for naught, and we would all of us be dead before morning.

  I strode back to the palace, planning to do that very thing.

  I passed by an alehouse well known for its cheap drink and the spies that gathered there.

  And I saw him.

  King Bastard’s man.

  His face was dirty and his hair overgrown. He wore magic over his eyes to make him seem a blind man.

  I only know that he was there, in front of me, and there was no denying I had seen him living, not mangled at King Bastard’s hands.

  There had been another killed in his place, the head disfigured so that no one would know the truth—that King Bastard had sent his man away.

  Why?

  To be a spy?

  And what of the body, the other signs of torture?

  I had stopped short at the sight of the man, and it was a mistake. Of all the mistakes I have ever made, I think that must be the one I regret the most, for he saw me in return. Those white, falsely blind eyes focused on me and his hunched stance straightened. He put a hand to his hair and pulled it away from his face and stared at me.

  “He hates you,” said King Bastard’s man.

  “I know that. I hate him, as well.” That was the purpose of this rebellion, was it not?

  But his man shook his head. “He hates you. He must hate you because if he were to love you, you would be a target of others. They would find you and hurt you. They might even see one who looked a little like you, and if they were drunk, they would kill him anyway, just because they could.”

  I could not speak. My heart beat like waves in my ears.

  “He hates you, too, because you can be the man that he cannot be. He must be the bastard. But you can be yourself.”

  “No,” I got out.

  “He sent me away to protect me. I sent myself here, to protect him. And what of you? He has kept you safe all this time, and what have you done in return? Turned your back on him.”

  “Safe? If I am safe if it through no effort of his.”

  “Oh no? What of the rat he sent you? Did he not show the murderers in the palace that you were harmless to them?”

  “But the murders—it was his hand behind them all.”

  The Bastard’s man tilted his head to one side. And laughed, harshly. “Of course he must take credit for them all. What kind of king would he be if he admitted that there were murders being done which were not at his command?”

  “And his father? That was not him at work, from the very beginning?” I asked.

  The Bastard’s man stared at me. “You do not beat your man,” he said. “But think of what it must be like, day after day, to know that when you wake in the morning, there will only be more pain. That when you dreame
d at night, it would be of pain. That the taste of every food that you ate would be tinged with blood and fear.”

  I thought of my mother and the man I had inherited from her, who had once worn bruises every day of his life that we lived with her. The anger I saw in him, even now, at sudden, unforeseen moments.

  “You,” I said.

  “It could not be me,” said the Bastard’s man mockingly. “A king’s man cannot be a threat to him. The order of the world would be in tumult. No justice would be great enough for that. No death terrible enough.”

  “So he let it be believed he had done it. Killed his own father.”

  The Bastard’s man spat. “Better for him. Better for us all.”

  The world reeled around me. Day was night and night was day, and this man before me was to blame. And not to blame.

  “So, what will you do tonight?” he asked me.

  I turned away, and my back itched as I waited for the knife that he had hidden underneath his filthy beggar’s cloak.

  But he did not kill me. King Bastard had saved me from him, as well, it seemed.

  I sat all that night awake, alone, imagining the world without him in it. Who would take his place?

  Me?

  The one thing that I did not doubt, that I had never doubted, was this: to be king was the worst fate that could befall any man.

  I lived through that night.

  And so did he.

  He hates me still. He makes it very clear.

  And I hate him, just the same.

  But there are times when I go to speak to the drunken beggar in the town, and there are things that I do for King Bastard that neither of us would ever admit to. It is just as well that I am not a man to talk too much, and just as well that I have no one I love who can be threatened.

  King Bastard and I are alike in that, as in many other things.