The Constant Queen (2 page)

‘Do you wish you’d gone to Norway, Mama?’ Elizaveta had asked her once.

‘Of course not, Lily,’ Ingrid had laughed. ‘I am happy here in Kiev – who would not be? It is a glorious city with a glorious future and there is nowhere in Norway
that’s as grand or as forward-thinking as Kiev.’

She’d sounded so certain and yet Elizaveta had been convinced that she’d heard a tiny, wistful hesitation in her mother’s voice and she remained intrigued by the northern land
that had so nearly been Ingrid’s destiny. Now, Elizaveta sank onto the window seat on the courtyard side of the great stone hall that housed the elaborate women’s chamber and bowers and
tried not to look too eager as her mother settled five-year-old Anne and two-year-old Agatha into their carved cot beds and composed herself for a tale.

‘There was once a great king,’ Ingrid started with a smile, ‘called Harald Fairhair because he had the lightest, brightest hair anyone had ever seen and everyone said that it
shone like Christ’s very halo.’

‘Except,’ Elizaveta interrupted, ‘that they were pagan then, so how would they know to say that?’

Ingrid eyed her sharply.

‘You are right, Lily,’ she conceded, ‘but many have said it since.’

‘Many who did not actually
see
him?’

‘Maybe so.’

Ingrid looked briefly to Hedda, the plump nursemaid who was suckling her baby in the corner. Little Greta would be six months old when Ingrid birthed and Hedda would switch from feeding her own
child to feeding the new prince or princess, as she had fed all of the others. Vladimir called her the ‘royal cow’, though only when she was out of hearing for her slap was as sharp as
her milk was plentiful. Elizaveta saw Hedda smile at her mother as she drew in a patient breath.

‘Very well,’ she said slowly, ‘everyone said it shone like Thor’s hammer.’

‘Was that not iron though?’

‘Elizaveta!’

Elizaveta huffed and looked away; fair hair of any sort was a sore subject for her. Ingrid, even now she was past her thirtieth year, had hair as blonde as overripe corn. Her husband, Grand
Prince Yaroslav, liked her to wear it loose at feasts and would wrap it around his fingers, stroking it as if it were spun gold. He called Ingrid his ‘sunshine’ and frequently invited
foreign ambassadors to match his metaphor with others of their own making. All too often Elizaveta had watched them fighting each other with words until even Ingrid was embarrassed by the rain of
praise.

Two of Elizaveta’s sisters, Anastasia and Anne, had both inherited their mother’s bright locks and nine-year-old Anastasia in particular spent hours brushing and styling hers until
Elizaveta longed to hack it all off with her eating knife. Once, when she was younger, she’d dared to cut a few strands whilst Anastasia slept. She’d only wanted to try it against her
own face in the copper looking-glass but there’d been such a fuss that she’d had to throw her precious treasure off the great city walls into the dark pines below. She’d mourned
the loss for weeks and resented Anastasia even more.

Elizaveta had not so much as an ounce of gold in her own hair. It did not shine brightly around her face but lay black as a midnight shadow against her olive skin. Her father called her his
‘beautiful little Slav’ and said she was truly his own Rus baby, but Elizaveta yearned for Norse gold and wore her dark locks covered as often as she possibly could. And it wasn’t
just her hair that marked her out from her smug little sisters. She was short – Anastasia was already grown past her – and as slight as a peasant child but however many courses she
devoured at the table, she never seemed to fill out into anything approaching her mother’s soft voluptuousness. She was all angles, with elbows as sharp as spearheads and knees as bumpy as
forest fungi and no sign whatsoever of breasts or hips.

‘Maybe you’re a boy, Lily,’ her eldest brother, Vladimir, would sometimes tease her.

‘I’m a better boy than you, Vlad,’ she’d throw back and then strive to beat him at whatever game they were playing, but the words would scamper around her head when the
oil lamps were all blown out and she was alone in her bed.

‘I’m not a boy,’ she’d mutter fiercely into her goose-down pillow but always her own voice would seem to creep back out of it: ‘Maybe, but you’re not much of
a girl either.’

‘So this King Harald, late in life, had a son,’ Ingrid was continuing, ‘a son called Hakon and, fearing his older brothers would keep him from power, Harald sent him into
England to be fostered by his friend, King Athelstan. And there he became a good Christian.’

She looked pointedly at her eldest daughter but now two-year-old Agatha was bouncing up and down in her bed, calling: ‘England, England.’

Elizaveta smiled at her littlest sister, cursed, like her, with dark hair and with a tangle of curls besides. Agatha had learned the name of the land of the Anglo-Saxons just last week and was
fascinated by it. There was a lost English prince called Edward at Yaroslav’s court – one of myriad exiles their father liked to harbour – and much to everyone’s amusement
Agatha had taken to following the poor young man around like a pet dog. Elizaveta didn’t laugh though. England, along with Norway and Denmark, was ruled by the great King Cnut, Emperor of the
North, and by all accounts it was a rich jewel of a country; Agatha was right to be fascinated.

‘Why keep these exiles, Father?’ Elizaveta had asked Yaroslav once. ‘Why house all these lost princes?’

‘Why?’ Yaroslav had laughed fondly. ‘Only a fool would not. These “lost princes” are only lost for now, Lily. If they find themselves again – if they find
their thrones and their kingdoms – then think what they will be worth. How grateful will they be to the one man who did not abandon them in their need? And what does gratitude
mean?’

She’d considered.

‘Money, Father?’

Again the laugh – wide, indulgent.

‘Eventually, yes, but first, daughter, alliances and alliances mean protection, trade, marriages. Your dear mother may have given me sons to rule after me, but she has also given me
daughters and with daughters, Lily, I can weave my influence across the known world. As you know, though, if you have paid any attention to your needlework lessons at all, any fabric starts with
small stitches.’

‘Your exiles are stitches, Father?’

‘Exactly! Small ones, yes, and ones that may be dropped without trace, but possibly ones that take hold and sew us into the very fabric of the vast kingdoms beyond the lands of the
Rus.’

Elizaveta could almost hear her father’s ambitious words now, echoing around the soft bedchamber, and she turned to look longingly out of the window to his grand courtyard below. The
fountain at the centre of the princely kremlin splashed carelessly against its mosaic surround. Guarding the four paths outwards, the great bronze horses her grandfather had brought back from war
reared proudly up, their gilded backs catching the last rays of the sun and shimmering rosy pink. To her right, the Church of the Holy Mother was glowing too as the light of a hundred candles
flickered through the vast coloured windows, defying the coming dusk.

The sound of choral plainsong drifted out of the open church doors but Elizaveta knew that soon Vespers would be over and Yaroslav’s
druzhina
– his courtly household –
would flood out and across to the hall, opposite her own bower, to dine. Mother had said that if she was good she could join the courtiers and she had on her best gown in anticipation. She had
persuaded the seamstress to pad the dress out a little to hide her spiky bones and a glance in the looking-glass earlier had almost pleased her.

The rich red wool suited her stupid olive skin and the pearls around the neck of her pleated linen undergown brought some light to her face. Not as much as blonde hair might have done but enough
to make her smile just a tiny bit at herself. Now her feet itched to tread the stairs out of the stuffy bower and she reached down to run a finger inside her calfskin boots, dyed red to match her
dress, as if she might physically scratch the urge away.

‘Patience, Elizaveta,’ Ingrid said softly, interrupting her tale to smile at her eldest daughter.

‘Elizaveta has no patience,’ Anastasia said primly. ‘She cannot sit still for a minute.’

Elizaveta glared at her pious sister. Just because Anastasia liked endlessly stabbing ivory needles into scraps of fancy fabric, she thought she was so dignified. She only did it because she
wanted prettier dresses than Elizaveta but if that was the cost, she was welcome to them. Anne was the same, ever working on her letters though she had not yet turned six, trying out fancy inks and
scripts as if there was a whole world at her desk and not out of the window, waiting to be explored. Elizaveta couldn’t understand it at all. She could only truly sit still when playing her
treasured viol, for then, at least, her spirit was dancing free, riding the rise and fall of the notes like a bird in the sky, or an acrobat at a feast, or a boy on the rapids. Elizaveta bit back
sudden angry tears.

‘Tell us about the trolls, Mama,’ she suggested sharply. ‘The trolls who live in looking-glasses and leap out to bite the noses off little girls who stare at themselves for too
long.’

Agatha giggled but Anastasia was up in an instant and flying across the bower, nails out ready to scratch her sister’s words from her throat. Elizaveta, however, despite her slightness,
was strong and held her easily at arm’s length as she kicked and spat.

‘Girls!’ Ingrid pulled them furiously apart. ‘There is no way you two are coming to dinner behaving like this.’

Elizaveta yanked away.

‘She attacked me,’ she protested.

‘Only ’cos she was horrid about me,’ Anastasia cried, flouncing back to her own corner by the mirror.

‘What makes you think I was talking about
you
, Stasia?’ Elizaveta threw after her.

‘Girls!’ Ingrid snapped again. ‘Honestly, how will I ever make marriageable women of you like this?’

Elizaveta sniffed and turned back to the window. More talk of marriages – ‘alliances’. Whatever her father’s grand plans, she couldn’t see herself as a bride; the
poor groom wouldn’t get much for his troubles. Anastasia, however, looked mortified.

‘I’m sorry, Mama. She’s just so mean.’

‘A princess should be able to ride over taunts, Stasia.’

‘You are right, Mama, and I will. Shall I have a great husband, do you think?’

Elizaveta rolled her eyes to the darkening skies beyond the bower; her future husband was far and away Anastasia’s favourite topic of conversation.

‘I’m sure your father will find you a worthy prince,’ Ingrid assured her.

‘Like yours did for you?’

‘Yes, Stasia. I was very lucky.’

‘But you should have married a king, should you not?’

‘King Olaf of Norway,’ Elizaveta agreed – she liked to hear her mother talk of this. ‘But when her father sent her to Kiev, her sister married Olaf instead.’

‘Astrid,’ Ingrid agreed, ‘yes, God bless her, for with Olaf dead she is back in Sweden with our brother.’

Elizaveta leaned in – this was better than talk of marriage. King Olaf of Norway had been in Kiev last year and his young son, Magnus – Astrid’s stepson – was here still
as another of her father’s pet exiles. Many of Yaroslav’s troops had returned to Norway with Olaf, only to be bitterly defeated at the Battle of Stikelstad. A few had limped home,
muttering darkly of an evil enemy, but most were either dead on the field or had given themselves to Cnut’s service. Elizaveta had tried to find out more but the men had been unusually
reticent.

‘Surely,’ Anastasia said, pretty head on one side, ‘Aunt Astrid will marry again?’

‘Perhaps,’ Ingrid agreed, waving away Elizaveta’s groan of protest.

‘She must. If she has been a queen once she must surely long to be a queen again? I know I would. Oh, I would so love to marry a king and have sons by him so they will be kings
too.’

‘That would be a fine thing,’ Ingrid agreed.

Elizaveta groaned again, louder this time.

‘What?’ Anastasia demanded.

‘Is that all you want for yourself – to produce kings?’

‘It seems a worthy aim. Why, what do you want, Lily, that’s
so
much better?’

Elizaveta stared at her sister, her father’s talk of the ‘fabric of vast kingdoms’ jittering in her head; Anastasia had such a narrow view.

‘I’d like to be a queen,’ she asserted, ‘a queen in my own right who can help my husband rule and shape a nation as Mother is helping to shape the Rus.’

Anastasia screwed up her face in disgust but Ingrid stepped across to Elizaveta and put an arm around her shoulders.

‘Thank you for your high opinion of me, Lily, though I’m not sure I deserve it. I am ever in my childbed.’

She patted her belly, newly swelling with her tenth child.

‘You are doing your duty,’ Anastasia told her. ‘Father is very proud of all his heirs.’

‘Indeed,’ Ingrid agreed lightly, ‘though sometimes I wish he could sire a few of you on concubines as his father did.’

‘Mother!’ Anastasia’s shock made Elizaveta long to laugh but down below she could see the Metropolitan Bishop of Kiev emerging from the church in his rich ceremonial robes, the
choir in his wake, and she knew the dinner hour was nearly upon them. She couldn’t afford any more antagonism.

‘You are a good Christian, Mama,’ she said, as meekly as she could.

Ingrid looked at her and, to Elizaveta’s great surprise, gave her a quick wink before turning for the door with a mild, ‘As are we all, daughter. Now, shall we to dinner?’

The smaller girls squeaked in protest as Hedda rose from the corner.

‘You haven’t told us about the trolls,’ Anne begged. ‘Do they really live in the looking-glass?’

Anastasia, who had rushed to check her reflection, flinched and Ingrid glared pointedly at Elizaveta.

‘No, Anne,’ Elizaveta forced herself to say, ‘they live deep in forests.’

‘
Our
forests?’ Anne looked fearfully to the window. Kiev stood on a high, clear plateau but the slopes below its thick walls were crowded with pines.