The Kingdom of Little Wounds (52 page)

So this be what decide me.

I lean in to see his wound. The bandage blood be mostly black by now, except that one red spot in center. I poke with my glove on and the wound do not give way so much, just flakes of blood upon the leather tip. He looks like to heal. But to be sure, I take a fleam from the physicians’ kit and cut away the cloth where it is dry, and then I yank it off at one rip and see the wound exposed.

Nicolas wake up then, to yell in pain. Fortunate that I have clap my hand over his mouth, and that in the hand I hold the night dress which he did order Ava to poison for the Queen. I had precautioned to hide it wrapped with in my underskirt.

He take a deep breath in of all that powder in the cloth — and then he cannot shout, for he cannot release the breath.

He look at me, I look him back. Some small blood flow from that place in his thigh, but more goes to his face, where it turn to purple and I feel his tongue come out his mouth like a dog’s that will lap water, but there be no water to lap, there be only my hand. And he could not swallow any way.

Mandrake, I guess. The most cruel of all the poisons.

When this have happened, I take the night dress away and fold it many times to make a strip, and this I wind about the hole in his thigh and over his hips, so if his poison do not go in the one end, it will in the other, and perhaps two streams shall meet in the middle and kill him dead. I fasten this neat with pins left from his ruff, and I remove my gloves and watch while his face go more purple and then black.

Yes, I ’ve decide. He had me once, and he may have my Lump (I am not certain, only tired), but he shall not take both my girls. My princesses.

For pleasure I slap his dying face with Elinor gloves and let them fall, like a noble man who challenge an other to a duel. This makes his mouth rictus in to smile again, and for the last second of his life, he and I are laughing together.

I
T is a night of mysteries. Every mind at court, at least each mind that matters, is impenetrable, even to a chronicler expert at peering around corners and listening through walls.

The greatest mystery lies in the chamber of Count Nicolas Bullen, regent and bridegroom, who sags abed with an injury and no one to tend him but a royal baby nurse. The two of them are smiling. She laughs her throaty version of laughter.

She does not stop when she sees a new actor enter; and Count Nicolas cannot bother himself to turn his head, merely continues to smirk at the rafters with his eyes slitted draftily. The two of them are locked in some occult intimacy.

An ordinary man would not be blamed for abandoning such a scene; discretion and courtesy would be expected of him. But a man who is charged with recording major court events, including and especially its secrets: this man must steel himself to stay.

He plants his feet; he draws himself tall. He arranges his various papers, wax tablet, and stylus so as to be ready for chronicling when a noteworthy fact is revealed.

But the children’s nurse merely stares at him with lips gone sullen, and the Count continues to gaze heavenward, as if History is not present.

Thus the scholar might be forgiven if he does more than merely observe but rather asks a question directly, to clarify what he’s heard elsewhere. Forgiven by History, that is, if not by the person to whom he addresses his question.

He says, “What in the name of devils and saints are you doing now?”

Her response is predictable: she presses her lips together, then licks the top one with the two tips of her forked tongue. History knows by long practice that this can be a sign of either confusion or rebellion.

“Is he —” The historian gestures. “Is that man
still
your lover?”

In answer, she bursts with a laugh, a different sort of laugh, that sprays drops from her nose and lips over Count Nicolas. He does not react. She gives a few further heaves of violent mirth, then clutches her belly with an expression of pain wrinkling her face like a walnut.

History must not be thought to have a heart. Impartial, cold, detached — this is what History must be, though where this woman is concerned, he has often slipped. When a woman holds her stomach in that particular way, the reflex has only one meaning, and the meaning sends a jolt through the historian’s entrails.

Check Midi Sorte’s belly, and there’s your answer!
So Ava Bingen had warned him.

Any reader of this chronicle will remember the slave’s quiet first appearance as attendant to Countess Elinor, then the part she played in the magnificent masque that marked the end of the Seven Years’ War. Glittering with white sugar, a candied purple plum between her lips, the sweetest possible kiss offered to the lord who stood in for Justice and who now lies here weak from blood loss but smiling up at her with pride. And this chronicle contains the account of terrible rumors about her liaison with this very lord in recent months, and how she yielded to him when she was loved by another. That other who taught her to write so she could express her feelings for him as he did for her.

That other stands before her now, moved by her pain and gaping at its cause — and unsure, after some arithmetic, whether it be his responsibility or that of the man in the bed.

He asks, “Is it — ?”

She catches herself on the bedpost, braces herself on the high mattress. Her face has broken into sweat. Still her bed-bound lover does not speak, either to defend or dismiss her. In this way, History knows that the occupant of the ceremonial
letto matrimoniale
has died.

The historian should make a note of the time and the man’s expression, but he does not. He goes around the bed to take Midi’s elbow and guides her to the carved-arm chair in the corner. He helps ease her down and puts the tablet and stylus in her hands.

“Now,” he says, and he is proud of voicing it without anger or judgment, “what would you like me to know? What
should
I know? For example . . . a small example . . . How should I describe this man’s death?”

She takes a few more gulps of air, then picks up the stylus and writes on wax,
Misadventure.

That is all.

Sitting, the curve of her stomach is more pronounced than before, when the belly was hidden in her skirts. She could have been harboring this atom a long time, in which case it is (most likely) the product of History’s seed, not the Count’s.

But that is not what he asks her next. He asks, “What did he promise you?”

In answer, she gives one of her maddening shrugs and removes hands from her belly long enough to hold them up empty.

True, the Count is a master of not-promising.

“Did he say anything to you just now?”

She shakes her head.

“Did you kill him?”

Finally, she looks at Arthur Grammaticus. It is a look for which poets would have a thousand comparisons — her eyes like black stones, the twin tips of a murderous lance, the mushroom caps beneath which wicked fairies prepare their poisons. None of these would be adequate expression for the anger she bores into him. Her feeling makes him both recoil and long to kiss her.

“A few moments ago,” he says instead, “Ava Bingen instructed me to do two things. I should look to your belly and I should ask for your writings, as you have been keeping a history of your life at court and most particularly with the Queen. I suppose” — he cannot help himself, he stares at that rounded belly and must keep speaking —“the secret of your baby is revealed there too?”

He lets his heart run ahead of History, which is a grievous offense when he should be doing his best to secure those papers. And, yes, to determine what has happened to Nicolas Bullen, the companion of his youth who managed such a rise to prominence.

In answer, his dark love reaches into the bosom of her tattered finery and draws forth a handful of scraps. She shoves them at him, but so carelessly as to let them fall about their ankles. The ink is smeary with her sweat, tears, rain, something — but he sees a word here and there:
story, lick, turquoise, Queen, Gorma.

Of a sudden, he sees the danger. Not just in these words that he is scrambling to collect before others see them — but in the entire situation: Midi, the dead Count, and himself alone in this chamber. The words have made him know it. He might stuff the pages inside his own shirt and hope to prevent other eyes from finding them, but how is he to extricate his darling, who is perhaps to bear his child, from a situation that will surely warrant her death?

And with that question, he knows something else: He does not mind so much whether she carries his child or the Count’s, only that she survives somehow. Some truths do not matter.

“You can’t stay here,” he tells her, still stuffing the crackly sheets into his own clothes. She rolls her eyes at him. “
Here,
I mean, in the palace — in Skyggehavn. You must go away. Whether you’ve killed Count Nicolas or not.”

He is fairly certain that she has killed him. Whatever may have happened earlier tonight, somehow when Nicolas was left alone to die, she made sure that die he did.

“You will be blamed, not Princess Beatte,” says the historian. “Everyone knows Queen Isabel ordered you to tend to the Count. The physicians left you with him. My dear, you have to flee. Take a ship far away — the guards will let you pass tonight, at least until his death is known.” He stops and watches that forked tongue press against her upper lip again. Beloved tongue. He reaches into his pocket and finds only two silver shield coins and some brass, no more. His little bit of wealth lies pathetic on his palm. Not enough for a single passage, let alone two, and no time to return to his chambers in the far quarters. And Midi Sorte wears no jewelry, even in her costume as the Countess. She has no way to bargain for her safety.

Poor doomed love. He should have married her, never mind public or royal opinion.

But she wastes no time gazing at him with a sense of all they’ve lost together. It is as if in shedding the written words, she has found a new strength in herself. She walks briskly to the bed, where she picks up a little knife the physicians left behind. He can only stare, numb, counting his few coins, as she pulls the sheet away from Nicolas’s injury and grabs that part of him that has caused so much trouble in the court’s desires. Shoving a bandage aside with her knife, she stretches his manhood to its fullest length. The flesh is still elastic, but beginning to congeal in knots beneath the skin.

With two hard strokes, she cuts it off his person.

The whole affair takes less than a minute. It leaves very little blood. But History feels the coins slip through his fingers and tinkle against the floor.

Midi stuffs that part of the Count into her bosom and wipes her hands upon the sheet. She does not bother to cover Count Nicolas again — let the whole world behold his new wound, she seems to say, it means nothing to her — and is about to open his door and leave when the historian comes to his senses and stumbles over to catch her arm.

“You cannot go alone. Let me at least show you some secret ways of leaving that I’ve learned over the years.”

She pulls herself up into the posture of Elinor Parfis, hoists her bosoms in the manner of that lady, and nods her head with its hair flying wild about her. As if permission is her favor to grant. She no longer seems unwell; she seems, truly, like a countess.

With every moment, his terror of her grows. He dares not ask why she’s chosen to steal Nicolas’s manhood, though there is a part of him that’s pleased to see her take revenge this way.

In this fear, he has discovered a greater love than ever imagined. It cannot be compared to anything; it is only itself.

S
HE has been washed and returned to bed, her old bed — tucked in next to Gorma, in fact, who shrinks away from her in fear, although none of their attendants have made mention of any of the night’s events. Beatte knows there is a fierceness about herself now, the air of a woman — a woman! — who will do anything to please herself, a warrior who loves blood for blood’s sake.

She does not know what happened to her dagger. She wishes for it. That beautiful jeweled dagger in which the bottom of every ruby told a story, tiny figures acting out complicated tales of violence depending on how the hilt was turned. A thousand stories for Beatte to enact herself, once she gets her dagger back. She will demand it in the morning. She will have herself declared Queen in full.

For now, the little girls have been dosed with valerian, and Beatte’s lids are heavy. She feels the nurses standing ’round, some ladies too, watching anxiously till she and little Gorma tumble into dreams and cause the grown women no more worry.

And she feels the presence of the wraith children, her sisters and brother, who have come to watch over her. When she sleeps, they will pull her down into their savage world.

But Beatte will not sleep. She refuses! Until she notices that the candlelight shining through her lids gives the same impression of story unfurling that she found in the dagger that Nicolas gave her. She can watch herself stabbing him over and over, watch the ruby blood spurt from the slit in his thigh. She can stab at the wraith siblings too, stab away everything, anything, even the parts of herself she doesn’t like.

So instead of fighting sleep, Beatte presses her eyelids down as hard as she can, to make them bloom with red. She thinks very hard to remember every detail. She will send it all as story-pictures into Gorma’s dreams. She will terrify Gorma and the wraith sisters with what she, Beatte, has done.