The Kingdom of Little Wounds (2 page)

I have cause for fear now. Pink flesh is about to burst through Queen Isabel’s gown, and that would be a wicked outcome, indeed: her body must be protected like a relic shut in a box. She seems eager to dwell in a coffin of misery, though, as she picks at the silver embroidery and costly white pearls with which the gown is adorned. Thus far she hasn’t let anyone approach — not even Countess Elinor, who is her chief lady and confidante, and who makes another attempt now.

“Your Highness.” Countess Elinor takes a cautious step forward. She is unusually pale for a noblewoman but wears silver brocade to complement the Queen’s costume, even though it washes out what little color she might have. “
Most beloved
Highness, it may be true that we’ve lived through an age of misfortune, but this is a happy evening. Perhaps a happy end to our trials. Think of your daughter —”

“Sophia!” Isabel sobs, and the turquoise velvet gives another inch. “Twelve years old and
married
! To a
Swede
!”

“She might be Queen of Sweden one day, if Duke Magnus’s older brothers die without issue.” Countess Elinor makes her voice soft as she takes another step. “You raised her well.” Another subtle step. “The entire kingdom sings praises of you both.”

Queen Isabel wards her off with a clawing hand that flashes sapphire from a ring. She is behaving like a child. Hardship has done that to her.

The last eleven years have been cruel to the royal city of Skyggehavn — cruel to the whole kingdom, in fact. First came the Great Sickness of 1561, which took my mother and four brothers, then seven years of war throughout Scandinavia, and when that ended, a mysterious illness that invaded the royal nursery and holds all the children, including Princess Sophia, in its canker-some grasp:
Morbus Lunediernus,
sent by God to scourge the royal innocents and test the nation.

Now Countess Elinor has an idea. At a discreet signal, her maid and one of the in-waitings flap their skirts and shoo Queen toward Countess like a chicken.

“Your Highness.” Triumphant, Countess Elinor finally manages to catch Queen Isabel’s hands in her own fishy white ones. Her maid dabs at the Queen’s cheeks as Elinor says, “Think of grandchildren. Isn’t that happiness?”

Isabel’s dripping dark eyes wander to an Annunciation that hangs over the desk where she writes her letters and does her accounts. In the picture, the Virgin sits with a book open on her lap, head tilted to let the golden banner of an angel’s words tickle her right ear: she is going to birth a Savior.

“Oh.” Queen Isabel sighs like a sail that the wind has forgotten. “Happiness.”

Everyone — Queen, Countess, chronicler, assorted attendants and maids, dwarfs who are here to amuse — all are silent for a moment. We wonder when happiness, real happiness, will come to us. We breathe in and taste that tempting sweetness on the air. Maybe I, more than any, fill my lungs to the bottom.

My movement draws Countess Elinor’s attention. She points a long white finger at me. “You. Fix this.”

At first I’m astonished — I am the youngest and humblest of the needlewomen, responsible for linen undergarments and never chosen for the silks and velvets — so I’m unable to budge.

“Get to it,” Countess Elinor snaps, as if this is my usual duty. But she would be the first with a slap if anyone approached the Queen without being ordered to do so.

Gudrun Tovasdatter, the ruddy Mistress of the Needle, hands me a basket of velvet scraps. She whispers, “Be careful, Ava. Pay attention. This could make your future.”

Excited, nervous, clutching that basket as if it holds my dead mother’s soul, I fall to my knees and make my way forward like a penitent in church. It has been thrilling enough before this day to think that my needle has stitched seams that would lie over royal skin; now it is to be my own fingers that feel for the Queen’s flesh, just a few thin layers of fabric between me and her belly. I am to touch royalty. I have been chosen.

I crawl into the soft blue skirts until I’m close enough to smell Isabel’s sweat — meaty overlaid with musk, some sort of whale-oil perfume — and feel the heat coming off her body. Suddenly she becomes real to me, an actual person rather than an idea. I am as afraid to touch her as I am eager to do it. I fumble in the pocket pouch at my waist for a pair of spectacles made by my father.

“Hurtigt, hurtigt.”
The Countess pushes at my shoulder. She has the high-sprung breasts of a virgin (indeed, she has given her crippled husband no children); they shake like milk jellies as she scolds, and in a gesture of annoyance she hoists them even higher. To the other ladies, she remarks, in the French that they use among themselves, “If this cow doesn’t move quickly, the men will see to the Princess’s
couchement
alone.”

The Queen moans at this thought, her daughter put to bed without her blessing. “The Duke,” she mourns, “is so much
hairier
than the men of this place . . .”

For speed, I abandon the search for my lenses and dig through the basket, trying to find a patch for the odd-shaped rip. I fold a piece into the shape of an eye, anchor one point to the top of the Queen’s tear, and begin. Counting out the stitches to the rhythm of my breath:
One, two, three, pause. Adjust the loose thread end. One, two, three, pause.
The ancient rhythm known to every woman.

I am like the girl in the story who stitches up a lady cut to bits by thieves, to be rewarded afterward with a purse of gold . . . a purse that more thieves will steal from her before she can spend it, but perhaps we may stop before that happens.

With my hand on the Queen’s side, I feel her breathing: in and out, slow, as if she’s trying to calm herself too, though she unravels further with each inhalation.

Suddenly Isabel frees her hand to scratch around her wig. At this, of course, the rip in her bodice grows wider. She’s stopped crying but not lamenting. “My daughter’s new husband is mad. How can she find
happiness
with him? I have heard that he once jumped from a window because —”

Countess Elinor catches the hand again and pulls it down.

“ — because he saw a mermaid in the moat below,” Queen Isabel finishes miserably. She struggles, but Countess Elinor holds her fast.

I keep stitching.

“The mermaid . . . incident . . . was nine years ago,” says the Countess. “And it is just gossip, told by Duke Magnus’s enemies.”

(Here is the full story: Magnus, Duke of Östergötland, was inspecting a castle in progress when from the fourth-level window he thought he saw a mermaid swimming in the moat. He jumped instantly from the window to the water, hoping to catch her. What he caught was a bad cold and a worse reputation; he’s been known as Mad Magnus ever since.)

Countess Elinor continues smoothly, “Everyone loves a mermaid. Think of the charming legend about the land’s first settlers . . .”

“Heathens,” Queen Isabel says. “Witches! Servants of the devil!” She sobs again.

Countess Elinor loses patience. “Bring the Queen a sweet,” she snaps, and her maid produces a sugar fig, expertly spun and painted. The Countess pops it into the Queen’s mouth, and Isabel stops weeping and begins to suck.

In the sudden hush, the ladies stand as if they’re at Mass. Only one of them murmurs a stream of flattery for the Queen, complimenting her on every silly thing, from her silvering hair to the sapphire ring that never leaves her hand. The others, including the dwarfs, mumble a litanous assent.
Our Queen is the greatest queen. The banquet she’s planned is the greatest banquet. There is no love like the love of our Queen for her children.

Underneath those voices run the whispers of the ladies’ maids, who can speak without moving their lips.

“. . . likes his fingers suckled while he’s inside,” one of them says. “I’ve seen it myself.”

Still sewing (
one, two, three, pause
), I allow myself to glance up and recognize the green of Baroness Reventlow’s made-over gown, now worn by her personal servant. So the speckly, chinless baroness (her husband blind from the war) is having an affair, and she doesn’t make her maid leave the bedroom to conduct it.

Queen Isabel crunches up the last of the fig in her teeth. I feel the vibrations in her waist.

“’Swounds,” breathes another maid. “That’s a bit of nasty.”

Absentmindedly, the Queen pulls a pearl from her gown and rolls it in her fingers. She puts it into her mouth like another confection, but when Elinor holds out her hand, Isabel spits the pearl into it. She looks ashamed, as if only just realizing what she’s done. Elinor calls for another fig and pops it into Isabel’s mouth.

Poor Queen,
I think, with a compassion that surprises me; usually I consider her the luckiest woman in the world. Poor Queen, whose beloved daughter is about to sail away to a part of Sweden called Östergötland. Poor Queen, who must always play a part scripted by others. Held in Elinor’s steel grasp, Isabel is no more free to act than the rest of us.

She slumps against my hand, and the rip widens yet again. I stop caring about neat work and stitch madly against time.

Our princesses are the loveliest princesses. Our prince is the handsomest prince . . .

“. . . handsome legs, and those white teeth,” comes another whisper — clearly not about the Crown Prince, who is as comely as a stick insect. “Hair black as a Southerner’s. But what I heard about him —”

“Gave his girl the Fire, he did,” whispers Reventlow’s maid, as the lady-in-waiting whose task it is to flatter declaims,
The most fortunate kingdom in all creation!

The whisper gets even softer, the bare stirring of a breath: “And she killed herself for the pain. Mandrake and antimony. Stole them from the physicians’ stores.”

I try to blink a blurriness away from my eyes. That horrid illness, Italian Fire, strikes nobles and prostitutes more often than their servants — there’s a famous wiggle in the court ladies’ hips, as they give a subtle scratch to its itch — but no one is immune. Half the sellers of simples and unguents outside the palace gates are touting cures for that burning white ooze and the ache in the bladder, but the cures are as bad as the symptoms and, often as not, even deadlier.

However much we crave love, love brings danger. As I’ve found out too well — though not with the Fire.

And now, the very worst happens: dim-sighted with grief for my own lost happiness, I let my needle slip. Of its own will, it plunges through layers of velvet and lawn and stiff linen, between whalebones and into royal flesh.
One, two, disaster.
A tiny bud of red appears around the slim shaft, then blooms to the size of my fingernail.

I have just wounded the Queen.

For a moment, time is frozen. I hold my breath; the voices murmur on. I think,
Maybe I imagined it, the stab. Maybe I’m imagining the stain.

Then Queen Isabel shrieks, tearing into the recitation of her praises. A piercing sound that seems forced from her very middle, as if her flesh has never been pricked before.

The women turn to look at me, all hidden as I am in the turquoise. I’m cold to the toes.

The Queen takes a step away, exposing me. She keeps her arms stiff and spread as if she’s afraid they’ll be splashed with blood.

“This seamstress,” she says, staring forward, “is a clumsy troll.”

Countess Elinor presses her lily-pale lips together. Her breasts are blue with fury. “What is your name?” she asks, one moment before she slaps my face.

So there is my power, to stab the Queen. And there is her power, nurtured by the drone bees who tend her.

T
WELVE and one-third years ago, in the twilit morning of a dark December day, Princess Sophia Lunedie slipped out between her mother’s legs and into a crown. Not her own crown but her father’s, or her future husband’s — it has never mattered whose. Invisible but no less insistent, a crown swaddled her through a childhood in which she was promised to a series of foreign princes that changed according to her father’s need for alliances. With each year the crown grew tighter, until, this spring, her woman’s courses stained its tines with blood. The rubies of a virtuous woman, more precious to her father’s kingdom than a real gem would be.

But these are the thoughts of a child,
Sophia tells herself. She will not always be a child. She has left the nursery for good and is standing in a bedroom,
her
bedroom for this week, and her husband’s. She is to sleep (if she sleeps) far from her one brother’s and five sisters’ chaste sickbeds, where they doze or moan according to their dispositions, dreaming doses of antimony and ground gold, prayers to thank God for the affliction that tests their souls and refines them in holy fire as He refined His son on the holy Cross. Dear, sweet siblings, all still children who listen to nurses’ stories and imagine themselves merely enchanted by the curse of some fairy jealous of their mother’s beauty.

Maman is
not
beautiful, and her teeth are gray. She is fat and split her dress while dancing with a lord; it has been mended clumsily and is tearing further. But in this moment, Sophia loves her fiercely.

It is Sophia’s last week at her parents’ court, and she must spend it with the stranger she just married, in a palace that skates on the thin skin of land between bay and canals. From this night forward, she is a Swede and a Protestant. And a duchess. What little girl has not dreamed of being a duchess? Or someday (if Magnus’s two older brothers die childless) a queen?

Candle flames shudder in the puddles of her jewels; the great diamond on what will someday be her bosom reflects the bed’s draping of red damask.

Maman (Mother, Sophia must call her now) unties the lacing at the neck of the girl’s stiff rose-and-gold gown. “Dear child,” she whispers, “you must be brave.”

Within this very hour, there will be blood again. The Princess already tastes it, there in the back of her throat, where her heart is trying to choke her.

Hands scrape Sophia like pincers, removing her jewelry, the pins in her scratchy ruff, the false curls in her thin hair. The ladies are ants, fat busy ants, seizing her sleeves and collar and overskirt. They strip her down to a frame of reedy limbs and hips.