The Kingdom of Little Wounds (49 page)

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 understand?” 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.

W
ITH 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.

S
HE belongs to him now. Or at least that is what she’s told, what the words spoken by the councillors (in French) and priests (in Latin) mean. And now, this gesture, this putting the two of them in bed together, in their nightclothes, with his hairy dark leg touching her thin, soft, bruised one, where the white paint can’t cover the dark marks of veins and sores: somehow, this gesture — with his thirty-six-year-old body touching her ten-year-old one in this way — signifies an irrevocable possession.

Christina-Beatte has spent most of her life in bed, and in her fatigue she expects that the rest of it will be passed in much the same way. Lying down, ministered to. But
possessed
? She is a Lunedie princess! She is the Queen Apparent!

All around the room, courtiers are clapping. Some smirk, as if at a sort of joke that they won’t allow themselves to speak aloud.

Once the image of these two in bed has taken hold in so many minds, the smelly old Duke and Duchess of Marsvin begin unsteadily to roll the sheet away again.

Christina-Beatte gets angrier and angrier. Her body will be revealed before all her courtiers, not just her ladies, in its undignified reediness, for she is still as thin and ill-formed as a sapling on a cliff side.

“Stop,” she whimpers; but amid all the clapping, no one can hear her.

Christina
-
Beatte is Queen.
She has inherited her father’s discretion and her mother’s sleight of hand. So it is only the dwarfs, who are used to looking closely, who notice as she reaches for her pillow, while the courtiers’ applause grows louder and more of Count Nicolas’s chest comes into view.

He has left his shirt untied, the slit exposed. Both Christina-Beatte and the dwarfs notice the prickles where hairs have started to grow back after their morning shave. They also notice that the Duke and Duchess are now having some difficulty, that the ceremonial sheet appears to be caught on something just below the Count’s waist.

It is at this moment, as the glittering courtiers can’t help a laugh encouraged by the proud smile on Nicolas’s lips, that Christina-Beatte strikes. Just as he taught her to do, just as the nursery stories have suggested. Anyone who dishonors her, who holds her up to ridicule, who seeks to
possess
her — such a person deserves immediate punishment.

She knows what the thing below his waist is. It is disgusting.

But she is resourceful. She pulls the pillow out from under her head and boffs him across the face with it, to knock the smile away. And then, as delighted laughter shakes the very bricks and stones of the palace, and the Duke and Duchess lose their balance in freeing the sheet, Beatte springs up and plunges into that thing that has caused Nicolas such pride.

She plunges her dagger. The one that he gave her. Into his thigh.

The flesh yields more easily to the blade than she ever imagined, perhaps because she has put more weight into the cutting than ever before. In fact, she did not mean, she is sure she did not mean, to stab him so hard — she fell on him. And now falls against the thorns of his chest. She thinks he will probably tickle or —
puhha —
embrace her now. She does not expect him to make her wet.

The guards and messengers have done their job well — too well. Before we can get my blood (the blood of my pure heart) and Isabel’s properly spread about, the room is nearly full. Isabel’s ladies, Beatte’s ladies, even a councillor or two. They rush toward the bed and then halt. Appalled, astonished, puzzled? For there Isabel is calmly nursing my brother, with a dreamy smile on her face and hardly a care that the court is now packing her chamber like herrings.

“
Shhh, shh, sh.
There’s a baby,” Isabel says, quietly, but somehow everyone seems to hear. “
My
baby. A boy. Your King.”

They fall silent. Staring. At the lips tugging away at the red royal nipple. At the nipple itself, which has so grown in color and size as to resemble a duke’s gouty thumb. Mostly, I think, they stare at the light that glows through my brother’s skin as he feeds, naked now and sprawled on the Queen’s great chest, with his chilly blue pallor replaced by a swell of rosy-gold.

He is a beautiful child. We are all beautiful in his light.

All at once, the women in the front — Baroness Reventlow, Lady Drin, Mistress Belskat — spread their skirts and fall to their knees, heads bent. As each cluster of courtiers behind them realizes what has happened, they follow suit, rustling and clanking into place. Their curtsies crowd against the others in the room, push the aprons and the guards to the edges and even out the door.