by Cynthia Hand
He sighed again. The night Pet had turned out to be a girl, Edward and Peter Bannister (and Pet, too, but she wasn’t much help with strategy, bless her heart) had come up with a plan to get Edward out of the castle. It was a good plan. First, Edward should stop ingesting poison. Then, when the poison he had already unwittingly taken had worn off, when he had regained some of his strength, when he could at least walk again without falling, he would request to be taken out to the gardens for fresh air. (Because it’s a well-known fact that fresh air has magical healing properties.) Then, on one of these walks through the gardens, Peter Bannister would happen by with a horse and help Edward onto said horse. And then Edward would flee.
But things weren’t going according to plan.
For the past three days Edward hadn’t eaten anything that didn’t pass a sniff inspection from Pet. Which was tough, because in order to obtain a sniff inspection from Pet, one had to wait until someone wasn’t hovering over him (which these days was proving to be difficult) and then quickly lower his plate to the floor beside his bed (because he wasn’t allowing Pet to sleep in the bed anymore, because, well, that would be inappropriate) and then wait for her to wag her tail. Code for: no wicked smells here; feel free to chow down.
At first the poison had only been offered up once a day, in his berries and berry-related pastries, but then Mistress Penne had noticed that the king seemed to have lost his passion for blackberries, and the wicked smell began to infiltrate the rest of his food. And then his wine.
So now he was down to water and hunks of bread and cheese that Peter Bannister sometimes slipped him. At this rate he was looking at dying of poisoning or dying of starvation.
The word famished had taken on a whole new meaning for Edward. He found that most of his dreams were now centered around a vision of himself sitting at a table laden with minced meat pies and roast legs of lamb and bowls and bowls of sweet, ripe blackberries.
Oh, how he missed blackberries.
But in spite of the fact that not a drop of poison had crossed his lips in over three days, Edward was not getting better. He could barely stand on his own, let alone walk, and had to be helped to the chamber pot. The coughing had not subsided; if anything, it was getting worse. His handkerchief was more pink than white now. His thoughts were still so cloudy most of the time.
And Dudley was becoming suspicious. “You must eat, Sire,” the duke was admonishing him at this very moment, as Mistress Penne offered him a bowl of chicken broth and Edward pushed it away. At least chicken broth didn’t appeal to him that much, but even the oily brown substance was making his mouth water. Edward was trying very hard not to smell it, lest he be overcome by his hunger and grab the bowl and drain it, poison or not.
“You must at least try, Your Majesty,” Dudley said.
Edward’s teeth clenched for a few seconds before he reined in his temper. “Why must I try?” he replied. “Will this bowl of broth keep me from dying?”
Dudley’s lips thinned. “No, Sire.”
“Then why bother?” Edward raised himself up slightly. “You’ve got your precious document signed now, don’t you? You don’t need me anymore. So if I’m going to die, I’m going to do it on my own terms.”
If this was a political game then he was showing his hand, he realized. He should be more cautious, but he didn’t care. He was tired of feeling helpless.
The duke stared at Edward with narrowed eyes, studying his face. Then in a cold voice he said, “As you wish, Sire,” and slunk away, closing the door behind him.
Mistress Penne, still holding the bowl of broth, clucked her tongue in disapproval.
Edward imagined the nurse’s less-than-slender form stretched on the rack while he dropped poisoned berries into her mouth.
From beside the bed, Pet gave a low growl. Mistress Penne eyed her warily and then exited the room, taking the broth with her.
Edward’s stomach rumbled. He groaned.
Pet whined and licked his hand. He couldn’t quite bring himself to pet her.
He picked up the letter from Jane and read it again.
“My confidant,” he murmured to himself. “My most beloved friend.”
He wondered if he would ever see her again.
That afternoon, his sisters came to visit him, without Dudley or Mistress Penne or even a servant to accompany them.
He couldn’t believe his good luck. He had almost forgotten his sisters in this whole mess, but here they were, Mary and Bess in his room, each holding a box, a present of some kind, both averting their eyes from him as if they couldn’t bear to see how wasted away he had become.
Help had arrived at last, he thought.
His sisters, Mary especially, had connections. Mary’s uncle was the Holy Roman Emperor, who Edward usually counted as a bit of an enemy, but desperate times called for desperate measures. Mary could rally an army for him, a few soldiers, at least. She could oust Lord Dudley, if it came to that. And Bess was tremendously clever. She’d studied books on herbs and medicines, he thought he remembered. Perhaps she could find an antidote for the poison.
“I am glad to see you both,” he breathed, smiling weakly.
“Oh, Eddiekins, we’re so sorry this has happened to you.” Mary put her box on the little table in the corner and moved to sit at the edge of his bed, sending Pet scrambling out of the way of her voluminous skirts.
Mary ignored the dog. She took Edward’s hands in hers and leaned toward him earnestly. Her breath smelled of wine. “I want you to know that I will look after England,” she said, her voice overly loud, like she was making a speech to the masses. “I will restore our country to its former glory. There will be no more of these blasphemous reformational ideas that Father spread in order to justify his own sinful lifestyle. We will root out this E∂ian infestation, starting with that horrible Pack that everyone’s talking about. I’ll see them all burn. We will be free of Father’s impurity. I swear it.”
Well, Dudley had been right on that count, Edward thought. Mary hated E∂ians. But he had bigger problems at the moment.
He glanced at Bess, who was staring at him intently, then back to Mary. “Listen, both of you.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t have ‘the Affliction.’ Lord Dudley has been poisoning me.”
Mary pulled free of Edward’s grasp.
“Eddie,” she said soothingly. “No one’s trying to harm you. Lord Dudley least of all.”
He scrambled to sit up. “No! He is! You must arrest him!”
Mary’s brow rumpled. “Eddie, my dear boy. The duke has been your trusted advisor for years.”
“He wants the country for himself,” Edward insisted. “He wants me dead.”
There was a moment of heavy silence.
“Why do you think Lord Dudley is attempting to poison you, Edward?” Bess queried then, softly.
“My dog,” he said breathlessly, winded from all this excited talking he was doing. “My dog could smell the poison in my blackberries.”
Both ladies turned to look at Pet, who was sitting on her haunches across the room. The dog rose to her feet uncertainly.
Mary’s nose wrinkled in distaste. “Eddie, please. Now is not the time for jokes.”
“I’m not joking,” he protested. “I’ve never been more serious in my life. My dog will tell you. Won’t you, Pet?”
He looked pleadingly at Pet.
She cocked her head at him quizzically.
“Come on, Pet. It’s all right. Show them,” he urged.
They all stared at the dog.
“You think your dog can talk?” Bess said slowly.
“Yes. She’s . . .” An E∂ian, he was about to say, but the word died on his lips. Mary had just been talking about how she wanted to purge E∂ians from the country.
Pet whined and lay down on the floor, her brown eyes worried.
Mary shook her head. “Edward,” she said even more solemnly than usual. “You’re not well.” She stood up and went to the table where she’d laid
the box. She undid the ribbon and opened it. “Lord Dudley thinks of you as a son, you know. He is devastated by what’s happening to you.”
Edward fell back, flummoxed. He could not think of anything else to say that would convince them.
“He said you haven’t been eating,” Mary said, as if this entire outburst of Edward’s was forgotten. “So I brought you something.”
She reached into the box and lifted up . . . a blackberry pudding.
“Your favorite,” she said brightly.
The sweet smell of the berries filled Edward’s nostrils. His stomach clenched. “Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said?” he gasped.
“Now, Eddie, don’t be difficult.” Mary produced a little silver knife and a china plate and cut him a hefty portion. She sat down next to him and lifted the fork to his mouth.
“Have a bite, Eddie,” she said. “For me.”
He met her eyes, hers glittering with some dark determination, his glossed by a sheen of tears. In that moment he understood the truth.
Mary was in on it.
“Be a good boy, Eddie.” She pushed the fork forward.
“Don’t call me Eddie,” he returned in a low voice. He gathered his strength and reached up to take the fork. He turned it around slowly, balancing the precarious morsel of pudding. His hand wavered, trembled, but he managed to hold the tines to her lips. “You first, sister.”
His heart ached with the betrayal of it. She was his sister. She was a terrible, humorless, traitorous, bloodthirsty, dowdy spinster of a woman, twenty years his elder, but she was still his sister. His own flesh and blood.
Silence.
Mary stared at him. Bess still was standing across the room like she’d been frozen in place, her expression unreadable.
Mary smiled quickly and took the fork back from Edward, set it on the plate. “I couldn’t possibly,” she said. “I’m watching my figure.”
“You’re watching your figure do what?” he asked.
Her eyes closed for a moment. Then she smiled again, tensely. “Oh, Edward, always joking, aren’t you?” She stood up and brushed imaginary crumbs from her skirt. “At least your illness hasn’t robbed you of your sense of humor.”
He wanted to tell her that he’d given the throne to Jane and see if she’d find that so funny. He couldn’t imagine that Mary would be in collusion with Lord Dudley if she knew that particular detail of the duke’s plan.
But telling Mary about the newly revised line of succession would only put Jane in danger. So instead he said, “The duke will turn on you, too, you know. Just as soon as he’s done with me.”
She stiffened. “You are confused, brother. You’re not thinking clearly. And I am sorry for you.” She touched his shoulder like maybe she even meant it. “I am sorry.”
He waited for her to leave before he turned his attention to Bess. He’d never seen his other sister’s face so pale and drawn. Her freckles stood out against her nose. He remembered a time when he was a child, when she’d let him count her freckles. Twenty-two of them, he thought.
“Do you think I’m confused, too, Bess?” he asked.
She shook her head almost imperceptibly. Her gray eyes were fierce and shining. They were her father’s eyes. His eyes.
She walked over to place her gift for him on the bedside table, then leaned down to kiss his cheek.
“I believe you,” she whispered against his ear. “I will help you. Trust me, Edward.”
“Rest, brother,” she said more loudly, as if there was someone else in the room.
After she’d gone, he opened her present. It was a smaller box than Mary’s, but inside he found a jar of honey-soaked apricots and a flask of cool water.
Trust me, she’d said.
The day his father died, he and Bess had been sitting together when they’d received the news. Edward was a boy of nine and Elizabeth thirteen, but both of them were keenly aware in that instant that everything had changed. “The king is dead. Long live the king,” his uncle Seymour had announced, which meant that Edward was king. He’d been overwhelmed by sorrow and terror, and started to cry.
“I don’t want it,” he’d said, trembling all over. “I don’t want to be king, Bess. I’m not like Father. Don’t make me be king.”
Elizabeth had turned to him and kissed his hand.
“It’s going to be all right,” she’d whispered. “Trust me.”
Trust me.
Edward ate the apricots and drank the water without a second thought. If Bess was also poisoning him, then he supposed he would happily die. When he was finished he felt more refreshed than he had in weeks, good enough to sit up and examine the rest of Bess’s box, where he found a small scrap of parchment with Bess’s flowery writing on it. You’re in danger. I’ll return tonight.
And in spite of all the trouble he was in, he felt better. Because there was still someone he could trust.
He woke in the middle of the night to Pet snarling. Before he was even fully awake, rough hands were upon him, forcing his arms up painfully. Hooded men loomed all around his bed. Someone lashed one of his wrists to the bedpost. He kicked and struggled, but to no avail—he had no force behind his blows, no strength.
He did, however, have Pet. She lunged over him with her teeth snapping. He heard a muffled curse, followed by a thump and a yelp as one of the men tossed the dog aside. Then came the noise of a sword leaving its sheath.
They were going to kill Pet.
Edward stopped struggling. “Wait!” he called out. “I relent.” He coughed for a minute. He couldn’t get air in his wretched lungs. “I relent,” he gasped again. “Don’t hurt my dog.”
Pet whined. One of the men grabbed Pet by the scruff and tied a rope around her neck. Suddenly she surged forward and buried her face in Edward’s shoulder.
He put his free arm about her and whispered against her long silky ear. “Don’t worry about me, Pet. Find Jane. Tell Jane what’s happened.”
She whined again, and the man yanked on the end of the rope, dragging her across the floor and then out of the room.
Edward’s heart thundered in his ears. He coughed again, into the air because his free hand was now being tied to the other bedpost. A man with a candle stepped toward the bed. Boubou. Edward glanced around at the other figures surrounding him.
“Honestly,” he managed to rasp. “You need three armed men to subdue me? I’m already dying.”
The man who was tying up his wrist grunted and jerked the rope tight.
“Oh,” Edward said, with sudden clarity. “Because you think I might transform into a lion and devour the lot of you?”
If only he could.
When he was secured, the men melted into the shadows, leaving him alone with Boubou. The old doctor looked tired and gruff, like he was unaccustomed to being awake at this hour, and it irritated him. He set the lantern down and slung a dark satchel from his back, from which he unrolled a set of rather sharp-looking knives.
Edward hardly felt the pain when the doctor cut his arms and drained the blood into a large pewter bowl. He was nearly senseless, hovering just outside some balmy unconsciousness, when the door creaked and through his half-open eyelids Edward thought he saw Lord Dudley’s nose. Which in his semi-delirious state struck him as hilarious.
“Excellent,” he slurred. “So glad you could join us, John.”
“Always so petulant,” the duke replied. “Foolish boy.”
Now Boubou was holding a goblet to his mouth. Unlike the tonic they’d given him last time, before he’d revised his will, this one tasted so sweet it made his teeth ache.
Wicked, he thought.
He tried not to swallow, but Boubou held his head back and kept pouring the poison down his throat, unrelenting until he was forced to swallow. The doctor wiped Edward’s lips with a napkin.
“So this is it,” Edward hardly had the strength to say. “Bravo, Boubou. You’ve successfully committed regicide.”
Boubou’s eyes crinkled at t
he corners. “It was a pleasure serving you, Your Majesty.”
Edward laughed. He was floating out of himself. Boubou was untying his hands but he couldn’t feel them. He drifted between light and dark. The last thing he remembered before he spun away entirely was the sound of the door closing, and a key turning in the lock.
There was a scratching sound. Once, and then again. Edward sucked in a lungful of air. He was alive. How was he alive?
The scratching came again, more insistently.
“Pet?” he called hoarsely.
Now he heard a sharp, bright noise from the direction of the door. The mew of a cat. Which made no sense.
He sat up. The wounds on his arms from the bloodletting throbbed, but his head felt remarkably clear. He threw off the blankets and swung his legs over the side of the bed. Tested his strength.
Maybe he could stand.
He tried. He stumbled to the door and attempted to open it.
Locked.
The meow came again. There was a flicker of light under the doorway.
He swayed and put his hand against the rough oak of the door to steady himself.
“Hello?” he whispered.
“Edward,” came a faint, familiar voice on the other side of the door.
“Bess,” he breathed.
“I can’t stay,” she said, so softly he could barely hear her. “They’ll come back. They assume you’ll be dead by now, but they’ll come back to check. They wanted to make it look like you died of ‘the Affliction,’ but if they find you alive now, Edward . . .”
“Get me out of here.”
“I can’t. I don’t have the key. You have to go out the window.”
“Bess, it’s a fifty-foot drop.”
“You could climb it,” she suggested. “When you were a boy you were always such a climber. You were never afraid of heights.”
He snorted. Right. Climb down. But carefully, step by deliberate step, he walked to the window and pulled back the drapes. It was morning, the sun just breaching the palace walls. Below him, so far below, the courtyard stretched toward the river. Guards were posted at regular intervals.
No good.