by Cynthia Hand
“No!” Ari shouted. “No, you can’t fire me!”
The queen jerked back and put her hand to her heart. “Excuse me? Were you hoping to find yourself in the dungeon, after all? I could provide actual fire.”
“No,” Ari rasped. “No, but my father—”
“Your father hasn’t given me an accurate vision in months. You and I both know that he’s lost his touch. He is no longer of use to me, so he, too, must go.”
“But, Your Majesty . . . What will I tell Queen Mary? I can’t simply—”
“I will deal with Mary.” The queen smiled grimly. “Now get out of my sight.”
“Please,” Ari said.
“Leave. Or die,” the queen said.
Ari fled the queen’s chambers. She felt as though she were caught in the middle of a horrible dream.
She’d gambled and lost everything—not only her love and her job, but her entire future.
Numbly, she returned to the laboratory. This time her father was there, working on his quatrains again, mumbling incoherently to himself. For a moment she just stood and watched him scribble onto the parchment. How could she tell him? What would he think of her when he heard what she’d so foolishly done?
She started to move about the laboratory, wrapping up glass vials and stacking cauldrons. After a time, Greer appeared in the doorway. “What are you doing?” her assistant asked.
“Packing,” Ari answered.
“Are we going somewhere? Where?”
A lump rose in Ari’s throat. “I don’t know. Queen Catherine is angry with me. She has ordered me to leave the palace. You should . . .” Her eyes met Greer’s. “You should go immediately and find another position.”
“I see,” Greer said softly. Then the girl began to cry, not a gentle flow of tears but a loud, wailing sob. She clapped her hands over her mouth and ran from the room.
“How’s that?” came her father’s voice from behind her. “What’s this about the queen?”
Ari crossed to kneel in front of her father. Then she told him the entire sordid story, including every detail (except the detail about Ari kissing Liv in this very laboratory—right over there, in fact). For once, her father seemed to be fully listening. His filmy blue eyes focused on her intently, and when she was finished, she was confused, because he smiled.
“Papa? Did you hear what I said?”
“Of course, dear child. But do you realize what this means?”
“Um, it means we’re fired?”
“It means that my visions were correct. You just fulfilled the third of them.”
“Huh?”
“Deadly biscuits. Traps. Betrayal,” he counted off on his fingers. “There was that deadly biscuit in the queen’s chamber,” he said.
“Was it deadly, though?” Ari asked.
“Hush, child. Then we saw a mouse—a literal mouse!—eating said deadly biscuit, and the queen responded by ordering that mousetraps be set all over the palace to combat the rodent infestation. Literal traps! And now you’ve discovered that Queen Mary is herself a mouse. And you told the queen. There’s the betrayal.” He patted her hand excitedly. “Don’t you see? It all came true. And that means that I’ve still got it!”
He jumped nimbly to his feet with an energy she hadn’t seen from him in years. “I’m going to need more parchment!”
“That’s wonderful, Papa, but did you hear the part where we have to leave the palace?”
“Bah!” he said. “That’s not going to happen. Trust me. I know.”
“You know?”
“It’s Queen Catherine’s favorite threat. Besides, there’s still the thing with the lions.”
“The lions?” Ari couldn’t decide if he was now completely lucid or if he’d lost his mind altogether. “But what about the queen?”
“Queen Catherine won’t always have power over us,” he said distractedly. “Can you order me more ink, dear child?”
“But, Papa . . .”
“You know what I’m craving right now? Biscuits. I bet you could get us some biscuits, now that they’re safe. I’ve quite missed them.”
“But, Papa, let’s get back to the queen,” Ari said. “How does she not have power over us? She’s the queen of France.”
“Only while she’s married to the king of France,” her father pointed out.
Ari frowned. “You predict that she’ll divorce Henry?”
Nostradamus’s nose wrinkled. “Good gracious no, child. Divorce is only something people do in England.”
He wasn’t making sense. The only other way for Catherine to stop being married to the king of France was if Henry were to—“You think the king will die?”
“He dies a cruel death!” Nostradamus said cheerfully.
Ari shook her head. It was a preposterous idea. Everyone knew that the king was as healthy as a bull. “Don’t be silly, Papa,” she said. “The king’s going to live forever.”
TWENTY-ONE
Francis
“The king is dead.”
Francis swayed on his feet. He’d misunderstood the physician’s words, surely. The king wasn’t dead. The king was as healthy as a bull, aside from his raging alcoholism and the variety of poxes and other downstairs problems that likely plagued him. Everyone said he’d live for years and years. Everyone said it. All the time.
“Francis?” Mary touched his shoulder. There was a murmur of stricken conversation behind her, but Francis barely heard anything over the pounding of his heart. The worried faces lined up outside the medical tent were starting to blur. “Eyes up, Francis.”
Eyes up? His eyes had been up all day, watching the tournament with the rest of the royal household. “Watching,” we should say, because Francis had never been all that interested in sports that could maim someone for life.
Or kill someone.
Like the king.
There was no way the king could be dead. Yes, he’d insisted on jousting in the tournament, because what a show that would be. Yes, he’d lost the first bout. Yes, he’d insisted on trying again (that first one had been a warm-up and therefore didn’t count). Yes, both Catherine and Diane had tried to talk him out of it. Yes, the king had gotten his way and the Count of Montgomery had been ordered to rearm.
But Francis hadn’t been truly watching any of that. He’d been, as he had all day, watching Mary. Gazing, more accurately, and thinking about how later she’d come to his rooms and they’d talk for hours until they fell asleep. They wouldn’t even have to sneak. Because they were married!
Then he’d squirmed and pulled his doublet so that the hem lay over his lap. Not for any reason, of course. Just because it was more comfortable like that.
He’d very quickly gone back to admiring Mary’s profile, the way afternoon light shone through her auburn hair, and how she held herself as though she were a queen.
She was a queen. And she looked the part every moment of every day. How was he ever supposed to be like that?
Fortunately, he would have a lot of time to practice, because King Henry would live a long, long time.
Except the royal physician was now saying the king was dead.
The words were a roar in Francis’s ears. The world started to spin. Time stuttered, and it was hard to say how long he’d been standing here, swaying here, resisting those four awful words.
But they kept burrowing inside him, deeper and deeper, like a song he couldn’t shake.
The king is dead.
That couldn’t be right.
Sure, the second match hadn’t gone Henry’s way. Francis hadn’t been watching, as we’ve established, because he’d been completely distracted by the way Mary was breathing. So elegant. So steady. So, well, breathy. Then, completely out of nowhere, she’d gasped. (Mary had actually been watching the match.) Francis had delighted in this, because Mary had a delightful gasp, but then everyone else had gasped, too.
Then he’d followed all the eyes to the joust, just in time to see the king fall from his horse. His a
rmor had clanged against the hard-packed dirt, the horse had bucked, and the Count of Montgomery had dismounted and thrown off his helm. Squires and physicians had run onto the field, obscuring Francis’s view of the king, but the gist was this: the lance had struck King Henry’s chest, then slid up under the visor of his helm, where it splintered into the king’s face. They said the shards could have pierced his brain, but they wouldn’t know for sure for a few more days.
Grimly, morbidly, Francis had envisioned sitting at his father’s bedside with the rest of the family, praying for the king’s eventual recovery. Then he’d imagined his mother sweeping in with some kind of cure concocted by Nostradamus and Ari, and all the tiny slivers from the lance would dissolve into harmlessness, leaving King Henry with a scar worth bragging about.
But the king had been carried into the medical tent an hour ago. Francis had been waiting outside with Mary, Charles IX, Henry III, Queen Catherine, Mistress Diane, Cardinal Charles, Duke Francis, several of Mary’s ladies, and a ton of other people who thought they were important enough to loiter nearby. This—the king dying within the hour of his accident—wasn’t supposed to be how it happened.
“The king is dead,” people murmured. The words rippled through the crowd. “The king is dead.”
Then, horribly:
“Long live the king!” someone called. “Long live the king!” And before Francis realized, it had become a chant.
The king is dead. Long live the king.
It was the most confusing thing in the whole world, because the king was dead. How could he live any longer?
Francis’s breath caught in his chest, rattling there as his vision grayed out, then back in. Faintly, he saw ladies helping Queen Catherine to one of the nearby benches. Someone fanned her, like more air would help. Mistress Diane was weeping not far away. She held her hands against her chest as she spoke hurriedly to her ladies. Without the king’s favor, she would have to leave court.
“Francis?” Mary squeezed his arm. “Francis, you have to say something. Everyone is waiting.”
Hadn’t he been screaming this whole time? It seemed like he should have been.
“Help him sit,” the Duke of Guise said. “The dauphin is too pale.”
“Just breathe,” Mary whispered. “Breathe through it. Do not sit. Do not cry. Do not reveal anything of what you feel inside.”
What? Sitting was probably the best thing he could do right now.
That chant was still going, though: The king is dead! Long live the king!
“You must show strength,” Mary whispered. “Stand straight up, just for right now.”
The king is dead! Long live the king! The chant went on and on, the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine the loudest of all. Then, as though this were some kind of waking nightmare, they knelt right there in the muck. Mary’s uncles first, followed by her ladies, Francis’s younger brothers, and out and out until everyone around him was bent in submission. Even Mary herself had lowered into a graceful curtsy, her head bowed.
No. No no no.
At once, he understood why Mary hadn’t wanted him to sit yet. And he understood the apparent contradiction in the chant, because it wasn’t a contradiction at all.
The king is dead! That part was about King Henry.
Long live the king! That was about Francis. King Francis now.
He swayed as gray fogged his vision again. He tried to breathe through it, tried to blink it away, but suddenly he couldn’t tell up from down or even hear the chanting he knew was still going on.
Help, he tried to say, but no sound passed his lips. He’d already fainted.
TWENTY-TWO
Mary
“Give him space,” Mary said. “Please.”
A handful of courtiers lifted Francis, limp as a rag doll, but they didn’t seem to know where to put him. Not in the medical tent, obviously. Because the king’s body was in there.
Henry’s body, Mary silently corrected. Because now Francis was the king.
Oh, dear. She was feeling a bit faint, herself.
Catherine rushed over. Her face was pale as paper, but her expression was calm. “What has happened?”
“I don’t know,” Mary wanted to answer. It seemed so impossible to her. The king—Henry, not Francis—was the most vivacious person Mary knew. Say what you will about him, but Henry had definitely tried to live his life to the fullest. An hour ago he’d been laughing and bellowing out orders and guzzling wine and sweating under the sun. And now . . .
“Has Francis . . . fainted?” Catherine asked.
Mary didn’t like something in the queen’s—the former queen’s—tone. There was an underlying criticism in it, of Francis being weak. Mary straightened. “He was overcome. It’s too much for any man to bear. The death of his beloved father. And the sudden weight of the crown.”
She was being metaphorical, of course. It would be days before Francis had to wear the literal crown.
“Your Highness,” grunted one of the courtiers. Oh, yes, they were still carrying Francis. “Where should we take him?”
“Over here,” she said, and directed the men to a shaded spot under a willow tree. They laid Francis gently in the soft grass. Mary dropped down beside him. She smoothed his hair and stroked his cheek. His eyes fluttered, then opened. He gazed up at her warmly for a moment, and then he remembered. His brow rumpled.
“Mary,” he murmured. “I had the most horrible dream.” He gazed up at her. “No. It wasn’t a dream.”
“It wasn’t.”
“He’s really dead.”
She nodded mutely. “I’m so sorry, Francis.” Tears burned her eyes. Henry, for all his faults, had been a father to her, too. The only one she’d ever known. But she didn’t allow herself to weep on her own account just now. Francis needed her to be strong.
“How did such a thing happen?” Francis whispered. “I wasn’t looking.”
“It was Montgomery,” Mary said, and then her blood ran cold.
Montgomery. Her uncles had been talking about Montgomery only yesterday. Montgomery will fall in line, is what Uncle Charles had said.
Montgomery would fall in line for what?
Her breath caught. Had Montgomery killed the king on purpose?
But Montgomery had protested, hadn’t he, when the king wanted to joust with him again? He’d been reluctant.
Hadn’t he? Or had he merely been acting reluctant? Had he known that protesting a rematch would only make Henry more determined to have one?
Had Montgomery been working at her uncles’ behest? Had Uncle Charles and Uncle Francis (gulp) assassinated the king?
And why would they do such a thing?
Mary knew why. Her uncles always worked for Mary’s benefit. And killing the king would be to her benefit. An hour ago, she was the queen of faraway Scotland. Now she was the queen of Scotland and France.
“Mary,” Francis said.
“I’m here.” She grasped his hand. “You must . . . you must get up now. You must show everyone that you’re all right.”
“I’m not all right. Mary, I don’t want to be . . . I can’t be—”
“You mustn’t say that,” Mary said. “You must be king.”
His jaw clenched. “Fine.”
She helped him to his feet. He didn’t let go of her hand. “Stay with me,” he said. “Please.”
“Of course.” This was her place, by Francis’s side. It had always been her place.
The next few hours went by in a blur. They retreated back to the palace, where they withdrew into Francis’s chambers, allowing no one entry but her ladies. Francis passed the time sitting at the window, staring out at nothing. Or staring into the fire. Or staring at Mary, which made her nervous.
Because deep down, she really was starting to wonder if the king’s death was somehow her fault.
There was a knock at the door. Hush went to open it, and there were Mary’s uncles. They were trying to look solemn, but they couldn’t help it. They we
re nearly grinning. She stepped out into the hall to speak with them.
“How is the king?” Uncle Charles asked.
Mary’s chin lifted. “He’s shaken, naturally. None of us could ever have expected King Henry to be killed so suddenly. It’s quite a shock.”
“Yes, it’s a great tragedy,” said Uncle Francis. “Everyone expected that Henry would live for years and years to come.” He exchanged a knowing glance with Uncle Charles. “But tragedies do happen.”
“The important thing now, dear,” said Uncle Charles, “is for you to be there for Francis. You have the benefit of years of experience in being the monarch of a country. He listens to you in all things, so you must tell him what to do. You must guide him.”
Mary swallowed. “I suppose.”
Uncle Charles patted her head like she was a dog. (Nothing against dogs, of course, some of our favorite characters are dogs.) “I have no doubt that you are capable of handling this great responsibility. You are the queen of two countries now.”
“And perhaps, quite soon, a third,” added Uncle Francis. Meaning England, of course.
Mary suddenly felt very tired.
“We must have the coronation as soon as possible,” said Uncle Charles. “And be sure that you are crowned alongside your husband, so that you will present a united front.”
“I don’t wish to think about the coronation right now,” Mary said stiffly. “This is a time of sorrow, of mourning. I am here to comfort Francis. That is all.”
“Of course,” said Uncle Francis. “We’ll talk later about the arrangements that must be made.”
She bade them farewell and shut the door.
She closed her eyes. She wished with all of her heart that she could write to her mother. What would Mary de Guise advise her to do now? But Bea still hadn’t returned and her mother hadn’t even received Mary’s other letter yet.
Mary was on her own.
Except for Francis. She hurried back to his side.
“So what’s the all-important news from the hall?” Francis said.
“What?”
“You went into the hall. What happened there?”