The Kingdom of Little Wounds

by Susann Cokal

  She realizes that all of her ladies are present, more than she thought she had. Some new ones she doesn’t recognize. Their black gowns make inky blotches against the white; hands folded, faces expectant.

  A stout one says, “It happened very quickly, Your Highness. Everyone thought best to let you sleep.”

  So it’s true. Christian is gone.

  No more sweating moon-face above her, no more tedious sitting next to each other at feasts and competing for tasty bits of meat and sugar. No more babies after this one.

  Isabel presses against her pillows and listens to the subtle shift of feathers. Her pulse beats: No more. No more. She should probably ask to see her husband’s body, but she is too heavy, too tired. Even the baby is asleep inside her. “Who is to rule?”

  Duchess Margrethe says, with as much of a curtsy as her old knees can muster, “You are, Your Highness. You will be the regent for your daughter . . . the new Queen Apparent.”

  That must be the title they are using, suggested by some councillor or other.

  Isabel lets the lids droop down over her eyes. Dimly, as from a great distance, she hears her ladies tell her that she is now the most powerful woman — no, the most powerful person — in the kingdom.

  You command the lords. They wait outside for your orders . . . Rafael af Hvas, Willem Braj, the Duke of Marsvin . . .

  Power. Command. From the seclusion of a white room.

  A silver peacefulness descends over Isabel’s vision.

  “Highness. Highness.” Someone is shaking her shoulder.

  The white room is now lit by fire, but at the shutter edges she sees traces of darkest blue, that sort of cold color that comes of snowfall in a long twilight. Isabel has slept her way into winter. La Reine d’Hiver.

  “Your Highness, you must rouse yourself.” Some wigless, gray-haired lady. She holds a gobletful of the bitter spiced ale that Isabel normally takes in morning. This woman is also dressed in black; even more inky ladies stand behind, watching. Their manner is as subdued as their clothing.

  “Is it time for the funeral?” Isabel asks.

  The baby twists in Isabel’s stomach. He is awake and swimming like a hungry little fish.

  “Not yet. But” — the lady seems nervous —“you have a visitor. An . . . insistent visitor.”

  “Beatte?” No, even as Queen Apparent, Beatte would not be able to walk so far; she would summon Isabel instead. A dim memory creates hope: “Elinor?”

  “Your Highness, it is the Count of Bon. He simply appeared. He commands us to let him in.”

  Yes, her husband’s favorite, the favorite among his favorites. Ladies say he has a way of simply appearing. Must Isabel receive him? Probably.

  Isabel drains her cup, hoping it will quiet the baby so that she can think.

  She must be wrapped too. Isabel’s ladies bring a robe, also white — where did all these white things come from? — and a veil for her head. They seat Isabel by the fire and arrange her skirts in a white waterfall. Nobody asks if she might like something to eat. They show Count Nicolas in.

  “Has it snowed?” she asks, before he even stands from his deep-kneed bow.

  He treats this as the ordinary question it is. “It has, Your Highness. Last night.”

  Isabel studies the thin strip of lapis at her shutters. She will not see outside until her forty days are over. Even if she is allowed to attend the funeral (Does she want to?), she supposes there will be some special measures. A closed barge, a curtained box in the church of Saint-Peter’s-on-the-Isle. A hood over her head.

  She shivers.

  “You’re cold?” Count Nicolas makes a gesture as if to remove his cloak and give it to her. He seems sweaty, too hot. Her ladies think him very dashing, but Isabel has never cared much about him. Such a narrow, bony face, and he has no particular talent such as Doctor Candenzius has.

  Good Candenzius — where is he now?

  Isabel realizes that her ladies have left; she and this man are alone in the white-draped room. A most unusual occurrence. He must have demanded it. He is the Secretary; he can command secrecy. What does he want from her? No one visits a regent or a queen without asking a favor.

  “I’m not cold, my man,” she says, forgetting his name for a moment. “You may sit.”

  An empty chair waits very close to hers, so she knows it is proper to invite him. Anyway, it exhausts her to see him standing. So he sits, and his breeches puff around his waist like capons. This reminds her that she is hungry, but he speaks before she can ask for food.

  “My lady,” he says, in a quiet, deep voice that is no doubt meant to impress her, “I have come on an important errand. To preserve you.”

  She thinks of jellied calves’ feet. “Preserve me?”

  “Your life and your rule,” Count Nicolas amends, with a gesture of one ringed hand. “Your children’s reign. Perhaps you do not realize that at this very moment, the lords are discussing —”

  “Discussing! Not with me!” she bursts out. She is suddenly petulant and achy; the baby is paddling against her bladder. “I am never consulted. I wasn’t even told my husband was dying.”

  “Had you asked to be told?” The Count’s expression is quizzical, just slightly interested, no more.

  Isabel is chastened. “I might have saved him,” she says in a small voice. “I have some skill with medicines.”

  When Nicolas does not respond, she has to admit, “No, I did not ask to be told.” It seems pointless to add that this was because she did not think of such a remote and specific possibility. Just as, surely, Christian did not think of the remote possibility that he would die while she was both incarcerated and with child. The star, the star distracted him. “I did not ask.”

  “Perhaps that is the problem,” says Nicolas. “If we are ever to get what we want, we must ask for it. And this returns us to the question of the regency.” He gives her one of his plump-lipped smiles, and she catches a glimmer of what her ladies love in him. “For the moment, Your Highness, the regency belongs to you. But there are lords plotting to overtake it. To steal it from you. You must assert both your right and your desire . . .”

  What would Isabel want, if she were allowed to have anything at all? Not a capon or a calf’s foot, maybe a fish. She has become fond of fish in this pregnancy . . . and marzipan . . . and cherries . . .

  Her eyes fall on Nicolas’s famous ruby ring, the one that has always belonged to the Bullens. She leans forward, reaches out, and tries to pull it off his finger.

  “I want this,” she says. She remembers Grand-mère saying over the gift of another ring, Nothing has value till it is given away or stolen. That sky-blue ring, now, has disappeared.

  For a moment, Nicolas is still. The two of them, Count and Queen, test his claim — suggestion, rather — that it is possible to get what one wants simply by demanding it. They test, too, his declaration that he is here to benefit her.

  He relaxes his finger, lets her take the ring. Then bows, in that proudly humble, irritating way he has. “I’m honored that you would allow me to make such a gift.”

  Isabel, delighted, slides the ruby onto the smallest of her fat fingers. It fits above the knuckle, and if she holds it in place, the red drop sucks in the light and offers it back up to her in a deeply beautiful way. It is almost, almost, as good as Grand-mère’s ring.

  “You have given me value,” she says. It is the best thanks she can offer in return.

  “Yes, value. I will help you preserve it. It is your value.” His eye lingers on the ring. He must not waste time — there’s no telling when a thump at the door might announce some rebel lords. “Your Highness, let me keep you in power. You must have a strategy to fight these men, and perhaps an army. I have a plan . . . I have command of informers . . .”

  “A plan?” she asks, still admiring the ring, still with her air of distraction. “A plot?”

  Sometimes she seems almost sane, this Queen. He will have to speak to Krolik about that.

&nb
sp; “Perhaps something to drink?” he asks, and reaches for the silver pitcher.

  “That is very kind,” she says. “I so rarely get a gallant visitor these days.”

  “Your Highness.” Nicolas gazes narrowly at her white hand, which is lifting the cup; the ring glows brighter there than it ever did on his own. “It is time that we talk about you. What you need now, in these difficult hours.”

  “A woman has no needs.” But it is nice to get a new ring; she’s had no others in a while, for her fingers have grown so fat with pregnancy that the physicians cut all her jewelry off weeks ago. That must be what happened to Grand-mère’s sapphire.

  Isabel says, “A woman serves her children. And the people. The Queen. Long live Beatte — Christina! Or the King in here.” She puts her hands on her stomach.

  But she feels her brow wrinkle; how is she to do any of it, locked in this white room? “Would you ask my daughter to visit me?” she asks.

  Nicolas looks away from the ring, into Isabel’s eyes. He picks up one of her words, repeats it till it sounds like the pealing of a bell: “I served Christian V. I serve the Lunedies. And I am here to serve you now.”

  His eyes are so pale, so penetrating — maybe she does see why her ladies like him. They are quicksilver eyes.

  “Why?” she asks.

  “Because the Bullens have always done so . . . Because the Lunedies are a great family.”

  Are they? Isabel wonders. Her husband, for example, looked like a sheep, and as far as she knows, he accomplished nothing for his subjects, only raised taxes to support his war. She herself is no great lady, though she has tried. And the children . . .

  “Are you certain?” she asks.

  “Isabel,” he says in a voice very tender, “I know.”

  She blinks. “What?”

  “I know how you feel.”

  She looks at the ruby. “I’m grateful for your gift. It is lovely.”

  “Not that.” He shakes his head as if the precious ring means nothing; the light shines on his black curls. “I know . . . how it feels to have such responsibility. Your husband taught me that. I also know the secret pain. He taught me that too.”

  She would rather not hear about her husband’s pain or his secrets. “We royals put aside our own wishes,” she says. “But I do admire this ring.”

  Nicolas says more sharply, “The people won’t trust your daughter as a ruler. She’s too young — and a female.”

  Isabel looks around for her paintings of the Virgin, which are, of course, just blots of color under their white veils. She says resolutely, “I will do my duty.”

  “Isabel. Isabel.” Nicolas makes her name sound like a song. “Why must you take on this enormous task? Why not rule” — drifting a hair’s breadth closer, very calm —“by trusting someone very wise . . .”

  “Candenzius!” A flash of happiness.

  “No, not a physician,” he all but snaps, and she recoils. He scratches his nose and softens his voice: “It must be a nobleman, and then you may have Candenzius’s attentions for yourself. Your Highness, if only for this one time in your life, think of it. Why shouldn’t you devote yourself to yourself — at last — and name someone to serve in your stead?” A pause, to let the idea sink in. “Appoint a new regent. You have it in your power.”

  His words are punctuated with a pop! from the fireplace.

  If it weren’t for that knot bursting in the flames, Isabel might decide differently; but at the sound, the baby takes a surge forward. He is a little whale inside her. He is her country’s salvation. And she (the blurry Virgins beam in approval) is the country’s mother.

  “I will protect my children,” Isabel says.

  Various expressions flit across Nicolas’s face — vexation, ambition, awareness, cunning. Isabel is not so cloudy as to miss them. Perhaps he wants her to see.

  Nicolas sits up taller. He changes tone and strategy. “My queen, I must inform you. I know your secrets. All of them.”

  “I have no secrets,” she says. “I am never alone to make secrets.” Except now, with him.

  “Oh, but you are clever. You guard secrets so close that not even your ladies might guess. And yet I know.”

  Isabel gazes at the walls, where the white drapes breathe gently in and out, sometimes filling with light from the fire, sometimes flattening against the wall.

  “Clever?” she asks. “Really?”

  “Oh, yes.” Nicolas comes another inch closer. His breath runs warm over her face — myrrh, musk, plus a pungent hint of sulfur. She thinks this proximity isn’t proper, but somehow she can’t tell him to back away. She doesn’t quite feel she is here, with him, sitting by the fire, in her body.

  “For example,” Nicolas says in the thinnest, tickling whisper in the depths of her ear, “no one else knows that you’re poxed.”

  Late: I’m the only one left, still hoping for some help from Nicolas Bullen. Otherwise the paneled anteroom is empty, just the chairs and tables and chests; the others have concluded that Nicolas’s hour is over and are gone to curry favor elsewhere. This room seems far from the hidden treasure box where I helped Count Nicolas achieve the power he now holds. In its very simplicity, it feels sinister, even though he’s no longer here to force me to comply with his wishes.

  I’m curious how it feels to sit in one of these chairs, to wait like a lady instead of an apron. A chair with arms, near the fire, where I might surveil both doors: the one to this anteroom, the one to the cabinet itself. So I do.

  It’s so pleasant that I almost forget why I’m here. I relax against the carved back, enjoying the feel of a wooden poke here and there about the shoulders. This is what a lady feels.

  Sitting there, it is easy to begin drifting into a story. I imagine that a girl who survives sickness and is played false by men somehow manages to save her father from death and chains and rats and is rewarded with . . . with . . . with having rescued her father, certainly, but something more, too. I push away the thought that such a tale has to end badly, with a lesson learned that proves a happy fantasy is a foolish mistake. Instead I envision a ship, a voyage, a house somewhere greenly pretty, a pair of arms that open for a welcome . . .

  The dream breaks apart when Arthur Grammaticus bustles in, looking important with his furrowed brow and sheaf of papers. I have waited for him too, and recently, but he is not the person I want now.

  When he stops, his robe sways as if it would like to keep going. “There you are,” he says.

  It’s such a stupid beginning that I lose the last shreds of my fantasy. I glare at his floppy hat and his graying beard, his slightly shabby black robe and the papers in his hand. I still hate to think it: I have shared a sweetheart with Midi Sorte. And both he and Midi rejected me.

  I ask, “And where have you been?”

  “Gathering information.” He waves his papers as if to demonstrate. The writing on them looks like charts of some sort, not the long accounts he normally composes. “For the chronicles. The order of succession.”

  “Then why are you here now?”

  “I came to find you.”

  “Well.” I stare at his bony face, the lips in the middle of his straggly beard, but he does not smile or say more. “Since these are Count Nicolas’s chambers, not the servants’ dorter, I think it’s far more likely that you’ve come for a favor and that seeing me now is a surprise.”

  I think I’ve won a point, my single victory in this ugly day.

  Grammaticus stays calm. “I knew you would come here when you heard about your father.”

  “Why would you care about my father?”

  “I care,” he says, “when you use my name as a passport at the prison door. You can’t help yourself to it as if it’s a cup of small ale. I have a reputation.”

  I feel as if I’ve been slapped — or stabbed. I stand. The man who once said he wanted to marry me denies me even a single use of his name! “If your father were still living,” I say, with the hot pain starting in my eyes again,
“you’d do anything possible to save his life.”

  “But I would be more cautious about how I used my friends to achieve my own ends.”

  “I only mentioned you — I’m sure they didn’t even believe I really know you, Arthur.”

  “Well, then.” He seems slightly mollified. He looks around the room as if he can’t meet my eyes, but when he comes back to me, he’s angrier than ever. “So did you mention Count Nicolas? Did they believe you know him? Did he promise to help you? Have you met him here often?”

  “I’ve never been in here before,” I say. I see Arthur make a mental reminder to himself; he will add this fact to his chronicle later — if humble lives like mine can be worked into that great history.

  For a moment, I see no difference between him and Nicolas Bullen. They are gatherers of stories, users of women, and gobblers of hearts. I feel a flash of anger so strong, I almost forget I’m trying to persuade one of them to help me. But I do remember. And I think I may have more luck with this one than with the Count.

  I’ve thought it before, many times, this afternoon: how vulnerable I will be when I ask Count Nicolas to intervene with the arrest. Grammaticus has never endangered me, even when I asked for his touch.

  I put my head back to meet his hooded eyes. I try to muster some charm, though I have never felt so charmless. “I haven’t seen Count Nicolas yet. And I came to him because I didn’t think you would help.” I try to summon my old self by running my hands over my face, feeling the heat there. “Will you help, Arthur?”

  “I’m a historian,” he says. “I cannot interfere in history, only record it.”

  I drop my hands. “Why do you hate me so much? What have I ever done to hurt you?” Suddenly I’m crying again. I can imagine plenty of reasons to hate me, starting with that bloody splash by the church and moving through my humiliation with Count Nicolas — but I don’t see how any of them can bother him. Not if he doesn’t love me.