Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [57]
We also went to the royal nursery, where for the first time I saw the queen’s heir, three-year-old Princess Stephanie, with her six-year-old brother. The queen’s older son, Prince Percy, had been sent away over the winter to be a page in the house of a Green noble, as was the custom. The little princess was thin and pale; she did not look strong. A grave, gray-eyed child without her mother’s beauty, she had her grandmother’s long face and wide jaw. In fact, she looked so much like a sickly, miniature version of the dead queen that I was startled. What did Queen Caroline think of that? I couldn’t tell. She kissed her children, held them, played with them, and I could not tell if it was genuine mother love, or the regard of a master chess player for her pawns.
I could not tell anything the queen might be thinking. She was as contradictory as ever: serene in the face of civil war, of siege, of starvation. Calculation in her eyes as she assessed her new realm. Kind to everyone in the palace, all those terrified servitors sinking into deep and reverential bows even as they believed, probably, that she had poisoned their monarch. The one place I did not go with Queen Caroline was the dungeons, if they existed. And if they did not, then where were all the advisors and soldiers who had refused to take the oath of fealty? Were they already in the country of the Dead?
No, I did not understand the queen. Beautiful, cruel, kind, ambitious—and most of all, unruffled. Even as the food ran out and the Blue army lined both banks of the river and the ladies-in-waiting whispered in terror.
“Starve us out—”
“Burn us all—”
“What is she doing?”
Then, on the sixth day, Lord Robert found us as we made our afternoon tour. We were crossing an exquisite courtyard, larger than most, with three circular flower beds. Tiny green shoots pushed up through the black soil of the beds. The air was soft and sweet. The queen had left off her furs and I my hooded cloak. My face had been freshly dyed yellow just that morning; my wit was no longer required, but my appearance as the queen’s fool still was. Lord Robert was in full armor.
He knelt, straightened, and said simply, “They’re here.”
She said sharply, “Where?”
“Within sight of the palace, obviously, since the lookout on the tower saw them. How else would I know?”
“Don’t speak to me in that tone, my lord!”
“I beg Your Grace’s pardon.”
Tension crackled between them like heat.
He said, “Your Grace, may I—”
“No. You may not. I need you here.”
“Your Grace, I am commander of the army! My place is out there, leading!”
“No one can be ‘out there’ until the siege is lifted—you know that. And your place is beside me. Go observe from the tower, and bring me report of the battle.”
Battle? What battle? What was happening?
Lord Robert bowed stiffly and stalked off.
“Come, Roger,” the queen said. “We return to my rooms.”
“Your Grace—”
“Yes? What is it?” She walked so swiftly that those we passed barely had time to fall to their knees, collapsing like so much scythed grain.
“You said ‘report of the battle’—who is fighting outside the palace?”
She spared me a glance, never breaking stride. “Who do you