When Katherine regained consciousness, all of the curtains were opened, letting in an ungodly amount of light, and all of the retinue was sitting in her chamber. Not only her retinue, in fact, but three Sbaians had joined them. Two of them she recognised even half-conscious: Freyza and his servant Iskander. The other, fairer than these two, was unknown to her.
Her eyes were half-open when the first great sighs of relief were heard. Katherine looked to her side and saw one of her maids, carrying a large vessel of heated water with herbs in it, that smelled like the most potent bath ever taken.
‘Morning,’ she cooed sleepily, stretching out her to her sides. ‘Everyone…’
Harcourt looked at her with the amount of fury she had expected him only to reserve for arch-nemeses. Then, he looked over at the Sbaians. ‘Lucky. You’ll live today.’
Freyza nodded calmly. ‘As you’d been told, Lord Overleigh. My apologies for not being clear enough in my attempts to tell you that I am in fact not an assassin.’ He scraped his throat. ‘Your Majesty. Did you have a restful sleep?’
Katherine felt as still as she had felt, occasionally, in the convent, where she would be dining in silence while some of her sisters sang hymns, or where she would fall asleep in her bed in the freezing cold, listening to the sound of the quietude of Dolcotshire, where nobody lived. The few stragglers left behind there only existed.
‘Yes,’ she said lucidly. ‘Better than I’ve slept in a while.’
He smiled a guiltily satisfied smile. ‘Then there is little for me to regret. Bayezid, shall we?’ he asked.
The man beside him nodded hurriedly. ‘We shall,’ he said. ‘Before they change their minds about decapitating us.’
Katherine, in the silence of a great absence of thoughts, chuckled. ‘Gentlemen. If they were to wish you dead, they’d have to go through me. Besides, my lord… I don’t believe I’ve had the honour of meeting your associate?’
She still felt too weak to swing her legs over the edge of her bed and stand up, and so simply outstretched her arm. Bayezid looked at Freyza, who looked at him sternly and expectantly.
‘Your Majesty,’ he said, and bowed, before stepping forward and sinking to his knees by the side of her bed. He took her small hand in two of his and kissed the rings that she fell asleep wearing perhaps two days ago, perhaps just one. ‘My name is Bayezid of Amouas. I have come to Massouron for my Baradran wife and I were exiled.’
Katherine did not look at him, instead looking with her eyes glazed over more in the direction of Freyza. Instead, she smiled cryptically. ‘Welcome, Bayezid of Amouas.’
There was strange and sleepy amusement behind Katherine’s eyes. ‘Bayezid,’ said Freyza. ‘Come.’
He stood up hurriedly and followed Freyza. ‘Loads of water,’ Freyza said to Richard, who sat closest by the door. ‘A warm fur. Broth tends to help. No loud noises for a while.’
Richard shook off Freyza’s hand, which had landed on his shoulder. ‘I know,’ he lied. ‘You were leaving…’
Harcourt scraped his throat when the Sbaians were gone. ‘De Vere, will you write the embalmer that the corpse has returned to life?’ he asked demonstratively. ‘She won’t lie easy when she can still talk, unfortunately. What a shame, I’d nearly had the crown resized…’
‘Very funny,’ said Katherine, scooting towards her headboard to sit upright. ‘Maybe next time, you should have some of this potion as well. I can tell you with some certainty, I am decidedly feeling more calm than you are right this moment.’
‘Well, let’s move past this,’ Richard said. ‘Overleigh and I will have to come to terms with the knowledge that you will drink from each vial given to you, regardless if it quite literally tells you it will knock you out, but we will do so on our own time. What he really means to say, Lady Katherine, is that he was scared to lose you.’
‘Isn’t that a given?’ Harcourt barked. ‘I wept my bloody eyes out. We all thought you passed. Nearly decapitated that Sbaian on the spot.’
Only then did Katherine consider how long she could have been under for. ‘Say, what day is it?’ she asked.
Richard raised his brows. ‘Right. It’s Sunday, my lady. We last spoke on Friday, towards the evening. Let you sleep until Saturday afternoon, thought you needed it. Ever since Saturday afternoon, after we tried to wake you, we’ve been keeping watch in episodes. Whenever anyone had a free spot, they’d sit by you and the physician and see if you still had a pulse.’
‘And a couple of times I was told you nearly didn’t,’ Harcourt added. ‘So.’
‘All very kind,’ Katherine said, swinging one of her legs over the edge of the bed. ‘Next time, believe Master Freyza, my dear.’
‘Respectfully, no,’ Richard said.
‘Gentlemen, I should really bathe,’ she said. ‘I’m covered in sweat. I’ll talk to you on the other end of that ordeal. We’ll talk about the fate of our prisoners. In the depths of my unconscious, I’ve made a decision.’
Richard stood up, and so followed the other advisers, who knew it was for the better to leave Katherine when she was asked, and thankfully Richard and the Massouric shadowmen had very recently inspected Katherine’s chamber for anything harmful.
Only Constance remained, aside from Katherine herself and the maid. She trailed behind the rest of them as if she was leaving too, but remained in the door frame after everyone else had left. The maid picked up the first cauldron of water from the floor by Katherine’s bed, and put it back over the fire to watch it.
‘What was it like?’ Constance asked in a small voice, closing the door behind her.
Katherine looked over at her lady-in-waiting. ‘Well… I fell asleep, I had a few dreams, and in an instant, I was at my own wake.’
‘Overleigh was right,’ Constance said. ‘The physician told me as well that you didn’t have a pulse for a while.’
She found the energy to clap her hands together once. ‘And miraculously, I lived. I think, barring any possibility that I’ll be considered a saint down the line, this means that the physician was incorrect. Come on — Sbaians have loads of potions. I’m sure they wouldn’t be able to have a functioning embassy if it was loaded with poison. Louise wouldn’t allow it.’
‘Who was that Bayezid of Amouas guy?’ she asked.
‘I wasn’t joking when I asked him to introduce himself. Why?’
Constance shifted her weight from her heels to her toes and back again. ‘Nothing. It was the first time I’ve seen either of them.’
Katherine stood up and took off her jewellery. ‘You’re trying to get me to say something,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ Constance said, ‘You’re not irritated knowing that the man so intently courting you has a handsomer, younger associate?’
‘First of all,’ Katherine said. ‘I don’t think he’s intent on getting any closer to me than an adviser or a confidant. Second of all, I can’t sleep with fellow redheads, and from Bayezid’s beard I deduce he is one. I made that mistake once and now I’m a traitor to the old Baradran regime. I’m guessing you find him handsome?’
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‘Relative to his countrymen,’ she admitted. ‘Though your ambassador, I’ll admit… very tall and mysterious. Didn’t break a sweat when Harcourt all but condemned him to death. And my goodness, Katherine. Did you have a restful sleep? Stop it. You’re saying you don’t experience any sort of tension between the both of you?’
Katherine blinked slowly. ‘Ask me when I’ve bathed,’ she said. ‘Freyza said no loud noises. Suppose that explains the splitting headache you’ve given me with your yapping.’
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Bathed, Katherine put a riding doublet over the clothes that had been picked for her for temperate spring weather. She was freezing, exchanged the silk stockings for wool ones, took fur-lined shoes, and tried not to pay attention to the disagreeing glances of the fashionable crowd as she walked through the great hall. Despite all appearances, an air of distant drowsiness still on her recently washed face, she felt like she had ascended out of struggle.
Despite the way she had returned to consciousness, Katherine felt like her humours were indeed balanced. The way she had felt before, still rattling from being attacked, the treason from her nearest men, it all felt so distant to her now. What to do with William was clear to her, but what to do with Walter was less so.
‘I’d like him executed,’ Katherine told Harcourt and Richard towards the afternoon, when they had met in Harcourt’s chancellery.
Harcourt especially could not believe his ears. Finally, after years of having to put up with this devilish creature, he was allowed to put it down, on a foreign shore where his wife could not stop him. Besides, it was the queen’s order.
‘Yes,’ he said instinctively. ‘That would be a great decision, I say.’
Richard stretched his neck. ‘In your absence, I spoke to him,’ he told Katherine. ‘He won’t confess to anything. I’ve tried all the tricks in the book that have reversible damage, just in case you’d change your mind. I believe you ought to know that. I see no other way in which this could have happened, but he will not confess.’
Katherine wiggled her brows. ‘We might as well try a thumbscrew or a pear of anguish,’ she said. ‘He’ll be axe-bound regardless. Might as well get that confession. Then, confession in hand, his execution will be ordered and put into action in Norbury Lake.’
‘We won’t be bound for Norbury Lake for a while,’ Harcourt said. ‘A quiet, unknown execution may be better in order to save face. No country appears more stable when it starts putting advisers to death.’
‘No,’ said Katherine. ‘He doesn’t deserve that. He deserves to be shown to the extent of his guilt, he deserves to be executed before a crowd that will collect his goddamned earring from that conniving traitorous head of his when it falls down from the block. His grave will be unmarked, his head and body buried separately, and I will make sure that Astwick becomes a royal barony, and any mention of his name burned to the ground.’
Richard and Harcourt looked at one another. Harcourt pleaded with his eyes not to cause so much of a stir. Richard relented. ‘This sounds like the precise thing that King Henri would like to see,’ he said. ‘I’ll run it through Theo and see if Henri is willing to be present as well. That way, any accusation of needless cruelty can be attributed to him, and you can withdraw into the role of a shocked, terrified queen who’d nearly died.’
‘William will know it was my doing, right?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said Harcourt. ‘You want that to be his last words, Katherine? In front of a massive, foreign crowd?’
Katherine sat back in her chair and chuckled innocently. ‘Of course, Lord Overleigh. Let it be a lesson to those who ought to take it. I will not see myself ruled by another. Not by an adviser, not by a husband, not simply by living at a foreign court, shall I ever be ruled. For me to relinquish my freedom or my fierceness is for Ilworth to be subjugated to its enemies. It is about time that I make it abundantly clear that nobody will see it done during my lifetime.’
Harcourt had chills all over his body. ‘Then, we know what needs to be done,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to it.’
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The carriage door was locked.
Walter forced his whole weight against it, but the door or its lock would not break. There were no windows, and it was pitch black but the cracks by the door hinges. He had been taken from his chambers, blindfolded, and thrown into it without a word spoken to him. Where he would be going, or what the meaning of this was, was fully unknown to him.
To think of the worst only occurred to him when he heard a large crowd outside the carriage, by the time it had already halted. His body suddenly went cold. He had spoken the truth during his interrogation, and furthermore, he had not been bugged for another confession. He had said all that there was, he had apologised… was this how it ended?
After some time, the door was unlocked, and two guards firmly took hold of his little body. He was where he feared he would be — the city of Souchon. He began to struggle in their grasp, but could not escape. To his right, he could just about make out the city square where hundreds, perhaps thousands, had gathered, and upon seeing the block in its midst, fainted.
He woke up in a tent erected on a base of scaffolding, his hands tied behind his back, but comfortable on a chaise-longue. ‘He’s back,’ said Richard, who had been watching him from one corner of the tent.
He recognised many of the faces turning to him. Katherine and Henri, both in full regalia, Louise and Theo on another chaise, and Richard keeping watch. It was Harcourt, from the look of his silhouette, that stood just behind the royal couple.
Katherine looked upon Walter’s face briefly, but her stare turned colder and colder, until it finally looked away.
‘You’re here to watch,’ Richard told Walter, sitting down beside him. ‘I hope you’re willing to pay attention. There’s a place to look to your right, it’ll afford you a decent view of today’s happenings.’
Walter’s teeth were chattering. ‘So I’m not dying?’ he asked.
Richard lay a hand on his shoulder. ‘Not by our doing,’ he said, then leaned in, ‘In fact, after today, you’ll be out of house arrest.’
‘Oh… thank you.’
‘No need to thank me,’ he said. ‘Thank Her Majesty. If she had no say, you could imagine yourself with your head on that block.’
He watched over the crowd through the opened flap to his right, where he could make out the exalted platform that separated the common people from the royal proceedings. The irony struck him. He had started on the ground, had unintentionally found himself in the royal caravan, but was threatened by the prospect of appearing with his head removed from his body for all to see. The crowd was stirring. The prisoner had arrived.
Katherine and Henri swiftly made their way out to take seats on the thrones just outside the canvas tent, from where they had an excellent vantage point over the crowd and the holding cell on the corner of the street, from where William was taken in chains.
He stepped up the first steps of scaffolding with great trouble. His face was downcast, bloody, turned hideous by his deeds, and the needful to give his confession. He did not look over or up at the thrones. His hands, tied behind his back, were wounded to the point where there was less skin to see than there was open flesh. William’s hair, usually tied up neatly at the nape of his neck, lay over his face in shame.
The executioner himself appeared ready, leaning on the handle of his axe, but the chaplain came forward to receive William, laying a hand on his shoulder as he walked forth. His other hand held a Bible.
Once they had reached the block, the chaplain shared a final prayer with him in private, and the crowd went silent.
William looked around, and quietly faced the bemused and revolted faces all the same. Once he had looked upon the crowd, his gaze turned to Katherine, who in return took Henri’s hand and squeezed it.
‘If my death can mend the the wounds I caused, then let it be so,’ he spoke, and thereafter slowly sank to his knees.
The lack of villainy in his words seemed to shock the royal retinue, raising a few eyebrows, but nonetheless the context coloured the words. His death would not mend the wounds he caused. His actions had changed the country for good.
He lowered his head onto he block and seemed to resign to the sort of ease only to be attributed to the foolish.
The chaplain took the word for William had not prayed, and the executioner took the axe out of the small space between the wooden planks on the scaffolding. The herald began to speak to the crowd, speaking of William’s misdeeds and the trial that preceded, but Katherine sat forward in her throne to watch the minute expressions on the traitor’s face.
There were none. Katherine looked in vain, watching the closed eyes and neutral expression, until the executioner took his stand, and as the prayer intensified, the herald held his breath, and the axe swung up to create enough momentum, suddenly his eyes open.
He looked at her. There was no madness anymore, no evil or manipulation. It was William. The same William she had met at her coronation, the William that had eased her mind about the alliance with Henri, the William that had stood up for her to keep her favourites. Katherine grimaced at the state of him. She had not sat in during the interrogation. His guilt was implicated by her advisers.
Had she been played?
The axe came down with vicious speed and severed his head at once. The crowd cheered, roaring at the gruesome deed and the head that rolled off of the block, long hairs dangling down and sticking to the blood that coated every surface of the head.
Whether the executioner picked it up, what happened to it otherwise, who took his earrings, Katherine did not know. She was looking down.
‘Well,’ Henri said, next to her, ‘I was hoping for a scream or something.’
Katherine took it as a great excuse not to look on anymore, instead looking at Henri. ‘I’m afraid I suddenly feel quite sick.’
He chuckled. ‘Women,’ he said. ‘Can’t stand a bit of blood and gore…’