The night air was cold and damp, and the sucking sound the mud made when the horses tried to relieved their hooves of it was beginning to drive Katherine crazy. Henry and her were dressed in armour — cheap, thin, decorated with the insignia of their houses — which clanked with every scant movement.
A cannonball was fired with such an enormous boom that while they were hardly close to the spectacle unravelling below them, down in the large empty plains, they uselessly covered their ears by holding the sides of their helmets.
‘Fuck,’ Henry murmured beneath his breath.
Katherine tipped her visor up. ‘Is that the last one of the night?’ she asked, her furrowed brows and pained expression barely visible in the moon’s milky light.
‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘We’re reenacting the battle of Le Roumont.’
It was not Katherine’s idea of an evening well-spent, but this was Prince Henry: rowdy, impulsive, giddy Prince Henry. Soon to be the immature young King Henry. And much to the chagrin of his favourites, Katherine and Henry had started to become fond of one another, even if it was in the way that a child was fond of their newest trinket.
Katherine looked into the burgeoning pile of people hacking at each other with blunt swords, axes and shooting false bullets and arrows at each other. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I mean, roughly. I don’t think there was such use of gunpowder two-hundred years ago, was there? Not even in the civilised state of Massouron?’
‘It wouldn’t look impressive to the modern eye otherwise,’ Henry protested. ‘Wouldn’t sound nearly as impressive either.’
‘Suppose so,’ was all Katherine said.
Henry reluctantly put his visor back down and brought his horse back to a slow trot, which Katherine followed. There was a fog of gunpowder that started to rise from the valley that they rode into. Their armours clanked awkwardly as the horses jostled the pieces against each other by the simple movement of their walking, mixing with the sound of guns, metal against metal, and the groans and pants of exertion.
Katherine coughed when the smoke came into her helmet, and as she beat her forehead against the shoddily made thing, she decided to take it off. Their armours had some differences, and both of theirs were different than those actually reenacting the battle: Henry made quick work of the possibility that either one of them might be taken for a participant lest royal blood were spilled.
The biggest difference between their armour was the fact that, despite the elegantly curved breastplate utterly unsuitable for battle and the helmet, Katherine was wearing barely any of it. She wore only a dress beneath it — a simple kirtle inspired by the early kingdom — no gambeson, no mail. After even the few minutes it took them to reach the valley, she was already soaked through from the steady rain.
Why had she even come? She could not keep the question out of her own mind, and yet the answer was so juvenile. If she had not come, he would have asked Diane or one of his other girls. Now she had the pleasure that, while she was the one being rained on at a faux-battleground, wearing faux-armour, at least it was clear to all involved that she, and not that Massouric heiress, was to be his wife.
Henry himself was already all but lost on the battlefield, high-fiving his friends that were to play generals, and calling over his shoulder for Katherine to catch up. ‘Your boy is here!’ he hollered through the shots and grunting.
She really did find it gruesome even if barely anyone seemed to be hurt. The force they used hacking into each other’s metal skin, the intensity of the acted screams, the horses in genuine panic. Henry’s friends had all gathered near one of the camps, where many of the women of court were also, dressed as nuns to aid in the care for the wounded knights and soldiers.
The nuns’ habits were shoddy but accurate enough for Katherine to find them unnerving. Seeing the libertine ladies of Henry’s favour dressed as women of the cloth brought her a certain type of discomfort she was not anticipating.
‘What boy?’ she asked, her helmet pressed against her side with her arm.
Henry turned and pointed to a soldier on foot who stood next to him on his other side. ‘Walter.’
On Walter’s other side was Charlie, also on horseback. Charlie — Charles d’Archambeau, who took the androgynous name of Charlie within Souchon Palace walls — was a handsome young man, a year or so below Henry himself, a talented jockey, and had such a rare aspect of femininity to him that anyone in his orbit was either enthralled or disgusted by this bent expectation of masculinity. Both Katherine and Henry were the former.
Though less feminine and decidedly less noble, Walter could have easily been mistaken for Charlie’s brother. They were around the same age, and both were blond and more boyish than mannish. Walter had the added charm of his humble origins, beginning his voyage south as Lord William’s servant. Now he too had the honourable position of royal bedwarmer — an honour usually only bestowed upon nobility. It was turning out indeed that the promise of Katherine’s reign, to build bridges, was taking shape.
‘Walt,’ she said sharply, and pointed at her own jaw. ‘Did someone hurt you?’
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The boy wiped away the dirt from his jaw and indeed noticed the blood on his hand. ‘Doesn’t hurt.’
Katherine swung herself off of the horse and grinned as she tossed aside her helmet to the camp. She was reminded to the disappointment of Henry de Vega’s absence when Prince Henry called Walter her boy. By all accounts, it was not this country youth, but the honourable knight who could have been called this, though he was far more man than boy despite their shared age. He was resting; there was a joust later that week. Given that Katherine always bet on Henry, she did not wish to disrupt his schedule in case that would tip the scale to his loss, but nonetheless, it made the fortnight leading up to any of his championships grimmer than they otherwise would have been.
‘You knew he’d be there?’ Katherine asked Henry, who was already chatting with Charlie in the time it took Katherine to get down.
He looked up with an air of amusement. ‘Walter? Well, I asked him, and he said yes,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that right, boy?’
Walter blinked his pond-water blue eyes. ‘Yes, my lord.’
Katherine crossed her arms. ‘He’s hardly armed and he’s wounded.’
Henry pushed against Charlie, who was wearing leather armour instead of the plate of his liege, and then playfully knocked against his head, which was uncovered as well. ‘Nobody but us is armed,’ he said. ‘Listen. Kathy. We’re filthy rich on this side of the channel, sure, but we’re not stupid. Mom wouldn’t let me waste gold on making everyone plate armour. Besides, it’s fine. All these weapons are blunt, most are wooden.’
‘Stand back,’ she ordered Walter.
‘What the fuck?’ Henry asked.
Walter’s gaze shot hesitantly between the two, and he was unsure of whether he would remove himself from the battlefield. The only steps he took were on the place where he already stood, awkwardly shuffling neither here nor there.
‘Nobody’s ever gotten seriously hurt in these things,’ Henry clarified to Katherine. ‘Are you being serious?’
She felt her fascination for the prince slip. ‘I stand by what I order.’
Henry’s demeanour changed from amusement to irritation, and he tugged at his horse’s reins to turn himself away from her. Katherine by this point was fuming and had already unbuckled her breastplate to toss it aside as well.
‘Come with me,’ she told Walter, and now out of Henry’s sight, he followed her into the fringe of the camp.
‘Was it something I did?’ he asked, meekly holding his hands behind his back.
Katherine’s jaws were firmly clasped when she looked over her shoulder to face him. ‘What? No. I sometimes can’t stand this man, that’s the truth of it. Won’t listen to a word I say. Knows everything better than I do somehow, that bloody imbecile. Too busy burying his cock in everything that moves to actually give a damn.’
Wisely, Walter was quiet, generally his first response to any situation that called instead for a sympathetic word. He was handsome and kind, easy and cheap to please, and more often than not, magically in the right place at the right time, but to say he was any more intelligent than the average hound would be untrue.
The nuns poured them both spiced wine, warm in the rainy evening that was cooling quickly, and Katherine swore from within the yellow light of the half-open tent, Diane had poured her glass.
Before she could even take a sip, which she decided it was ill-advised to do if indeed her rival had poured it, a piercing screech filled the air. Katherine peered out of the tent as the fighting came to a slow halt, as if the realisation that there had been real hurt inflicted took a while to land.
The rain beat on, now to be heard clearly in the newfound silence, and as it trickled down to wilt all the faces of those present, the crowd parted, and at the end of the schism lay a young boy with a dagger embedded somewhere in his face, exactly where was hard for Katherine to see.
A few young men were hurried off of their horses by Henry, and were asked to carry up the injured lad to the castle. By the time they had configured a way to hold the young man, who was screaming again after a short period of worrying silence, and who was flailing his arms and legs in protest, Katherine had turned her head in disgust.
Instead, she faced Walter, who had not dared to come out.
‘I could have sworn that was Charles,’ she said solemnly. ‘There on the ground.’
Louise had heard the ruckus from her chamber but had not wished to interact with it until Theo stood before her door. The curtains were drawn in her cavernous bedroom, and she was sitting cross-legged on her bed as a maid brushed her wild dark brown curls that reached down to the small of her back, each curl on its own, after which she wrapped the perfect coil around her fingers to avoid destroying its beauty.
That being so, Louise could not turn to Theo as he entered, which meant that she did not see the horror on his face. He was wearing riding clothes, and his little hat lay limply on his wet hair.
‘Katherine is leaving,’ he barked at first. ‘And Charles may not survive.’
Louise raised her brows as Theo came into her line of sight. ‘So that’s what I heard? The death screech of my son’s swain?’
She was clearly disappointed. Louise had a strong distaste of her son’s wishes, his promiscuous nature, though she was acutely aware that these attributes had crept into his blood through her. In fact, it could have been precisely this confrontation with her own nature, wrapped up not in the attractive Amazonian form of the queen herself, but in the short, stout prince that was to rule during her lifetime. A trick mirror would replace her.
‘I believe so,’ Theo said, sitting down on the stool by the vanity like a young lady, his legs crossed. ‘And this has reached most everyone. In fact, I heard about it from Will Lennard — Katherine’s administrator, I’m unsure whether you’ll recall.’
‘Was he there?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Theo said. ‘He came to me because of an issue raised by his footman, who Katherine appears to be sharing a bed with, though after I raised that to Will, he retracted any suspicious statements… he was present when Charles was hurt.’
The maid finished up Louise’s hair and left, and Louise shuffled forward on her seat. ‘So? Theo, I certainly do not care to hear court gossip at this time of day. Whether Henry fucks Charles or the next jockey that he lets his eyes feast upon, whether a damned servant complains to a courtier — it matters not.’
‘Katherine is leaving,’ he said defensively. ‘Because of this. Not permanently, I’ve been told, though she is leaving nonetheless.’
Louise shrugged. ‘Scared of a little blood and gore, then? She’ll come running back if she thinks she can get any better, even if she’s doubting it now.’
Theo folded his hands together and smiled. ‘No. Rumours are doing the rounds that it was Norbury Castle court itself that means to withdraw — not Katherine personally. If anything, I believe the prospect of blood and gore interests her. Concerning as that may be.’
She huffed indignantly. ‘Let her go. In fact, when she arrives, have flowers waiting for her. Redo the castle garden. Spare no expense. If you must know, Theo, I believe that we should have the queen herself by our side — not her court. She is young now, but one day she will have had enough of her courtiers. I want to be there when this happens.’