In Great Waters (39 page)

“I answer to no one,” Henry said. If she came close enough, it would come to bloodlust between them. He could fight. And it would be good to grapple her, force her down and tear the certainty out of her; that measured voice could scream for mercy, he was sure of it, and those pale little arms would feel good gripped in his fists. Wasn’t this what it all came down to, a cry of claim against claim?
Mine
, her hand was saying. Why else would she so clearly be gasping to plunge in the knife?

“Answer me about the death of Erzebet, or I shall begin by unmanning you.” Her lips dragged over the last words, as if she was unused to saying them, but Henry saw the angle of the blade.

Henry was back where he was born, chest convulsed with dread, and only fury to keep it at bay. So he concentrated on her stupidity until its magnitude made him want to slap her; she was not even asking the right questions. “I know nothing about the death of your Erzebet,” he said.

“Answer me,” she said. Her hand lowered the knife a little, as if testing its edge against the air.

“What do you want of me? She died of a fever. I did not give it to her.” John had told him this, he remembered; he had thought it good news, one less obstacle to the throne. Fevers meant burning skin, hot and painful; it had given him a moment of angry gladness. That moment seemed a long time ago now. Henry clenched his teeth together, to keep from blurting out the insults that crowded inside him. If he berated her for asking the wrong questions, he might point her to the right ones.

Did you kill her?
The question came in his mother tongue, and it shook Henry badly. The urge possessed him to grab her face, press his hand hard over that neat little mouth and silence this sea-water call, but he could not reach her.

Henry inhaled, finding himself oddly breathless. He could carry air in his lungs for a quarter hour, but this girl, this fragile ugly girl, was making him gasp as if he had been fighting. She would answer for it later, he told himself; it was a reassuring thought.

I did not
, he said.
She is a stranger
. You could lie in the deepsman’s language, but it was difficult to equivocate with so simple a vocabulary. In the sea you needed only statements and challenges:
The prey is there. Do not trifle with me. I want that
.

The girl turned the knife in her fingers. “Tell me what you know of her,” she said.

Henry shook his head. “You are foolish, Princess, and you ask me things I cannot answer. I know nothing of this Erzebet of yours. I heard she died of a fever, and I was happy to hear it because it meant one less prince between me and my goal. Do you think I should weep for her?”

“Do not lie to me.” The girl’s voice was quiet, but as she stared at him, she bared her teeth suddenly and the knife went back in her grip. “Do not lie to me,
do not lie to me!”

Henry felt an angry pulse of pleasure at the distress in her voice. “A fever took the tyrant bitch before she could burn me,” he said. “I
saw what she did to my brother and I know what she would have made of me.”

The girl was blinking now, her voice a hiss. “Do not tell me he was your brother,” she said. “I have been in the sea, and I do not believe you.”

So she was not sentimental. Good. “He might have been,” Henry said, telling the truth. It was an idea he had not told to John, even; he could not tell his laughing friend so weak-minded a thought. “My mother must have liked to fuck landsmen, after all, just like yours. I saw him burn.”

The girl stopped for a moment, stood over him. “My mother did not fuck landsmen,” she said. Her voice caught over the word, as if she were unused to coarse language, and Henry gritted his teeth in satisfaction. “My mother was a prince, not an animal. My mother married an imbecile who cannot go into the water in case he fucks a deepswoman. Do not talk to me of fucking or I will tell you what imbeciles do.”

“I thought you meant to begin by unmanning me,” Henry said. “If you wish to begin by talking to me, that is a lesser threat.” He had not really meant that Erzebet fucked landsmen; if he thought about it, this girl must have been the child of a half-caste, her parents the children of half-castes, back and back, generations of hobbling spiders like her. She had understood what he meant, which was odd in itself; John or Allard would have frowned, made him explain. But the word
animal
was a strange one on his ears, one he had never thought of. Animals were creatures you hunted, spitted on spears or choked with your bare hands. They were prey. Out of the water, he knew no animals that could threaten him like the creatures of the water: no sharks, no porpoises, no poison fish. Only landsmen, with their swords and their numbers and their incomprehensible rules. He had two languages, and now he was trapped, he was, for the first time in his life, speaking to a person who understood both of them.

There was silence as the girl stared at him. Then, knife still in hand, she dropped to the floor, letting go of her crutch and collapsing into a sitting posture with a suddenness that must have been painful. He saw her face flinch for just a second, but she was still out of his
reach and he couldn’t get to her. She sat opposite him, a wasteland of skirts all around her, and fingered the blade.

“What would you do,” she said, “if I gave you this knife and told you to take your choice between self-murder and the pyre?”

Henry looked back at her. “I would take it and wait until someone came close enough to fight,” he said.

Her voice was almost interested. “Do you really think there can be an escape for you?”

“I shall not give up my will.”

She nodded, more to herself than to him. “A king does not speak so bluntly, Master Deepsman.”

Henry shrugged. “If I gained the throne, I would have diplomats to speak for me.”

“Is your name truly Henry?”

He hesitated. John must have made a mistake, let it slip, as he had told it to no one. John needed a sharp warning when he next appeared. But it could betray nothing, and it was strange, somehow compelling, to hear this girl speak his name. “In their language,” he said. “Back in the sea, it was something else.”

“What was it?” Her black eyes looked up at him, attentive.

Whistle
, he said. It was like speaking a dream, some lost childhood memory that had sunk and resurfaced, changed with the salt water. “But it has been a long time since anyone has called me that.”

Whistle
, the girl said. She sighed. “We have only one name, here on the land. But the deepsmen have names, out in the bay. You cannot explain them to a landsman.”

Henry shook his head. “We are not alike, you and I.”

“No indeed.” Her eyes were on him still. “You have seen the depths. The great waters out beyond the bay.”

He shook his head again. “You do not track them by sight. Everything is blue.”

“That I could have known,” she said. “I do know that.”

Henry braced himself. “Why are you talking to me? Where are your threats? You have asked me only one question, and that one was useless.”

She shrugged. “I am poor in kinsmen, Master Deepsman.
Whistle
. Do you truly know nothing of Erzebet?”

I don’t know
, Henry said. “I only heard she died of a fever.”

The girl curled her legs under herself. Her face was glowing in the indoor shade now, a bright, cold blue. It was a sight he had not seen for so long, a colour of home. On that enemy girl, still, there was something beautiful about it. “She was poisoned,” she said. “Someone put poison in her bath and it stripped the skin from her.” He could hear her take a breath, another one, panting like a landsman.

Henry frowned. Had Claybrook not known of this? He had told Henry she died of a fever, and Henry had believed him. Or had he known, what then? Would Claybrook have knocked out the tyrant that stood between him and victory? If he had done so, why hadn’t he raised an army as soon as she was dead? It was a sudden gulf of ignorance, and at its appearance, he felt the fear coming back. He was lost in weeds, sounds bouncing back and no clear echo to guide him.

He raised the bottle, turned it over in his hands. Perhaps some wine would be good for him.

“I saw my mother die,” the girl said, and Henry realised that it was her own mother she was talking about when she spoke of Erzebet. He had known it, he could have told it, but the word
mother
meant little to him. Erzebet was a tyrant, a bare-toothed killer of his kind, and this girl was something else. The fact that she would be upset at the loss of Erzebet was not something he had considered. It wasn’t the words she used so much as the fact that she said them at all. She did not seem talkative. Erzebet’s death must have meant something to her, for her to speak of it for no purpose, only to hear herself say the words.

“If you call her a tyrant bitch again,” Anne said, “I will cut you.”

“People die,” Henry said. He had seen plenty of people die in the sea. It had not made them his friends. But the girl had a knife, and he did not say that.

The boy was an animal, Anne told herself. No, he was not an animal. He called her mother a tyrant bitch, he spoke of fucking as if it mattered
not at all, as if nothing, none of the things that clasped and crushed her, could touch him at all. He was appalling, but he talked to her, he had seen the sea, he was probably telling the truth when he said he had no hand in Erzebet’s death. He just didn’t care about it all.

What would it be like, to be so unburdened? He had no courts to please, no country to care for, no deepsmen to manage with nothing but quick hands and shut eyes. Men did not bear down on his body; he kept his own space, pretended nothing, no concern he did not feel, no loyalties he did not owe. Even with a gyve on his wrist, he spoke his mind.

She had wanted to cut him, for being so unconcerned with all that mattered to her, for being so distant, so far from home, so isolated. But he was not Philip, she told herself, he was not a deepsman from the bay.

“Do you mean to tell me who hid you all these years?” she asked him. Somebody must have. He cared nothing for her family, but he must have one of his own.

Henry looked at her. “Do you wish the truth?”

“I do.”

He cocked his head. “My—father will notice I am gone, and he will seek for me. If he cannot save me, I may name him to save myself. But I will wait until you push me to that point.”

Anne swallowed. She had tried, she had tried hard to be good all those years. This casual casting-off of his family should have been horrifying. But at the same time, some part of her ran out to meet it, like a figure glimpsed in the distance. The freedom of disloyalty, the safety of solitude. When duties penned you in on all sides, ingratitude could save your life.

“Do you think you could withstand it if I had you put to the question?” she said. If he could think only of himself, so could she. If he was free to owe nothing to anyone, it freed her to owe nothing to him. He did not ask to be a stone around her neck. Something was running through her at the boy’s self-centredness, something she did not expect: an answering pulse of relief.

Henry seemed to consider the question seriously. “I think so,” he said. “Could you withstand it?”

Anne shivered against her will. “If it were easy to withstand, it would not be useful,” she said. “But it would not be me suffering, it would be you.”

“True.” Henry did not smile, did not make it a joke. He simply conceded the point.

“If your father saves you, it will be the worse for me,” Anne said. “Is he your real father?”

“I doubt it,” Henry said. “And perhaps it would be the worse. But if you mean to kill me now, you will have to come close to me to do it. And if you meant to burn me, I believe you would not have hesitated. It is not a thing one can do if one wavers.”

“If one does it with one’s own hands,” Anne said slowly. “But to give an order and have you burned where I cannot see you would not be so difficult.”

He seemed to have no answer to that. Instead he grimaced, and pulled the top off his bottle of wine. It sat in his hand, dark and clean.

“Do you mean to drink that?” Anne asked suddenly.

Henry frowned at her. “Why not? It can hardly matter if I am drunk here.”

People drank wine without checking it all the time, of course. Most people did not have to fear poison. “Do you know who brought it to you?”

Henry shrugged. “The man called John. He said it was a gift.”

Anne nodded. “From his father. Most Christian of him.” The scent of alcohol rose from the bottle, heavy and choking.

A Christian gesture. But Claybrook was not a Christian man.

An English bastard, full-grown, was a serious threat to the throne. People might accept a princess’s marriage to a foreign prince, but an English, clean-blooded, rational bastard to set on the throne—if he could hold it for a few years, he could hold it for ever. Every royal house in Europe would be courting his alliance. And bastard though he was, he was English. Many people would rather have a new English master than an old French one.

Perhaps Claybrook was being wise, playing both ends of the game. Waiting. Making no move on the outcome, sitting on the edge
of a battlefield until he saw which side was carrying the day. A gift of wine, a simple enough gesture. And yet …