Prince of Thorns

39

“He’s not dead yet?” A woman’s voice, Teuton accent with a creak of age in it.

“No.” A younger woman, familiar, also Teuton.

“It’s not natural to linger so long,” the older woman said. “And so white. He looks dead to me.”

“There was a lot of blood. I didn’t know men had so much blood in them.”

Katherine! Her face came to me in my darkness. Green eyes, and the sculpted angles of her cheekbones.

“White and cold,” she said, her fingers on my wrist. “But there’s mist on the mirror when I hold it to his lips.”

“Put a pillow over his face and be done with it, I say.” I imagined my hands around the crone’s neck. That brought a hint of warmth.

“I did want to see him die,” Katherine said. “After what he did to Galen. I would have watched him die on the steps of the throne, with all that blood running down, one step after the next, and been glad.”

“The King should have slit his throat. Finished the job there and then.” The old woman again. She had a servant’s tone about her. Voicing her opinion in the security of a private place, opinions held back too long and grown bitter in the silence.

“It’s a cruel man who will take a knife to his only son, Hanna.”

“Not his only son. Sareth carries your nephew. The child will be born to his due inheritance now.”

“Will they keep him here, do you think?” Katherine said. “Will they lay him in his mother’s casket, beside his brother?”

“Lay the whelps with the bitch and seal the room, I say.”

“Hanna!” I heard Katherine move away from me.

They’d taken me to my mother’s tomb, a small chamber in the vaults. The last time I’d visited the dust had lain thick, unmarked by footprints.

“She was a queen, Hanna,” Katherine said. I heard her brush at something. “You can see the strength in her.”

Mother’s likeness had been carved into her coffer’s marble lid, as if she lay there at rest, her hands together in devotion.

“Sareth is prettier,” Hanna said.

Katherine returned to my side. “Strength makes a queen.” I felt her fingers on my forehead.

Four years ago. Four years ago I’d touched that marble cheek, and vowed never to return. That was my last tear. I wondered if Katherine had touched her face, wondered if she’d stroked the same stone.

“Let me end this, my princess. It would be a kindness to the boy. They’ll lay him with his mother and the little prince.” Hanna honeyed her voice. She set her hand to my throat, fingers coarse like sharkskin.

“No.”

“You said yourself that you wanted to see him die,” Hanna said. She had strength in that old hand. She’d throttled a chicken or three in her time, had Hanna. Maybe a baby once or twice. The pressure built, slow but sure.

“On the steps I did, while his blood was hot,” Katherine said. “But I’ve watched him cling to life for so long, with such a slight hold, it’s become a habit. Let him fall when he’s ready. It’s not a wound that can be survived. Let him choose his own time.”

The pressure built a little more.

“Hanna!”

The hand withdrew.