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in the impetus of its fire

Hennike is her father’s first child. She’s a girl and thus a disappointment, unfit to inherit. Should her father die without male issue, the throne will go to her cousin in the west, though which cousin, it seems, changes from season to season.

Her mother has three more children, all girls, before she succumbs to illness. No one will say so, but the whole court heaves a breath of relief at the queen’s passing - the king will be free to remarry now, to someone young and fertile, who will fulfill her duty. This is the fate that awaits a woman who cannot give her husband strong sons, Hennike realizes; a cold burial, shrouded in jewels, with no tears shed.

Her father remarries, a year later, after the mourning period has passed. His new bride’s barely twice Hennike’s age, as poised and beautiful as a nymph in a painting. She spits out two daughters, to the court’s concerned murmurings, before she has a son.

Twelve years old and newly girdled, Hennike’s old enough to watch her brother’s birth. A cloth and the figures of the physicians block what’s happening between the queen’s legs from view, but her step-mother’s face is clearly visible, pale and clammy and ravaged by pain. The screams will echo in Hennike’s ears for days afterwards.

She’s there too, when her step-mother bleeds through her bed-linens in the night, the youngest in a gaggle of terrified ladies-in-waiting.

The funeral is a lavish affair. A statue is commissioned in the dead queen’s honor and the whole court weeps. If Hennike cries, hers are tears of rage, rather than sorrow - the difference between being a bad wife and a good one, she learns that day, is only in how sincerely your husband mourns you when he outlives you.

When Hennike turns fifteen, the men in the court start watching her. She’s too young to be bedded yet, her hips still narrow with the vestiges of childhood, but her face promises beauty and, more to the point, she’s a princess. She looks at the men around her, jockeying for her father’s approval, and dismisses every single one of them.

She will marry above her station, or she will marry not at all.

She considers her options, carefully. The King of Patras is a widower, but he is old, much older than her, and with two male children already grown - a marriage to him would not last her long and she’d have no powerful sons to protect her once she’s alone. His heir, Torgeir, is her age, or thereabouts, but he is betrothed, already, to a daughter of the empire. Patras shares a border with Vask and not with Kempt, so a Vaskian-born queen is more valuable to them then Hennike could ever hope to be.

Vask is matrilineal and has no use for foreign brides.

She’d rather not go across the Ellosean sea, to lands she does not know, or travel to the frozen north, where the terrain is harsh and cruel.

The young, gallant king of Akielos, Theomedes, tempts her. She’s seen him, once, when he’d been a prince still, come to her father’s palace to discuss alliances; he’d been handsome, tall and proud with black eyes and shining curls and she’d had to suppress a pulse of desire low in her belly. He’s engaged to be married, like Torgeir is, and just as likely to throw his intended aside for Hennike. But Egeria, the gossips whisper, is frail and sickly. She might not last long as queen, might not even live to see her wedding-day.

She considers it, briefly, but waiting Egeria out is a long, risky game. Theomedes already has a mistress he dotes on, one who’s proven herself by giving him a son. He might never remarry, if Egeria can manage a true-born heir before she breathes her last, and then Hennike will have wasted some of her child-bearing years with nothing to show for it.

So she turns her gaze to Vere.

Aleron, the crown prince of Vere, is younger than her. Not by much, there’s maybe a year between them, but man care for such things and beauty alone might not be enough to remedy this shortcoming.

But if beauty is compounded by cleverness - well, who’s to say what might happen.

She guards her maiden-head well, because she knows that Veretians value such things in a woman. As she grows, the men of her father’s court start attempting to entice her into a tumble - just the touch of hand and mouth, they whisper to her, entreating, in dark corners, nothing that could ruin her, but she turns down each one of them. Turns down the women, too, though there’s fewer of them approaching her. Eventually, she develops something of a relationship for it, the untouchable golden princess, the beauty everyone covets and none can touch. Good. It will play in her favor, for no man has ever been able to resist wanting to conquer that which has never been soiled.

She studies the language of Vere, carefully, and once she’s mastered it she moves on to their history, their myths and legends and terrain. She becomes accomplished in singing and dancing and recitation.

She could talk in circles around each man in her father’s court, if she wanted to, but she holds her tongue and does not show her teeth. No man wants a wife that is cleverer than him. The art of womanhood, she knows, is to let them all think themselves better than her, and yet ensure they walk away from each conversation sharing her convictions, firmly believing they were the ones who came up with them in the first place.

When prince Aleron comes to her father’s palace, she’s ready. She flatters him, subtly, speaks Veretian to him and lets herself trip over the words, lets some of her native accent bleed through, so that he can correct her, gently, and feel strong, and feel clever, and feel fond.

He may have come to discuss trade agreements, but he has eyes only for her by the end of his visit.

They are married within the year. For the wedding ceremony, she wears the silk her homeland is famed for, died a deep, dark purple like expensive wine, the most precious of dyes, befitting a future queen. Her hair is long and golden and smooth, loose down her back, woven through with seed pearls and amethysts. She is, her sisters and ladies assure her, the most splendid of brides.

Yet, when she looks at herself in the mirror, it is only her eyes she sees, pale and cold like a winter morning.

She smiles, at the banquet, and laughs and dances. She looks at Aleron, always, whatever it is she’s doing, letting her smile turn intimate and warm, just for him, the very picture of an ecstatic new wife, besotted with her husband. She goes to him, before he’s too deep in his cups. She stands in front of him for a moment, looking at him through half-lowered lashes, as though she’s bashful, as though she’s uncertain of her own desires, before she holds out her hands for him to take.

Afterwards, she will remember little of the consummation. She’s drunk as much as she dared, beforehand, so that her body is loose and pliant. The bed is shrouded in gauzy curtains, the bedding heavy and thick where it covers them to their waists, so that she’s barely aware of the councilmen sitting around them in a circle, as Aleron moves over and into her, her shift pushed up so that it’s tangled at her breasts, her legs wrapped around his hips.

It is over quickly. She makes sure to cast Aleron a last, lingering look, as she’s ushered from the chamber so that the council can inspect the bedding and see the spend and blood mingled there, proof of her husband’s virility and her virginity. He smiles at her, satisfied, as though he really believes the fumbling attentions of a man who’s never had a woman in his bed have somehow afforded her a revelation.

He visits her chambers often, after their marriage. It is not long before she’s swelling with their first child, the eyes of the court heavy and expectant upon her as she walks slowly through the hallways, her guards and ladies a cluster around her, a fine-boned hand resting on her rounded stomach.

None watch her as closely, or as expectantly, as her husband’s brother. He is young, much younger than her or Aleron, his beard still patchy on his chin and the roundness of childhood still in his cheeks.

Hennike made an effort to befriend him, when she’d first come to Vere. He’d been stiff and awkward, but she’d thought little of it - his and Aleron’s mother had died when they’d still been children and he’d not had any sisters or female cousins (their line, Aleron tells her, once, delighted with the news of her pregnancy, did not throw girls at all), no women it would’ve been appropriate for him to be close, growing up. But the months passed and he’s not warmed up to her.

She puts the matter far from her mind, though his gaze on her makes her uneasy, choosing instead to focus on more pressing concerns. The birth, the moment she’s dreaded since she was a child at her step-mother’s bedside, goes smoothly.

Her son is born quickly. He’s healthy and bright-eyed and she breathes easy, looking at him, because she knows her place in this court is secure as long as he lives.

It is twelve years before she has another child.

She’s always been strong and lively, but Auguste’s birth took something from her, even though she’d not noticed at the time. She tires easily, after, falls ill often. She’s pregnant six times in the years between her two sons and carries no pregnancy to term, each miscarriage another failure that earns her the displeasure of her husband and the court.

A few weeks after Auguste’s eleventh birthday, she receives news from Kempt that her father has died. A fever, like the one that claimed her mother.

Her husband is unsure about letting her go, fragile and sickly as she is, but she presses him. She flatters and cajoles and sulks, calls upon all the charms and skills a woman must learn if she is to make her way in a man’s world, until he relents.

It is good, to see her siblings again, and the court of her youth, for all that the occasion is not a joyous one. The court weeps for her father as it never did for her mother. There are songs and plays commissioned in his memory, games of skill are held at his funeral, his portrait hung up in the long gallery of her ancestors, young and proud and red-bearded, mounted on horseback with a sword in his hand and a crown on his brow.

It is a little thing, to press her husband into staying for longer than the funeral’s week - Vere and Kempt may share a border, but it’s a long journey, still, between the two capitals, and it makes little sense to brave it only to stay for so short a time. She feels herself growing stronger, the longer they spend in Kempt, her breath and health returning as she takes to walking the gardens with her sisters, then the trails just a little ways off from the palace; thin winding paths through the woods, up among the jagged rocks of the mountains that encircle her homeland like a crown.

Her newfound health pleases her husband. He runs his hands over the golden tumble of her curls, over her pink cheeks, whispering in her ear, as he claims his marital rights, “You’ve been returned to yourself, my heart.”

As their visit to Kempt winds to a close, she notices that her cycles have not come upon her as they do each month. She is not surprised.

One of her sisters, the oldest among her step-mother’s children, catches her retching after breakfast, one morning, and presses her hand, something tight and urgent in her gaze. “You cannot mean to return to Vere,” she says.

Hennike shrugs. “I am queen there. I do not have a choice.”

“Have you not noticed how much better you’ve been since you came to stay here?” she demands. “Do you know what that means?”

“Besides that someone in Arles is poisoning me?” asks Hennike. And, when her sister gapes at her, “Come now, you can’t think I didn’t notice. I’ve more sense than that.”

“It’ll kill you!”

Hennike only shrugs again. “Eventually, yes. If I allow it to go on.”

“It’ll kill the babe in your belly,” her sister presses.

“No,” Hennike says, firm. “It won’t.”

She does not return to Arles at all. She presses her husband’s hand to her belly, on the ship and murmurs vague nothings about how much she loved the view of the mountains in Acquitart, when Aleron took her there as they, newly wed, toured his kingdom. About how she has been dreaming of it, each and every night.

He smiles at her, enchanted with her reconquered beauty, and offers her the keep there for her confinement.

“What a wonderful idea”, she thrills, beaming vapidly at him.

Her second son is born eight months later. He’s a healthy, round-cheeked boy and he squeals and twists when he’s placed into her arms, nosing at her breasts in the hungry way of newborn children.

She allows herself to hold him, for just a moment, before she’s pulled back into her role as queen, back to the court, where they’ll whisper platitudes at her with honeyed smiles, congratulating her on a duty well-accomplished. Where someone is weaving deceit in the shadow, and tipping poison into her cup.

She kisses her son’s fine, matted hair, something like love kindling in her chest at the tiny, mewling sounds he makes.

She hopes he will not be forced to grow up without a mother.

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