He nodded. “But I’ll never forget her. My father admired her a great deal. Said he’d never seen a more able woman than her. She had a lot of power here at one time. She had the ear of the queen and, through her, the king.”
“It is hard to imagine that now.”
“Things shifted at a certain point. It seemed like everything changed at once. That happens at court, people gaining power and losing it. Things have changed much since your husband took the throne, too.”
His tone suggested that he did not think it was for the better.
I gestured toward the birds in the mews. “Why do you keep them this way, chained up and with hoods over their heads?”
“That’s how they’re trained to hunt, to work with a human hunter.”
“Brune, Mathena’s falcon, always flew free, with us.”
“I know. The queen gave Brune to Mathena, as a gift. Brune was trained in the same manner as the other birds. My father trained her, the same way I train these birds now. They’re ferocious hunters. It’s not in their nature to serve men.”
“I did not know that,” I said. “About Brune, that she’s so old.”
“I’m happy she’s been able to survive these many years. It’s not usual, but then she has a very unusual mistress.”
“Indeed she does.”
He watched me then, making no attempt to fill the space between us. A multitude of questions battered at me about Mathena’s past.
Instead I repeated awkwardly, “I would like to go out with the hawks one day. Perhaps you might accompany the princess and me on horseback. I understand she is partial to horses.”
“I’m at your service,” he said. “The king now has little use for me, though I keep the finest hawks any king could want. My name is Gilles.”
“I will call for you.”
Just then the sky opened and rain began pouring over the earth. I looked up, letting the rain stream down over my skin and dress.
I had the odd feeling that Mathena herself had caused it, angry at me for trying to uncover her secrets.
I shook the thought away, and went running for shelter from the wet afternoon.
12
It rained nearly every day after that, but I didn’t mind, and sometimes preferred this wet world around me. Either way, I loved that unobstructed, treeless sky. I spent afternoons luring Snow White away from her studies and riding through the sodden countryside with her. There were whole swaths of the kingdom I’d never seen to the north of the palace, away from the forest where I’d grown up. The Dark Forest, as people called it in whispers, lay to the south. I came to learn that people not only spoke about the bandits and witches who lived in the forest, but about enchanted swans, mythical centaurs, and fire-breathing dragons. Sometimes, just for fun, I liked to mention my dragon friends and make my ladies shriek with horror.
It was wonderful, riding through the meadows and farmland with Snow White next to me, and the guards following. It helped satisfy my craving for the woods, and made it easier for me to adjust to life at court, with all its formalities. I kept my hair loose and flying in the wind, creating a golden ribbon behind us. On occasion, when I summoned him, the falconer Gilles would join us with one or two of his hawks. His quiet, honest presence was calming, and I came to count on it. I loved looking over and seeing Snow White smiling, leaning into her horse, her hands stroking its sleek neck, her hair streaming out behind her. Above us, the birds would glide and dip and cry out, and I’d spur my horse to go faster, to try to keep up. To fly. Lush green rolled out on all sides of us, and we rode through villages and past sprawling farms and peasant cottages with gardens in front of them.
It was on those rides that I first noticed the failing crops that plagued the kingdom. Though it was nearing harvest time, we passed wheat fields with dirty brown stalks, sticking out from pools of mud. Fields of scraggly, half-dead barley, gardens that were decimated or rotted over.
“Do you see that?” I said to Snow White and Gilles, when they slowed down at my command and pulled up their horses beside mine.
“It’s all the rain,” Gilles said.
“What is?” Snow White asked.
“The crops,” I said. “There’s no wheat.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, looking around.
“The crops are failing. These people can’t make bread, if there’s no wheat. See how the wheat is brown instead of gold? That field should be full of golden wheat, and men harvesting it.”
“Will you show me?” she said. “I want to see.”
The three of us dismounted, and walked across the wet grass. The field in front of us was empty. A few cows grazed on the grass nearby.
I bent down and pulled up a piece of wet, moldy wheat plant. Where there should have been a bright head of grain sparking from the top, there was nothing. Just a rotten stem.
“Do you know what wheat should look like?” I asked, handing the stalk to her.
Again she made that worried face, and I realized she did not. She was a child of book learning, in the palace of a king obsessed with art and words.
“There should be grain here, all along the top. It should be alive, vibrant.”
She stared at it intently, rubbing it through her fingers.
I looked up at Gilles, who was watching me curiously.
Snow White scrunched up her serious face. “Can we do anything for them? Can we make the wheat grow again?”
I thought of all those years of gardening, and working with the earth. All those women whose hunger I felt vibrating through my locks. “We can’t make it stop raining,” I said, “but I think we might do something.”
“Really?” Her face lit up as she turned to me, clutching the plant in her fist.
“Perhaps you can help me gather herbs from the palace garden. We can make a mixture of them that might help these crops, that might help the wheat grow better next year.”
“That is a good idea,” Gilles said. “A generous one.” He caught my eye and I looked down, embarrassed but pleased by his admiration.
Snow White nodded vigorously. “I want to do that,” she said.
“Then that is what we’ll do.”
Over the next days, as Snow White and I—and other ladies of the court we gathered to help us—collected herbs from the garden, the castle was also beginning to prepare for the greatest event of the entire year, the harvest ball. It was the same ball I’d wanted to attend years before, the night Mathena locked me in the tower. All across the kingdom the richest subjects planned which of their daughters could afford to go and made clever uses of fabric to create suitable dresses for them, in hopes of attracting a nobleman for a son-in-law. At court, every servant was tasked with some type of elaborate preparation and the kitchen was busy for days as cooks created herb-scented breads, pastel-colored pastries, sugared-flower sculptures, and any number of other decadent treats.
Father Martin warned the court at Mass about excess and overindulgence, but could not dampen enthusiasm for a ball that everyone loved, and had loved, for centuries.
At Josef’s urging, I had seamstresses working night and day on a dress that would be more dazzling than anything anyone had ever seen before. Ten ladies sewed gems onto silk, so that when I moved the dress would gleam like the moon.
“Soon you won’t fit into these gowns anymore, will you, Your Highness?” the seamstresses said. “We’ll have to make you a whole set of new ones.” And they clucked over my flat belly, managing to touch a few stray strands of my swept-up hair, enough that I could feel their longing for an infant prince.
