The Kingdom of Little Wounds (9 page)

So the Princess is declared intact, a daughter rather than a wife. But there still remains the matter of the poison.

“We must open her belly,” Candenzius decides.

While Venslov helps push the girl’s legs back together, Dé finds a pair of scissors so that Candenzius can slit the nightdress where needed — shielding that pleat between her thighs from the other men’s gaze.

So they make their cuts into yellowed flesh and jellied veins, till they reach the Princess’s entrails. Venslov fetches basins to accommodate her organs and the seventeen separate courses of last night’s feast. Taking turns, the physicians bend to the yawning wound and sniff, trying to sort rich viands from rank poison.

As he dissects, Candenzius dictates observations, and Dé writes them down.
A sharp odor, a sweet odor, a lesion in the belly; watery intestinal matter, a leathery texture to the liver.

Dé imagines horrible, thrilling possibilities: mandrake, wolfsbane, death cap mushrooms, belladonna. When he was at his French university, he made a special study of toxicity. Paracelsus wrote that disease comes from poisons emitted by unfavorable stars, but there are just as many lethal substances here on earth as there are pricks of light in the heavens.

Light pours thick through the window, angling down to fill the cavity in the center of Sophia. No candles are necessary here. The Princess is a split fig, with the claws of a dead bird, eyes gone to white marbles. She is animal, vegetable, mineral, and she reeks of an army’s worth of injury.

“Shall you say it was murder?” old Venslov asks Candenzius, at last, as they run out of organs to unpack and have still failed to name a specific substance. “Shall you identify a cause?”

Candenzius draws a last breath, savoring the complicated odors around the corpse. Weighing the advantages of a spectrum of answers. Folding his sticky hands together.

“This is what I will tell the King,” he says: “Although the Princess died a virgin, her body has been violated. The man — or woman — who killed her is extremely cunning, as sophisticated in skill as in evil, for the means used is still indeterminate. We shall dedicate ourselves to breaking down the poison into its components. We must begin by a meticulous distillation of the fluids in her liver, which we will ask the King to save from burial.”

The three physicians nod solemnly, relieved to have found a direction. Dé admires Candenzius’s artful turn of a speech, no less than his mastery of anatomy. He does not speak this admiration aloud, lest Candenzius’s fall from favor — which seems inevitable, given his very particular views — come quickly, and Venslov resume the chief position. Fawning is an art even subtler than medicine.

“Well done, Doctor,” Venslov flatters first, and Dé is relieved at the chance to echo him. Candenzius smiles modestly, blinking those fine eyes, and thanks the other two for their assistance.

Then the three of them look at the brimming basins, asking themselves how to put the Princess together again for her funeral, or if they should even try.

L
YING almost weightless in the simple bed of her inner chamber, Queen Isabel mourns her daughter. The first child to live after a series of miscarriages, the child who saved her from a shameful divorce, after which she would have returned to France forever disgraced and known for her inability to breed. Sophia, whose name means “wisdom” and whose character was forever pleasing, until the foul
Morbus
Lunediernus
seized her and her siblings.

Princess (Duchess?) Sophia, twelve years old and now deceased.

Crown Prince Christian, eleven.

Princess Beatte, nearly ten.

Princess Hendrika, nearly nine.

Princess Amalia, seven.

Princess Margrethe (named after Christian’s ancient cousin, the Duchess of Marsvin), six years old.

Princess Gorma, at five years of age the likely last child of the Lunedies.

Another series of miscarriages followed Gorma’s birth, and Isabel is now thirty-nine, an age at which the womb turns rotten and bears bad fruit if any at all.

To distract herself from this grief and shame, Isabel remembers a journey she took as a child, before she’d even heard of this northern land and its capital city, when she was still young Isabelle des Rayaux, a daughter of the Loire Valley. As part of her education in the ways of the world, she traveled by barge to the palace of her extravagant Uncle Henri, Duke of Pau d’Impors, who was wealthier than any duke had the right to be and just a little bit (she heard her father say it) mad.

For pleasure, Uncle Henri had filled a pool at his summer castle with quicksilver. It was a beautiful, trembling thing, reflecting each face with a giddy accuracy, but at such an angle that one had to lean over farther and farther to see beyond one’s chin and nose, to get a glimpse of one’s own eyes. Visiting ladies used to incline so far — Isabel did this herself — that their scarlet lips very nearly touched the surface that quivered under their breath. It made their faces ever more beautiful, their minds ever more dreamy. It was the marvel of the Loire.

Until, that is, one dizzy baroness leaned so far that she tipped in and drowned. Her hat and hair tangled just under the fountain’s spray, her tawny dress floating on the surface.

The spell, then, was broken. Uncle Henri’s advisers (fearing war with the baroness’s husband) forced him to pull the plug. A gardener waded in knee-deep and dug blindly through until he found the drain. With a deep shiver, all that beauty began to seep away.

The child Isabelle watched as quicksilver slinked down the smooth rock walls; she listened to the drain as it slurped, guiding the precious mercury to the waters of the river. Saw the silver beads on the corpse of that silly baroness, glistening on her skin, puddling in the cups of her ears.

Isabel mourns now as she did then.

Exquisite memory, beauty lost.

Sophia.

Fear make the Earth’s worst odor, whether in bottom of a ship or some silvered palace room. The nursery smell sour and dark with sweat of one prince, five princess, all so afraid, though we wipe bodies with perfume and put them in new linen twice today all ready.

Six children cough like a family of dogs, but they sit in bed-thrones of fancier animal shapes, one yellow lion, five white swan. Every hair, every feather painted in, and each bed have a crown of crescent moon. Six moons under a ceiling of golden tree branch and leaves of colored glass. This be a poem-place for children, a set of extra chores for nurses. It be not easy to reach over wings to feed the Princess Gorma, but this is my task.

Countess Elinor have come for children’s supper, and she likes all order to be held. All faces to be clean, all spoons a-moving like hands that feed time to a clock. Gorma try to spit out gruel, I scrape back in her mouth. She be five year old all ready but some time act a baby. She know full well that every prince and princess must empty one bowl before sleep.

That new maid with the face of a rat pass me linens to dab the Princess’ face. Gorma’s fever gone high since Sophia died, and she whimper, though she know words well enough. She say them some times, like
Maman
and
thirsty
and
no.
And
Midi,
be cause that be my name.
Midi Midi Midi.

Another task is keep her quiet, so I put my finger to her mouth, hiss,
“Shhh, shh, sh,”
hope she stop her noise before the Countess hear.

Elinor sit now by Christian, the Crown Prince all most twelve. She feed him her self, for he favorite with her and she with him. He will be the King some day. He some time say he be much too old for feeding, but when
she
spoon the gruel, he relax. He is the most afraid just now, being all most so old as Sophia he think he must be next to die. Elinor murmur words to him, wave her sleeves, soothe his fears or try to. She act like a coquette who seek a husband, though she be married all ready to her wounded Count and also twelve years old times one-two-three.

Gorma moan. I take another cloth to wipe her mouth.

“I made that,” say the ratty maid.

My eyes narrow. Some nurses gossip, but I do not.

“That towel.” The maid point at my hand. She think I do n’t under stand. “I cut and hemmed and embroidered it. That particular carnation pattern is always mine. Until this week, I was one of the Queen’s needlewomen.”

This girl is like a reed that scream a note each time the wind pass by. My eyes so slitty now I hardly see her stupid face. Far behind it is the Countess’ black dress of grieving, and if this girl think it care to me that once she sew with a needle what now I fold up wet with Gorma spit, she be wrong as a frog in a cream pot.

When I were little, I lived with fifty aunts in a house made of turquoise. I had an arm of gold bracelet and four black cats I name my self. That make no differents now.

“Shh,”
I tell her.
“Shhh, shh, sh.”

The Princess fret to hear me sound at some one else.
“No!”
she say, loud enough that Countess Elinor cock her ear, though she keep spooning to Crown Prince Christian and trying coax his smile.

“Shh,”
I hiss to Princess again. I say it different to her, though, and stroke my hand downside her face — soft, wet pink skin. I tuck a curl in to her cap.

Gorma open her mouth like a baby bird. I spoon.

That maid come so close, I smell her woolly smell. She think she and I be friends now. I think this shall change with nursey-work. We all reek like bottoms of a moat, so our lovers hold their breath when we embrace. We none of us are friends.

Her voice lower to a whisper, and she talk in the way of those girls who do with out their lips. “Were you there when
it
happened? Princess Sophia?”

I do n’t look, just shake my head. I knew what she mean before she spoke.

She go on: “Do you know what took her? Have you heard? Some sort of seizure, I heard. Or else a poison. But what kind?”

I ignore the maid, wipe Princess Gorma’s face, do as I am supposed. After so many year, I can feel when the Countess my mistress coming close. If she leave the Prince, this mean he all ready asleep, and she wonder why the other children are n’t. After they all fall off, nurses and grooms will pick them up and put them in the little night rooms, where some body sit and watch each one till dawn.

I murmur in my throat, water on a stone, and see Gorma lids go droop. Soon she sleep.

That girl still have n’t seen the Countess coming. “What do you
think
?” she ask. “What can you tell me?”

I turn to this stupid girl and open my eyes all they way. She believe this a kindly thing; she blink, smile, then part her mouth to speak again.

I open my mouth first and show her my tongue.

She scream.

They are no uncommon sights these days, the wounds of men who’ve been to war and the scars of disease at home. But there is something worse, something evil, in the tongue that Midi Sorte shows me.

The thing is forked. Split from the tip to the root and scarred thickly down the way. The two halves of it move, waving like snakes till they wind back into her throat and disappear.

Of course I scream.

My scream rouses Princess Gorma. She screams too, thinking Satan’s wraiths have come to drag her to her sister’s fate. The other children take up Gorma’s cry, and there’s such a general wail and clamor that the glass leaves tremble on their branches overhead.

Countess Elinor’s face is a knot of fury when she descends upon Midi and me. She sees the twist of Midi Sorte’s lips, now pressed tight together, and guesses what I’ve been looking at. She gives Midi a cuff across the jaw that wipes the lingering smirk clean away.

This is some small vindication for me, but not enough. I feel sorry for having brought Elinor Parfis’s wrath on Midi Sorte, even though she did provoke me. Sorry, too, that it seems Midi cannot speak; she could have been my best source for what Lord Nicolas wants of me.

Later, while I sit among the deserted fanciful beds, waiting to be needed in one of the night chambers, that tongue troubles my mind. Midi Sorte has gone to her own cot in the nurses’ dorter; but in the shadows I see her tongue licking the walls, splitting itself into a thousand parts, opening holes and passageways within the bricks; then knitting up again in a long, fat muscle that could make toothpicks even of Prince Christian’s massive lion bed. It is a demon, a dragon, worse than the monster of any story I’ve ever heard.