Chapter 8: Marked in Thorns
The silence after the tower was a living thing. It followed Catherine through the drafty corridors, sat with her at the solitary dining table, slept coldly on the other side of the enormous bed. For three days, it was the only thing they shared.
On the fourth morning, seeking air that didn’t taste of stone and tension, Catherine retreated to the gardens. They were a concession to a past queen’s sensibilities, all geometric precision and subdued color. She walked the gravel paths, her slippers crunching a steady, lonely rhythm. The lavender was over-pruned, its scent released only in harsh, medicinal bursts when she brushed a spike with her fingers.
She turned a corner around a towering hedge shaped like a crouching lion.
And stopped.
There, in a sheltered niche meant for a marble statue of some forgotten god, were two figures, entangled. The woman was tall, willowy, with hair the color of wheat. She was pressed against Michael, her mouth on his throat, one hand splayed possessively on his chest, the other moving with intimate familiarity over the front of his trousers. Michael’s head was tilted back against the hedge, his eyes closed, his expression one of tense, almost angry concentration.
Catherine felt the world tip. The lavender scent turned cloying, sickly. The crunch of gravel under her feet had been loud, but they were lost in their own world. She didn’t feel rage first. She felt a cold, plunging clarity, as if she’d been doused in winter water. This was the answer to the silence. This was his retaliation for the tower, for her victory. A cheap, garden-variety betrayal.
She didn’t scream. She didn’t retreat. She walked forward, the gravel now silent under her careful steps, until she was close enough to smell the woman’s rosewater perfume, to see the flush on Michael’s neck under those painted lips.
She reached out and tapped, once, on the solid plane of his shoulder.
He jerked as if stabbed, his eyes flying open. The woman—a lady-in-waiting from his mother’s court, Catherine vaguely recognized—spun around, gasping, her hand snapping back from his groin as if burned.
“What,” Catherine said, her voice disturbingly calm, flat, “are you doing?”
Michael’s face cycled through shock, guilt, and then a defensive, hardening fury. The woman stammered, clutching at the neckline of her gown. “Your Highness, I—we were just—”
“You are dismissed,” Catherine said, not looking at her. Her eyes were fixed on Michael’s. They held a storm, but beneath it, she saw something else: a flicker of shame, quickly buried.
The woman fled, the sound of her frantic footsteps swallowed by the hedges.
Michael straightened his doublet, a futile gesture. “This is not what it appears.”
“It appears,” Catherine said slowly, “that you have the emotional subtlety of a warhammer. Was this the plan? Hide from me, then let me find you like this? A lesson in my place?” Her composure was a thin pane of glass, and she could feel the cracks spreading. The deep, physical claim of the tower, the raw honesty of it—it felt defiled. Made trivial.
He said nothing, his jaw working.
The sadness welled up then, hot and unavoidable, blurring the sharp edges of the hedges. She couldn’t hide it, didn’t try. It filled her eyes, made her voice soft and unbearably weary. “Can you at least respect your wife enough to do this in private?”
The words hung in the air, simple and devastating. They weren’t a plea for love, or even for fidelity. They were a request for the barest minimum of dignity. A courtesy.
Michael flinched. That, finally, seemed to pierce the armor. He looked away, towards the stark silhouette of the castle, the kingdom he’d won and now didn’t seem to know how to rule. “It meant nothing,” he muttered.
“I know,” Catherine said. The acceptance in her tone was worse than any accusation. “That’s what makes it so profoundly insulting.” She wrapped her arms around herself, though the sun was warm. “You won the war, Michael. You have the crown, the land, the treaty sealed with my body. What more do you need to conquer? My expectation of basic decency?”
He turned back to her, his gaze searching her face, seeing the quiet devastation there. The strategic part of him, the prince, might have calculated this—to hurt her, to reassert dominance. The man, the one who had shattered in his study chair, looked unnerved by his own success. “You think you understand power,” he began, his voice rough.
“I understand that power which needs to be this small,” she cut him off, her gesture taking in the empty niche, the lingering scent of rosewater, “isn’t power at all. It’s fear.” She took a slow breath, the glass pane of her composure holding, just. “I’ll be in the library. I hear there are fascinating accounts of how kingdoms fall from within. Petty grievances. Stupid, self-inflicted wounds.”
She didn’t wait for a reply. She walked away, back down the gravel path, leaving him standing alone in the shadow of the lion hedge. The wind picked up, carrying away the last trace of perfume, replacing it only with the dry, indifferent smell of dust and clipped green things.