allow a foot-stomping illegitimate hag to get in my way!”
“You mean, to get in the queen’s way,” G said slowly. “Right, Father? The queen’s way?”
“Yes, yes, the queen’s way,” Lord Dudley said dismissively.
“But Mary is rather popular among the people despite being a bit duddy. If she rallies support—”
G’s father put a hand up. “Gifford, I have put forth great effort to secure your future, and the future of our country. I have done things you would never be brave enough to do. Focus on becoming king. Until then, keep your expert opinions limited to things you understand. Like apples.”
With that, his father ducked out from behind the banner, leaving G with that fallen expression that can only come from the harsh rebuke of a father. He stepped out from the chapel. When Jane saw him, she didn’t smile. Maybe his father was right. Until he was crowned king, he shouldn’t worry about things that didn’t concern him.
THIRTEEN
Edward
The king (the actual king, we mean), through no particular fault of his own, was lost.
During the first few hours in his newly acquired E∂ian form, he’d been caught up in what he could only describe as a kind of beautiful bird joy—the sweet euphoria of flight, of riding the wind, testing the strength of his wings, encompassed in the soundless serenity of the world as seen from so high above. He’d lost himself in how good it felt to no longer be . . . well, dying.
Edward didn’t know this at the time, because he had no way of looking at himself and assessing what kind of species of bird he actually was, but he had transformed into a kestrel, which is, for those readers who are not bird-enthusiasts, a small falcon—Falco tinnunculus—with very handsome brown-speckled feathers. Edward simply knew that he had wings and a beak and two legs that ended in talons, which made him some kind of bird. And he knew that up there, against the sky, he was free in a way that he had never been free before.
But after a while—who knows how long, really, as kestrels aren’t known for their ability to keep track of time—he began to have a nagging human thought in the back of his brain, and it was this:
I should be doing something.
Which led to: I should be going somewhere.
He strained to remember more. It’s not somewhere that I should be going to, so much as someone, he thought. Someone who will help me.
Then he remembered that he was not just a bird, but a king, and someone had attempted to assassinate him and steal his throne, and he had a sister named Bess who had told him—what had she told him? That his mother had also been a bird, a beautiful white bird, and wasn’t it divine to be a bird, to rule the air, to dive and lift so, to hover, and then the bird joy had him again.
Some time later he thought, No, that wasn’t all Bess told me. She said to go to Gran—his grandmother—although he hadn’t seen the old lady in years.
At Helmsley. Which was an abandoned, half-fallen-down old castle.
North, somewhere.
Now which way was north?
As a sixteen-year-old human boy, Edward had never possessed the keenest sense of direction, since most of the time when he wished to travel to a place he was taken by carriage and did none of the driving. As an only-a-few-hours-old bird, he didn’t know north, either. He knew there was a river in one direction, and a series of low hills in another direction, an expanse of green field below him, and in that field he somehow knew there was a little brown field mouse, just coming out of its hole. Without consulting him at all, his body plummeted toward the defenseless creature, wings tucking in, talons reaching, until Edward-the-bird struck the mouse with tremendous force and snatched it from the face of the earth. The poor thing gave a rather awful shriek, which was understandable, and then went quiet. Edward-the-bird flapped off to a nearby tree branch, still clutching the mouse, and then, to Edward-the-boy’s horror . . . he ate it, bones and fur and all.
Edward stayed in the tree for a while, disgusted with himself on the one hand, and on the other wanting to go out and find another delicious mouse, or perhaps a tasty garter snake. A growing bird has to eat. But he needed to get control of these bird impulses, he decided. He needed to