My Lady Jane(2)

But apparently none of that was going to happen.

Untimely was the word people would use, he thought. Premature. Tragic. He could practically hear the ballads the minstrels would sing about him, the great king who had died too soon.

Poor King Edward, now under the ground.

Hacked his lungs out. They’ve yet to be found.

“I want a second opinion. A better one,” Edward said, his hand curling into a fist where it rested on the arm of the throne. He shivered, suddenly chilled. He pulled his fur-lined robes more tightly around him.

“Of course,” said Boubou, backing away.

Edward saw the fear in the doctor’s eyes and felt the urge to have him thrown into the dungeon for good measure, because he was the king, and the king always got what he wanted, and the king didn’t want to be dying. He fingered the golden dagger at his belt, and Boubou took another step back.

“I’m truly sorry, Your Highness,” the old man mumbled again toward the floor. “Please don’t eat the messenger.”

Edward sighed. He was not his father, who indeed might have assumed his lion form and devoured the man for bearing this dreadful news. Edward didn’t have a secret animal inside of him, so far as he knew. Which had always secretly disappointed him.

“You may go, Boubou,” he said.

The doctor breathed out a sigh of relief and darted for the door, leaving Edward alone to face his impending mortality.

“Bollocks,” he muttered to himself again. “The Affliction” seemed like a terribly inconvenient way for a king to die.

Later, after the news of his upcoming royal demise had spread around the palace, his sisters came to find him. He was sitting in his favorite spot: the window ledge in one of the south turrets of Greenwich Palace, his legs dangling over the edge as he watched the comings and goings of the people in the courtyard below and listened to the steady flow of the River Thames. He thought he finally understood the Meaning of Life now, the Great Secret, which he’d boiled down to this:

Life is short, and then you die.

“Edward,” murmured Bess, her mouth twisting in sympathy as she came to sit beside him on the ledge. “I’m so sorry, brother.”

He tried to smirk at her. Edward was a master of smirking. It was his most finely honed royal skill, really, but this time he couldn’t manage more than a pathetic halfhearted grimace. “So you’ve heard,” he said, trying to keep his voice light. “I do intend to get a second opinion, of course. I don’t feel like I’m dying.”

“Oh, my dear Eddie,” choked out Mary, dabbing a lace-edged handkerchief at the corner of her eye. “Sweet, darling boy. My poor little dove.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. He disliked being called Eddie, and he disliked being talked down to like he was a toddler in short tights, but he tolerated it from Mary. He’d always felt a bit sorry for his sisters, what with his father declaring them bastards and all. The year that his father had discovered his animal form—the Year of the Lion, the people called it—King Henry VIII had also decided that the king got to make all the rules, so he’d annulled his marriage to Mary’s mother and sent her off to a convent to live out the rest of her days, all so he could marry Bess’s mother, one of the more attractive ladies-in-waiting. But when Wife #2 failed to produce a male heir, and rumors started to circulate that Queen Anne was an E?ian who every so often transformed into a black cat so she could slip down the castle stairs into the court minstrel’s bedchambers, the king had her head chopped off. Wife #3 (Edward’s mother) had done everything right; namely, she’d produced a child with the correct genitalia to be a future ruler of England, and then, because she was never one to stick around to gloat, she’d promptly died. King Henry had gone on to have three more wives (respectively: annulled, beheaded, and the lucky one who’d outlived him, ha), but no more children.

So it had just been the three of them—Mary, Bess, and Edward—as far as royal spawn went, and they’d been their own brand of a mismatched family, since their father was possibly insane and definitely dangerous even when he wasn’t a lion, and their mothers were all dead or exiled. They’d always got on fairly well, mainly because there had never been any competition between them over who was meant to wear the crown. Edward was the clear choice. He had the boy parts.

He’d been king since he was nine years old. He could only faintly remember a time when he wasn’t king, in fact, and until today he’d always felt that monarchy rather suited him. But a fat lot of good being king was doing him now, he thought bitterly. He would have rather been born a commoner, a blacksmith’s son, perhaps. Then he might have already had a bit of fun before he shuffled off this mortal coil. At least he would have had an opportunity to kiss a girl.

“How are you feeling, really?” Mary asked solemnly. Mary said everything solemnly.

“Afflicted,” he answered.

This produced the ghost of a smile from Bess, but Mary just shook her head mournfully. Mary never laughed at his jokes. He and Bess had been calling her Fuddy-Duddy Mary behind her back for years, because she was always so cheerless about everything. The only time he ever saw Mary enjoy herself was when some traitor was beheaded or some poor E?ian got burned at the stake. His sister was surprisingly bloodthirsty when it came to E?ians.

“‘The Affliction’ took my mother, you know.” Mary wrung her handkerchief between her hands fretfully.