My Lady Jane(4)

“No, Sire,” Lord Dudley said urgently. “We cannot let the throne of England fall into the wrong hands.”

Edward frowned. “But she’s my sister. She’s the eldest. She—”

“She’s a Verity,” objected Dudley. “Mary’s been raised to believe that the animal magic is evil, something to be feared and destroyed. If she became queen, she’d return this country to the Dark Ages. No E?ian would be safe.”

Edward sat back, thinking. Everything the duke was saying was true. Mary would not tolerate the E?ians. (She preferred them extra-crispy, as we mentioned earlier.) Plus Mary had no sense of humor and was completely backward thinking and would be no good at all as ruler.

“So it can’t be Mary,” he agreed. “It can’t be Bess, either.” He twisted the ring with the royal seal around his finger. “Bess would be better than Mary, of course, and both of her parents were E?ians, if you believe the cat thing, but I don’t know where Bess’s allegiance lies concerning the Verities. She’s a bit shifty. Besides,” he said upon further reflection. “The crown can’t go to a woman.”

You might have noticed that Edward was a bit of a sexist. You can’t blame him, really, since all his young life he’d been greatly exalted for simply having been born a boy.

Still, he liked to think of himself as a forward-thinking king. He hadn’t taken after his father as an E?ian (at least, he hadn’t so far), but it was part of his family history, obviously, and he’d been raised to sympathize with the E?ian cause. Lately it seemed that the tension between the two groups had reached a boiling point. Reports had been coming in about a mysterious E?ian group called the Pack, who had been raiding and pillaging from Verity churches and monasteries around the country. Then came more reports of Verities exposing and subsequently inflicting violence upon E?ians. Then reports of revenge attacks against Verities. And so on, and so on.

Dudley was right. They needed a pro-E?ian ruler. Someone who could keep the peace.

“So who do you have in mind?” Edward reached over to a side table, where there was always, by royal decree, a bowl of fresh, chilled blackberries. He loved blackberries. They were rumored to have powerful healing properties, so he’d been eating a lot of them lately. He popped one into his mouth.

Lord Dudley’s Adam’s apple jerked up and down, and for the first time since Edward had known him, he appeared a tad nervous. “The firstborn son of the Lady Jane Grey, Your Majesty.”

Edward choked on his blackberry.

“Jane has a son?” he sputtered. “I’m fairly certain I would have heard about that.”

“She doesn’t have a son at the moment,” Dudley explained patiently. “But she will. And if you bypass Mary and Elizabeth, the Greys are next in line.”

So Dudley wanted Jane to get married and produce an heir.

Edward couldn’t imagine his cousin Jane with a husband and a child, even though she was sixteen years old and sixteen was a bit spinsterish, by the standards of the day. Books were Jane’s great love: history and philosophy and religion, mostly, but anything she could get her hands on. She actually enjoyed reading Plato in the original Greek, so much so that she did it for fun and not just when her tutors assigned it. She had entire epic poems memorized and could recite them at will. But most of all, she loved stories of E?ians and their animal adventures.

There would be no doubt that Jane would support the E?ians.

It was widely rumored that Jane’s mother was an E?ian, although no one knew what form she took. When they were children Edward and Jane’s favorite game had been to imagine what animals they would become when they grew up. Edward had always imagined he’d be something powerful and fierce, like a wolf. A great bear. A tiger.

Jane had never been able to decide on her preferred E?ian form; it was between a lynx and a falcon, as he recalled.

“Just think of it, Edward,” he remembered her ten-year-old voice whispering to him as they’d stretched out on their backs on some grassy knoll, finding shapes in the passing clouds. “I could be up there, riding the wind, nobody telling me to sit up straight or complaining about my needlework. I’d be free.”

“Free as a bird,” he’d added.

“Free as a bird!” She’d laughed and jumped to her feet and run down the hill with her long red hair trailing behind her and her arms spread out, pretending to fly.

A few years later they’d spent an entire afternoon calling each other names, because Jane had read in a book that E?ians often manifested into their animal forms when they were upset. They’d cursed at each other and slapped each other’s faces, and Jane had even gone so far as to throw a stone at Edward, which actually did rile him, but they had remained stubbornly human throughout the whole ordeal.

It’d been a great disappointment to them both.

“Sire?” Lord Dudley prompted.

Edward shook off the memories. “You want Jane to get married,” he surmised. “Do you have someone in mind?”

He felt a twinge of sadness at the idea. Jane was easily his favorite person in this world. As a child, she’d been sent to live with Katherine Parr (King Henry’s Wife #6), and so Jane and Edward had spent hours upon hours in each other’s company, even sharing many of the same tutors. It had been in those days that they’d become fast friends. Jane was the only one who Edward felt truly understood him, who didn’t treat him like a different species because he was royalty. In the back of his mind he’d been holding on to the idea that perhaps someday he’d be the one to marry Jane.