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The fate of Edward the King Anne reads in water. Not the most refined of surfaces, and easily changeable—any true Beauchamp would have recoiled—but after all it is treason to consult even the remote stars after the well-being of the King. A bucket of water, should the situation call for it, can easily be knocked over and blamed on a slovenly maid. The Nevilles, as all the world knows, are practical above all.
So she scries for Edward, and watches in silence as he gorges on life, ladies, and lavish feasts. It will not be long, then. Richard will mourn his brother, and wholeheartedly at that. Anne, though, remembers a time when another Edward —despite his many flaws—at least made her a Princess of Wales, and when this Edward seemed determined to make her nothing at all save a bone thrown from table to be tussled over by his brothers. She will not intervene, only wait.
Once though, an imprecise invocation calls up the the form of her son Neddy instead. Anne shrinks from the dread image, and dashes the bucket to the ground. The next day, and all those after, she doses him with feverfew and sighs with relief to see him growing stronger and stronger.
Everything can be changed, she reminds herself. That is her gift.
Isabel she looks for in flower-blooms, fragile and lovely, and does not allow herself to worry when the petals wilt and darken. For is that not Isabel’s special talent, to transform as necessity requires? Her loyalties turn with the tide of war and the tendencies of those around her, with the ease that she turns matter from one form into another, and Anne could no more hate her for it than an apple tree that shakes off its white coat in autum for bright red fruit and back again the following spring. How is Isabel to survive otherwise, being so born and so bedded?
When Isabel passes, Anne wants to excuse it as just another trick, a simulacrum to fool the rest of the world. But the wind blows only a bit colder around her, her needle cutting through a cloth with only a bit more resistance than before, and Anne knows her sister and her small sensible spells are gone.
George’s fate Anne finds in wine.
Under other circumstances she might have laughed, it being so very apt; but Isabel is dead, and there seems very little left to laugh about in the world. He might have been saved, had he not argued so strongly than a lady-in-waiting named Ankarette Twynyho was guilty of witchcraft. Isabel’s stillroom, after all, needed some explanation when discovered after her death. A word, an apology for a grieving widower before the affair had escalated would have been enough.
But Anne remembers a harsh winter abandoned in an unfriendly kitchen, and all so that Richard might not claim her hand in marriage and her dower-lands. She remembers a night retching below deck, as Isabel screamed and George drank. She remembers a thousand slights and sneers at odd behavior noticed during their shared childhood.
Malmsey, she remembers, had always been his favorite. Malmsey will do nicely.
The most important thing about magic, Anne Beauchamp taught her daughters, is that every use of it renders the body that much weaker and the heart that much colder. Now, Anne supposes Mother meant it as an apology; but she can’t be sure what it is for. Mother might not have loved them, but she had trained them for the role she expected them to play— as much as Anne adored her father, she can admit he did neither, without magic to serve as a convenient excuse.
The second most important thing about magic is that despite all that sacrifice, there are some fates that are unalterable, whether because of stubbornness or honor or some male combination of both. She knows, because all Anne Beauchamp’s skill at persuasion—sufficient to enchant Marguerite of Anjou into alliance with the man she hated most—wasn’t enough to win her husband a final victory. Anne suspects that is why her mother remains silent to this day, lingering in self imposed sanctuary. Why speak with a siren’s tongue at all if it would do no good?
Anne, though, is a throwback to the strongest of her mother’s line, those allowed prophecy and the opportunity to change destiny when they please. If they please.
Anne knows this. Anne waits.
Richard’s fate she casts in nothing less than her heart’s own blood. It has always been so, since they were young in this very place and Anne had known with overwhelming certainty that they would one day be wed. In truth, the prospect hasn’t appealed much to her at first, when she was tall and lanky and Richard shy and stooped, but the knowledge had never left her. Not even when she had been wed in France, with Richard in exile. She had done her best to affect surprise when his eyes followed her just as much as they had when he was a boy, had smiled when he made a faltering proposal of protection, had endured George’s treachery, because Richard would someday be at her side. He will always be there, she knows. She need only wait.
And so she does, until the night she wakes in a sweat, Richard still sleeping soundly beside her. Her chest constricts; she shakes him awake.
“Ride for London,” she says, voice hoarse, “and now. You must, before Grey and Hastings act against you. Otherwise—“
She breaks off. Richard does not argue, as Father was accustomed to, or jeer, as George might have. Instead he takes her hands in his and asks urgently, “The boys. Eleanor Butler. I—Are my brother’s children the true heirs to the throne? Might I best serve his memory by serving them?”
Anne knows the answer, even without peering at the shapes and smears of blood on the sheets below her. Her gift is to bring about change when and where she can.
“No,” she lies, and Richard goes.
The Woodville women she observes in honey, the only substance that comes close to the curious golden tint of their hair. Elizabeth the Elder is harmless, Anne decides, a dragoness doomed to remain dormant despite her intrigues. The younger, however….No matter how many times Anne casts in the future, Elizabeth of York always wears a crown. That is remedied easily enough; Anne hints at a Portuguese alliance to Richard, who indulgently agrees. Let him believe it has everything to do with jealousy of a niece wearing the fine golden cloth Anne had given away herself. As long as it serves her purposes, Anne has no complaint.
The boys she reads in tears, bitter and belated. She has enough inkling to warn Richard to house them in the Tower, the one edifice in England capable of resisting the most vicious of curses, she forgets—foolish, foolish Anne!—to consider murder by more mundane means.
Her shame is nothing to her sorrow when news comes from Middleham; in the end, all the feverfew in the world is not enough to save her Neddy.
She thought once, when young and unwary, that she might do anything she put her mind to. Now, weary beyond belief, she can no longer hope for anything of the sort.
Anne never quite dares to examine her own future.
At first it had been a question of not knowing where to start, as any substance remained opaque to her sight when she made an attempt; then it had simply been that, with Richard and Neddy at her side, it did not seem to matter. Now, though, she admits she is, more than anything, afraid of what she will find.
She suspects she is overcome. The payment for years of seeking Richard’s future has come due with a lingering, bloody cough, and try as she might, she can’t seem to rise from her bed. What use is there to poor proud Anne Neville, humbled at last? The people of England mark only one thing worse than a Woodville behind the throne, and that is a witch-queen whose illness is greeted with outright relief. What use is there to anything at all?
It is in that illusory instant where sun and moon meet that she sees the two things that matter. The first is the realization of what generations to come will make of her: a question mark, a riddle , a passing mention so insignificant as to forgo even pity. Anne will be utterly forgotten, and Neville pride might bear a great deal, but it cannot suffer this slight.
The second, the awareness that she loves Richard, hardened heart or no, and she will not let him go.
Grimly, she forces herself up on her pillows and swallows the feverfew that did so little for her son. If illness wishes to claim her, it can, but not before outright war. She clings to life with both hands and clambers back to health with the determination the Kingmaker showed in his fiercest battles.
Anne has a gift, and that gift matters every bit as much as her childhood dreams had promised. She will prove it so, or die in the attempt.
So here Anne makes her stand. Leagues away, Henry Tudor’s forces traipse across England to meet King Richard at Bosworth Field. In her husband’s absence, Anne rules as regent. Voices might whisper in protest, but they cannot stand against a spouse’s enduring fidelity; Anne will not allow them.
Fate spreads wide before her, and Anne knows precisely what to say to make sure the results fall in her favor. She smiles now at the messenger, poised to take her word to the King’s camp on this night before the planned battle.
“Tell His Grace I am with child,” she says, each word precise and pointed, “and beg him consider what will become of his heir should he fall in battle.”
Oh, Richard is well aware of that fate. He has seen it in Elizabeth of York’s drawn face when setting sail for a foreign land; he has seen it in the empty rooms where his nephews once sheltered. Such a future, of her own making, will provide him with the desperation he needs to survive; all that remains is desire, to bring him home. That, too, is in her power to give—a different magic than that she learned as a girl, but no less potent.
“And tell him,” she whispers, “that his queen awaits his return.”