The Crippled Angel by Sara Douglass Page A

dreamed, and yet it felt unlike any dream she’d been lost in before, for in this dream she was both witness and participant.
    She dreamed of a woman, a woman on her knees atop a dusty, stony hill swept by a warm, fragrant wind. Above pressed a heavy, depressing sky; the atmosphere was hot and humid, and full of noiseless lament. In the distance was a walled city dressed in pale stone, and a roadway lined with people leading from the city gates to the hill where she knelt.
    The woman’s world had turned to grief. Her tears ran down her cheeks and dripped into the neckline of her white linen robe. Dark hair lay unbound down her back and clung in dampened wisps about her face. A cloak of sky blue lay to one side.
    Several yards away lay her husband, still and dead, his corpse battered and bloodied. He had been sprawled across a rock for the vultures to feast on.
    She reached out a hand towards him, wordlessly, now too exhausted and emotionally devastated to weep any more than she already had.
    How could it have ended like this? Why had people hated him so much?
    “Take her!” came a shout, and she jerked her head up at the same moment her hands slipped about her swollen belly.
    People—soldiers, several priests and a crowd of ordinary men and women—surged towards her, and she started to rise. But her foot caught on the hemline of her robe, and she tripped and sprawled on the dusty earth.
    She tried to rise again, desperate, knowing they meant her death, but she was too late.
    Hands seized her by the shoulder of her robe and by her hair, and dragged her to her feet.
    “Whore!” someone cried, and the entire crowd took up the accusation. “Whore! Whore! Whore!”
    “I am not,” she said, but her words were lost in the roar of the crowd. “I am not!”
    I am not a whore, but a queen , she wanted to say, not understanding why it was she thought that.
    But delusions were not going to help her or her unborn baby now.
    They dragged her forth, ignoring her pitiful cries for mercy, to where a long-dry well had been covered over. Men tore away the wooden beams that closed the well, exposing a thirty-foot drop.
    Then, still roaring their hatred, they threw her down.
    They stopped roaring soon enough to hear her body hit the rocks at the bottom of the well.
    A minute passed, then one of the priests grunted as he saw her limbs move slightly in their agony.
    “She lives still,” he said, bending and picking up a rock.
    All about him, those closest to the rim of the well bent down, and picked up their own rocks.
    Then they began, one by one, to pitch them down towards the woman.
    It took them most of the remaining hours of the afternoon to kill her completely, and before they were done they’d broken every bone in her body.
    Margaret sat by Mary’s bed, watching the woman’s chest rise and fall in shallow, slow breaths. Mary had been moaning in agony by the time Neville had carried her back to her chamber, and Culpeper, the castle physician, alerted to her need by runners who had come ahead, had been ready at hand. He’d given Mary a powerful infusion of monkshood, wild mushroom and opium poppy, which had eased Mary’s pain within minutes.
    It had also caused her mind to drift, and for almost an hour Margaret had sat holding Mary’s hand as the queen talked of things she could never have seen, and people she could never have met.
    Now, Margaret hoped, Mary had finally settled into a deep sleep.
    But just as Margaret was about to rise and go to her own bed, Mary’s eyes flew open.
    “Meg?” she whispered in a cracked voice. “Meg? Are you here?”
    “I’m right beside you, my sweet lady. I have never left.”
    “Where am I, Meg?”
    “Why, you are in your chamber in the Rose Tower, my lady.”
    Mary’s head slowly rolled back and forth and her eyes searched. “No, no. I cannot be. What is that wind? And that scent of sweet spice upon it?”
    “Madam—”
    “And why do I weep? Why do I feel such