PodCastle 443: Blueblood (Aurealis Month) - a podcast by Escape Artists, Inc

* Author : Faith Mudge

* Narrator : Loulou Szal

* Host : Cat Sparks

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

*

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First published in Hear Me Roar





Rated PG-13.

Part of our Aurealis Month, celebrating the Australian Aurealis Awards.

Blueblood

by Faith Mudge

It is an insult to die at midday.

In the mountain country where I was born, such things take place in the dark of night: the fall of an axe, the knotting of a noose. Here, it is a spectacle. From the narrow window of my tower room, I can see the road that leads away from the castle, down to the sea; it is already lined with people, jostling and squabbling amongst themselves for the best view of my execution.



In this place, a town will turn out to watch a man kill his wife, and call it justice.

My husband wants me to see this, to spend my last hours thinking about what will happen when the sun hits its zenith. Very soon he will step from the great oak doors, and a guard will come to bring me down. The crowd will get what they hunger for then. I hope it haunts them. It probably won’t.

By this point it makes no difference. He can break every bone in my body and shed every drop of my blood and he will still be the fool.

Elyse will still be gone.



This is the story I stole. It began without me, in a city I will never see again.

Elyse was the queen’s seventh child and the first to survive infancy. By then no one expected a son; it had begun to be doubted there would be an heir at all. The rumours that had plagued the queen from her first miscarriage grew louder, circumventions around a central point, delicately half-said by people who mattered. The outlandish death of the queen’s mother. Her difficulty birthing a healthy child. In the early years of her marriage, the servants swore it had rained when she cried, and stormed when she raged.

Witch blood, was what they wouldn’t say out loud.

So on her fifth birthday Elyse was paraded through the streets in a palanquin, a poppet princess waving solemnly to the curious populace, drowning out the gossip in a rush of loyalist sentiment. Daughters have their uses.

For the queen, however, it opened a new quandary. Elyse was now too old for a nurse, yet too young for lady’s maid. She needed a companion—a handmaid close to her own age, quiet, quick and competent. There were plenty of servants to suit already at work in the castle, but while commoner girls were good enough to scrub floors and pluck chickens, even the daughter of a better sort of merchant was never going to be the confidante of a princess. To say the queen was a traditionalist would be to say that a tree is made of wood; her daughter had to have a companion of good noble blood, as generations of heirs had before her.

Unfortunately, while the practice was still favoured by the royal family, the sense of it being an honour had declined amongst the nobility. They would rather send their daughters abroad to the new academies, to forge friendships that might mature into advantageous political alliances and acquire a cultured polish that would appeal to wealthy husbands. Royal patronage could only take you so far; a future marchioness was much better off learning to talk about art in five languages.

That was never going to be my life.

My father’s title was the only aristocracy my family could claim.

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