Boubou fidgeted with his collar. “I can give you tonics for pain, and make sure you remain comfortable until the end, but yes. I am certain.”
The end. That sounded ominous.
“But . . .” There was so much he wanted to do with his life. First off, he wanted to kiss a girl, a pretty girl, the right girl, possibly with tongue. He wanted to throw grand, lavish balls to show off his dancing skills to the nobles. He wanted to finally best the weapons master at swords, because Bash was the only person he knew who forgot to let him win. He wanted to explore his kingdom and travel the world. He wanted to hunt a great beast of some sort and mount its head on his wall. He wanted to climb to the top of Scafell Pike, get as high up as a person could possibly go in England, and look over the lands stretching below him and know that he was king of all he surveyed.
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