Excerpt from The Beheading Game by Rebecca Lehmann, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Chapter One

The Arrow Chest

Anne opened her eyes to darkness. And wood. Her face was pressed into the wood. And the left side of her body. She realized fabric as well. A thin fabric that covered her. Linen, she thought, from the smell of it—like wet grass—and the way the air moved through it. Just slightly, for the air here was very still. The linen was wet and sticky. She remembered once wrapping linen around the neck of a stag, whose flank she'd pierced with an arrow, whose throat she'd slit with an ivory-hilted dagger. When the beast had stopped convulsing, she'd draped the gash with linen and played at dressing Christ's wounds. That had been before, when she was young. Her brother, George, had stood beside her, laughing at her joke. She did and didn't remember the two men, servants, who held the dying hart by its horns while she cut its throat. They could have been any men, low class, assigned to serve her.

She understood she could move her hands. Movement came to her fingers slowly, in twitches, one finger, then another. She curled them in and out, made fists. She understood now that her arm could move too. Her left arm was pinned beneath her, but her right arm was free. She moved it so her hand, through the linen covering, touched the wood. She felt around, up, down. Wood below, wood before, wood above. Perhaps the wood before her extended to a height of three feet, joined at the corners to the wood above and the wood below. A box, then. She must be in a box. She rapped against the wood once, twice, three times, but no one answered. She rapped the wood above and the wood below. Little hollow knocks.

The back of her head was pressed into flesh. Whose flesh? Was someone else in the wooden box? She blinked her eyes open again, tried to open them wider. Her lids were hard to part. Something crusted their corners shut. Probably the same sticky wetness that she felt on the linen. In front of one eye, a piece of straw. And the linen, wrapped around her, right over her mouth. Its tightness made her want to scream, like being trapped in a bedsheet. She didn't like it. She tried to scream but could draw no air. Or, rather, she could draw air; she could feel her chest rising and falling, but the air was not coming through her nose or mouth. She understood her mouth was shut. She understood her nose was clogged. She opened her mouth, which was dry, and pushed her dry tongue out to touch the sticky linen. It tasted like metal. Her fingers were light. No jewels. Perhaps she had been robbed. Perhaps she had been struck over the head and wrapped in fabric and thrown in a crate, to be ransomed.

She used her free hand to feel her body. All around her, linen, en-casing her, like a caul. Through the linen, she felt something round and hard. It was at her knees. And large. Her hand went to her stomach, to feel for the roundness that had been there. Her baby. No. She'd lost the baby months ago. She remembered Henry's face when he confronted her in her chambers, in her sickbed. In her birthing bed? No, the child had come early and still. A boy, it had been a boy. The hatred then, in Henry's face. "I see God will not give me male children," he'd said. And his eyes, cold with retribution. No more sympathy. No more love. No more most--cherished one. No more consort. He'd limped around her chamber, stopping before the window, his injured leg bulky with the physician's dressing.

To dress a wound was to show care, after all. Who had shown Anne care? She remembered stepping to the stage. The stage was draped in black. And the straw, strewn underfoot, for absorption. No, she remembered being helped to the stage by her ladies, who stood behind her. They must have brought the linen with them. She remembered the good blue of the sky, the blue like a baby boy's eyes. Good Christian people, she'd declared. She'd wanted to say my. My good Christian people. No. They weren't her people anymore. Good Christian people. I am come hither. That one lock of hair that kept slipping out of her cap, that she kept tucking in. Who had shown Anne care? The executioner, dressed so finely she mistook him for a gentleman, who'd let her finish her prayers, who'd danced behind her, moving so quietly from one side of her blindfolded and kneeling form to the other. Who'd misdirected: "Boy, fetch me my sword." She'd turned her head to the sound of his voice, searching for him. Je vous cherche; I look for you. But he'd already danced, silent--footed, to her other side; he already held his sword. As he swung, she searched, unseeing, unaware, in the other direction, no time to flinch, to botch the stroke. And then. And then a terrible pain. And then darkness.

Excerpted from The Beheading Game by Rebecca Lehmann. Copyright © 2026 by Rebecca Lehmann. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.