Three Dark Crowns (12 page)

She smirks at Jules as she sharpens another skewer.

“I can't imagine any gift so strong,” Jules replies. “I'm one of the strongest naturalists on the island, and I can't call much farther than the deep waters off the coast.”

“You don't know that,” Arsinoe says. “And I bet you could, if you tried. I bet you could call anything, Jules.”

“I think so too,” says Joseph. “She's become something fierce, since I left.”

The meat comes off the skewers, and they eat in silence. It is good, marbled and tender. Arsinoe considers allowing the juices to run down her chin, but decides that is going too far.

Still, she does not speak until Jules kicks her in the foot. “How are you finding the island, Junior?”

“I am in love with it,” he says. “Absolutely. Joseph has been telling me about Fennbirn since the moment he came to stay with us. It's a great pleasure to see it, and to see you, and Jules, who I have heard about even more frequently.”

Arsinoe purses her lips. It is a good answer. And he delivered it so well.

“I suppose I should thank you,” Arsinoe says. “For taking care of Joseph. He did tell you that I was the reason he was banished?”

“Arsinoe,” Joseph says. “Don't. If I could go back, I wouldn't change it.”

“But I would,” she says. “I missed you.”

“I missed you, too,” he says, and reaches to take Jules's hand. “Both of you.”

The two of them ought to be alone. As much as Arsinoe missed Joseph, it was not in the same way that Jules missed him.

Arsinoe pops the last of the meat into her mouth and then stands up.

“Where are you going?” Jules asks.

“To show Junior the views,” she says. “We won't be gone long.” She winks at Joseph. “Well. Not too long.” Arsinoe leads the mainlander through the trees and onto the narrow, rock-edged trail that winds around the hills above Sealhead. It is an unsafe path to take in winter, unless you know the land. She almost feels guilty. But if he wants to become a king-consort, he will go through worse.

“This is a trail?” he asks, behind her.

“Yes. You can tell by the lack of trees and bushes on it.”

The rocks are sharp, covered with ice more than not. A slide guarantees a cut elbow or split-open knee. A wrong step could kill. Arsinoe walks as fast as her conscience will allow, but Billy does not complain. Nor does he try to steady her. He is a fast learner.

“Is it true that on the mainland you have no gifts?” she asks.

“Gifts? Oh. You mean magic. Yes. That's true.”

That is not, in fact, what she meant. And it is not true. Though he may not be aware of it, low magic is alive and well in the rest of the world. Madrigal told her so.

“They say that you did, once,” she says. “And that you lost them.”

“Who is this ‘they,'” he asks. “They've been telling you wild tales.”

“That would be a strange thing. Having no gifts. The mainland must be a strange place.”

“Having them is far stranger, trust me. And you should stop calling it that. The ‘mainland.' There are many lands, you know.”

Arsinoe says nothing. On the island, everything that is not the island is the mainland. That is how it has always been. That is how it will always be for her, who will never have the chance to leave and see any different.

“You'll see,” Billy says. “Someday.”

“No, I won't. The queen might.”

“Well, aren't you a queen? You look like one. Black-as-night hair, striking black eyes.”

“Striking,” Arsinoe mutters under her breath. She smirks. She will not be won over that easily.

They crest the last bit of hill and reach the overlook.

“There,” Arsinoe says, and points. “The most complete view of Wolf Spring on the island. The Sandrins' house, and the winter market. And your boat, bobbing in the harbor.”

“It's lovely,” he says, and turns about. “What's that peak there?”

“That is Mount Horn. I was born at the base of it, in its shadow, in the glen at the Black Cottage. But you can't see that from here.”

Billy is out of breath. That pleases her. She is only a little too warm for her scarf. When he takes her hand, it is so unexpected that she does not even try to jerk away.

“Thank you,” he says. “For showing me. I'm sure you'll show me much more, before you are crowned and I am crowned beside you. Or are king-consorts crowned? That part was never exactly clear.”

“You are very stubborn,” she says, and tugs her hand loose. “But you're not a fool, and neither am I.”

He smiles a begrudging smile that looks very much like Joseph's. Lopsided and devious. Perhaps he learned it from him.

“All right, all right,” he says. “My God, this is difficult.”

“It will only get worse. Perhaps you should go home.”

“I can't,” he says.

“Why not?”

“The crown, of course, and everything that comes with it. The trade rights to Fennbirn Island. The prestige. My father wants it all.”

“And you think I can help you get it?”

Billy shrugs. He looks out over the cove thoughtfully.

“Joseph thinks you can. And I hope that's true. It would make him happy. He won't like it if you die and I marry another queen.”

Arsinoe frowns. Joseph would not like it. But he would come around. They would all come around. Even Jules.

“This is all so strange,” Billy says. “I boarded a boat in the bay and sailed through some mist, and there was Fennbirn, though it was never there before when I sailed in the same direction. And now here I am, taking part in all this madness.”

“Looking for sympathy?” Arsinoe asks.

“No,” he says. “Never. I know what you've got to do is worse. And I like what you did just now. Snatched your hand away. Made me come clean. There are not many girls who would do that, where I come from.”

“There are plenty of them here,” Arsinoe says. “So many you'll soon tire of us. Just don't waste your time on me, all right? I am not . . . I am not to be courted.”

“All right,” he says, and shows her his palm. “But we will be neighbors, for some time. So perhaps you will shake my hand and guide me carefully back down this treacherous path?”

Arsinoe smiles and shakes Billy's hand. She likes him better already, now that they understand each other.

“What do you think they're doing now?” Jules asks as she stirs the fire.

“I think everything is going according to plan,” Joseph replies.

He moves closer to her on the damp, snowy log. He is warm, and the fire is warm. Jules fidgets with the green stone on her finger. On the mainland, it would have meant he wanted to marry her, he said. But on the island, it is only a ring. She has not yet found the courage to ask him which way he meant it.

“It is a bit early to say so,” says Jules. “She might not even like him. And he still has to meet the other queens.”

“He does. And he will. But he won't want to. After all the stories I've told him about Arsinoe, I think he is half in love with her already.”

Jules does not know what stories Joseph could tell about Arsinoe to make someone fall in love, as they were only children when they were parted. But if they were lies or embellishments, Billy will discover the truth soon enough.

“It will be strange, after she's crowned,” Joseph says. “Having to bow my head when she speaks.”

“We will only have to do that in front of people,” Jules says.

“I suppose so. But it will be hard to bow my head at all, after being so long away. I'll probably forget to bow to the High Priestess and get myself banished again.”

“Joseph,” Jules laughs. “They wouldn't banish you for that.”

“No,” he says. “But it's so different out there, Jules. Out there, men don't tremble when women speak.”

“No one ought to tremble. That is why the island needs change in the Black Council.”

“I know. And it will have it.”

He puts his arm around her and then touches first the ring he gave her and then her hair.

“Jules,” he says, and leans in to kiss her.

She jumps when their lips touch. Joseph moves back, confused.

“I'm sorry,” she says. “I don't know why I did that.”

“It's all right.”

It feels anything but all right. But Joseph does not move away. He stays and holds her tighter.

“Jules, has there been anyone? Since I left?”

She shakes her head. She has never been ashamed of that before, but she is ashamed of it now.

“No one at all?”

“No.”

No one has ever looked at her the way that Joseph looks at her. Not even Joseph, before he returned. She is not beautiful, like her mother or her aunt Caragh. She has always felt small and plain and strange. But she will not say so to him.

“I think,” she says instead, “that the boys have been afraid of me.”

“I would not doubt that,” Joseph says. “They were afraid
of you when we were young, just because of your temper. The cougar cannot have helped.”

Jules smiles at Camden.

“I should be sorry,” Joseph says. “But I don't like to think about anyone else touching you. I thought of it sometimes, when I was away. And then Billy would take me out to get drunk.”

Jules laughs and rests her forehead against his. There beside the pond, he feels like the boy she has known for so long. Her Joseph. He only looks different on the outside, all that dark hair and the new angles in his face. The broadness of his chest and shoulders.

“We are not the same,” Jules says. “But I don't want us to have changed.”

“But we have, Jules,” Joseph says softly. “We've grown up. I loved you when I was a child. The way a child loves his friend. But I fell in love with you, for real, while I was away. Things can't stay the way they were before.”

He leans close again, and their lips touch. He is gentle and slow. Every movement tells her that he will stop, even as his arms tighten around her waist. He will stop, if it is not what she wants.

Jules slips her arms around his neck and kisses him deeply. It is exactly what she wants. It is all she has ever wanted.

“T
hey will come to part us soon,” Arsinoe says. She has been in the brush, after the berries again. Bright red juice is streaked across her cheek. Or perhaps it is a cut from a thorn.

“Willa won't let us go,” says Katharine. “I don't want to go. I want to stay here.”

Mirabella would like to stay there as well. It is a warm day, newly spring. Now and again, when they grow too hot, she calls the wind to prickle their skin and to make Katharine giggle.

They are on the far side of the brook, divided from the cottage, and Willa will not cross the water to collect them anymore. It is too cold, she says. It makes her old joints ache.

“Willa won't save you,” Arsinoe says.

“Yes, she will,” says Katharine. “Because I am her favorite. It's you she won't save.”

“I will save you both,” Mirabella promises, and runs her
fingers through Katharine's long black hair. It is smooth as satin, and shines. Little Katharine. The youngest of the triplets. She has been Mirabella and Arsinoe's treasure since they were old enough to hold her hand.

“How?” Arsinoe asks, and drops cross-legged into the grass. She plucks a flower and rubs pollen onto Katharine's nose until it turns yellow.

“I'll call thunder to scare them away,” Mirabella replies, twisting Katharine's hair into a fat braid. “And wind so strong it will blow us up onto the mountain.”

Arsinoe considers this, her small brow furrowing. She shakes her head. “That will never work,” she says. “We will have to think of something else.”

“It was only a dream,” Luca says. They are high inside the temple, in her cluttered room of pillows and trinkets.

“It was not,” says Mirabella. “It was a memory.”

Luca dodders about beneath a fur shawl, trying not to be irritated at being shaken from bed before dawn. When Mirabella's eye snapped open in her bed at the Westwood House, it was still dark. She waited for as long as she could stand to before coming to the temple to wake Luca, but the light peeking through the temple shutters is still the palest of grays.

“Come down to the kitchens,” says Luca. “There is no one awake to call for tea at this hour. We will have to make it ourselves.”

Mirabella takes a deep breath. When she lets it out, it shakes.
The memory, or the dream, if that is, indeed, what it was, still clings to her, as do the feelings it stirred.

“Be careful here,” Mirabella says as she guides Luca down the steep temple stairs. She pushes the flame of their lamp up higher. Luca ought to take a room on a lower level. Perhaps a warm one, near the kitchens. But Luca will not admit that she is old. Not until she is dead.

In the kitchen, Mirabella starts a fire in the stove and heats water in a kettle while Luca searches shelves for the leaves she likes best. They do not speak again until they sit with two steaming cups of tea, sweetened with honey.

“It is only something your mind has made up. Because you are nervous. It is not surprising with the Quickening drawing near. And with you so haunted by the death of that sacrifice. Rho should never have made you do that ritual.”

“It is not that,” Mirabella insists. “I did not make it up.”

“You were a child when you last saw your sisters,” Luca says gently. “Perhaps you have heard stories. Perhaps you remember a little, about the cottage and the grounds.”

“I have a very good memory.”

“Queens do not remember these things,” Luca says, and takes a sip of tea.

“Saying so does not make it true.”

Luca looks into her cup solemnly. In the orange light of the table's lamp, every line, every furrow, in the old woman's face is visible.

“You will need it to be true,” the High Priestess says. “For
it is too cruel otherwise, to force a queen to kill that which she loves. Her own sisters. And for her to see that which she loves come at her door like wolves, seeking her head.”

When Mirabella is silent, Luca reaches across and covers her hand with her own.

The echoes of Luca's words are so loud in Mirabella's ears that Elizabeth is almost on top of her before she hears her calling.

“You didn't hear me?” Elizabeth asks, slightly out of breath.

“I am sorry,” Mirabella says. “It is so early; I was not expecting anyone to be awake.”

Elizabeth gestures up the trunk of a nearby evergreen. “Pepper rises with the sun. And so I do as well.”

Looking at the young priestess, Mirabella cannot help but smile. Elizabeth has a way of making it impossible to be sad. Her hood is down, and her dark hair has not yet been braided. Her tufted woodpecker darts onto her shoulder, and she feeds him a palm of seed.

“It is nice also,” she says, “to be up so early that we don't have to worry about being seen.”

Mirabella grasps Elizabeth gently by the wrist. The bracelets the priestess wears are only that: bracelets made from black ribbon and beads. She is only an initiate and can still change her mind.

“Why do you stay?” Mirabella asks. “When I met you, you said that they would take Pepper and kill him if they knew. But your bond is so strong. Why do you not go?”

Elizabeth shrugs. “And go where? I was a temple child, Mirabella. Did I tell you that?”

“No.”

“My mother was a priestess of Kenora Temple. My father was a healer who she often worked with closely. My mother didn't give me up to foster. I grew up there. The temple is all I know. And I am hoping . . .”

“Hoping what?”

“That you will take me with you to Indrid Down Temple, after you are crowned.”

Mirabella nods. “Yes. Many people in Rolanth hope for similar things.”

“I'm sorry,” says Elizabeth. “I do not mean to add to your burden!”

“No.” Mirabella hugs her friend. “You have not. Of course I will take you with me. But think on these”—she holds Elizabeth's bracelets—“I do not necessarily have to bring you to the temple. You have choices. You have all the choices in the world.”

Rho does not like being called to Luca's chambers. She stands near the window, shoulders squared and back stiff. She never tries to make herself at home. She never looks at home anywhere, except perhaps when she is supervising the younger priestesses at their tasks.

Luca can see why Mirabella does not like her. Rho is severe, and uncompromising, and when she smiles, it does not reach
her eyes. But she is one of the best priestesses Luca has ever known. The queen may not care for Rho, nor Rho for the queen, but Rho will certainly be of use.

“She said that,” Rho says, after Luca tells her of Mirabella's early visit. “She remembers her sisters.”

“I do not know if it is true. It might only be the dreams playing tricks. It might only be her nerves.”

Rho looks down. It is clear that she does not think so.

“And so?” Rho asks. “What do you wish to do?”

Luca leans back in her chair. Nothing. Perhaps nothing need be done. Or perhaps she was wrong all this time and Mirabella is not the chosen queen. She wipes at her mouth with the back of her hand.

“You will look a fool,” Rho says, “after supporting her. It is too late to change course.”

“I will not change course,” Luca says angrily. “Queen Mirabella is chosen. She has to be.”

She looks over Rho's shoulder, at the large mosaic hanging on the wall. A depiction of the capital city of Indrid Down, the six-sided dome of its temple and the great black spires of the Volroy.

“How long will it be before we can look at that and think of it only as the capital?” Luca asks. “Instead of as the poisoners' city?”

Rho follows her gaze and then shrugs.

“It was, once,” says Luca. “It was once ours. Ours and the queen's. Now, it is theirs. And the council is theirs. They have grown too strong to listen, and we belong nowhere.”

Rho does not respond. If Luca had hoped for pity, she ought to have summoned a different priestess.

“Rho, you have seen her. You watch her like a hawk above a mouse. What do you think?”

“Do I think she can kill them?” Rho asks, and crosses her arms. “Of course she can. A gift like hers could sink a fleet. She could be great. Like the Queens of Old.”

“But?”

“But,” Rho says darkly, “it is wasted on her. She can kill her sisters, High Priestess. But she will not do it.”

Luca sighs. Hearing it finally spoken does not shock her. In truth, she has suspected it for some time, feared it since meeting Mirabella on the banks of Starfall Lake and nearly being drowned. The child was so angry. She had grieved the loss of Arsinoe and Katharine for nearly a year. Had she been as strong then as she is now, Luca, and every Westwood besides, would be dead.

“If only there were a way to channel that rage,” she mutters.

“Perhaps you will think of one,” Rho says. “But I have thought of something else.”

“What?” Luca asks.

“The way of the White-Handed Queen.”

Luca cocks her head. White-Handed Queens are queens who ascend the throne without ever spilling a drop of their sisters' blood. Without staining their hands.

“What are you talking about? Mirabella was born one of the common three.”

“I am not talking about the Blue Queen,” Rho says, referring to the rare fourth-born twin, who is deemed so blessed that her sisters are drowned by the Midwife as babies.

“Then what?” Luca asks.

“In the old legends, there were other White-Handed Queens,” says Rho.

“Queen Andira, whose sisters were both oracles, with the sight gift,” Luca says. Queens with the sight gift are prone to madness, and put to death. But neither Arsinoe nor Katharine are oracles.

“Another,” says Rho. “Still another. I speak of the White-Handed Queen of the Sacrificial Year.”

Luca narrows her eyes. Rho has been thinking on this for a long time. A Sacrificial Year refers to a generation in which two of the queens are nearly giftless. So weak that they are viewed less as kills than as sacrifices.

Rho has dug deep. Only temple scholars are likely to have heard even the vaguest allusion or parable of the Sacrificial Year.

“This may be such a year,” says Luca. “But I fail to see how it will help, if Mirabella will not claim the sacrifices.”

“In some Sacrificial Years, the people take the sacrifices for her,” Rho says. “The night of the Quickening, in the most sacred of places, the people rise up and feed the other queens into the fires.”

Luca watches Rho carefully. She has never read that. “That is not true,” she says.

Rho shrugs. “Enough whispering will make it true. And it would be quick, and clean, and it would spare the queen's soft heart.”

“You want us to—” Luca starts, but then glances at the door and lowers her voice, “sacrifice Arsinoe and Katharine at Beltane?”

“Yes. On the third day. After the Quickening Ceremony.”

Bloodthirsty Rho, always seeking final solutions. But Luca never imagined she would hatch anything like this.

“The council would have us killed.”

“Mirabella would still have the throne. And besides, they would not, if the island was with us. Not if the rumor was spread. We will need Sara Westwood.”

Luca shakes her head. “Sara would not agree.”

“Sara has become a pious woman. She will do as the temple instructs. And so will its priestesses. Besides, it will do the island good, to be reminded of its old legends.”

Old legends. Legends that they spin out of thin air.

“I do not want to give up on Mira so quickly,” she says, and Rho frowns. “But it is something to consider.”