One Dark Throne

by Kendare Blake

  Ellis sets Jake down and tears the letter open.

  “They make a point of noting that the suitors all requested first court with Queen Katharine,” he says as he reads.

  “That is a lie,” Jules mutters.

  “Maybe so. But it hardly matters. It says here that we are to welcome the suitors Thomas ‘Tommy’ Stratford and Michael Percy.”

  “Two?” Arsinoe scrunches her face in distaste. “Why both of them? Why any?”

  Jules, Cait, and Ellis trade glances. More than one suitor at the same time is a great compliment. Before the show of the bear at the Beltane Festival, no one expected that Arsinoe would receive any requests for first suit, let alone two.

  “They are to arrive any day,” Ellis says. “And who knows how long they might stay on if they like you.”

  “They’ll be gone by week’s end,” Arsinoe says, and chops a potato in half.

  Jules takes the letter from Ellis.

  “Tommy Stratford and Michael Percy.” So much of the Beltane Festival is a blur, but they were the two who came ashore on a barge together the night of the Disembarking. It seemed that they could not stop laughing. Billy had wanted to throttle them.

  Arsinoe tosses her knife onto the table and piles the last of the potato slices onto a wooden platter.

  “That’s done, Cait,” she says. “What’s next?”

  “What’s next is you getting out of this house,” Cait replies. “You cannot hide in my kitchen forever.”

  Arsinoe sinks in her chair. The people of Wolf Spring cannot get enough of their Bear Queen. They gather around her in the market and ask for tales of her great brown. They buy him huge silver fish and expect her to tear into it, too. Raw, right before their eyes. They do not know that the bear was a ruse, called onto the stage during the Quickening Ceremony to dance as if on a string. They do not know that it was Jules controlling it and a low magic spell. Only the family and Joseph and Billy know that. And still fewer know of Arsinoe’s biggest secret: that she is no naturalist at all but a poisoner, her gift discovered when she and Jules both ingested poisoned sweets from Katharine. Jules had sickened to near death, and the damage to her body gave her constant pain and a limp. But Arsinoe had not sickened at all.

  That secret only she, Jules, and Joseph know.

  “Come on,” Jules says. She claps Arsinoe on the shoulder and rises, stiffly. Beside her, her mountain cat, Camden, favors the shoulder that was broken by Arsinoe’s first false familiar, the diseased bear that scarred Arsinoe’s face. Not even two months passed between the crippling of Camden in that attack and the crippling of Jules by poison. It is as if the Goddess cruelly intended for them to match.

  “Where’re we going?” Arsinoe asks.

  “Out from underfoot,” Cait says as she tosses scraps of food up onto the cupboards for the crow familiars, Aria and Eva. The birds bob their heads appreciatively, and Cait lowers her voice. “Do you need some willowbark tea brewed before you go, Jules?”

  “No, Grandma. I’m fine.”

  Outside in the yard, Arsinoe follows Jules past the chicken coops as she and Camden stretch their sore limbs in the sun. Then she darts off into the woodpile.

  “What are you digging for?” Jules asks.

  “Nothing.” But Arsinoe returns with a book, brushing bits of bark off the soft green cover. She holds it up and Jules frowns. It is a book of poison plants, lifted discreetly from one of the shelves in Luke’s bookshop.

  “You shouldn’t be messing about with that,” Jules says. “And what if someone sees you with it?”

  “Then they’ll think I’m trying to get revenge, for what was done to you.”

  “That won’t work. Reading a book to out-poison the poisoners? You can’t even poison a poisoner, can you?”

  “Say ‘poison’ one more time, Jules.”

  “I’m serious, Arsinoe.” She drops her voice to a hissing whisper even though they are alone in the yard. “If anyone finds out what you really are, we lose the only advantage that we have. Is that what you want?”

  “No,” Arsinoe says quietly. She does not argue further, tired of listening to Jules talk of advantages and strategies. Jules has been considering their options since before she was even able to get out of bed from the poison.

  “You sound hesitant,” Jules says.

  “I am hesitant. I don’t want to kill them. And I don’t think they really want to kill me.”

  “But they will.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because every queen we have ever had has done the same. Since the beginning.”

  Arsinoe’s jaw tightens. Since the beginning. That old parable, that the Goddess sent gifts through the sacrifice of queens, triplets sent to the island when the people were still wild tribes. The strongest slew her sisters and their blood fed the island. And she ruled as queen until the Goddess sent new triplets, who grew, and killed, and fed the island. They say it was an instinct once. The drive to kill one another as natural as stags locking horns in the autumn. But that is only a story.

  “Arsinoe? You know they will. You know they’ll kill you whether they want to or not. Even Mirabella.”

  “You only think that because of Joseph,” Arsinoe says. “But she didn’t know and . . . she couldn’t help it.” I did it, she almost says, but she still cannot, even after all that her botched spell has cost them. She is still too much a coward.

  “That’s not why,” Jules says. “And besides, what happened with Joseph . . . it was a mistake. He doesn’t love her. He never left my side during the poison.”

  Arsinoe looks away. She knows that Jules has tried hard to believe that. And to forgive him.

  “Maybe we should just run,” Jules goes on. “Go to ground and hide until one destroys the other. They wouldn’t hunt for you too hard with each other there to choose from. Why bother searching the scrub brush for a grouse when there’s a deer standing in the clearing? I’ve been squirreling away food, just in case. Supplies. We could take horses for distance and trade them for provisions when we go on foot. We’ll circle around the capital, where no one will look. And where we’ll be sure to hear of it when one of them dies.” Jules looks at her from the side of her eye. “And for the record, I hope it’s Katharine who dies first. It will make Mirabella easier to poison if she’s not on the lookout for it anymore.”

  “What if Mirabella dies first?” Arsinoe asks, and Jules shrugs.

  “Walk up and stab Katharine in the throat, I suppose. She can’t hurt you.”

  Arsinoe sighs. There is so much risk, no matter which queen falls first. Mirabella might kill her outright, without a bear to defend her, but if Katharine were to cut her with a poisoned blade, her poisoner secret would come out. Then even if she won, the Arrons would claim her, and she would be yet another poisoner queen seated on the throne.

  There must be a way, she thinks, a way out of this for all of us.

  If she could only talk to them. Even if it was forced. If she could force a stalemate and they were locked together in the tower. If they could only talk, she knew it could be different.

  “You have to get rid of that book,” Jules says stubbornly. “I can’t stand the sight of it.”

  Arsinoe slips the book guiltily into her vest.

  “How would you feel if I told you to hide Camden?” she asks. “If you hate the poisoners, you hate me.”

  “That’s not true,” Jules says. “You are ours. Haven’t you been raised a naturalist all this time? Aren’t you truly a naturalist, at heart?”

  “I am a Milone,” she says. “At heart.”

  Arsinoe bends down and parts the foliage and longer grasses in the meadow north of Dogwood Pond. She sent Jules into town, to the Lion’s Head to look for Joseph and Billy. She said she would follow as soon as she hid the poison book. But she lied. Crouching, she combs through the grasses, and it does not take long for her to locate what she seeks: a stalk of white-flowered hemlock.

  The poison sent by Katharine, meant for
Arsinoe but swallowed by Jules as well, was thought to have contained a measure of hemlock. According to her book, it causes a peaceful death as it paralyzes the body from the feet up.

  “A peaceful death,” Arsinoe mutters. But it was not merciful, combined with whatever other poisons Katharine mixed it with. It was terrible. Slow, and damaging, and Jules suffered cruelly.

  “Why did you do it, little sister?” Arsinoe wonders aloud. “Is it because you were angry? Because you thought I tried to have that bear slice you open?”

  But in her mind, Katharine offers no reply.

  Little Katharine. When they were children, her hair was the longest. And the shiniest. Her face had the sharpest little features. She would float on her back in the stream behind the cottage, with her hair clouded around her like black widgeon grass. Mirabella would send currents through it, and Katharine would laugh and laugh.

  Arsinoe thinks of Jules’s face, contorted in pain. Little Katharine is not to be trifled with.

  Impulsively, she reaches forward and tears the hemlock out by the root. She should not have those fond memories anyway. She would not, if not for Mirabella and her cursed sentimentality, making her remember things that might never have been true.

  “And even if they are,” Arsinoe mutters, “Jules is right.” Before the year is over, two of them will be dead. And no matter how hesitant she is to kill, she does not want to be one of the fallen.

  She sniffs the hemlock blossom. It smells terrible, but she jams it into her mouth. The rancid smell takes on a new note as her chewing brings out the juices.

  The hemlock does not taste good. Yet it tastes . . . satisfying. What she feels chewing poison must be something like Jules feels when she ripens an apple, or Mirabella feels when she calls the wind.

  “Later I’ll go take a nap in a bed of poison ivy,” Arsinoe says, and chuckles as she eats the last of the flowers. “Or perhaps that is going too far.”

  “What’s going too far?”

  Arsinoe steps quickly away from the hemlock plant. She drops the last of the stems and kicks them about to be lost in the grass.

  “Good Goddess, Junior,” she barks. “You sure know how to sneak up on somebody.”

  Billy grins and shrugs. Somehow he never seems to have enough to do. And he always manages to find her. She wonders if that is some mainlander gift. The gift of being a busybody.

  “What are you doing?” he asks. “Not more low magic?”

  “Cait sent me out after blackberries,” she lies. Blackberries are not even in season yet.

  Billy cranes his neck and looks over the shrubbery.

  “I don’t see any berries. Or a basket to carry them.”

  “You’re a pain in the arse,” Arsinoe mutters.

  He laughs. “No bigger one than you.”

  She walks past him, leading them away from the hemlock.

  “All right, I’m sorry,” she says. “What are you doing here? I thought you would be with Joseph and Jules, at the Lion’s Head.”

  “They need their time alone together.” Billy plucks a fat blade of grass and puts it between his thumbs to whistle. “And Jules says you’ve had news of your suitors.”

  “So that’s why you’ve come running.” She grins, and the grin pushes up the side of the black lacquered mask she wears to cover her facial scars.

  “I didn’t ‘come running,’” he insists. “I’ve always known this would happen. I knew they’d be after you once they saw that bear. Once they saw you up on that cliff at the Disembarking.

  “And everyone else knew too. Down at the pier, we have boats lined up to have their hulls scraped and repainted. No one in Wolf Spring wants to seem like they care what the rest of the island thinks. But they are lying.”

  Wolf Spring. A hard, farming, seafaring town full of hard, farming, brutal people. They value their land, and their waters, and the swing of their axes.

  Arsinoe puts her hands on her hips and looks out over the meadow. It is beautiful. Wolf Spring is beautiful just as it is. She does not like to think of it changing to please some so-called illustrious guests.

  “Tommy Stratford and Michael . . . something or other,” she says. “Are you worried I’ll like them better than I like you?”

  “That’s just not possible.”

  “Why? Because you’re so irresistible?”

  “No. Because you don’t like anyone.”

  Arsinoe snorts.

  “I do like you, Junior.”

  “Oh?”

  “But I have more important things to think about right now.”

  Billy has let his hair grow since coming to the island, and it is long enough now to almost move a little in the wind. Arsinoe catches herself wondering what it would be like to run her fingers through it and promptly stuffs her hands into her pockets.

  “I agree,” Billy says, and turns to face her. “I want you to know that I’ve refused to go to your sisters.”

  “But your father. He will be furious! We’ll stop the letter. Did you send it by bird or by horse? Do not say by boat. Jules can’t call one of those back.”

  “It’s too late, Arsinoe. It’s done.” He steps closer and touches the cheek of her black-and-red mask. He was there that day, when she had foolishly led them into a bear attack. He had tried to save her.

  “You said you didn’t want to marry me,” she whispers.

  “I say a lot of things.”

  He leans toward her. No matter what she says about putting off thoughts of the future, she has imagined this moment many times. Watching him from the corner of her eye and wondering what his kisses would be like. Gentle? Or clumsy? Or would they be the way his laughter is, confident and full of mischief?

  Arsinoe’s heart beats faster. She leans into him, and then she remembers the hemlock that still coats her lips.

  “Don’t touch me!”

  She shoves him, and he lands on his hip in the grass.

  “Ow,” he says.

  “Sorry,” she responds sheepishly, and helps him up. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

  “The near kiss or the shove?” He brushes himself off without looking at her, his cheeks red with embarrassment. “Did I do something wrong? Did you want to be the one to kiss me? Is that how it is here? Because I would be fine with that—”

  “No.” Arsinoe can still taste the hemlock, in the back of her throat. She almost forgot. She almost killed him, and the thought takes her breath away. “I’m sorry. I just don’t want to. Not right now.”

  Jules and Joseph finish two mugs of ale before acknowledging that Billy is not coming back with Arsinoe.

  “Probably for the best,” Joseph says. “It’s grown late. Drunk folk might start demanding to see her bear.”

  Jules frowns. Their phantom bear is becoming a problem. Arsinoe has not been seen with him since the night of the Quickening, saying that he is too violent and must be kept far off in the woods. But that will not satisfy the people of Wolf Spring for much longer.

  “Well,” Joseph says, and pushes back from the table. “Shall we go? Or do you want another order of fried clams?”

  Jules shakes her head, and they walk together out into the street. The early-evening light is softening, and the water of Sealhead Cove glitters cobalt and orange, visible between the buildings. As they make their way down toward it, Joseph slips his fingers into hers.

  His touch still gives her a pleasurable jolt, even if it is tainted by what happened between him and Mirabella.

  “Joseph,” she says, and holds his hand up. “Your knuckles.”

  He lets go of her to make a fist. His knuckles are split and scabbed from working the boats. “I always said I would never work in the shipyard with my father and Matthew. Though I don’t know what else I thought I would be doing.” He sighs. “It’s not a bad life, I suppose. If it’s good enough for them, who am I to think any different? As long as you don’t mind me smelling like a barnacle.”

  Jules hates to see his brave face. And how trapped he se
ems.

  “I don’t mind,” she says. “And anyhow it’s not forever.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Of course not. It’s only until Arsinoe is crowned, remember? You on her council and me on her guard.”

  “Ah,” he says, and slips his arm about her shoulders. “Our happy ending. I did say something like that, didn’t I?”

  They walk companionably through the alley between the Heath and Stone and the Wolverton Inn, Camden hopping up and down on stacks of wooden crates full of empty bottles.

  “Where did Arsinoe go off to tonight?” Joseph asks.

  “To the bent-over tree, probably. To find Madrigal and do more low magic.”

  “Madrigal is with Matthew. She met him on the docks, the moment he came in off The Whistler.”

  Madrigal and Matthew. Their names together make her wince. Her mother’s fling with Joseph’s older brother should be over by now. Matthew at least should have come to his senses. He should realize how flighty and fickle Madrigal is. He should remember that he still loves her Aunt Caragh, banished to the Black Cottage or not.

  “They ought to end that,” she says.

  “Maybe. But they won’t. He says he loves her, Jules.”

  “Only with his eyes,” she spits. “Not with his heart.” Joseph nearly flinches when she says that, and she glances sideways at his handsome profile. Perhaps that is how all men love. More with their eyes than with their hearts. So maybe it was not the storm and the circumstances. The delirium. Queen Mirabella is certainly more to look at than she is, and maybe it was nothing more complicated than that.

  Jules pulls away.

  “What?” Joseph asks. They round the corner at the end of the alley, and a small group spills out from the doors of the Heath and Stone. When they see Joseph, they stop short.

  Joseph wraps an arm about Jules’s shoulders.

  “Just keep walking.”

  But as they pass, the nearest girl, brave on too much whiskey, cuffs Joseph in the back of the head. When he turns, she spits on the chest of his shirt.

  Joseph exhales in disgust, but does his best to smile.

  Jules’s temper flares.

  “It’s all right, Jules,” he says.