One Dark Throne

by Kendare Blake

  “But,” Arsinoe sputters. “You can’t!”

  “I must.”

  At her anxious tone, Braddock bobs his head and wanders away.

  “Junior! Don’t be an idiot. You can’t be her taster! Doesn’t your father understand the danger? She . . . Katharine is already sending poison to Rolanth. One of Mirabella’s maids has already died in a poisoned dress!”

  “It was not a poisoned dress,” Billy says. “It was a poisoned glove. And she did not die. They cut off her hand in time. They don’t even know if it would have killed her or if Katharine is only playing.”

  “The Arrons do not play,” Arsinoe insists. “And how do you know all that?”

  “My father discussed it with the Westwoods at length.”

  Her brow furrows, and he smiles charmingly and slips his hand onto the back of her neck, beneath the fall of her hair. That stupid, mainland bluster, but she cannot seem to move away.

  “Do all mainlanders think themselves immortal, or is it just you?”

  “I will be perfectly safe! My father wouldn’t put me at risk. And when he’s done being angry, I’ll come back to you, I promise. In the meantime, I can be your eyes and ears on Mirabella.” He caresses her mask with his thumb. “I heard what happened in the woods. You shouldn’t have gone up against her like that. You great half-wit.”

  She pushes his hand away from her mask.

  “Are you sure that your father wouldn’t make some other bargain? He is always in Indrid Down, with the Arrons.”

  “He likes Indrid Down. It’s more like home. Civilized. He’s looking forward to ousting the Arrons when you are queen.”

  She rolls her eyes and he laughs, trying to cheer her.

  “Don’t be so worried! I’m his only son. And where I come from, that means something.”

  “Can’t anyone change your mind?”

  “No one,” he says. “Not even you.”

  “So you’ll leave. When?”

  “We’re sailing for Rolanth today.”

  “But you’ve only just returned.” Everything inside her is suddenly heavy. She takes a clumsy, half step forward and throws her arms around Billy’s neck. After an initial “oof” of surprise, he holds her tight.

  “Don’t be daft,” he says into her hair. “No matter how far I go, I’m still your person. We stand together now. We are together now, aren’t we?”

  “Are we?” she asks.

  He kisses her forehead, and her cheek. He kisses her shoulder, still too nervous to kiss her properly, and that is her fault. Then he gently removes her arms and turns to walk away.

  “Billy!” she calls out, and he stops. “Why did you choose me? Instead of one of my sisters?”

  “Because I saw you first,” he says, and winks. “I’ll be back soon. But . . . just in case I die, I want you to remember that you could have kissed me that day in the meadow.”

  Jules and Joseph load barrels of ale onto the back of an oxcart. It will be driven over the hill to the apple orchard northeast of the Milone house, where the feast to welcome the suitors will be held.

  “You’re strong for someone so small,” Joseph says as they load the last one. He wipes sweat from his brow.

  “What is that,” she asks, “a compliment wrapped in an insult?”

  He laughs, and they move into the shade on the back steps of the Lion’s Head. Camden stretches out at their feet on the cool stone pavement, and Jules leans forward to scratch her belly.

  “I can’t believe that Billy’s father is sending him to be a taster,” Jules says. “It feels like we shouldn’t let him go. Or that he should refuse.”

  “He never refuses his father,” says Joseph, and cocks his head thoughtfully. “No one ever refuses his father. All that time I lived with them, I only saw folk kiss his arse and tell him what he wanted to hear. He’s used to getting the things that he wants.” He shrugs. “I wonder what that’s like.”

  “It doesn’t sound like much to me,” says Jules. “Sounds like arse-kissing and lies. One of us ought to go with Billy. To ease Arsinoe’s mind, if nothing else.”

  “I’m going with him, Jules,” he says, and she looks at him in shock.

  “I didn’t mean you! And I was really only saying it to be kind!”

  “I’m not staying,” he says, half-smiling at her outburst. “Just going to get him settled in. Make sure everything is on the up and up, like you said. So Arsinoe won’t worry.”

  “She’ll worry anyway.” Jules crosses her arms. “Will you see Mirabella? Climb into her bed, maybe?”

  “That’s part of the reason I’m going. To see her! Not the bed part!” he adds when Jules’s fists come up.

  “Why do you need to see her?”

  “To tell her that it’s over. To make sure she knows.”

  “She doesn’t need to know, does she?” Jules asks, knowing how mean it sounds but unable to keep quiet. “It was never anything to start with. Mirabella will die or marry a suitor. You were never an option.”

  “Jules.” Joseph takes her face in his hands and kisses her. “I love you. What I did was wrong, but I wronged her, too. This was my fault. She didn’t know about you until it was too late.”

  Jules sighs.

  “Go, then.”

  “So you trust me?”

  She turns and looks squarely into his handsome, storm-blue eyes.

  “Not one bit.”

  THE SUITORS ARRIVE

  INDRID DOWN

  The Highbern Hotel is the finest in the capital, a tall, imposing rectangle of gray brick and gold-gilded rainspouts fashioned into the likenesses of falcon heads, close enough to the Volroy to cast its morning shadow into the western gardens. The black-and-white flags above the doors have been replaced with pure black ones embossed with coiled snakes and poisonous flowers. A clear announcement that the poisoner queen is in attendance.

  In the grand ballroom, Katharine sits restlessly between Natalia and Nicolas Martel as he oohs and aahs at the finery. It is nothing new for her. She has been to the Highbern many times, with Natalia for tea and for other banquets through the years. Personally, she has always thought the place smelled too old, as if it were rotting beneath its carpets. But today they have opened the doors and windows, so at least she can enjoy the lilac wafting from the Volroy’s courtyard fences.

  “Have you heard the news from Highgate?” Renata Hargrove asks.

  Natalia arranged the seating differently for the suitor’s feast, more intimately, around curving tables covered in deep red cloth. To Katharine’s great delight, it meant she was able to place Genevieve nearly all the way across the room.

  “What news is that?” Natalia asks.

  “Apparently, the elemental called not one but two storms. With fierce lightning and fires with smoke that was visible for miles.”

  “Yet the naturalist lives,” says Lucian Marlowe, the only non-Arron male on the Black Council.

  “A pity her carriage was only a decoy. We could have used the rain.” Natalia sips her tainted wine, and the guests chuckle. “Though with any luck, she will kill the naturalist, and we will never have to close our windows against the smell of bear.”

  “But what fun is that for our Queen Katharine?” Lucian says, and laughs.

  Katharine ignores them and leans toward Nicolas.

  “You must think us awful with all this talk of death.”

  “Not at all,” he says in his soft accent. “I have been educated in the ways of the queens. And I have seen death, and dying, on the battlefield. Coups in my country cost tens of thousands of lives. Your Ascension Year seems civilized in comparison.”

  “You sound very certain,” Katharine says. “But your eyes are nervous. Perhaps even afraid.”

  “Only of accidentally eating something that was not meant for my plate.” Nicolas smiles and looks down as though to guard it.

  The feast is a Gave Noir but not of the scope of the Quickening. Each dish is served as a separate course, and all of the poisoners in
attendance partake, not only the queen.

  Katharine pushes her fork into a green salad dotted with poisonous mushrooms, and adjusts the itchy gloves on her hands. Underneath, her skin is healing from a rubbing of dwarf nettle. The combination of healing scabs and sweat is making her want to scratch her skin off.

  “Before the Beltane Festival, I thought watching a Gave Noir would be vulgar. But afterward”—he looks up at her from beneath his fall of gold hair—“there is something alluring about it. That you may eat something that I will never be able to taste.”

  “Shall I describe it to you?”

  “Do you think you could?”

  “I do not know.” She looks down at the mushrooms: their bright red caps spotted with white. “Much of what we eat is bitter or has little taste. But there is something in the sensation of it. It is like eating power.” She stabs a bit onto her fork and pops it into her mouth. “And it does not hurt that our cooks drown everything in butter.”

  Nicolas laughs. His voice is not deep—indeed, Natalia’s voice is deeper—but it is pleasant.

  “It must be more than that,” he says. “Every poisoner here has turned their nose up as my dishes go by.” He glances about the room, and Katharine raises her eyebrows at his plate: a shallow bowl of chilled summer soup. Only he, giftless Renata Hargrove, and war-gifted Margaret Beaulin are eating that, and they all have the sense to pretend they are not hungry.

  “Do not pay them any attention,” Katharine says. “Poisoners are always that way about untainted food.” She reaches up and touches the flowers of the centerpiece and the towers of shining fruit. “They see it as inelegant, no matter how much silver they pile it upon or how much spun sugar they hide it under.”

  Nicolas reaches out as well, and their fingers touch. He seizes the opportunity and takes her hand to press it firmly to his lips, so firmly that she is sure to feel it even through the gloves.

  Katharine does feel it. It shocks her just how much, and for a moment, Pietyr flashes into her mind, the memory of him suddenly strong enough to make her heart pound. She clenches her teeth and takes a breath. She refuses to think of Pietyr that way. Pietyr, who tried to murder her. She touches her face. Her cheeks are flushed. But Nicolas will think it is because of his kiss.

  “There is such finery here,” Nicolas says. “But less of a heartbeat than at the Beltane Festival. Those nights beside the fires were so exciting. Watching you through the flames. Looking up at you from the sand. Will there be other festivals like that?”

  “The next festival is for Midsummer,” Katharine says, and coughs when her voice trembles. “Celebrated across the island, of course, but really it is a naturalist affair, of harvest and bounty. Then there is the Reaping Moon in autumn, though the elementals claim that through fires and chilled winds.”

  “Which festival is the poisoners’ festival?” Nicolas asks.

  “Every festival,” Natalia answers from Katharine’s other side. She should have known that Natalia would be listening.

  “At every festival there is a feast,” Natalia explains. “And every feast is for the poisoners.”

  The main course is served: a poisoned hog with a bright spring pear stuffed into its mouth after roasting. The servers bring it first to Katharine and Natalia’s table, to carve her the choicest bits along with spoonfuls of orange squash sweetened with molasses and arsenic. The hog is delicious, juicy and robust. The seared bird on Nicolas’s plate looks shrunken and sad in comparison.

  After the meal, Katharine leads her suitor onto the floor to dance.

  “I can’t believe how well you are,” Nicolas whispers, gazing at her in awe. “There was so much poison . . . enough to kill a man twice your size.”

  “Enough to kill twenty,” Katharine corrects him, smiling. “But do not worry, Nicolas. I have been eating poison since I was a child. Now I am practically made of it.”

  ROLANTH

  Mirabella turns back and forth in front of the mirror with a pained expression as Sara and the priestesses adjust the fall of her dress.

  “It is so thin in places,” Mirabella says, studying a transparent spot near her hip.

  The gown is fashioned from gauzy material overlaid and wrapped around itself. It is light as air and moves in the breeze.

  “It is beautiful,” Elizabeth assures her.

  “Just the thing to welcome a suitor in,” says Bree.

  “William Chatworth Junior is not here as a suitor. He is here as a prisoner. Everyone knows he has already chosen Arsinoe. This feast is a farce.”

  Sara fastens a necklace around Mirabella’s throat: it is the one she selected for Beltane, with the obsidian beads and gems that burn like fire. “Boys’ minds are changeable,” she says, and taps the gems. “This will remind him of your dance. His eye was on you then, no matter what he says about the naturalist.”

  With an impish grin, Bree bumps Mirabella aside and turns before the mirror.

  “I cannot wait for the feast. Stewed apples and pork . . . berry tartlets . . . All this business of poison and tasters. I’m so afraid of my plate most days that I barely manage a mouthful.” She points to a gap between her dress and her armpit. “Look at this bodice! My breasts have shrunk!”

  “Bree,” Elizabeth says, and giggles. “They have not.”

  “Easy for you to say, with the pair that you have. If they were not trapped under temple robes, no one would look at me twice.” She swishes her skirt back and forth. Despite her words, the dress is very becoming, embroidered with bright blue hydrangeas.

  “And what young man do you have your eye on now, daughter?” Sara asks.

  “Mrs. Warren’s glassmaking apprentice,” Bree replies. “The tawny-headed one. With good shoulders and freckles.” She turns. “Mira, if we fall in love, you must promise to appoint him to your royal guard. And then you must promise to get rid of him when we fall out of it.”

  “Bree,” Elizabeth objects. “She can’t dismiss someone just because you’ve finished with them! If you turn around one day and find that Mira’s guard is filled with your old lovers . . . then that will be your own fault.”

  Mirabella tries to smile. They have worked hard to cheer her since Arsinoe and her bear escaped in the Ashburn Woods. Mirabella had searched and searched, but it was as if her sister and the bear had vanished.

  “There will be whispers,” Mirabella murmurs. “They are saying I ran home with my tail tucked between my legs.”

  “But we know the truth,” Elizabeth protests. “It was Arsinoe who ran, not you.”

  Arsinoe had run. But why? The bear had caught Mirabella completely by surprise. It could have torn her wide open. She does not understand why it did not. Why Arsinoe did not fight back.

  The pavilion in Moorgate Park has been decorated with wreaths of flowers and long, trailing white and blue ribbons. The temple means to present William Chatworth Jr. to her there. As though he is a gift.

  “So many people have come,” Mirabella whispers as their coach draws to a halt. All of Rolanth must have emptied, from the sheep farms in the south to the northern stalls at Penman Market.

  Mirabella takes a deep breath. The air smells of baked apple pies and fragrant spiced smoke from the roasting fires.

  “Mirabella! Queen Mirabella has arrived!”

  Those near to the coach rush toward it. Mirabella, Bree, and Elizabeth get out and are quickly jostled into the center of nine guardian priestesses. Some in the crowd are into their cups and push too close.

  “Get back!” Bree shouts as the priestesses grasp the handles of their serrated knives.

  “We should have brought Rho,” Elizabeth says.

  “Rho is with Luca,” Mirabella replies.

  “And besides,” Bree adds, “who likes to bring Rho anywhere?” But Elizabeth is right. If Rho were there, they would not have to worry about trouble from the crowd.

  “Do you hear that?” Elizabeth mutters. Mirabella does not hear anything except the noise of the people, and the music from
the players beside the pavilion.

  “Hear what, Elizabeth?”

  Elizabeth cranes her neck toward the green-leafed branches casting shade onto the path.

  “It is Pepper,” she whispers. “He’s agitated. He recognizes someone.”

  “I think I know who,” Bree says. Beside the fountain, Luca and Rho stand at the head of a band of priestesses. Kneeling at their feet, his head down so she can see only the top of his sandy hair, is the suitor, William Chatworth Jr.

  And to his right is Joseph Sandrin.

  Mirabella wants to shout but she does not react. She has been raised a queen and feels every eye on her. She cannot ask what Joseph is doing there. She cannot even reach out to squeeze her friends’ hands.

  “Queen Mirabella,” William says. “I have come to serve.”

  “You are most welcome,” comes her distant reply.

  William raises his eyes, and she forces herself to smile. Has Joseph come to stay? Is this the way he has found to be near her?

  “Come, Mira,” Bree whispers, and escorts her to the banquet table. Elizabeth bows, and leaves to dine with her fellow priestesses.

  They seat Joseph on the other side of William Chatworth, who is seated to Mirabella’s left. At her right, High Priestess Luca signals the musicians to play, and dancers and jugglers fill the space in the grass before the table.

  When a novice priestess brings Mirabella the first cut from the haunch of a roasted boar, Chatworth takes her knife and fork before she can even touch them.

  “Not yet, my queen,” he says. “This is my lot. To chew and swallow and see if I will die so you won’t.” He takes a little of the meat and a section of apple pastry. Then he washes it all down with wine from her goblet.

  Mirabella waits. He drums his fingers.

  “No cramps. No burning. No blood from my eyes.”

  “Do you think it safe, then, William?”

  “Call me Billy,” he says. “And yes, I think it’s safe. Safer anyway than what you did to Arsinoe in the forest.”