One Dark Throne

by Kendare Blake

  Katharine slaps it away.

  “You do not know what you have come back to,” she says. She grasps the sides of his head and kisses him forcefully, her lips hard enough to make it a punishment. She bites along his jaw. She licks the blood from the cut on his throat.

  He wraps his arms around her waist and pulls her to him.

  “Katharine,” he says, and sighs. “How I love you.”

  “How indeed.” She shoves him hard. “How you must love me, Pietyr,” she says, and leaves to return to Nicolas. “But you will never have me again.”

  WOLF SPRING

  The house is quiet. An odd thing for a naturalist house to be. Usually, it is filled with barks and caws and someone in the kitchen or Cait talking to the flock as they cluck and honk through the yard. Jules takes a deep breath and listens to the air move in and out. She sips a hot cup of willowbark tea and strokes Camden’s head where it rests on her leg.

  She and the cat have been even closer than usual since Jules’s legion curse became known. They cling to each other, unsure what it might mean for their bond. The thought that one day she could wake and find that Camden is not a part of her anymore—it is more terrifying than anything she could do with the war gift.

  Madrigal walks in, back from the market with her arms full of baskets. Breaking the peace.

  “Will you help me?” she asks. “I’m making chowder with fresh cream, and biscuits with that soft white cheese that you like.”

  “What’s the occasion?” Jules asks suspiciously. She takes the basket of clams and dumps them into the sink to wash.

  “No occasion.” Madrigal sets the rest of her shopping on the countertop. “But when it’s ready, you could float the bowls onto the table for us.”

  Jules scowls.

  “That isn’t how it works.”

  “How do you know?” Madrigal asks. “The war gift has been weak for so long that nobody knows how it works.”

  That is true enough. Everything Jules has ever heard about the war gift has been the stuff of long-ago legends. Of the recent there are only rumors. Folk in Bastian City who have uncanny accuracy with knives and bows. Near-impossible shots made so clean that it is almost as if the weapon were pulled on a string.

  But it is not pull so much as push. Jules has worked at it, alone and mostly in secret, aghast and amazed at what she is able to do.

  At the sink, Madrigal begins scrubbing clams, nearly managing to look like she has done it before. She wipes her forehead. Sallow circles mar the undersides of her eyes. And she is still breathless from the walk.

  “Are you all right?” Jules asks.

  “I’m fine. How are you? Is that willowbark tea? Is your leg paining you?”

  “Madrigal, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “Only that . . .” She pauses and heaps washed clams into a pot. “Only that I’m pregnant.” She twists at the waist and flashes a fast smile, then looks back down at her hands. “Matthew and I are going to have a baby.”

  Aria flies nervously onto the table. Her wing feathers shift in the quiet.

  “You,” Jules says, “and Aunt Caragh’s Matthew are going to have a baby?”

  “Don’t call him that. He is not her Matthew.”

  “That’s how we all think of him. That’s how we’ll always think of him.”

  “Honestly, Jules,” Madrigal says, her tone slightly disgusted. “After what happened between Joseph and Queen Mirabella, I thought you’d have grown up a little.”

  Jules’s temper rises, and on the countertop, Madrigal’s knife begins to rattle as if of its own accord.

  “Don’t, Jules.” Madrigal backs away. “Don’t do that.”

  The knife stops.

  “I’m not,” Jules says quickly. “I mean, I didn’t mean to.”

  “Your war gift is strong. You should let me unbind it.”

  “Grandma Cait says the binding might be all that’s keeping me sane.”

  “Or all that’s holding you back.”

  Jules looks at the knife. She could make it move. Make it fly. Make it cut. Nothing about her naturalist gift has ever felt so wicked or out of control.

  Madrigal picks up the knife, and Jules breathes easier with it safe in her hand.

  “I suppose this means you’re not happy about the baby. But you can’t hate him, Jules. Just to spite me. You won’t, will you?”

  “No,” Jules says darkly. “I will be a good sister.”

  Madrigal looks at her. Then she rolls potatoes onto the counter and starts to chop them.

  “I thought I would be so happy,” she mutters. “I thought this baby would make me so happy.”

  “Pity for you, then,” says Jules. “Nothing is ever as good as you want it to be.”

  A second crow, larger than Aria, flies into the kitchen and lands on the table with a letter in her beak. It is Eva, Grandma Cait’s familiar, and the letter bears the seal of the Black Council. Cait comes in behind her and sees the scowl on Jules’s face.

  “I take it that you’ve told her about the baby.”

  “Why does everyone in this family know things before I do?” Jules asks.

  “Never mind that, Jules. You’ll get over it.”

  Jules nods toward Eva’s letter. “What does it say?”

  “That Wolf Spring is about to be crowded. It seems that both of the other queens and their households are coming for Midsummer. Where has Arsinoe gotten off to?”

  “The woods, I think, with Braddock.”

  “You’d better go, then, and tell her.”

  Jules gets up from the table, and she and Camden head outside. They hurry down the path to the road, stretching the muscles in their bad legs. They meet Joseph as they reach the hilltop fork.

  “What’s got you in such a hurry?” he asks as she slips her hand into his and tugs him along.

  “News for Arsinoe. I’m glad you’re here. It saves us a trip.”

  “Oh no,” Arsinoe says when Jules and Joseph come into the meadow. “What news is there now?” She had been watching Braddock pluck blackberries off a vine, his flapping lips nearly as good as fingers.

  “Mirabella and Katharine are coming here,” Jules says. “For Midsummer. And they’re each bringing an army of supporters besides. The letter from the Council just arrived.”

  Arsinoe’s shoulders slump. The other queens, here. Wolf Spring will be flooded with strangers.

  “A lot of good it did, my trying to keep Mirabella out of my city.”

  “I don’t like it,” Jules growls, and at her side, Camden snarls. “We won’t be able to guard you. It’ll be chaos.”

  “It won’t be easy,” Joseph agrees. “But at least we’ll be here, at home. Where we know how things lie.”

  “Midsummer is in less than a week,” Arsinoe says. “And there was no letter of warning from Billy. What good is having a spy in Rolanth if he can’t even tell us about this?”

  “Rolanth might not have gotten more notice than we did,” says Jules. But that is unlikely. Even if it was an Arron plot, the temple would have needed to agree.

  Arsinoe sighs.

  “Naturalists. We are always the last to know.”

  “After you’re crowned, there will be naturalists on the Council,” Joseph says. “Wolf Spring will finally have a say again in how Fennbirn is run.”

  Arsinoe and Jules trade glances. Joseph, the look says. Ever the optimist.

  “Has Billy written?” he asks. “Is he well? Is he safe?”

  “He’s written twice. He promised to write daily.” Arsinoe crosses her arms. Two letters, and both were formal and stilted, containing none of the awful personality that she misses so much.

  She looks at her friends standing in the meadow where they have stood so many times before. The summer sun casts their shadows onto the ground, and those shadows seem like the ghosts of their childhood, forever running through these trees.

  “Our happy ending,” she says quietly.

  “Arsinoe,” s
ays Jules. “You have to do something. You know why they’re coming.”

  Not to talk. Foolish to have thought that talking would stop Mirabella from searing blisters up and down her back.

  Arsinoe watches Braddock foraging in the bushes. She does not want to put him in danger. Or Jules. Or Joseph. But they are all she has. Only her friends and her low magic.

  GREAVESDRAKE MANOR

  Katharine holds Sweetheart carefully as she extracts the snake’s venom, pressing the glands. The yellow poison runs down the sides of the glass jar. There is not very much. Sweetheart is a small snake, and even in a small jar, her venom barely coats the bottom.

  Nicolas leans across her bed watching, enrapt.

  “How strange,” he whispers. “That so little of a thing can cause such great harm.”

  Katharine pries the snake free with a gentle motion and places her back into her cage. Sweetheart writhes crankily and bites at the glass, wriggling as she tries to inject venom that is no longer there.

  Nicolas recoils; Katharine giggles. She screws a lid onto the jar.

  “What will you use it for?” he asks.

  “Perhaps nothing.” She tips it back and forth and watches the poison run. “I just wanted a bit of her with me, since I must leave her behind. Now let us go!” She tugs him playfully off the bed, and he kisses her gloved fingers.

  Downstairs, Natalia arches an eyebrow, already waiting at the door. But she does not scold. Indeed, she smiles toothlessly at the sight of their linked hands.

  Outside, a dark caravan packed full of Arrons and poisons stretches down the long, horseshoe drive.

  “I cannot wait to see the faces on the bumpkins of Wolf Spring when we arrive,” Katharine says. “Their bottom teeth will scrape the dirt.”

  The household servants line up to bid them farewell, and as she passes her maid Giselle, Katharine reaches out and squeezes her shoulder. Giselle jerks back. Her eyes fall to the stone steps.

  She is afraid of me, Katharine realizes, and looks down the row. They are all afraid of her. Even Edmund, Natalia’s steadfast butler.

  Katharine smiles at Giselle and kisses her cheek as if she had not noticed. She turns away when she hears horse hooves clip-clopping in her direction.

  She will not ride in a coach like the others. Pietyr rides up on a tall black mare and leads two saddle horses behind him: Katharine’s favorite, Half Moon, and the blood bay Nicolas brought from the mainland.

  “This will be a good opportunity to let the people see you,” Natalia says.

  “To see how well and healthy you are,” Genevieve adds, and stops talking when Natalia shoots her a look.

  The island will see her as she passes, a live queen, not the decaying, animated corpse the rumors would have them believe.

  “Whatever the reason, I am glad to ride outside,” she says. Loaded as they are, the caravan will move at a snail’s pace and still slower when navigating the steep and unkempt roads in the hills.

  Pietyr starts to dismount to help Katharine into the saddle.

  “Don’t trouble yourself, Renard,” Nicolas says, using Pietyr’s non-Arron name on purpose just to irritate him. “I will assist my queen.”

  “She is not your queen yet,” Pietyr mutters, and Katharine grins at him before Nicolas boosts her onto Half Moon.

  “Careful, Pietyr,” she whispers after Nicolas has gone to mount his own horse. “Or Natalia and Genevieve will send you away.” She takes up her reins, but Pietyr holds fast to Half Moon’s bridle.

  “They may, but I will not go,” he says. “I will be here until the day you tell me to leave.”

  Katharine’s pulse quickens. The look Pietyr gives to Nicolas is so dark that she wonders whether it is a good idea that they both remain at Greavesdrake. If their rivalry goes much further, she will enter the drawing room one day and find Nicolas poisoned or Pietyr slumped across the sofa with a knife in his back.

  “May we ride ahead?” Nicolas asks, bringing his horse up beside hers. “We can circle back around to the carriages if we go too far . . . unless your horse will tire?”

  “Impossible.” Katharine strokes Half Moon’s long, sleek neck. “Half Moon can run for days and never tire. He is the finest horse on the whole island.”

  They trot together down the drive ahead of the caravan but behind the guard and the scouts. The day is hot but with a strong, cool breeze. A true Midsummer day. Perhaps a good omen.

  “What is that there?” Nicolas gestures toward the end of the drive.

  A cluster of women in white-and-black robes, priestesses from Indrid Down Temple, have gathered to give her a blessing. As they ride closer, Katharine notes that Head Priestess Cora is not among them.

  “So many coaches,” says one of the priestesses, whose name she does not remember. “Wolf Spring will overflow.”

  “Indeed,” Katharine says. “When I leave, they may be poorer by one queen but much richer in money from the capital. Have you come to give the Goddess’s blessing?”

  “We have. Tonight we go into the hills to pray and burn oleander.”

  Half Moon starts to fidget and Katharine takes up an inch of his rein.

  “Everyone knows that the temple supports Mirabella,” she says. “But you are priestesses of Indrid Down. In service to poisoners since you came.”

  “All queens are sacred,” the priestess responds.

  Katharine’s jaw tenses. She glances at Nicolas, who moves his horse back.

  “I know you do not like me,” Katharine whispers. “I know you sense that I am wrong, even if you will not say so.”

  “All queens are sacred,” the priestess says again in her infuriating, even voice.

  Katharine would like to ride the white robes into the dirt. Grind them into the mud until they are stained dark red and brown. But the caravan approaches in hoofbeats and jangling harnesses, trunks and wheels rattling. So instead she smiles a smile of bared teeth.

  “Yes,” she says. “All queens are sacred. Even those you threw into a pit.”

  ROLANTH

  A woman and her husband kneel before the temple over an offering of dyed and scented water. The water is a dark, stormy blue, calm inside a beautiful mosaic bowl of white-and-silver glass.

  “Blessings upon you, Queen Mirabella,” the woman murmurs, and Mirabella extends her hand over her bent head. She recognizes them from the central district. They are merchants who deal in silks and precious stones. And she has seen the woman through her carriage window as they passed, shouting orders to workers restoring the Vaulted Theatre.

  Not many from Rolanth will accompany her to Wolf Spring. Since it was announced that the Reaping Moon would be held here in a few months’ time, there is simply too much to do.

  “Thank you for your offering,” Elizabeth says, and picks up the bowl to be brought inside. Bree takes Mirabella by the arm.

  Once inside, Mirabella takes a deep breath. The open air smells of temple roses in full bloom, and beneath that, the salt of the sea and the cold, earthy essence of her beloved basalt cliffs. Today they depart for the long road to Wolf Spring. Wagons have been loaded with supplies, and at Westwood House, coaches stand ready with a portion of her wardrobe folded away in trunks.

  “You seem so sad,” Bree says as they walk around the southern dome. “Are you not even a little bit excited?”

  Mirabella pauses before Queen Shannon’s mural, storms and lightning in blue-and-gold paint. The weather queen seems to be gazing down upon her.

  “I should not be excited,” she says. “I should be ready. No decree from the Black Council is to be trusted so long as the Arrons control it.”

  Bree rolls her eyes.

  “Now you sound like Luca. This is a good thing, do you not see? You will kill Katharine and Arsinoe both, and then we will have nothing but feasting and suitors until your crowning at Beltane.”

  Everyone in Rolanth seems to agree, indoctrinated by Luca all these years to believe Mirabella’s legend.

  “It will be h
ard to protect you in Wolf Spring,” Elizabeth says. “The people are wild. And with the temple obligated to be neutral, Rho will not be able to help.”

  “Her gift will keep her safe,” Bree says confidently. “And so will we. That is what foster guardians are for.”

  She pats Mirabella’s hand, but in truth they have always relied on the priestesses for their security. The Westwoods have had nearly no practice guarding her at all.

  “Are you frightened, Mira?” Elizabeth asks.

  “My senses are uneasy,” she replies. “I do not like leaving Rolanth. And that it was not our idea.” And she cannot stop thinking of what Billy told her. That Arsinoe had not sent the bear. And she did not fight back in the Ashburn Woods or use the bear then to harm her . . .

  She looks into Elizabeth’s wide, dark eyes.

  “I am only afraid of what I must do.”

  Elizabeth slips her arm around the queen. “It will be all right,” she says, and Pepper the woodpecker flits from his hiding place in her hood to nibble on Mirabella’s earlobe.

  “Pepper ought to be in a tree,” Bree whispers. “It is risky having him with you in the temple, close to so many watchful eyes.”

  “I know.” Elizabeth rolls her shoulder and Pepper disappears back into her robes. “But it’s hard to get him to leave me when he knows I’m nervous or upset.”

  “So do not be nervous or upset! Mira will not fail us.”

  As they pass by an open storeroom door, they see Billy bent over in a barrel. Harriet the chicken sees them and clucks. Billy straightens and knocks dust and straw out of his hair.

  “Oho! You’ve caught me.”

  “What are you doing?” Mirabella asks.

  “I’m setting aside things to bring with us to Wolf Spring. I heard there were jarred tomatoes and blackberries. For your favorite of my dishes: warmed jarred tomatoes on toast.”

  “I thought you would be better at cooking by now,” Bree scolds. “Mira has grown so thin, half of her dresses had to be sent to the tailor!”

  “Why don’t you teach me, then, Bree?” he asks. “If you are any better at it, I’ll eat my hat.”