“If Natalia were alive,” Pietyr mutters, “she would never have dared.”
Katharine raises her chin. “It was Luca herself who administered the crown. Needles upon needles sinking into my skin. She cannot want to unseat that which she so recently bestowed. She only wants to crow and see if she can drown us out.”
“She wants to see how far she can push you,” says Pietyr.
“But I suppose . . .” Genevieve sighs. “That is how it always is after an Ascension. After any new appointment to the council. If we stand our ground, eventually she will give up.”
“Queen Katharine.”
A servant, hair covered in baking flour, approaches quickly and takes a knee.
“Pardon the interruption, my queen.”
“Of course. Speak.”
“The feast is prepared. And I was told to tell you . . . to inform you that the High Priestess is on her way. I don’t know why they sent a servant from the kitchens. We’re all just very busy and—”
Katharine touches the man’s head. “It is all right. Once the feast is in place, take your ease. Eat.” She looks up at the building before her and gestures to the faces ducked behind the windows. “All are welcome. As many as the square can hold.”
She steps onto the raised platform and stands before the head table, rubbing flour from the palm of her glove. Genevieve and Pietyr hurry away to see to last touches: the last of the pale ribbon hung from the lamps, the final sprays of pink and purple flowers. Her Black Council waits at the edges of the square and greets the first folk who wander in. Not something they are terribly accustomed to, and the strained expressions of pleasantness stretched across Lucian’s and Antonin’s faces make Katharine chuckle. Before long, the tables are full and so many people stand between that it is hard for the High Priestess, Rho, and Bree Westwood to make their way through when they arrive in their carriage.
In any case, it seems they are in no great hurry to reach the head table. Luca stops to offer blessing to every person she passes. Even Rho tries to woo the guests, though some will not come close enough for a handshake, and she is near unrecognizable when smiling. Luckily for her, Bree can charm enough for both of them. She is more beautiful than ever with her hair studded with opals. And her bright green summer gown highlights the fact that Katharine may wear only black.
“Wait.” Katharine stops a servant as she passes with a tureen of soup. She dips a spoon and tastes it. “The little brat had better eat something today. This soup is too good to miss.”
The banquet progresses as banquets do until someone notices a commotion near the harbor. Katharine has almost relaxed enough to sample the desserts when cries of alarm begin to rise.
Pietyr nods to one of the queensguard, and several soldiers push through the crowd. Everyone has turned toward Bardon Harbor. Even the guards. “Pietyr, what is it?” Katharine asks, and stands.
The mist has risen thick over the water. So thick it might be a cloud, if clouds were known to creep quickly and deliberately toward land. At the sight of it coming closer, those nearest the docks start to back up and then to flee, walking quickly up the hill for higher ground. Katharine glances nervously around the square. There are so many people gathered. If they are not careful, there will be a panic.
She thrusts out her arm and snaps her fingers at High Priestess Luca.
“You and I must go there now.” She walks around the table, and Luca is already out of her chair following. “Bring horses for me and the High Priestess,” she says loudly. “And clear a path to the harbor.”
“Make way for the queen! Stand clear!”
In moments, her queensguard has opened the road to them. Katharine’s black stallion is ready for her, always nearby and saddled in case of emergency. She half leaps and is half thrown onto his back.
“That was good work,” Luca says when she is mounted and riding beside her. “Nothing curbs a panic like the courage of a queen. Natalia would be proud.”
“I am too distracted just now to wonder whether you mean that,” Katharine replies. Her eyes are ahead, on the approaching mist. She hears, behind them in the square, Pietyr and the Black Council mounting horses to follow. As they ride to the docks, she holds her stallion to a canter to keep from trampling anyone near the shore, but she need not have bothered. Her figure on horseback is enough to clear a path, hair a black flag and black gown billowing, and the gathered folk part like butter to a hot blade.
“Stay. Do not dismount.” Luca holds her hand out across Katharine’s reins. “The mist does not do this. I do not know what it means.”
“I am the Queen Crowned.” Katharine takes a breath and swings her leg over to land on the dirt. “I have nothing to fear. It is my mist.” Hers. Theirs. The mist has been the protector of the island ever since it was created by the last and greatest Blue Queen. It will not hurt her. It cannot. It was her bloodline that made it.
“Help me, old sisters.” She reaches out to them with her mind and feels their familiar surge in her veins. Katharine walks toward the shore as the dead queens fill her ears with shrieks. She walks until the sand is wet from the surf, and then they allow her to go no farther.
A wall of white and swirling gray stretches across the harbor from north to south. It has traveled into the shallows, closer than she has ever seen it and continues to advance, moving like the sea creatures do: smoothly and swiftly. The way it darts at times reminds her of a striking shark.
How badly Katharine wants to run. The mist is so thick. If it rushes upon the shore, she is sure it will knock her down and smother her. Choke her. She will die, and find the ghosts of Mirabella and Arsinoe waiting inside the gloom.
“No,” she whispers. “You must stop.”
The mist pushes forward, and the people behind her scream. Perhaps even the High Priestess. Certainly Genevieve. But before the cloud can touch the earth, it draws back and moves away, back out to sea to dissipate and break apart, gone so quickly, it is hard to believe it was there in the first place.
Katharine hears footsteps as Rho comes to stand at her shoulder, along with Pietyr, backed by a dozen queensguard.
“Queen Katharine, are you unharmed?” He examines her, but she pats his hand and moves him aside. She was not touched.
“What is that?” Rho draws her serrated knife and points into the waves. Something dark and heavy rolls through the water. A dark shape, soon joined by more, cresting and coming toward shore.
Screams and moans of terror sound from all sides as Katharine walks toward the water to see what the mist has brought.
“Keep them quiet,” she orders. “Keep them back!” The dead sisters hiss and spit; they scratch at her insides and retreat to the darkest corners of her mind. She does not care. Nor does she care when she steps into the water up to the ankles and catches waves across her knees.
The mist has brought her bodies. Ragged, water-logged corpses tossed heavily into the shallows.
Katharine splashes in deeper. The Goddess has answered her prayer. She has brought her the corpses of her sisters and the cursed naturalist. The mainland suitor and the Wolf Spring boy. Her hope to see what is left of Mirabella and Arsinoe is so strong that she convinces herself it is them, even though there are far too many. Far more than she sought. She convinces herself it is them until she turns the first one over and sees a stranger’s watery eyes staring back.
As the bodies beach themselves, Katharine searches up and down the sand, looking into one dead face and then another for some spark of recognition. But none are queens.
“Haul them out.” She points to the water. She shouts when her queensguard hesitates to move. “Haul them out and line them up on the sand!”
It takes several minutes for the task to be completed. Her soldiers grimace, and some will not touch the corpses or enter the water until Rho forces them to at knifepoint. “My priestesses are braver than you,” Rho barks, and several priestesses hurry into the surf to help, wetting their white robes to the waist.
Katharine and Rho survey the bodies lined up on the beach. Pieces of their crafts have been brought up as well, bits of curved hull and planks, an oar. Some on shore and others still bobbing in the waves. Scattered tidbits.
“What is this?” Katharine asks, and no one replies. “Bring me someone who might know.”
Rho shouts to the gathered crowd, and a man comes forward, wringing his hat between his hands. In the face of so much death, he almost forgets to drop to his knee.
“You are familiar with the harbor?”
“I am, my queen.”
“Can you tell me, then, who these people are?”
“They are—” He hesitates, looks up and over the wet shapes laid out. “They are the searchers. They sailed this morning at your request, to search for the remains of the traitor queens.”
Katharine clenches her jaw.
“Is this all of them?”
“I don’t know, my queen. It—it seems so.” He presses his handkerchief to his sweating, balding head and then again to his mouth and nose. The stench of rotting flesh is thick in the heat. But if they sailed that morning, they should not smell at all. Katharine dismisses the man and steps closer to the corpses with Rho.
“All sailed out today, he said,” Rho says in a low voice. “But some of these bodies are much older, as if—”
“As if they drowned weeks ago.”
Katharine stares down the line of wet, bloated dead, some large, some small, some missing parts. Women and men alike. Fishers and sailors who were doing her bidding. They had hoped to find Arsinoe and Mirabella facedown in the sea and net themselves a fine reward.
Now they remind Katharine of seals, spread out to lounge on the warm sand. The bravest of the gulls flaps down atop one of the farthest bodies and begins to tear at it like a thief after coin. Then it raises its head and flies away. Someone with the naturalist gift must have told it to wait.
“What could have done all this?” Pietyr turns to the balding man. “Did they all sail together? Travel as a fleet?”
“No, Master Arron. The Carroway sisters and their brother”—he gestures to three—“they set out in two small craft with crew.” He points to several more. “Mary Howe and her crew there, she has the elemental gift and a knack for storms. She’s never once sailed into bad weather, that one.” Mary Howe lies faceup and freshly dead, her blue shirt buttoned to the throat. What she wore on her bottom half is anyone’s guess. The entirety of her lower body is gone. Torn away. Katharine walks to her and leans down, pushes up her shirttails and lifts the torso to better look at the wound. It is ragged and there are errant tooth marks. A shark. The rest of the body is pristine.
“Odd for the shark to leave it so. Odd for a shark to have killed her at all in these waters.”
The bodies lying on the beach tell a strange story. Some are clearly drowned, with purple lips and bloated faces, while others bear signs of harm: a boy with one side of his head cleaved in as if from a heavy, sharp object, another with what looks to be a stab wound to the heart. Some bodies seem to have been dead so long that the flesh falls from them in whitened, water-logged chunks. Yet others, like Mary Howe’s, are so fresh she might have died only hours ago.
Katharine kneels and buries her gloved hands deep in the rot of some poor girl, her face unrecognizable.
“Queen Katharine,” Pietyr says.
“What?” She moves to the next body, and the next, turning their heads left and right, inspecting them. They are a message, she thinks. They have something to tell her if she will only look hard enough. “How . . . how did you die . . . ?” she murmurs, and Pietyr puts his hand on her shoulder.
“Kat.”
She stops and looks up, sees all the gathered staring faces. They have watched her pick through the bodies crouched like a crab, her black silk gloves slicked with blood to the elbows.
Reluctantly, Katharine rises.
“I am a poisoner, Pietyr. Taught by Natalia these many years. What do they think? That I am shy to what death does to flesh? That I have never seen a gut burst open?”
Pietyr’s mouth draws into a firm line. Even he, an Arron himself, looks slightly green.
Katharine stares out toward the sea. Clear now, calm and shining on a sunny afternoon. Gathered higher on the beach, the people whisper. Too many whispers and voices to identify, but she is able to hear one word above all.
“Undead.”
THE MAINLAND
At first when Mirabella hears Arsinoe muttering in her sleep, she thinks she must be having some scandalous dream about Billy. Mirabella has stayed awake, lying in the dark and listening to Arsinoe’s breathing slow. Listening to her drift off. Looking after her as an older sister should after a younger sister is frightened in a graveyard. So when she hears Arsinoe start to murmur happily, she smiles, torn between listening closer and pressing her pillow around her ears. She is reaching for her pillow when Arsinoe says:
“Centra.”
Mirabella sits up and turns toward her sister. She knows that word. She listens closer as the dream goes on, Arsinoe muttering faster and faster, her words becoming harder to hear. Sometimes it is only a snort. Lots of snorts, actually, and Mirabella bites her lip to keep from laughing.
Suddenly, after a moment of quiet, Arsinoe jolts up from her pillow, back straight as a board. Then she slumps and rubs her face with both hands.
“What a dream,” she whispers.
“Arsinoe.” She flinches when Mirabella says her name. “What was that?”
“It was . . . Why are you awake? Did I wake you?”
“I was not asleep.” Their room is so dark that Arsinoe is only shapes. Hints of bare arms poking out of her pale nightclothes. Mirabella climbs out from underneath her sheets and goes to sit at the foot of Arsinoe’s bed. She takes the candle from her bedside table.
Her fire feels close. She can almost sense the heat of it, curling around her ankles like a warm and loyal pet. A small pet now, after weeks on the mainland. Mirabella stares at the wick of the candle and calls the flame. Nothing happens. It is so slow and shy. Each time it takes longer and longer, and the muscle inside her mind goes slack.
“You can always use a match,” Arsinoe says.
“Elementals with gifts of fire do not use matches.” But she sets the candle down. “What were you dreaming about?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you keeping secrets?”
“No. I’m just not sure I’m ready to tell you I’m losing my mind.”
Mirabella touches the tip of the wick. It is not even warm, and shame creeps up the back of her neck.
“You said, ‘Centra.’ Is that what you were dreaming of?”
“You know it?” Arsinoe says, and then, “Of course you do. So what do you know about it?”
“Not much.”
“Most people on the island wouldn’t even recognize the name.”
Mirabella thinks back to her teachings. To afternoons with Luca in the temple, surrounded by stacks of books. Even all the way back to Willa and the Black Cottage.
“I know that Centra is the name of Fennbirn’s ally to the north. Before the mist came. That is all.”
“That’s all?”
“What else mattered? All nations that are not Fennbirn are the mainland now.”
“Do you know anything about their history?” Arsinoe asks.
“Nothing,” she replies.
“Think hard. Nothing about a missing Fennbirn queen called Daphne?”
“A missing Fennbirn queen? Of course not. Arsinoe, what are you dreaming of?”
“What about Henry Redville?”
“Arsinoe—” She turns to her in the dark to demand answers. But that name. Henry Redville. “Redville of Centra,” she says. “I think he was Queen Illiann’s king-consort. Queen Illiann, the last Blue Queen.”
“Queen Illiann.”
“Yes,” Mirabella says. She would say more, but everyone knows of Illiann, the last and greatest Blue Queen, who won a great war
with the mainland and whose gift was so strong that she created the very mist that shrouds and protects them to this day. Everyone knows that legend. Even those who resist study as hard as Arsinoe.
Arsinoe gets out of bed and starts to pace, jostling the little dog at the foot of the bed that Mirabella had nearly forgotten about. “Her king-consort. But he loves Daphne. And if Daphne is nowhere in the history books . . . then did she stay behind or go back to the island to be killed? And if Henry Redville was a real person, then I really am—” She stops and turns back to Mirabella in the dark. “Dreaming through her eyes.”
“Dreaming through whose eyes?”
“Daphne’s.”
“Daphne,” Mirabella says doubtfully. “The lost Fennbirn queen?”
Arsinoe quiets, and Mirabella finally strikes a match to light the candle, tired of trying to decipher her sister’s expressions in the blackness. Yellow-orange light flickers through the room; she touches her candle to the lamp on Arsinoe’s bedside table, and the space glows brighter.
Arsinoe’s eyes are haunted. But even so, the corner of her mouth is upturned as though she is amused.
“Tell me what you dreamed.”
“I dreamed I was inside someone else.” Arsinoe touches the ends of her hair, down past her shoulder now. She touches her chest and her face, as if to make sure they are still hers. “Someone who sailed ships on Centra with Henry Redville and had black eyes and hair, just like ours.”
“On Centra,” Mirabella says. “With Henry Redville. Arsinoe, that was over four hundred years ago.”
“Four hundred . . .” She sits down beside Mirabella on the bed, pulling the dog into her arms when he wakes and begins to whine. “What does that mean? Why am I dreaming it?”
“It cannot be real. It must not be. Perhaps it is only a memory, from a book you forgot about reading.”
“Maybe,” Arsinoe whispers, but Mirabella can tell she does not think so. “Except I saw something else first. In the cemetery.”
“What?” Mirabella holds her breath. Finally, her sister is ready to tell her what happened. She has been patient, but her patience had started to wear thin.
Two Dark Reigns Page 8