Five Dark Fates

by Kendare Blake

  Katharine’s chest heaves as she pulls her injury close, cradling it.

  “Say nothing of this,” she orders. “And find me a healer. A discreet one.”

  SUNPOOL

  Arsinoe wakes with a start and strikes out with her fists.

  “What—what is it?” Billy asks groggily, jerking awake himself.

  Arsinoe exhales and rubs her hands roughly across her face. “Nothing. Just a nightmare.”

  “A Daphne nightmare?”

  “Yes, but it was only a nightmare. It wasn’t one of the dreams she sends. Contrary to what you and Mira think, I can tell the difference.” She squints up at the windows; the light streaming through suggests it is already late morning. And they are on the floor. All they have are pillows and the small blanket that Arsinoe has kicked up against the wall. “What are you doing here?” she asks. “Why aren’t you in our room?”

  “Because you’re not in our room. I found you here already asleep with your face against the wood. So I fetched these pillows and a blanket.” He sits up and stretches his back, wincing.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, and squeezes his arm.

  “It’s all right. Have you found anything?”

  Arsinoe drags herself toward her work space: knives and bottles and half the inventory from the apothecary shop lay scattered on the solitary table as well as the floor. The jar that contained Madrigal’s binding sits open, the letter out and five blood-soaked cords still inside.

  “I’m going to try this one.” She holds up a vial of rust-colored liquid. “It’s the regular tonic, but I stirred in one of Madrigal’s blood-soaked cords.”

  “Well, that’s disgusting,” says Billy. “So much for breakfast.”

  Arsinoe rubs her face. She is sick to death of this room, and it is a mess. She is not a careful poisoner and leaves drippings of her concoctions running down the table legs and pooling on the floor.

  “Look at this.” She gets to her feet and takes up spilled bottles, angrily righting them, then grabs for a cloth and wipes at the spills, even though some have dried into sticky stains. “I never learn.” She throws down the cloth and lifts her fist. It takes everything she has not to shove every last bottle and blade onto the floor.

  Billy stands behind her and puts his hands on her shoulders. “Hey, it’s all right.”

  “It’s not. And don’t touch anything!” She slaps him away. “You shouldn’t be anywhere near this. Do you want to end up like those two suitors I killed?”

  “That was an accident.”

  “It doesn’t matter. They’re still dead.”

  “Listen.” Billy reaches out and tugs her away from the table. “I know enough not to lick the spills. And if you’re being careless, it’s because you’re working too hard. How much sleep have you gotten? How much blood have you lost, cutting into yourself?”

  She flexes her fingers. Drops of blood have been squeezed from every tip. And her arms are a battlefield of scabs. She thought her days of low magic were finished. Instead, she is into it deeper than ever, deeper than Madrigal, perhaps deeper than any practitioner that came before her.

  “I’m not even her daughter, yet I am so like her.”

  “Like Madrigal,” Billy says. “And will you wind up like her?” He gestures to the jars, the knives, and the cloths spotted with red. “There’s always a price, isn’t that what you said? Low magic always has a price. But you never know what it costs until it collects.”

  Arsinoe gestures to her weary face. “I think the cost is these big black circles underneath my eyes.”

  “I don’t think you know the cost. Just like Madrigal didn’t know that hers would be a knife stuck through her throat.”

  Billy’s eyes are so serious, he hardly looks like himself. Madrigal’s death might have been a turn of luck. Murder at Katharine’s hands. Or it might have been the low magic. There is simply no way to tell.

  “Are you asking me to stop?”

  “But I can’t ask that, can I? Not when you’re doing it for Jules.”

  “It’s not because I want to,” she says, but even she hears the lie. Low magic is dangerous, true, but it is potent, and thanks to her queensblood, hers is more potent than most. How can she stop now, in the middle of a war, when she is full-up with one of their best weapons racing right beneath her skin?

  “But it will have a price,” Billy says. “There’s no way around that. No . . . loophole in the contract.”

  “Maybe it’s different for queens.”

  “Maybe it is,” Billy says quietly. “Maybe they pay through the people they love.”

  Arsinoe swallows hard. The people she loves. Joseph, dead. Jules, out of her mind. Billy takes her by the arms.

  “I didn’t mean that. I shouldn’t have said it. I only thought it because I almost hope that it’s true.”

  “How can you hope that it’s true?”

  “Because I’m selfish. And it would be better for me if it happened to me or Jules. Just not to you.” He chuckles without much humor. “Maybe you should start intensely caring about Emilia.”

  “That’s not funny,” Arsinoe says. “And besides, I don’t think it would work.”

  She takes his hand and kicks at the sad blanket crumpled up on the floor. “Let’s go find something to eat. And get some fresh air.”

  “Let’s go to the great hall,” Billy suggests. “There’s bound to be stew. There’s always stew. And we’ll probably find Luke, and Matthew and Caragh if the baby is sleeping. They found Braddock; did Luke tell you? Someone reported seeing him down the beach, and there he was, picking for shellfish during the low tide.”

  “They didn’t bring him inside?” Arsinoe asks with alarm.

  “No. Caragh caught some fish for him, and they let him be. Warned the people here to give him plenty of space. They said that with you so distracted by the rebellion he might be close to wild.”

  Poor Braddock. He should be off somewhere in a warm den. Instead, the scent of her blood kept him pinned to Sunpool.

  They leave her small workroom and walk through the courtyard, where Arsinoe spots Emilia in her bright red cloak. She is standing at the center of a cluster of people, and they are agitated, with crossed arms and broad stances. Poor Emilia. The success of the rebellion hinged upon the strength and the legend of Jules. In the city, work continues: laborers fortify the wall using picks and pulleys and harnessed horses to reclaim stone that has rolled away. Food stores are loaded into the granaries as more people arrive in Sunpool and must be fed. So much being done and so much still to do, but no matter how defiant Emilia is, or how determined, it is not for her that the people come, and it is not her they will follow.

  Arsinoe and Billy turn down a quiet alley, in no rush to join the discussion.

  “Do you think the rebels are asking about Jules? Or Mirabella?” Arsinoe wonders.

  “Probably both. They’re growing unsatisfied with Emilia’s tales. She’s losing her hold on it. On all of it. I wouldn’t expect her to keep quiet about Mirabella for much longer.”

  “I was sure Mirabella would send word by now. To tell us what she’s doing. What her plan is.”

  “Maybe she can’t.”

  “Or maybe there is no plan,” Emilia says, stepping out from around the next turn. “And she has abandoned you both to ally with the queen.”

  Billy shudders and takes a step back. “Gad, how did you get here? Are there two of you?”

  “Good Goddess, don’t let there be two of her,” Arsinoe says, and Emilia cocks an eyebrow.

  “I saw you slip away when you spotted the crowd, so I followed you. You ought to be careful, talking in these corridors. The sound carries from one end to the other.”

  “What was happening out there?” Arsinoe asks. “It seemed tense.”

  “They want answers. They want their queen.” Emilia sighs. “Some of our soldiers are losing faith. If we tell them we face not one but two queens, without a single queen of our own . . .”

  “Hey
,” says Arsinoe, “I’m a queen.”

  “Of course you are. Forgive me. It is so easy to forget. You have still not gone back to wearing the blacks, and your hair is always full of filth.” Emilia reaches out and picks at it. “Is it black? Is it gray?” She pulls out a long piece of yellow straw. “Is it blond?”

  Arsinoe swats the straw out of her hand. “Soldiers, you say. Don’t you mean farmers and laborers?”

  Emilia sighs. “How is Jules?”

  “Unchanged.”

  “Unchanged? But you have been locked up with your poisons and her mother’s low-magic curse for days. What is taking so long?”

  “It’s a binding, not a curse,” Arsinoe says, and shoves her aside this time. “And it’s not like following a recipe.”

  “Gather the Milones and meet me in the keep. I want to know everything that you know about the binding.” Then she turns on her heel and is gone.

  “Grab the Milones and meet me,” Arsinoe grumbles through her stew in the great hall. “Like she’s the commander of the whole rebellion or something.”

  “Well, she sort of is,” says Billy, grabbing a torn piece of bread from a table as they pass and spreading butter onto it.

  Despite Arsinoe’s grumbling, they do as they were bid and take Cait, Ellis, and Caragh to meet Emilia in the room outside Jules’s chamber in the castle keep.

  Mathilde greets them at the door and shows them inside.

  “You won’t be able to use this room for much longer,” Arsinoe says. “Soon, you’ll need a space the size of the Black Council chamber.”

  “Soon we will have the Black Council chamber.” Emilia smiles. She motions for Cait to sit, but it is Ellis who takes the chair. Cait always prefers to stand, so much so that Arsinoe suspects that when she dies, they will have to erect a special pyre that will allow them to burn her upright.

  “I have asked you here because I wish to know what Arsinoe has discovered regarding the legion curse. It has been several days since she was given the low-magic spell and the letter, and I hoped to hear of some progress.”

  For a moment, Cait stares at Emilia as if she, too, is annoyed by the summons, and Arsinoe hopes she will give Emilia an earful. Even Emilia, a warrior and so full of bluster that she nearly blows herself over, would shrink in the face of stern words from Cait Milone.

  “I admit,” says Cait, “that I am curious about that as well.” She looks at Arsinoe, and Arsinoe swallows. “What have you found, shuttered away in that room of yours?”

  Several times Arsinoe opens and closes her mouth before she can find the words to speak. “Not as much as I’d like.” Every eye in the room drops with disappointment, and she reaches into her pocket for the vial of blood-infused tonic. “But maybe this.”

  Emilia unbolts Jules’s door, and the Milones and Billy stand outside, necks craned as Arsinoe administers it. She lifts Jules’s head and uses her sleeve to dab at the tonic that spills from the side of her mouth. Jules closes her eyes, and they wait. But aside from a shaky sigh, there is no change.

  “Nothing,” Caragh whispers.

  Arsinoe clenches her fists. She knows their disappointment is only because they love Jules so much, but she cannot help wondering what sort of miracle they expected her to perform with some of Madrigal’s blood and a piece of paper.

  “Did you read the letter, Cait?” she asks.

  “I did.”

  “Then you know what’s in it. Or rather, what’s not in it. All Madrigal wrote down were the details of the binding spell and instructions for how to remove it if she died. Not much help now, considering it was removed when she was killed.”

  “But there must be something,” Emilia says.

  “If you’re so sure, why don’t you try looking.”

  “Wait,” says Billy. “I’m no expert, but . . . you have the binding spell that Madrigal used. Couldn’t you just do the same spell again? Rebind the curse?”

  “No,” Arsinoe says. “When Madrigal first performed the binding, Jules was a baby. Neither of her gifts had taken root yet. Trying to bind her war gift now would be like trying to stuff an oak back inside an acorn. But—”

  “But what?”

  She pauses and glances at Jules. Her heartbeat pounds in her ears and sends blood throbbing into her pricked fingertips.

  “But maybe it could be tethered.”

  “Tethered?”

  “Tamed, tied down as a loose sail flapping in the wind. Perhaps it could be bound if it were tied to another person.” Arsinoe’s thoughts race ahead. It would not be a binding but a sharing. Whoever did it would help Jules to shoulder the load.

  “Tethered to someone so that they could be the keeper of the curse?” asks Cait. “Like Madrigal was?”

  “No. Not exactly. The curse would be . . . shared. And before you ask, I have no idea what that would mean for the other person. They could lose themselves to the curse as well, over time.”

  Emilia pounds her fist on the table. “When can you do it?”

  “I don’t even know if I should. It would be massive. Not like charming a false-familiar bear or even reaching out to old gifts. It’s bigger than anything I’ve ever tried.”

  Emilia turns to Mathilde. “Do you have any particular feeling about this?”

  “Nothing yet,” says the seer. “I have seen nothing about Jules’s fate. The thread has gone dark. I will keep listening. Keep reading the smoke for visions.” That is the only aspect of the gift she possesses, Arsinoe has learned. Visions and momentary flashes. The oracles say it is the stronger side of the sight, but Arsinoe does not know why. It would be much more useful to be able to cast the bones and have an answer when you need one.

  “Could it harm Jules?” Ellis asks softly.

  “It could harm everything,” Arsinoe replies. “It could all go wrong.”

  “Arsinoe.”

  At the sound of Jules’s creaking whisper, they turn. Jules lies on her bed of straw, but her eyes are fixed on them, her throat straining to speak. Arsinoe and Emilia nearly dive to her side. It is so good to hear her voice.

  “Jules, Jules,” Arsinoe says. “You’re back.”

  Emilia smoothes Jules’s hair away from her forehead.

  “I knew you would be.”

  They fall silent as Jules’s lips struggle to form words.

  “You have to do it. You have to bind it. I can’t . . .” She squeezes her eyes shut and braces against a wave of pain.

  “All right,” Arsinoe says. “All right, I’ll do it.”

  Arsinoe lays supplies out across the small desk that has become an apothecary table. Bundles of herbs for burning. Candles to burn them with. Two thin, delicately made white scarves, a knife and bandages. Always bandages.

  When Madrigal performed the first binding, she bled herself nearly to death and Jules, too. Innocent, tiny, newborn Jules. Arsinoe was not there, just a newborn herself at that time, but she can still imagine the baby’s fading, exhausted screams. She squeezes her eyes shut. At least Jules is not a baby anymore.

  Across the room, Jules’s door opens and Emilia emerges. She looks wrung out, as she always does when she leaves Jules.

  “I do not mean to disturb you,” the warrior says, leaning down to hug Camden roughly and offer her a strip of dried meat. “Is it . . . going well?”

  “The original binding was cast in Wolf Spring, not far from the Milone property beneath the bent-over tree, and if I had a choice, that’s where I would attempt this.” She looks up at Emilia regretfully. Wolf Spring is too far, and too watched. Innisfuil Valley and the Breccia Domain are out, too, for much the same reasons. “But otherwise . . . all is going according to plan.”

  “And what,” Emilia asks, “is that plan? Who are you going to tether? Who will carry the curse with Jules?”

  Arsinoe’s brow furrows. That answer was obvious the moment the plan was hatched. “I will, of course.”

  “You will.” Emilia’s mouth crooks. “A queen and our one low-magic practitioner. Brill
iant. If the tether goes wrong and the curse takes you both, I cannot think of a worse person to have out of control. You might be even more dangerous than she is.” She walks to the table and sweeps her hand over the top of it like she would dash the ingredients to the floor. “And of course it would be you. So that Jules could be tied again to your fate. Hers with a queen’s.”

  “How about because it’s dangerous and I would rather risk myself than anyone else?” Arsinoe looks away from her and continues working. “Besides, it can’t be just anyone. There has to be a bond there.”

  “How do you know? What do you really know about low magic? Are you a master of it?”

  “I’m not,” says Arsinoe. “It had a master; she is dead. But I learned from her. When Madrigal bound Jules’s curse, she did it out of love and desperation. A lot of love and desperation. That’s probably why it worked. Low magic is like a prayer, Emilia. A pleading, foolish, costly prayer.” She stares at the knife on the table and feels the scar of every cut, every thin, pink line that mars her arms.

  “And what will it do to you?” Emilia asks. “Tethering a naturalist-and-war-gifted legion curse when you are already a poisoner?”

  Arsinoe narrows her eyes at the warrior as the realization dawns. “You think I should tether it to you.”

  Emilia stands taller. “I think you should. Why not?”

  “A hundred reasons why not.”

  “It might go easier with me, as I already carry the war gift. I may not even notice the extra burden. And then you could maintain your strength; you would not have to bleed yourself so much during the spell.”

  Arsinoe turns away and selects a piece of amber to burn, for clarity. “Is that what you’re after? A stronger gift for yourself? Maybe even a legion curse of your own so you won’t have any need of Jules as your queen. But that’s probably not what’s—”

  Arsinoe gasps as Emilia shoves her into the wall, hard enough to take her breath away, and harder than Emilia could have done with only her hands in such close quarters. That was the war gift. Arsinoe shoves back and Emilia lets go.

  “Do not ever say anything like that to me again,” Emilia says.