Gilbert snorts. “Somehow I do not think so. But in his state, he will probably not mind if you give it a try.”
Arsinoe approaches the bed. She reaches out and touches his hand, folded over his other atop his chest. His skin is warm, his pulse steady if not strong. He looks pale. Though that could be the effect of all of the white, and the intense light blond of his hair.
She touches his face and tilts his head back and forth. He does not stir. No twitches or movement, even beneath his eyelids. And according to every rumor they have heard, he has been this way since returning from the botched trade for Madrigal at Innisfuil.
“I would say he was poisoned,” she murmurs. “Except how do you poison a poisoner?
“Gilbert,” she says suddenly. “Can you see? Can you . . . sense anything with your gift? Any thoughts inside his head? Or anything about what was done to him?”
“Perhaps it was only an illness. A natural illness.”
“Where my little sister is concerned, I doubt it.” She gestures to the bed. “Please.”
With a deep breath, Gilbert comes closer and lays his hands on Pietyr: one across his forehead, the other across his eyes.
“Nothing. I’m sorry. There is simply nothing there to read, he—” Gilbert’s arms stiffen all the way to the shoulders, and his words cut off so fast that Arsinoe hears his teeth clamp shut. Whatever passes through him leaves him gasping. He sinks onto the chair and wraps himself tight in the yellow blanket.
“Gilbert? What was that?”
“Nothing good,” he says, staring at Pietyr’s sleeping face. He takes a moment to swallow. “I saw a chasm. And blood. I heard the voices of queens.”
“What did they say?”
“I could not tell. It was . . . mutterings. Wails.”
Arsinoe leans back, relieved.
“This pleases you?” he asks.
“This pleases me. Because whatever happened to him was decidedly unnatural. And unnatural I can work with.” She reaches for Pietyr’s hand again and pushes the sleeve up his arm to look at the pale skin of his wrist. As she grasps him, she feels something uneven and rough across his palm. She turns it over, and clucks her tongue. “Did you notice this?”
“We did. An old wound. And an ugly one.”
“Not that old.” Arsinoe leans close to study the scars. There are so many, it is a wonder his hand did not just fall apart. Most of the palm is dark pink scar tissue. But the lines are still there, for someone who knew where to look. His scar is the mess one makes when one is trying to cover over a rune. A low-magic rune.
“Pietyr Renard,” she whispers. “You have come to the right place.”
As she hurries through the city to the apothecary shop, Arsinoe’s mind spins so fast that it forms knots. Pietyr Renard was doing low magic. And she knows who it was who taught it to him.
“Madrigal,” she whispers. “You always knew how to make the most of what time you had.”
The shop is empty this early in the morning, but she and the shopkeep have a generous understanding: she is free to come and go and take what she needs as she pleases. Quickly, she goes to the shelves and pulls down a mortar and pestle, a bottle of rose oil, and a tightly bound bundle of rosemary. Chunks of resin or amber would be best, but the herbs will have to do. She stuffs a small bag of dried flower petals into the mortar and quickly returns to Lermont House.
The house is awake. And full. Gilbert must have gotten nervous and raised the alarm. Mathilde is back, her hands pressed to Pietyr’s forehead and eyes. Emilia stands at his bedside with a drowsy, sick-looking Jules. Even Cait and Caragh have gathered there, with their arms crossed.
“I can’t do this with all of you in here.”
They turn to Arsinoe. Mathilde removes her hands from Pietyr’s face.
“Do?” asks Cait. “And just what is it that you are going to do?” By the way she frowns, it is plain to see that she knows very well.
“If I don’t,” she says, “he stays how he is.” She looks to Jules, who glances at Emilia before nodding.
“Leave her to it,” Jules says. And one by one, the others bow their heads and go.
Caragh pauses at her ear. “You turn to this too quickly and too often,” she says. “You are too like my sister.”
“I don’t have a choice,” Arsinoe replies.
When the room is empty except for her, Jules, and Camden, she begins laying out her materials.
“Don’t listen to her,” Jules says. “You’re not like my mother.”
“Maybe not,” Arsinoe mutters. “But Caragh’s right. I turn to it. Even though it destroyed you and Joseph. Even though it might have killed him. Even though it scarred my face and gave the cat a limp. I still—” She stops and looks down at her hands and the marks the low magic has left on her. No one else has been able to wield it like she has. And the greater the magic, the greater the cost.
Arsinoe pours oil into the bowl of the mortar and pestle and adds a fat pinch of flower petals. They are deep red, from roses. Rose petals into rose oil. Perhaps she should have chosen a different oil, but she was in a hurry.
“So you’re going to try and wake him up.”
“That’s the idea.”
“But haven’t the healers in Indrid Down been trying to do that for months?”
“I’m sure they have. But not like this.” She nods to his hand. “Turn that over.”
Jules winces at the sight it, lips drawn back in a silent hiss.
“I think your mother taught him.”
“You think my mother taught him this?” Jules holds up his palm. “It’s nothing but scars.”
“No,” Arsinoe says. “It’s just been buried. And we’re going to dig it back up.”
“Why do I not like the sound of that?”
“I don’t know,” says Arsinoe. “You’re very queasy for a warrior.”
“Half a warrior,” Jules corrects her as Camden sniffs at Pietyr’s face.
Arsinoe leans forward and smears rose petal oil in a crescent across Pietyr’s forehead. The smell is strong. Strong enough, she hopes, to reach him all the way down wherever he is hiding. She lights one of the short candles by the bedside and uses the flame to ignite the herbs before blowing them out and waving the smoke across his chest. In her own chest, she feels the tug and tickle of the low magic as the oil and smoke open the path. It makes every scar on her arms come alive and her mouth water.
She sits beside Pietyr on the bed, and Jules brings the light close as Arsinoe peers into his hand. A dagger, a new one, to replace the one taken by guards at the Volroy, comes out of the sheath at her waist. It makes a dangerous, almost ringing sound as it does; one would think she was war-gifted herself for how sharp she always keeps it.
“How can you dig anything up out of that?” Jules wonders quietly as they look upon the nest of intermingled scars. So many slashes. So many cuts. It seems someone made a flurry of them in all directions. And Arsinoe senses that it was not Pietyr.
If she looks hard enough, there are a few lines that seem different from the rest. Longer and more deliberate. Some curved, and deeper perhaps, and defined, like they had been cut more than once. Those will be the lines of the original rune, whatever that original rune was. But there is no way to trace it. The new cuts have obscured it almost completely.
Jules tilts the candle away so it will not drip wax onto Pietyr’s skin. “What are you thinking?”
“It’s not about thinking,” Arsinoe says, her voice flat. “It’s about feeling. About instinct.” She takes up the knife and looks at her own mottled palm of scars. She too has had too many lines, too many runes cut into it. “Palm to palm,” she whispers, and stabs deeply into her hand.
“Arsinoe!”
But before she can change her mind, she pulls the blade out of her skin and brings it down hard into Pietyr’s. Their blood pools, and she seals their hands together. Their mingling blood releases magic in a jolt; it makes her head spin as whatever remains of what Pietyr did t
ries to invade her. She feels their hands jerk and feels the skin of his palm burst open wider. His fingers close around hers, and he pulls hard. Their blood smears across the white blankets and sheets. Whispers fill her head like wind, babbling whispers so loud that she drops her knife and plugs her ear with her free finger.
They are seeping into her head. “Jules, get him off me!”
Camden bites gently onto her arm to pull, but when she tastes Arsinoe’s blood, she leaps off the bed and cowers in a corner. With a grimace, Jules grasps on to their joined hands. She pries on their fingers. It should be easy to part hands that are so slick with blood. But they do not release until Jules wraps both arms around Arsinoe’s waist and heaves her away.
When the connection breaks, Pietyr Renard wakes with a shout. He grips his wrist and stares down at the deep, broken open wound in his hand. Then he peers around the room, at the cougar and at Arsinoe and Jules. Despite being in pain, startled, and unconscious for months, it takes him no more than two blinks to recognize the naturalist pretender and the Legion Queen.
“How did I get here?” he asks.
“Do you know where ‘here’ is?” asks Jules.
“I could make an educated guess.”
“And . . . do you know who you are?”
His eyes flicker, the slightest movement, as he considers whether or not to lie. “I am Pietyr Arron,” he says flatly.
“Good,” Arsinoe says, and sighs. “Because that makes you someone worth keeping.”
THE VOLROY
In the throne room, the suitor is facedown on the floor. His eyes are open but blank, his sand-colored hair dark and stringy with sweat. The only sign of life he gives at Katharine’s approach is a small puff of breath that fogs the dark marble. The Black Council has been having too much fun with him. They have broken him down too fast, and spoiled their own game.
Katharine draws one of her poisoned daggers and slices through the rope that binds him to the throne. He moans gratefully as his arms fall free.
“Behave yourself,” she cautions as he eyes the guards near the door. “I could slide this knife between your ribs faster than they could reach you with a spear.”
“Is that any way to treat the boy to whom you gave your first kiss?” he asks, and winces as the feeling returns to his fingers.
“My first kiss. Is that what I conspired to have you believe or simply what you assumed with your inflated mainland ego?”
He glares at her, stretching his stiff shoulders and gingerly touching the angry red blisters at his wrists.
“The poison has a bite, does it not?” She motions for a tray of tea and biscuits to be brought to the table nearby. “But you will get no sympathy from me. I have been made to endure much worse. And I endured it better. Fetch the biscuits.”
He climbs to his feet and shuffles to the table. “Ah yes. The abuse you suffered at the hands of the Arrons. Is that how you enticed Mira to come to you? By playing the wounded girl?”
“My sister is a queen. She comes to her queen’s aid.”
“Mirabella is good. Not like you.”
“Who says I am not good? I take no joy in seeing you this way. Filthy and scarred. Scarred like your Arsinoe.”
“Shut your mouth.”
She draws back. She nearly apologizes. Since the dead queens have been gone, she has felt no real malice toward Arsinoe, though she is a fool and a traitor to ally with Jules Milone. It is the dead sisters who keep all her rage and all her morbid indulgences. Every gift Katharine borrows from them has been corrupted by their endless hunger for more blood, more pain, more flesh torn apart. But just now they are far away, with Rho, and she is free to be merciful.
“You should not speak so to the Queen Crowned, Master Chatworth.”
“You’re no real queen.”
“I am the only true queen of Fennbirn.”
“Then why have people been trying to snatch the crown off your head from the minute they put it there? Do you think they’d have done the same to Mirabella? Or Arsinoe?”
“My sisters did not want it. They chose to flee. Do you still dream of how it would be had the Ascension gone another way? Do you imagine yourself in the king-consort’s apartment? Do you see your father wandering the fortress, barking orders?”
“If Arsinoe or Mira had won, there would be no rebellion. No Legion Queen, no rising mist. Your precious Natalia would still be alive. You were the worst queen that anyone could have hoped for.”
At the mention of Natalia, Katharine’s fingers dig hard into the arms of the throne. “The only reason you live is because to kill you would sadden my sister.”
“And because Arsinoe and Jules have your boy,” he says. “People talk. I’ve heard plenty about your tantrums, stomping around because they came and stole him right from under your nose. Sending that murderess, Rho, to attack the people of Bastian City in retaliation. How do you think Mirabella is going to react to that?”
“She heard me give the order. She is a queen. She knows what it is to be at war.” But would she truly understand? When she knew the extent of it and the havoc that Rho would wreak, infested as she was by dead queens . . . Mirabella would look at her like she is a monster. And perhaps she is.
Katharine backs away. She will not let a mainland boy, a former suitor, get into her head. It will all be different after the rebellion is over. And after the dead queens are gone for good.
“I think you will find that Mirabella and I understand each other completely,” she says. “Before long I think you will see we are allied in ways that not even she imagined.”
“She will never turn against Arsinoe.”
“Then why has she not once asked me to let you go?” Katharine asks. She snaps her fingers to the guards near the door. “Tie him up again. I have lost my appetite.”
“Mirabella.” Luca greets her at the door of her chamber and kisses her on both cheeks. “It is nice to see you here. And not hidden behind a veil.” She leads Mirabella inside to a tray of tea and savories and the meringue cookies she likes. “How are Bree and Elizabeth?”
Mirabella walks the edge of the room, looking out the windows down upon the capital from all directions. They are high in the temple; the only things higher are the Volroy towers.
“Elizabeth yearns for spring. She is worried that one of the bee colonies in the apiary has not wintered well. And as for Bree . . .” She reaches out and opens a window, letting chill air rush in, sending Luca’s papers flying up from her desk.
“Troublemaker.” Luca laughs as she snatches rolling parchment out of the breeze. Her hands are still fast. And not the least bit stiff.
“As for Bree, you would know better than I would, since you are on the Black Council together.”
Luca presses the last of the papers to her desk and weights them with a stone. “Bree has become a fine politician. Fair, and she sees things from interesting angles. She still needs help controlling her temper. She singed Paola Vend last week over a disagreement about import tax.”
“Paola Vend could do with some singeing.”
“Indeed,” Luca says as Mirabella takes up a meringue. “But what brings you here, Mira? Though I wish it were not so, our afternoons spent in the pleasure of each other’s company are over.”
“You are not happy to see me?”
“I am always happy to see you. I regret that our goals have . . . estranged us.” The High Priestess sighs. “But what use are regrets? We learn our lessons, and we do our best.”
Mirabella nods. The meringue breaks apart in her fingers, and she sets it down upon a saucer.
“What I tell you now,” she says, “I tell you as the High Priestess, as well as my old mentor and friend. It was told to me in the queen’s confidence, and I am entrusting you with it. Because I feel that you want her reign to succeed, and to preserve the line of queens.”
“Yes. Of course I do.”
“And I am telling you”—Mirabella looks at her levelly—“because I suspect that you
already know.”
Luca’s steady eyes lose focus for less than a blink before she inhales and nods resignedly.
“The dead queens. She showed you.”
“She told me,” Mirabella amends. “I do not think I would like to be shown.”
“It is difficult to believe, isn’t it?” Luca runs her fingertips across the seam of a blue silk pillow. Her quarters are always furnished with wide chairs and sofas piled high with soft pillows and blankets. Yet Mirabella has rarely seen her sit upon them. “Even after I watched and suspected, I would not have believed. Had I not seen the way the mist circled her at Innisfuil. And had I not followed Pietyr Renard to the Breccia Domain and watched him strip stones from inside it.
“The dead queens. Who would have thought they would be lying there in wait? Who could have imagined the force that was being created every time another was thrown into the pit?”
“Who can imagine anything about the power of queens?” Mirabella murmurs. “We do not even know it ourselves, what we are capable of. Not until we are needed.”
“And what will you do now?” Luca asks. “Now that you know?”
“She wants me to carry the triplets. She wants me to continue the line.” She looks at Luca. Is she surprised? Horrified? Hopeful that Mirabella will say yes? She cannot tell. The High Priestess is impossible to read. “But no matter what is to be done, the dead queens and the mist must be dealt with first.”
“They are headed for a confrontation,” Luca agrees. “And I cannot guess the outcome.”
“The mist will overtake the dead queens. The mist is our protector.”
“You are certain?”
Mirabella shakes her head. “How can one be certain of anything? I only know that we—my sisters and I—are at the heart of this conflict. And if we come together, I believe we can put an end to it. I would write to Arsinoe.”
Luca turns away. She waves her hand and walks behind her desk.
“Arsinoe is a rogue. She has chosen the side of the Legion Queen. If she sets foot in Indrid Down, she will be executed immediately. And besides, what could she do? What use is she? A bear? Against the dead?”
Five Dark Fates Page 20