Five Dark Fates

by Kendare Blake

  As she storms into the Volroy, one of her guards bows and hurries forward to meet her.

  “Queen Katharine. We found the commander this afternoon unconscious—”

  “Get away from me!” Katharine bellows. “Leave me alone!”

  Except she is never alone. Not in the empty halls, not when she presses her hands to the sides of her head so hard she thinks she will crack her skull. Nor when she slams the door of her rooms closed behind her and listens to her breathing in the quiet.

  She tried to rid herself of the dead queens. To distance herself from them. Appease them. She has tried to control them and lull them into silence. They had won her a crown. But they had cost her Pietyr. And they had made her murder her sister.

  We are you now, they whisper as they twist themselves back into her veins.

  Do not fight us, anymore.

  In the quiet shadows of the throne room, Billy lies on his stomach, hands bound behind his back. His feet are bound to his hands. He has stopped being able to feel either set hours ago.

  He turns his head to the side, which makes it easier to breathe. He is not sure what poisons they gave him today. Perhaps they did not give him any. But every time food or drink passes his lips he imagines for hours that he can feel the effects: his throat closing, his stomach and chest tightening. At night, he weeps with silent panic, alone and tied and hating that it is only his imagination making him suffer.

  But it is not all in his head. The Black Council has been inventive in his torture. Renata Hargrove is a master of knots and continues to find new ways to twist and truss him. Paola Vend prefers setting him to impossible tasks and laughing and kicking him when he fails. She challenged him to find a sewing needle in a bowl of grain using only his tongue. She made him try for an entire day. When he failed, Antonin Arron dipped the needle in wasp venom and stuck it in each of his fingers, and the swelling made it much more difficult to serve the bastards their tea.

  Mirabella has not visited him since the first night. And he has had to admit that Arsinoe is not coming either. He is glad of that. He would never have her risk herself. But at night, in the dark, fearing his tongue is beginning to thicken, he stares at the tapestry behind the throne and wishes and wishes that she would step out from behind it.

  When he hears shuffling feet near the door, he thinks it is only a changing of guard. He pays no attention to it at all until someone gives a muffled cry and a body thumps to the rug.

  He twists his head. All he can make out are whispering white robes. At once, he is surrounded by them and feels his feet and hands cut free.

  “Luca?” He flexes his fingers and tries to push himself up.

  “Help him,” the High Priestess whispers, and he is hauled up by the arms.

  “What’s happening?”

  “What do you think is happening?” Luca slides her knife back into the sheath at her belt. “I am getting you out. Would you rather stay?”

  He does not argue. He hobbles quietly along with the priestesses out of the throne room, and through the dark castle to the kitchen entrance. Outside, a priestess holds a saddled horse, with something large and dark thrown over the front of the saddle.

  “Quickly, quickly.” Luca takes his arm and helps him to mount. He feels what the shape is at once and tenses.

  “What is this?” he asks. “Who?”

  “It is”—her mouth tightens—“it is Queen Mirabella.”

  Billy’s heart seems to stop. It cannot be Mirabella, this cold, stiff shape rolled into a blanket. But from the look on the High Priestess’s face, he knows it is.

  “I am sending her home with you. I could not protect her. Tell her sister that it was Katharine and the dead queens who did it. Tell her to come and fight. The temple and the High Priestess will not get in her way.”

  Billy adjusts Mirabella carefully in his arms. “I can’t believe—”

  “Nor can I. But there is no time. The path through the rear gate is clear. I know you are a mainlander, but you will have to find your way from there. We can offer you no more help.”

  He takes up the reins. The blood has returned to his fingers and lower extremities, but they are still sore and clumsy.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asks.

  “For Mira,” she says. “And perhaps for me. Now go!”

  Billy turns the horse and rides through the gate. When he is safely out, he turns back and sees Luca with her hand raised in farewell. He raises his in return. After all, Katharine will know she was the one who freed him, and he doubts that he will ever see her alive again.

  SUNPOOL

  For Jules and Emilia, the ride back to Sunpool is grave and filled with silences. After seeing the surviving children from Bastian City safely to Wolf Spring, where they were welcomed with gruff embraces, as Jules knew they would be, they traded for fresh horses and, after a brief reunion with Matthew and little Fenn, returned to the road. Emilia did not want to talk about Margaret. Neither of them wanted to speak about what they saw at Bastian City and what could have done it. But as Sunpool draws ever nearer, they will have to soon enough.

  The road from the south winds near to the sea, and when the rebel city comes into view, so does the western shore. Only a season ago, Arsinoe and Mirabella came aground there. Jules can almost see them, sputtering and cold, stumbling onto the dunes.

  Ahead in the city, lookouts will see them coming. The gates will open. Arsinoe will run out. She will leap at the horses, relieved they have returned. She will tell them how stupid they were for going in the first place.

  But she’ll understand, Jules thinks. After she hears what we have to say.

  “They are opening the gates,” Emilia says. “And there is a rider.”

  Jules looks. She sees no one coming from the city.

  “No. On the road. There.” Emilia juts her chin. A lone figure on horseback appears from where they had been hidden behind the rise of a hill.

  Camden raises her head, and with a grunt, leaps off the back of Jules’s horse to race ahead to them.

  “Who could that be?” Emilia asks.

  Jules watches her cat’s happy, flailing tail. She nudges her horse into a canter.

  “I don’t believe it. It’s Billy!”

  Together, she and Emilia race to meet him. She is astounded that he is alive, let alone free. But when Camden recoils, crouching low, she and Emilia slow their horses.

  “How did he get free?” Emilia wonders. “And what is that he’s carrying?”

  He pulls up when he sees them, far short of the open gate and the gathering onlookers. He looks pale and ill. Filthy.

  “Billy Chatworth,” Jules says when they reach him. Then she stops. She does not know what else to say.

  “They let me go,” he says quietly. “Luca let me go. She sent me, with a message for Arsinoe.”

  “What kind of message?” Emilia asks, her eyes on the rolled blanket.

  Billy’s face constricts. He lets go of his horse’s reins and adjusts the blanket in his arms. Then he uncovers Mirabella’s face.

  Jules cannot believe what she is looking at. It does not seem possible.

  “Jules!”

  Arsinoe bursts through the gate, racing for them like Jules knew she would. Jules’s heart pounds. She maneuvers her horse in front of Billy’s.

  “Don’t let her see, do you hear me?” She knows it is a ridiculous command. Something like this cannot be hidden.

  Arsinoe reaches them and clasps her leg. “You were gone too long,” she says. “I didn’t know— Billy?”

  Jules looks between them as Arsinoe half smiles.

  “But how did you—how did you get him?” She pushes through the horses, and her smile disappears.

  “Arsinoe,” he says softly. “I’m so sorry.”

  “No.” She grabs at Mirabella’s body, trying to pull it to the ground. “No. What happened to her? What happened to my sister?”

  “Arsinoe—” Billy leans back, struggling to control his horse, a
nd Jules quickly dismounts. She grasps Arsinoe around the waist.

  “Let go of me!” she shouts, and strikes Jules in the head. “How did you find them? You were supposed to be in Bastian City! I don’t understand!” Her voice is high. Strained, as Jules holds on tight. She does not know what happened, only that Mirabella is dead. And that for the rest of her life, she will never forget the sound of Arsinoe’s voice screaming that she does not understand.

  In the room that they share in the castle, Arsinoe watches Billy put on a fresh shirt. It is quiet there; the whole city is quiet, in the wake of Mirabella’s death. Almost like they cared.

  “Here, let me.” She stands up and helps him with the buttons. There are so many blisters on his fingers that a new one pops every time he makes a fist. She took a long time cleaning them, gently, with warm water and soothing herbs. Knowing they came from poison filled her with disgust. But even as she looked upon the welts and the cuts and the ligature marks at his wrists and ankles, the anger she felt was muted compared to what she felt when she thought of Mirabella.

  They had murdered her. Impossible as that seemed, when she was so powerfully gifted. When she was the one who could battle the mist and win. Yet she was dead.

  Before Jules dragged Arsinoe away, she had seen the clean cut across Mirabella’s throat like a second smile. She had seen the mess they had made of the back of her skull when they dashed it against something solid.

  “Is the horse all right?” Billy asks quietly. “I rode him too hard from Indrid Down. I should have stopped, but I was afraid.”

  “He’s fine,” Arsinoe says. She does not really know. But there are plenty of naturalists in the rebellion to look after him.

  Billy turns to her and slips his injured hands up onto her neck. He rubs his thumb along her cheek, and she lets him press his forehead to hers for just a moment. Billy’s touch would make her soft. She would curl into it and cry, use him to forget where they are and what has happened.

  “You should eat.” She turns away and gestures to an untouched plate. Some bread and cheese and one of the cakes Luke has started to bake after commandeering the ovens.

  “We should eat,” Billy corrects her. “And we should sleep. But I don’t want to do either.”

  She would be surprised if he could sleep at all, with the amount of pain he must be in. His right eye is so swollen, it is almost closed, the entire socket a deep and sinister purple. Someone without the poisoner gift would assume he had been struck. But she knows he was stung with something. Injected with some venom.

  “I’ll brew you some willow bark tea,” she says. “Make you some salve.” She clenches her hands into angry fists. But Billy takes them and tugs them open.

  “She didn’t betray you,” he says. “I accused her of it, but I believe her. She loved you, Arsinoe. Maybe she loved you both and just couldn’t see what Katharine was.”

  “They’ll say she was stupid. Or a traitor. A stupid, gullible fool or a turncoat. And that’s all they’ll ever say. No one here really knew her. Only me and you.”

  “So we’ll set them straight.”

  “She would have been a better Queen Crowned than any one of us still living,” Arsinoe whispers. She pulls her hands free. “I should have stopped her. I should have stopped myself.”

  “Yourself?”

  “Every cut I made into my arm. Every favor I asked for from whatever the low magic is. I knew the whole time it wasn’t free. And I did it anyway!”

  “Arsinoe—”

  “You warned me. You told me to stop. You said it was the people around me who would bear the cost.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant. This . . . it wasn’t what I meant at all.”

  He looks away, and a silence grows between them. There in the room with Billy, something is slipping away. And if she would just reach out and take his hand, she could catch it and keep it from disappearing.

  “My father’s dead,” he says dully. “They murdered him, too. Punishment for murdering Natalia Arron.”

  Arsinoe looks up.

  “I’m going to have to go home and look after Mother and Jane. They deserve to know what’s happened.”

  “You’re going now?”

  “No. I won’t go now.” He pauses. “Maybe I’ll come and find you after they’re settled. We can go away together like we talked about.”

  It was not so long ago that they made that pact, to start over together someplace new.

  “The people who said that,” she whispers, “were from another world. Now there’s only this one.” This one, she thinks, and shuts her eyes bitterly. Where war presses in against the walls and will force them to battlefields soon enough. Where in the morning, she will have to burn the body of her sister.

  “I think we had our chance, Junior. And I think we missed it.”

  “I think so, too,” he says through clenched teeth. He walks to the door and pauses with his hand on it. “Luca gave me a message for you. She told you to come and fight. That the temple wouldn’t stand in your way.”

  Arsinoe nods. “Good. Then that’s just what I’ll do.”

  INDRID DOWN

  After Mirabella was killed, Luca made no attempt to hide what she had done. She confessed to freeing the suitor and sending Mirabella’s body with him home to the rebellion. She gave Katharine no choice but to summon the guards and have the High Priestess escorted to her rooms in Indrid Down Temple to await her sentence.

  Rho, meanwhile, recovered from the sudden abandonment of the dead queens, regaining consciousness after a day and a night. Though she is not entirely the same. Her eyes, at times, seem to be missing something. But only Katharine herself knows what that could be.

  With Genevieve in her shadow, Katharine walks atop the battlements between the Volroy’s indomitable towers, where the wind is strong enough to nearly knock her down. The Black Council refuses to meet. After the arrest of Luca, Bree is terrified she will be next, and as for Antonin, Cousin Lucian, and the rest . . . When first they were reluctant to have Mirabella in the capital at all, now they are more than happy to blame Katharine for the loss of their champion against the mist.

  Katharine looks out across the harbor to the place below the cliffs where her sister died. The presence of the dead queens rests heavy and cold in her belly, as if she had swallowed a sphere of ice. After she stole Mirabella from them, they had stormed through her blood, cutting like razors, rotting her flesh from the inside out. But she is all they have, and soon enough, they quieted.

  Katharine cannot be quiet. She feels only hate. Hate and impotent anger. But at least she had spared her sister the experience of sharing her skin with the dead.

  “The mist still hangs there,” Genevieve says, leaning against the stone of the battlements and looking out at the bay. “Like it is waiting for something. But for what?” She shivers and then cocks an eyebrow. “So much for the promises of a dead king-consort.”

  “Have you told anyone else what you found in those pages? That Mirabella’s death might have vanquished the mist?”

  “No. Only you. Though perhaps we should. We could say you had to try, based on what we learned. That you sacrificed her in an attempt to save the island. Even if it failed, no one could fault you for that.”

  “No. I do not want to make excuses.” Katharine glares out at the mist. “Mirabella wanted to bring Arsinoe here. She would have brought Jules Milone. She would have had us fight beside them, had me stand aside and put the crown on the Legion Queen’s head. Perhaps that is still what I should do.”

  Genevieve studies her carefully.

  “Do not worry,” Katharine says. “I would only be that brave if she were still here. Now I will be a coward and let them bite and claw and scratch until there is nothing left.”

  “Kat,” Genevieve says, but Katharine turns away. “Very well. What, then, do we do with the High Priestess? I never thought I would plead for mercy, but . . . seeing Luca’s eyes as she confessed . . . Her heart has broken, and her influence w
anes. I think this was the last disappointment her old heart can bear.”

  “Let the High Priestess remain in her rooms under guard. Let her stay there until it is over.”

  “Over?”

  “If you do not think that Arsinoe will come for me now, you are a fool. She will come. And the mist will come. And the Legion Queen will come. And then there will be an ending.”

  SUNPOOL

  Jules and Billy try to keep Arsinoe from preparing Mirabella’s body herself. But who else could do it? Who else knows the way she liked to wear her hair or which perfumed oils she preferred? Only Arsinoe. So the morning of the funeral, she stands before her sister’s broken body and tries to work up the courage for that first touch.

  She will be cold. A shell. And the bits of dried pink matted into her hair make Arsinoe’s stomach wobble. No one else should see her like this.

  She places her hands atop Mirabella’s shoulders.

  “There,” she whispers, as if it is done, but despite herself, she is disappointed that Mirabella does not sit up and tell her it was all a ruse.

  “Do you do this alone?” Pietyr Renard asks from the shadows behind her.

  “Get out.”

  “I only thought to share the load.”

  “I don’t care what you thought. No one else can see her this way. Especially not you.”

  “I can help you reset the bones. Help you to restore her.”

  “There is no restoring her,” Arsinoe half shouts, and Pietyr, with typical Arron boldness, walks closer, uninvited. As he looks upon Mirabella’s wounds, all Arsinoe wants to do is give him wounds to match. Cave in his skull. Break his ribs and legs. Cut his throat and send him back to Katharine wrapped in a blanket. And then he touches Mirabella’s face so tenderly that Arsinoe’s tears pause in surprise.

  “She was so lovely,” he says. “And so strong. How we feared her.”