“Am I going to have trouble with you?”
“I told you you would not.”
“The word of an Arron?”
“It means more than the word of a Milone.”
“I doubt that,” Arsinoe says, and snorts. But the Milones have done their share of wrongs and kept their share of secrets. Just like the Arrons. And like the temple.
“You should be more worried about Katharine, in any case. You know what she is. How strong she is, thanks to the borrowed gifts, and how good she is with weapons. You know she is likely to kill you.”
“We are likely to kill each other,” Arsinoe says, her voice hard. “Yes, I know.”
She takes a deep breath. She hears Mirabella and Jules saying how foolhardy she is. How she never thinks anything through. But they would only say that because they love her. Deep down, they know as well as she does that this task can fall to no one else.
Quick as a cat, she draws her knife and shoves Pietyr against the wall, pressing the edge to his neck.
“If I were smart,” she says, “I would kill you. So tell me why I shouldn’t.”
“Because I am an ally. Because I swore I would not stop you.”
She presses the blade harder against his skin.
“Liar.”
Pietyr grimaces at the pressure of the knife, but he is not really afraid. He looks at her with his usual amount of disdain.
“Then I will tell you the whole truth to prove that I am not what you say.”
“The whole truth?”
“In order to reach you on the battlefield, I had to stab your boy, Billy.”
For a moment, she cannot believe what she has heard. Then she pulls him forward and slams him back into the wall, hard enough to make him believe she has the war gift.
“You what?”
“I did not kill him. But he refused to let me by. He seemed to think I had nefarious plans for you. He is rather gallant for a mainland idiot.”
“You stabbed him?”
“Yes. But I did not kill him.”
“How do you know? How do you know for sure?”
“A poisoner knows the body,” he says. “We know where to cut to make you feel it. We know how deep to make the blood run. And we also know how to keep you alive, to prolong the suffering.”
“If there was poison on your knife, I swear—”
He shakes his head as much as he is able to without being cut.
“There was none. The weapons were provided to me on the march, and I have been watched and searched regularly. When would I have had the chance?”
Arsinoe holds him for a long moment. Then she steps back, and Pietyr rubs at his neck.
“I did not have to tell you that,” he says. “But I am being honest. So please believe me when I say I will not interfere with you and Katharine. I just need to be there.”
Honest. The word does not even fit in his mouth right. But Arsinoe puts her knife away.
“You can’t stop me, Renard. It would be a waste of your life to try.”
He nods, and she walks past the garden, pressing her finger to her lips when footsteps sound down a corridor. She flattens against the wall and grabs the servant by the collar as soon as he turns the corner.
“Where is the queen?”
“He is a kitchen boy,” Pietyr says. “He might not know.”
“She—she is in her rooms.” The boy points skyward and to the west. Arsinoe lets him go.
“Good. This can all end like it used to in the old days. With queens in the tower.”
Arsinoe is almost there. Katharine can feel her coming. Her angry, middle sister. Arsinoe is coming, and she has purpose: to do what Mirabella promised she would.
She will not want to kill you, the few dead queens whisper. She is weak.
“She will,” Katharine whispers back. “For what I did. For sending the others into Rho Murtra to grind Jules Milone’s bones into the mud.”
The only thing left to decide on is the place.
It should not be here, in these rooms of striped silk and brocade, clumsy furniture, and tea settings. Rooms that reek of ease and civilized capital business.
It should be somewhere stark and wild. Where Mirabella can see.
Katharine goes to the door. She calls down to Arsinoe. And then she hurries up the stairs to the door that leads to the battlements.
When Arsinoe bursts out onto the battlements, she is unprepared for the dizzying height, worse even than when she clung to the side of Mount Horn. She squeezes her eyes shut. When she opens them, she sees Katharine, standing across the rooftop. The Undead Queen’s arms are bare and full of poison scars. She wears a black, corseted gown. And she looks almost happy to see her.
Arsinoe is not sure what she expected, but seeing her is a shock. After Pietyr’s descriptions of the dead queens, she imagined Katharine half rotten, her skin blackened and showing glimpses of exposed bone. She thought Katharine would simply charge—that they would charge each other—and there would be an end to it. Now, despite her anger and her hands clenched in fists, she cannot bring herself to simply walk across the rooftop and strangle her little sister to death.
“You came,” Katharine calls. “I knew you would. She said you would.”
“Don’t speak of her.”
“But you received it? The letter she sent?” Katharine’s eyes flicker hopefully to Arsinoe’s small, sharp knife. “You know what you have to do.”
“Aye,” Arsinoe growls. “I know what I have to do.” She clenches her fists. “Come and face me!” She squeezes the knife handle and waits, her breath hard, her pulse in her ears. But Katharine does not move. It only makes Arsinoe angrier, this calm exterior, this act. She did not come all this way to butcher a fawn as it slept. She wanted a fight. It has to be a fight.
“Come on!” she shouts. “You’re a joke in that crown. A giftless queen. When you found out that I was a poisoner, didn’t you think to ask old Willa? Didn’t you want to know that you were nothing but a weak-gifted naturalist? A weak, pathetic, nearly giftless naturalist, like I always thought I was. We were supposed to have each other’s childhoods, Katharine. Though I’d like to think I’d have handled yours better than you have.”
“It does not matter what I was,” Katharine says, frowning. “I am something different now. I know that you are angry—”
“Angry? I am more than angry!”
It is not working. Down on the battlefield, people are dying. Her friends are dying. Arsinoe lifts the knife. And Pietyr steps out from behind her.
Katharine rushes forward two steps.
“You are something different, Kat,” he says. “You are right about that.”
“You are well.” Katharine smiles, and her eyes shine. “You are well again.”
Arsinoe seethes at the happiness on Katharine’s face. She does not deserve it. She deserves cruelty. Pain. She should be allowed to feel nothing but regret. Arsinoe turns to Pietyr and puts her hand on his chest.
“He is well again,” she says. “You tried to kill him, and I woke him up.” She walks around him. When she trails her hand down his back Pietyr nearly jumps out of his skin, but to his credit, he stays quiet.
“He’s not here to return to you, Katharine. He’s here to declare that he is with us. With me.” She steels herself and grabs Pietyr’s face, kissing him hard. Then she shoves him away and runs for her sister.
Katharine knows that the kiss was not real. But it gave her sister the courage she needed. As Arsinoe runs at her, Katharine puts her hands up. Arsinoe’s knife swings in a slicing arc. It stabs through the meat of Katharine’s hand, lodging between her ring and pinkie finger.
She cries out as the dead queens hiss. They want to twist Arsinoe’s head around on her neck. But Katharine swallows them down.
“You killed her!” Arsinoe shouts through clenched teeth. Her knife shakes in Katharine’s flesh and saws into it deeper. “When she loved us more than the crown. More than the island!”
Fr
om the corner of Katharine’s eye, she sees Pietyr, looking on in misery. “Queens do not get to have loves like that,” Katharine shouts.
As they struggle, she feels the pain in Arsinoe’s eyes like it is her own. She wants to tell her what happened to Mirabella. That Mirabella had asked Katharine to kill her, to protect her from the invasion of the dead queens. She wants to tell her that it was still her fault because she could not protect her. But if she does, Arsinoe will lose her nerve. She is more like their older sister in that way. And besides, despite the blade in her hand, Katharine almost enjoys the fight. This is what she and Arsinoe do, without Mirabella to mediate between them. It is what they have always done, even back at the Black Cottage.
Arsinoe shoves Katharine back, and wrenches the knife free.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Arsinoe pants. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Cut me,” Katharine cries. “Kill me or cut them out of me. There has to be an end to it. An end to the line of queens.”
She cradles her hand as blood runs freely down her arm. Arsinoe stares at her in exasperation, exhausted already from the stairs and from whatever she faced upon the battlefield. Below them, and all around them, the mist blankets entire buildings like a covering of snow. Coming ever closer to devour them.
“You brought this on yourself, Katharine. All of it.”
Katharine’s face falls. Not all of it. She had begun the game as much a pawn as the others. But enough of it is her doing that the rest does not matter.
“I wish we had not been born here, Arsinoe. I wish things could have been different. But I think Mirabella was right. And we were put here for a reason.”
“Why didn’t you say this before?” Arsinoe asks. The knife hangs in her hand. “Why not when she was still alive and we could have done something?”
“I did not feel it before. I am a queen. It is not in my nature to admit defeat. It is not in yours either.”
Before she can say more, there rises such a cry from the battlefield that she and Arsinoe both turn. She knows what that sound was. So do the dead sisters, who swell in her blood, preparing to welcome home their kin. Katharine turns to Arsinoe with wide eyes.
“You must do it now! We are out of time!”
“What are you talking about?”
“If they return to me, I will not be able to control them!”
“Listen to her, Arsinoe!” Pietyr shouts. “Banish them, now!”
Arsinoe unwraps the bandage around her palm as the dead queens arrive in a whirlwind. The black fury of them swirls around Katharine like a horde of stinging insects. Katharine clamps her mouth shut and squeezes her eyes closed. But they always find a way back in.
Katharine drops to her knees. The dead queens are so angry. They tear at her face and arms, trying to claw their way in. They will swarm her mind and steal her body for good.
“Get away from her.”
The pain eases. It disappears from her neck and chest, bringing relief like a cool breeze. Katharine opens her eyes. Arsinoe is coming to her across the rooftop, her hand extended and bleeding, parting the cloud of dead queens like smoke. She has carved into her hand the same rune that Pietyr had carved into his when he tried to banish the queens back into the stones.
“That will not work,” she says as Arsinoe kneels beside her.
“It will when I do it.” Arsinoe takes Katharine’s hand. She works fast with her knife, carving the rune upside down, so the two will seal together. She holds out her palm.
Katharine grips her sister’s hand. The feeling of the queensblood mingling is unlike anything she has felt before. Beyond the dead queens’ gifts. Beyond the elation of the crown etched into her forehead. Her body convulses as the last of the dead are thrown out past her lips to flow onto the rooftop. They slither like ink to rejoin the others, and Arsinoe and Katharine rise.
The dead queens are not strong enough to take form. They linger in the air, boiling like water, and for the first time, Katharine is able to glimpse who they once were. Faces and hands fight to remain, pressing out from the cloud. Echoes of black hair drift like seaweed. She sees braids and the hints of gowns, dresses from times long ago. They were no different than Katharine and Arsinoe once. Their ends no less unfair than Mirabella’s.
“They’re past saving,” Arsinoe murmurs, reading Katharine’s thoughts through their joined blood. “We have to banish them. Permanently.”
“Look out!” Pietyr cries as the body of Rho Murtra climbs over the battlements.
Not all of the queens gave her up after the mist was done with her. After it left her shredded and torn from a hundred cuts. After it hollowed her eyes. A few of them were clever, and suspicious. And after the mist had eased, they climbed back inside the dead priestess like a suit of armor.
Arsinoe flinches as the thing that used to be Rho raises an ax and brings it down hard on the stones. Katharine pulls her sister out of the way, and they fall against the rooftop, scuttling backward as the dead queens jerkily advance, clumsy inside the dead skin.
“What in the Goddess’s name is that?” Arsinoe asks.
Katharine clings to her as they stare wide-eyed at the horror Rho’s body has become.
“It must be stopped,” Katharine whispers, and Arsinoe lets go of her to carve another rune into her other hand.
Before Katharine can object, she darts forward, quick as a cat.
“No!” Katharine scrambles to her feet and moves to help, but Pietyr takes her shoulder.
“Please, Kat,” he says. “Let me.” He dashes past her and throws himself onto Rho’s corpse. A sound comes from deep inside the rotting, greening skin, almost like a wheeze, a bellow from lungs full of holes.
Frozen, Katharine watches as Arsinoe ducks the swing of an undead arm, trying to press her hand against the corpse’s forehead. Pietyr hauls the arm back, but he does not see Rho’s other arm swing hard with the ax.
“Stop!” Katharine shouts as it catches Arsinoe in a glancing blow, the blade slicing into the meat of her hip. It sends her flying, crashing to the stones, to roll all the way against the wall of the battlements. Katharine runs to her.
“You are bleeding.”
“Yes,” Arsinoe says, and grimaces as Katharine helps her up. She flexes her hands, squeezing more blood from the runes. “But I still have enough.” She takes a deep breath and heaves off away from the wall, leaping again for Rho’s corpse as Pietyr grapples with the dead queens who still hold fast inside it. They rake their undead fingernails down his perfect cheek and he growls and shouts in pain.
“Arsinoe, the ax!” Pietyr wraps his arm around Rho in a crushing embrace and Arsinoe kicks hard against the hand that holds it. She must kick twice more before the ax clatters to the stones.
“I need the head!” Arsinoe bares her teeth. But as she tries to reach it, seeking to climb Rho’s massive arm as if it is a tree branch, the corpse jerks its neck and connects with Pietyr skull to skull, sending him to the ground. Katharine holds her breath as Rho’s darkened, broken hand wraps around Arsinoe’s throat. She will see her sister’s windpipe crushed. See the life ebb out of her.
Katharine runs forward. In one fast, smooth motion, she scoops up the ax and swings hard, with a guttural howl. Then she blinks. The blade is buried in the corpse’s chest. As the dead queens stare at her in shock, Arsinoe rises and slams the rune into Rho’s dead forehead.
The last of the dead seep out, the corpse’s jaw hanging as if dislocated. It takes only a moment, and then it collapses into a pile of meat and empty eyes. Katharine, Arsinoe, and Pietyr stand over it, breathless.
“Don’t ever, ever make something like that again!” Arsinoe shouts at Katharine, and starts to laugh, bent over with one hand on her knee, the other pressed against the deep cut in her hip. Pietyr begins to chuckle, too. In the face of the reanimated Queensguard Commander, they have momentarily forgotten about the cloud of the dead hanging in the air.
But Katharine has not. Her eyes flicker to the
m as the dead queens contract, desperately holding themselves together. They need a queen in order to remain. They need a body. And they sense that Arsinoe has been weakened enough.
Katharine does not have time to warn her. She jumps to her feet and throws herself in front of Arsinoe as the dead queens dive for her throat. The impact of them knocks her off her feet. The brush of the battlement stones against her shoulder is surreal as she goes over the top of it, hearing Arsinoe scream as she goes over the edge as well. But Katharine, always the smallest, is also the quickest, and kicks Arsinoe against the wall. The last thing she sees before she plunges into the mist is Arsinoe, holding tight to the Volroy stones. Safe.
Arsinoe clings to the side of the Volroy, legs dangling, her neck twisted as she watches Katharine and the dead queens fall into nothingness. Katharine had saved her. She had saved her. And she fell.
“Kat,” she whispers, and then she shouts. “Katharine!”
“Give me your hand!”
She looks up. Pietyr is leaning over the edge. With a groan, she reaches up and grabs him, wincing at the sting of the rune in her hand.
And behind her, the dead queens scream.
“Pietyr! Pull me up!”
He tries, but he will not be fast enough. She knows that by the terror in his eyes.
Arsinoe kicks; her feet scrabble against the stone, unsure whether she is trying to climb or to keep the dead queens away. She dares to look over her shoulder and sees them coming, their form stretched in inky arms and elongated legs.
“I’m not going to make it,” she shrieks. “Let go!”
She pulls against his grip, the blood making it easy to slip loose.
“Wait!”
Arsinoe looks over her shoulder again.
The mist is rising, racing up alongside the dead queens. It swoops up above them and dives back down, swallowing them whole and tearing them apart, spitting wisps of blackness into the sky. Arsinoe and Pietyr freeze as they stare at the battle, the dead queens shrieking, becoming a maelstrom of writhing arms and bared teeth, as the mist wraps around and around them.
Five Dark Fates Page 30