Queens of Fennbirn

by Kendare Blake

  “We all do on Fennbirn,” says Cait. “We just blind ourselves to it when it suits us. When we need it most.”

  Caragh sighs. She starts to say more, but her mother has stopped listening. Cait stares out the window over the kitchen sink, into the yard and the garden that borders their long driveway.

  “By the Goddess,” Cait whispers, and dries her hands on a towel. She tears off her apron and throws it onto the countertop. “Ellis! Ellis, where are you?”

  “What’s wrong?” Caragh asks as Cait shoves past her and dashes into the yard. She follows to the door and looks out. If it is Jules, showing up again in head-to-toe mud, she will scrub the girl raw. But it is not Jules running up the drive to leap into Cait’s arms.

  It is Caragh’s sister, Madrigal. It is Jules’s mother.

  No one leaves or is allowed to find the island if it is not by the will of the Goddess. That is what Caragh has always been taught. So she tries to accept it with a little bit of grace that her sister has returned. Surely the Goddess must have a purpose, beyond upsetting Caragh’s carefully ordered and relatively happy life.

  She watches through the window as her mother weeps and her father lifts Madrigal in a whirling embrace, like he used to do when she was a little girl. Madrigal, they cry. Madrigal is home.

  For how long, and for what, Caragh wonders. No one has heard from Madrigal since she left the island six years ago to go to the mainland, and no one expected to. It is said that once a woman leaves Fennbirn, she begins to lose her memory. And then, slowly, her gift. Indeed, when Madrigal finally sees Caragh through the kitchen window, it is almost as if she does not recognize her.

  “But I recognize you,” Caragh whispers, and at her knee, Juniper growls. Whatever Madrigal has been up to on the mainland, it has only made her more beautiful. She is still slender, but rounded now in just the right places. Her light brown hair shines, and her eyes sparkle. Her familiar has already returned to her and perches on her shoulder: Aria, a pretty black crow. Madrigal cocks her head, and so does the bird.

  “Caragh,” she says in a tone that is somehow familiar and insulting. Oh Caragh, there you are. Where else would you be?

  Caragh brushes her hands nervously against her skirt and goes to meet her sister at the front steps. Madrigal is dressed like an outsider, in a strangely cut dress of green silk. There are gold hoops in her ears, and gold bangles on her wrists. She holds on to Jules with one hand, and Jules holds on tight, as though afraid she will disappear if she lets go.

  “I hope you don’t mind that I didn’t come straight here,” Madrigal says. She wraps an arm about Jules’s small shoulders. “I wanted to find my daughter first.”

  My daughter. The words swirl in Caragh’s stomach like blood from a punch. She wonders whether on Fennbirn all sisters are meant to hate one another. Not only the queens.

  “She has not grown tall.” Madrigal cups Jules’s face. “But she has certainly changed since I saw her last.”

  “She was a baby when you saw her last,” Caragh says, and Cait and Ellis look at her sharply.

  “A baby.” Madrigal smiles. “She was three and a half. Walking and talking and even slightly gifted. A baby. Caragh, what can you be thinking?”

  Not far away in the grass, Arsinoe’s pale face peeks out from behind Joseph. He seems curious, and confused, like he thinks he should be happy but cannot remember why. Arsinoe looks suspicious.

  “Are you home for good, Mother?” Jules asks. “Home to stay?”

  “I am, my Jules.” Madrigal plants kiss after kiss into Jules’s hair, and the family closes around them in a circle, all smiles and tears. No one sees Caragh press her fists into her middle, where it hurts so badly it must surely be bleeding.

  GREAVESDRAKE MANOR

  Greavesdrake Manor rests at the western end of the capital city of Indrid Down and spills across woodland and meadow. The great house stands on a low central hill and has grown larger as the years passed, expanding steadily, as if the house has somehow learned to feed. One more poisoner queen, and Greavesdrake will spill over into the streets.

  Its pitched roofs have been washed black, to show the Arrons’ devotion to the crown. That is what Natalia told little Katharine that first day, more than three years ago, when the carriage drove up to it. But Katharine has come to believe that the roof is black for another reason: it screams down to the capital, and all across the island, This is where your queens are raised.

  Katharine sits at her vanity table and lets her maid brush out her long black hair. Her eyes are hollow and haunted, and she is painfully thin. She has simply lost the taste for eating. It is not easy to pretend to relish the poisoned food they serve. Nor to keep from crying when they put her to the scorpion’s sting or lash the nettles across her back. But she tries. It is all part of being a poisoner queen. Natalia says it is her duty to become strong, her obligation—to the Arrons who house and clothe her and to the island that worships her like the Goddess. Take the pain into yourself, Natalia tells her, and you will grow strong.

  But sometimes it feels like her gift will never be strong. Like it will never come, and she will never revel in the poisons like the Arrons do. It feels like she has been poisoned forever. She cannot even remember anything that came before.

  “Shall we braid you, miss?” her maid asks, and Katharine does not reply. The maid will do it anyway.

  A short while later, Katharine walks alone to the dining room for breakfast with Natalia. Her hair is done, and she has been fitted into a soft, fine dress of black muslin. When Natalia sees her, she smiles. Even drawn and miserable, Katharine is still very pretty, and all Natalia sees is a perfect poisoner queen.

  “Good morning, Queen Katharine.”

  “Good morning.” Someone pulls a chair out for her, and she sits in front of a bowl of oatmeal and a plate of cut strawberries.

  “How are your studies?” Natalia looks severe as she always does, but not unkind. A red-and-black-striped coral snake is twisted around her wrist like a bracelet.

  “Does it have a name?” Katharine asks.

  “No.” Natalia kisses it on the head. “But it is very beautiful. Now. How are your studies? Is your new tutor more to your liking?”

  “We are reading from Toxicology: The Use of Poisons in Modern Medicine.”

  “Very good.” Natalia lifts the silver off her own dish. She eats a soup for breakfast, a bitter broth steeped with poison mushrooms. For lunch she might enjoy blowfish or a salad of bloodroot. Dinner is meat tenderized and tainted with scorpion venom. Poison for every meal. Such is her strength.

  Natalia promises that one day, Katharine will eat the same. But Katharine cannot imagine it.

  “I have to go into the capital today, Queen Katharine. But I shall be back before supper.”

  Katharine puts down her spoon. “I would like to go with you,” she says softly. “Perhaps . . . perhaps I ought to go with you, if I am to rule there one day.”

  During the short carriage ride to Indrid Down, Natalia studies Katharine as she looks out the window, nosed pressed to the glass like an excited puppy. At nine years old, she has little of the lanky, lithe quality that Queen Camille had. But then, queens do not pass down physical traits or talents. Nothing but the bloodline.

  “Natalia,” Katharine asks, “what are we going to do in the capital today?”

  “We are going to the Volroy. Where I must meet with the Black Council. You will not meet with them until after you are crowned.”

  “Then what am I to do while I wait?” The little queen turns and blinks at her. There is no guile in her questions, no petulance. Only a genuine curiosity that awaits instruction. Katharine pulls a little bit at her sleeve, tugging the muslin down to cover the fading welt of a spider bite.

  Natalia sighs. “Perhaps I can put off the council. I will show you the poison room. An entire room with a full inventory of poisons, both domestic and foreign. Common and rare. Curated by many Arrons before me, on expeditions to the mainland.” />
  “An entire poison room? Is it larger than the one at Greavesdrake?”

  “Not larger.” The poison chamber at Greavesdrake is the size of a small ballroom. “But better stocked. I have added to its shelves myself, as did my brother Christophe, when he traveled through the mists to the exotic, tropical climes of the southern seas.”

  Queen Katharine leans forward, daydreaming of poison as she gazes through the window glass.

  “A whole room of poisons, right in the Volroy castle. Is that because the queen is always a poisoner?”

  “She is not always, and you know that.” Natalia reaches out and taps her beneath her chin. “But our queens have kept this island safe for three generations, without war or intrusion. Our family has kept it safe. And if the Westwoods think they can do the same, with their breezes and rain clouds . . . Fennbirn needs a poisoner. It needs a queen to fear. Death and strength are the only true currencies on the mainland anymore.”

  The carriage halts at the gates and moves on when Natalia nods to the guards. Inside the vast, chilled halls of the Volroy, eyes widen at the sight of the young queen, so rarely seen there.

  “I should like to hang more tapestries when I am queen,” Katharine remarks, quietly so her voice will not echo.

  “And why is that?”

  “So it will not feel so cold. Cold and distant and brittle. The Volroy was not made to be loved.”

  “Indeed it was not,” Natalia replies. “It was made to endure.” She leads the queen up the stairs of the East Tower, up and up and through the antechamber that leads to the room of poisons.

  She steps in, and Katharine walks eagerly to the center of the stone floor. She marvels at the cabinets full of poisons, dried and liquefied and preserved, glittering malevolently in their vials. She reaches out to touch the long table of sealed wood, topped with glass, and Natalia grasps her by the wrist.

  “Take care. Your gift has not come. You must wear gloves before you touch anything in this room. No matter how meticulously it is maintained, I will not take any chances with your tolerance.”

  She goes to a closet and selects a pair of small, lined gloves for Katharine to wear.

  “Now,” she says, and smiles, “shall we make something pretty? Something pretty, and something deadly.”

  The poison that they craft is called Winter’s Blush, since it kills by constricting the blood vessels and making the body go cold all over. Sometimes the constriction causes the capillaries to burst as well, making the name even more fitting. It is a popular poison lesson for beginners, because it has only four ingredients and because of the pretty lilac color that it turns, and the way that it fizzes.

  Katharine holds the stoppered vial gleefully between gloved fingers, admiring the purple hue. “It is like Miss Genevieve’s eyes,” she says.

  Natalia chuckles. “She would love that you said that. But though it is beautiful, you must treat it with respect. As you must treat all poisons. A poison is not a plaything. It is sacred and serious business. As the head of the Black Council, I must concoct poisons to administer as punishment to those on the island who would do harm. Who commit crimes. Sometimes I must punish them to death. And as queen, you must do so as well.”

  The young queen slides the poison into the cuff of her sleeve, practicing her sleight of hand. She is still not very good at it. But she is no stranger to death and has heard such words before. Each time she turns a little less green.

  “I will do what I must.” Katharine looks at her in sudden alarm. “But you will be there with me?”

  Natalia begins to clean the table, returning ingredient bottles to shelves and drawers, carefully brushing stray bits and dust into a bin to be destroyed. Queen Katharine may be small, and some, like Genevieve, may think her weak, but Natalia disagrees. She is small, and softhearted. She is kind. But she is also resilient and dutiful. She has never refused or hesitated in the face of poisoning. She will make a fine queen.

  “Yes, Queen Katharine. I will always be with you.” She wipes the blade of one of the short knives she used to cut a sliver of root and finds it so sharp that it sinks into her finger. She gasps as blood runs down her knuckle. “Foolish. Foolish and careless of me.”

  “Natalia, you are bleeding!” Katharine reaches for her hand and quickly wraps it in a clean cloth. She looks so concerned as she pats Natalia’s fingers and squeezes them gently. And over such a small thing. “Is that better?”

  “All better,” says Natalia. And then she laughs and pulls the queen close. “You are such a strange girl, Kat. Such a strange and dear girl.”

  WOLF SPRING

  Arsinoe and Joseph walk behind Jules and her mother by at least a dozen paces. They watch the pair suspiciously and wonder who this strange woman is, the strange woman with the beautiful face, whose very presence turns their friend Jules into an affectionate pet. Joseph pulls up a long bit of big bluestem out of the meadow grass and thwacks the other stalks as Aria the crow flaps overhead. She is never far from Jules’s mother. Perhaps she is afraid of being left again.

  Arsinoe tugs at the collar of her black shirt. She is the only one who has to wear black year-round, even in high summer, when it soaks up the sun and makes her so hot she might have a stroke.

  “You should quit wearing black all the time,” Joseph says, and he makes it sound so easy that she wants to hit him.

  “Arsinoe!”

  She looks up—they both do—and sees Madrigal waving for them to come on. She is smiling, and the blades of grass move around her in a dance. She is hard to resist. Joseph runs at once, and after a moment, Arsinoe, the most skeptical and sullen queen born for at least the last thousand years, goes, too.

  Madrigal grabs Arsinoe, and Arsinoe grabs Joseph, and Joseph grabs Jules, and they spin through the grass, churning up their own wind. Arsinoe and Joseph laugh, and Jules and Madrigal throw their heads back, and the butterflies come. All the butterflies it seems, from every crick and corner of Fennbirn. Monarchs, wood whites, orange tips, and black-and-yellow-striped swallowtails. They swirl into the meadow and fly over and under and around them. In the corner of Arsinoe’s eye, flashes of blue and brighter yellow ignite in the grass: the wildflowers all blooming at once.

  Finally, they fall apart onto their backs, laughing. Madrigal pulls fresh blooms of flowers to her nose, and Aria lands on her chest to eat a blue butterfly. Delicate wings cover Madrigal from head to toe, opening and closing in all colors. They are on Jules, too, but Jules does not seem to notice. She stares at her mother with such love it makes Arsinoe jealous, only she is not sure who she is jealous of.

  “That was a very good game, Funny Eyes,” Madrigal says. She reaches a finger out to touch her daughter’s nose, and Jules’s smile fades.

  “I like your eyes, Jules,” says Joseph. “I wish I had them.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like them,” Madrigal says. “I only said they were funny. Which they are.” She touches Jules’s hair. “It’s a pity, though, that I didn’t find a boy that Beltane with black, black hair. The butterflies look so pretty in Arsinoe’s.” She lets go of Juillenne and leans toward the queen.

  “Do you feel the way they talk to you? Can you hear what they say through their beating wings?”

  Arsinoe sits still a moment. She feels only their legs and furry antennae, tickling her scalp.

  “No.”

  Madrigal sighs. She puts one hand on her crow and then tosses her into the air before she can eat any more butterflies. “I haven’t been back on the island for two weeks, and already I’ve heard them whispering. ‘Will she be strong enough to become the queen?’ ‘Could she be?’ ‘When will her gift start to show? She is already nine.’”

  “I’m already a queen. That’s why they call me Queen Arsinoe.”

  “But you aren’t the only one. You know that, don’t you?”

  Jules and Joseph look at Madrigal, faces bleak, as if they sense she is about to ruin a sunny afternoon.

  “Fennbirn has three queens in
every generation,” Madrigal goes on. “You don’t just get the crown by virtue of being born. You have to fight for it.” She prods Arsinoe in the belly playfully, and Arsinoe swats at her hand.

  “I don’t think I want to be crowned anyway.”

  Madrigal leans back with her elbows in the grass and clucks her tongue, like that is a very great shame. She brushes at the last of the butterflies lingering on her clothes—strange clothes from the mainland: tall leather boots with heels, and tight trousers.

  “Caragh and Mum want to coddle you,” she says. “Make you happy until your time comes. They want to treat you like a loser. Like you’re dead already.”

  “Dead?” Jules sits up.

  “That is what happens to the queens who lose. They are killed. But don’t despair.” Madrigal cups Jules’s cheek with one hand and pinches Arsinoe’s with the other. “There is plenty of time yet to train. To grow strong. To be the victor. And I am here now, and I will help you.”

  Caragh and Matthew walk the long dirt road that leads to the Milone house. It is a cool, pleasant walk thanks to the oaks that stretch their branches over the path, but still Matthew is quiet. He has been quiet all afternoon.

  It is high and fading summer, as August draws toward close and minds turn toward the fall and the celebration of the Reaping Moon. It is a difficult time for naturalists, as their gift sings in anticipation of harvest but also shakes before the descending shadow of winter. In some it shakes so hard it feels like something trying to escape. For a barren Milone girl, it is a season to be driven mad as all across the island, pregnant Beltane bellies begin to show. Matthew knows this. Caragh suspects that he has always been aware of it, since he always seems aware of whatever she needs. How he knew she would need him that claiming day at the Black Cottage. How he knew that this turn of season was the first one to break her heart. In every other year, she had Jules.

  The breeze moves the leaves overhead, and Aria the crow dives down on Juniper and caws loudly, making Juniper yip and scrunch her back. She tries to bite the bird out of the sky, but the crow is already up and out of danger. Caragh’s heart sinks when she hears Madrigal’s laugh, and sinks farther when she turns and sees Jules, Joseph, and Arsinoe walking up with her.