Two Dark Reigns

by Kendare Blake

  “A dark figure. Like a shadow. She had on a crown made of silver and bright blue stones.” Arsinoe goes to her desk and rifles through it for paper and ink. The sound of the pen scratching across it in the dark sends unpleasant twitches down Mirabella’s spine. She hands the paper to Mirabella, who looks at it in the candlelight.

  “The Blue Queen’s crown.”

  “I saw the shadow of the Blue Queen,” Arsinoe says. “And it pointed back to Fennbirn.”

  All through breakfast, Mirabella tries to eat as though nothing is wrong. She butters her toast and drops sugar into her tea. Pretends to listen to Mrs. Chatworth and Jane gossip about the governor’s wife’s birthday party or coo over the little dog and the ribbon on his collar. Only Billy seems aware that anything is amiss, his gaze flitting from the dark circles beneath Arsinoe’s eyes to Mirabella’s tense fingers and then back again.

  They had barely slept. They had simply sat side by side on Arsinoe’s bed until the candles had burned down to nubs. Finally, in the early gray hours of predawn, Arsinoe had lain down and let her eyes drift shut. But the moment she closed them, the muttering commenced. Mirabella shook her awake, but every time she slept, it would begin again.

  Mirabella does not know what the dreams mean or if they are true visions or simply nightmares. She does not know if Arsinoe really saw the shadow of the Blue Queen, though her hands ache from clinging to the crumpled paper of Arsinoe’s drawing. All she knows is what she can feel: that it is the island reaching out for them again.

  “A party at the governor’s grand estate!” exclaims Jane as if they had not already been talking about it for the last half hour.

  “Indeed.” Mrs. Chatworth says, tapping into a soft-boiled egg and feeding a bit to her new pet. At least that idea of Arsinoe’s seems to have gone smoothly. “We will need a new jacket for you, Billy; I saw one in the shops that will do. And Jane, you must wear your new lilac silk. There will be plenty of eligible bachelors there; perhaps I can marry off both of my children in one afternoon!”

  At the mention of Billy’s marriage, Arsinoe stops eating, and Mirabella turns to Billy with an arched eyebrow.

  He clears his throat.

  “I’m not looking for a wife, Mother.”

  “Christine Hollen is a fine choice. Everyone in the city knows she has set her cap at you.”

  “Mother, did you not hear what I said?”

  “And did you not hear what I said?” Mrs. Chatworth asks. “Your father, it seems, is in no hurry to return from”—she glances sidelong at Mirabella and Arsinoe—“that place, and without him our creditors will come calling. The partners will push us out, and before you know it, the estate at Hartford will be gone, and this town house will be gone, and the business will be gone, and we will be ruined! And all you need do to save us is ask for Christine Hollen’s hand.”

  “If I ask for her foot instead, do you think they’ll just give us a loan?” Billy asks, and Arsinoe barks surprised laughter into her napkin.

  “May we be excused?” Mirabella asks, and grabs her. “I am afraid my sister and I have slept poorly. Perhaps a bit of fresh air . . .”

  “I’ll join you,” Billy says, and starts to rise.

  “You will not. You’ll stay and come to the shops with Jane and me to be fitted for your jacket. And you.” Mrs. Chatworth fixes her gaze on Mirabella. “You and your sister are my guests, and how you conduct yourselves reflects on my house. Make sure to take your parasols. And make sure she wears a dress.”

  Mirabella assures her that she will, though it will be easier said than done, and pushes Arsinoe gently up the stairs. Not ten minutes later, Billy knocks at their door and pokes his head in.

  “I’ve managed to put my mother off jacket shopping for the time being,” he says, and glances at Arsinoe, who is still dressed in trousers and one of his old shirts.

  Mirabella gestures to her sister helplessly. “She has it in her mind that she should start passing herself off as a boy.”

  “It’s my fault, I suppose.” He softly closes the door. “For letting her have so many of my clothes.”

  “Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” Arsinoe says from her dresser, where she is rummaging through drawers. “Billy, would you lend me a pair of your socks? I know how protective you are of them, but you have several dozen pair.”

  “And I’ve lent you at least five pair already. What have you done with those?”

  “Does it look like I know?” She tosses long white stockings and other frilly underclothes out of the drawer and onto the floor. “Just give me the socks, will you, Henry?”

  She stops.

  “Who’s Henry?” Billy asks.

  Arsinoe turns and quickly walks past him to search under Mirabella’s bed.

  “No one,” she says. “Isn’t that your middle name? William Henry Chatworth Junior?” She comes up brandishing black socks.

  “You know it isn’t,” Billy says. “Now who is Henry?”

  “She will explain later.” Mirabella takes Arsinoe by the shoulder and tugs her through the door, even as she struggles to put on her last shoe. “If I do not get her out of the house soon, your mother will change her mind and confine us to our room.”

  “That was close,” Arsinoe whispers as they walk down the front steps.

  Mirabella grasps her by the elbow. “You are in far better spirits than I would expect, considering.”

  “Well, I got more sleep than you did.” Arsinoe ventures a smile, but it fades when Mirabella is unmoved. “I can’t explain it. The dreams are good dreams. They feel safe.”

  “And the Blue Queen’s shadow? Did she feel safe?”

  Arsinoe swallows. “No. She felt like a threat.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe it won’t happen again.”

  Mirabella takes her sister by the arm. “Neither you nor I believe that,” she says. “So you had better take me back to where it started. Let us go back to Joseph’s grave.”

  “You haven’t been back here, have you?” Arsinoe asks as she leads Mirabella down the groomed path of the cemetery.

  “No.” Not since the day they erected the grave marker. Mirabella has thought about it and about him, many times, but she has never visited. “It does not feel that I have the right when she cannot.”

  “I don’t think Jules would begrudge him visitors.”

  “Perhaps. But that is not the only reason. I also do not like to think of him rotting underground when he should be ashes on the wind. Ashes in the water.”

  “When he should be alive.”

  “Yes,” Mirabella agrees. “When he should be alive.”

  They reach Joseph’s grave and step into the shade of the elm trees. It is hard to believe that he is really there, under that dirt, beneath that smooth patch of green grass. Mirabella cannot feel him. But then, they had so few days together. Sometimes she does not trust her own recollection of his eyes or his smile. The sound of his voice. But she had loved him. He had loved Jules, but Mirabella had loved him for those brief few days.

  “Why here?” Mirabella asks as Arsinoe drops to a crouch beside the headstone. “Why at Joseph’s grave?”

  “I think it started here because he’s a piece of the island.” Arsinoe touches the earth. “I think, with him and me together, she was able to find me. And maybe because of . . .” She makes a fist.

  “What?”

  “Madrigal said once that low magic was the only kind of magic that worked outside of the island. And maybe because I’ve done so much of it, the island is able to find me.” She pulls up her sleeve and studies her scars. “Maybe I burn like a beacon.”

  Mirabella’s eyes wander over the slashes of raised pink on her sister’s arm. The pocked marks inside her hands. They are different from the bear’s claw marks across her face. There is something about them. Something disturbingly useful.

  “If that is true, then I like this even less,” Mirabella mutters. “Lo
w magic has never been trustworthy.”

  “It saved me often enough,” Arsinoe says.

  “Not without cost. And not only to you.” Mirabella’s eyes flicker to the dirt of Joseph’s grave. It was an unconscious movement, but Arsinoe sees it and grimaces. “I did not mean that, Arsinoe. I only mean . . . We should hope the dreams are only dreams.”

  “And the shadow queen is only what?”

  “Another dream.”

  “Mira, I was awake.”

  “Barely.” Arsinoe scowls and Mirabella softens her tone. “Tell me what you dreamed of this morning, when you fell asleep again.”

  Arsinoe hesitates, as though she would keep it to herself. When she finally tells her, she keeps her eyes on the dirt.

  “I dreamed that I was her again.”

  “Who?”

  “Daphne.” Arsinoe cocks her head and shrugs, a gesture she has taken up from the mainlanders. “The lost queen of Fennbirn.”

  “There is no lost queen of Fennbirn.”

  “Do you want to hear this or not?”

  Mirabella exhales and motions for her to continue.

  “I dreamed we stole away on a ship bound for Fennbirn. To help Henry Redville in his suit.” She closes her eyes as though remembering and sniffs, searching for scraps of the dream as if they might carry through the memory. “Her plan is to befriend the queen. To enter into her confidence so she can steer her toward Henry. But I think she’s going to want Henry for herself—”

  “And then what?” Mirabella interrupts. “After she stowed away, what happened?”

  “Then we were back on Fennbirn. We got off the boat dressed as a boy and made our way to the queen.”

  “You met Queen Illiann? You met the Blue Queen?”

  Arsinoe nods gravely. “I have been back there. Back on the island. Back on the docks in Bardon Harbor, and in the Volroy.”

  Mirabella turns away, shaking her head. This cannot be real. The more Arsinoe talks, the closer the island feels, as if she could look out past the bay and it would be there, leering back at them.

  She squeezes her eyes closed. “So this . . . missing queen . . . she has met the Blue Queen and not been recognized? How? Did she truly believe Daphne was a boy?”

  “No. Illiann saw past that right away. But Daphne moves like a mainlander. She talks like one. And according to everyone on the island, Illiann’s sisters have all been dead for a very long time. She’s never had to look over her shoulder and guard her crown. She was the Queen Crowned since birth. Not like us.”

  “And this Daphne . . . she knows nothing?”

  “Nothing,” Arsinoe says sadly. “She doesn’t even know she’s an elemental. Her gift has been so long stunted. But I’ve seen her moods affect the weather. Subtle changes. Her gift is dormant from so many years away from the island, but it’s still there.”

  “Wait. If Daphne truly is—was—a lost elemental queen, then why is she speaking to you? Why not me?”

  Irritation flickers across Arsinoe’s face.

  “I do not say that because it should be me,” Mirabella explains, “because I should be chosen. Only that like speaks to like. Elemental to elemental.”

  Arsinoe nods. “I don’t know why. Maybe she’s more like me than like you. She smuggled herself off Centra by dressing in boy’s clothes and sneaking onto a boat to Fennbirn along with Henry’s horses. I’ve never smelled so much manure in one place.

  “And then there’s the fact that she’s essentially an orphan, at the mercy of Henry’s family’s charity.”

  “That makes her like both of us,” says Mirabella with a frown.

  “Maybe it’s something else, then.” Arsinoe rises to her feet and trails her hand along Joseph’s headstone. She pauses on the inscription, on the line that reads, “A friend to queens and cougars.” Then she clenches her fist. “The low magic. It has to be the low magic. And I’m marked through.”

  She turns toward Mirabella with a devious glint in her eyes. “Perhaps if we marked you with it as well. . . .”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Well, what do you want me to do, then? Stop dreaming? Stop sleeping?”

  Mirabella sighs. She cannot very well ask that. And besides, she knows her sister. Arsinoe will follow this queen to whatever answers and whatever end there may be. No matter the risks.

  “Just promise me that you will not keep secrets? That you will tell me everything, no matter what it is.”

  THE VOLROY

  Katharine walks through the rose garden on the east side of the castle. A small cloistered space, very private, with full bushes of roses of every color. It has been difficult to find a moment of peace in the days since the mist brought the bodies. Everyone is afraid. And no one has answers. Examination of the bodies themselves has yielded no explanations, and the mist continues to behave strangely, rising when it should not rise, thicker and closer to the shore than normal.

  Katharine reaches out to cradle a large red bloom in the palm of her hand. It is the dead naturalist queens who have lured her into the garden, craving sunshine and the scent of green, growing things.

  But Katharine cannot bloom the rose. She cannot make it grow, any more than she can make it wither and die. The borrowed gifts are not true gifts, after all. The borrowed naturalist gift gives her a sure hand with the royal horses and hounds, but she cannot command them. The borrowed war gift makes her skilled with knives, but it does not let her move them. The dead poisoners let her eat the poison but could not stop the poison from corrupting her.

  “Queen Katharine.”

  Katharine releases the rose and turns. It is High Priestess Luca with Genevieve, of all people.

  “An unlikely pair,” she says as they bow.

  “Unlikely indeed,” says Luca. “Genevieve stepped into my shadow the moment I stepped outside the castle. Almost as if she does not trust me to be alone with the queen.”

  Genevieve sighs but says nothing. It is not worth denying.

  “We have decided to release the bodies of the searchers for burning,” Luca says.

  “But,” says Katharine, “we still do not know why or how—”

  “And we may never. But the bodies will reveal no more secrets. And the families have waited long enough. The longer they are kept, the more time the people will have to murmur wild speculation and incite a panic.”

  Katharine frowns, her mind a flicker of images from the day of the banquet. So many bodies rolled onto the sand: fish-bitten and mutilated or pristine and pale. As she thinks, a bee lands upon the back of her hand, and Luca’s eyes flicker to it. Katharine lets it crawl a moment and then brushes it off.

  “There are still questions unanswered, questions that the people will not just forget.”

  “The people will accept the explanation of the temple. That the searchers fell to a tragic accident at sea.”

  “And the mist?”

  “The mist delivered them home.” Luca looks to Genevieve as though for support, and to Katharine’s surprise, she acquiesces.

  “People want the soothing answer,” Genevieve says. “They want the answer that allows them to go on with their everyday lives. Let the temple give a statement. Let the High Priestess wield what influence she has. It is, after all, why we allowed her a seat at the table.”

  “Well put,” says Luca, her expression sour.

  “Go ahead.” Katharine says, and clenches her jaw. “But though the people may forget, I will not. I will not forget that my searchers met with violent ends. That they sailed and died within days yet some appeared to have been dead for weeks.”

  The High Priestess gazes over the line of rosebushes. She gazes over them for so long that Katharine thinks she will change the subject and comment instead on the blooms or the weather.

  “I remember when your sister tried to flee through the mist,” says Luca. “Do you remember? You were separated by that time, of course, but you must have heard, living here with the Arrons. I was there, when they found them bobbing i
n their boat. They could not have been gone from Sealhead Cove for more than a night. Yet their little faces were gaunt. And they had drunk all their water.”

  Katharine swallows as the High Priestess looks back at her.

  “No one spoke of it then. There were too many other things—pressing things—to distract us. But even those who the mist allows to pass through remark on it. Those who sail from the mainland. Those who trade.

  “Time and distance do not mean the same things within the mist. Nothing means the same thing within the mist. As much as we would like to know what befell your searchers, we will probably never know.”

  And with that the High Priestess bows and walks away.

  “She is an irksome old thing,” Genevieve says after Luca is gone. “But I think she is right. Better to put this incident behind us. The people see the mist as the guardian of the island. For it to behave so alarmingly . . . We are lucky it has been quiet since then. And who knows? This story the High Priestess spins about the mist bringing the bodies home to you, maybe it will work. Maybe it is even true.”

  “In case it is not,” says Katharine, “I would learn more about the mist. Perhaps even about the Blue Queen who created it. Will you look into it for me, Genevieve? Discreetly?”

  “If you wish it.” One of the bees hovering near the roses buzzes too close to Genevieve’s hair, and she waves her hand at it. Then she cries out when it stings her on the finger.

  “Now you have killed it.”

  “It stung me!”

  “And how many times did you sting me as a child? Stop being such a baby about it.”

  Genevieve bows and stalks out of the garden, sucking on her wounded finger. As a poisoner with a strong gift, the venom from the bee’s sting will not even cause swelling. It will not be more than a momentary pain.

  Katharine looks back at the roses. The dead naturalist queens always make her feel the calmest, drawing her into the flowers or urging her toward the stables to ride. But the talk of the mist has put all the dead sisters on edge.

  “You know as well as I do,” she says to them. “The mist is not finished.”