Two Dark Reigns

by Kendare Blake

  “I am here now,” Katharine says. “And you may speak to me.”

  The man licks his lip and glares at her from under his brows. “I come from Wolf Spring. I fish there. Ten days ago, I was out on a run with my crew, running up the coast after striper. And the mist—” He stops and swallows. “It took one.”

  “Took?”

  “It came up out of nowhere and slid onto the deck. I’ve never seen anything like it. One minute she was there and the next she wasn’t, and the look in her eyes . . . I can’t forget it.”

  Another disappearance. Another taken by the mist. And this time, as far away as Wolf Spring.

  Behind Katharine, the rest of the council has drifted out into the hall, drawn by the voices.

  “Someone else taken?” Renata Hargrove gasps. “But why? Why only a fisher? Was she searching for the other queens? Had she anything to do with the Milones?”

  “And is there anyone who can corroborate the story?” asks Genevieve. “What would you have us do, fisher? Send ships to aid your search for one missing crew member? Who is to say he did not push her overboard and is now looking to hide behind the rumors of the mist?”

  “I do not think it likely he would come all the way from Wolf Spring to do that.” Rho’s white robes swing into view. “It’d be easy enough to explain as an accident at sea. Why come here, to the capital, and to a queen that Wolf Spring despises, unless it is true?”

  “I wouldn’t have come if I had any other choice,” the man says angrily. “No one wanted me to.”

  Katharine squeezes her eyes shut as they bicker, gathering close in their tiny factions. Old council separate from new. Poisoner separate from giftless. Giftless separate from elemental, and all removed from Luca, Rho, and the temple.

  “Did you sail here?” Katharine asks loudly. The voices behind her quiet, and she opens her eyes. “Fisher, have you sailed all the way here from Wolf Spring?”

  “Yes.”

  “I would see your craft.”

  Katharine’s stallion is saddled, and she rides for the port at Bardon Harbor. Pietyr accompanies her on one side. On the other is the man from Wolf Spring, who is called Maxwell Lane. Some others from the Black Council have come as well: Paola Vend, Antonin, Bree, and of course Rho Murtra to bear witness for the temple. The others, including Luca, remain at the Volroy to grumble and gossip, and Genevieve, determined to become Katharine’s eyes and ears, stays behind to listen.

  “What good will this do?” Pietyr asks as they trot through the streets. “What do you think we will find?”

  “I am not sure yet, Pietyr.” In truth, she does not expect the boat to provide any answers at all. But the port is gripped by fear and has been since the mist spat the search party onto the sand. The people need to see that their queen is still not afraid.

  Ahead, the port is full of docked boats but nearly empty of people. Only a few sailors busy themselves on their crafts, tying and retying knots, checking sails, cleaning decks, shooing off the seabirds, who seem perplexed by the lack of activity. The birds at least are everywhere, posting atop masts in great patches of shifting feathers or aimlessly waddling along the shore.

  “Which is it?” Katharine asks, and Lane points to a small fishing boat with dark green decks, laden with nets.

  They dismount on the hill and make their way to the docks. Those who have been working in the port stop to watch, and people from the marketplace farther inland begin to gather as well, drawn by the murmurs of the queen’s presence.

  “This is the same vessel from which she was taken?”

  “It’s the only one I own.” He leads them down the dock and boards the boat.

  “Where is the rest of your crew?” Rho asks. It is not a large craft, but too big to be sailed alone across such a distance.

  “I sent them ashore.” Lane’s voice is gruff as he checks knots and runs his hand along the rail. “They didn’t want to be close to the water.”

  Nor does Katharine. With every board that creaks beneath her feet, she grows less and less brave. And a glance at the boat tells her that she was right: it will yield no answers. What could she have hoped to find? Remnants of the mist still gripping the hull? The poor girl’s blood splashed across the deck?

  “Bree,” Katharine whispers, and Bree draws close. “Do you sense anything amiss here? With the water?”

  Bree looks down, along the side of the dock to where the waves lap against the wood and rock. She shakes her head.

  “My gift is for fire. The water has never spoken to me. Perhaps if my mother were here . . .”

  “Look!”

  Back on shore, the gathered crowd stares out at the sea. More voices join the first shout, and a cacophony of cries sends the nearby gulls winging into the air. Katharine turns to see what has their attention, though the dead queens inside her already know.

  On the horizon, the mist has risen like a wall.

  “Oh, Goddess.” Bree makes a pious gesture, touching her forehead and her heart. “What does it want?”

  “It wants nothing,” Rho replies. “It is only the mist. Our protector, since the Blue Queen’s time.”

  Only the mist. Except that Katharine can feel it looking at her. Watching. The mist would speak. It has spoken, by laying bodies at her feet.

  “Oi!” someone calls from inland. “What’s that?”

  “What is happening?” Pietyr grasps Katharine’s hand as the water beneath them quickens. “The waves . . . The current is coming in harder.”

  The boat lurches as the surge hits it, and the ropes holding her strain and squeak. Rho, who had boarded to further inspect the deck, is tossed against the mast.

  “Priestess,” Lane says, and tries to help her. She has struck her nose against the pole and come away bloody.

  Inside Katharine, the dead queens tug, this time toward the water. It takes only a moment to see why. There is a corpse drifting in toward the boat, facedown.

  “Get it out of there. Paola, Pietyr.” Katharine nods to the body. “Antonin, help them.”

  They use gaffs to pierce the flesh and drag the corpse closer. It is unpleasant to watch it bob in the waves, which have slowed now that the body has reached the shallows. It is also unpleasant to watch them drag her up by the hook. But even worse is the sight of her watery, gray eyes when she rolls faceup.

  “Allie?” At the sight of her face, Lane leaves Rho and nearly pitches himself over the side. “Allie!” He pulls the dead girl into his arms and shoves the gaffs away.

  “This is your friend?” Antonin asks acidly. “Who disappeared off the coast of Wolf Spring ten days ago? What kind of stunt is this? What kind of naturalist plot?”

  “A fine plot, indeed, if it allows a naturalist to manipulate the mist and the water.” Rho speaks through her own blood, her teeth slicked red. Then she twists her nose back into place.

  “Give her over,” says Pietyr, and holds his arms out with a grimace to pull the body onto the dock.

  Rho glances toward the shore and the rustling crowd of onlookers. “Bree.” She jerks her head. “Block their view.”

  “How did she follow me here?” Lane asks helplessly. “I lost her off the point of Sealhead. Those currents aren’t right . . . to carry . . .”

  And something more. Though her flesh is slightly bloated and her cheeks fish-bitten, Allie’s corpse is far fresher than one would expect after making such a long journey through rough waves.

  “She is just like the others,” Pietyr whispers.

  Katharine crouches. The girl must have been very pretty once. She touches the dead girl’s chin. “We would keep her here to be examined for a time, to learn what we can of her death. After that, she will be returned to Wolf Spring under royal banner, with more than enough coin to pay for her burning. Do you know the family?”

  Lane nods.

  “Then this news will sit easier with them, coming from you.”

  Katharine’s hand hovers over the man’s head, but answers are what he needs, not emb
races. She nods to Rho and strides back down the dock to return to the horses. Ahead, the crowd has grown, and the people frown at her approach.

  “We should disperse them,” Pietyr whispers. “I will notify the queensguard.”

  “It was you!”

  Katharine blinks at Maxwell Lane. He has stood, and points at her for all to see.

  “You! Undead Queen! You are the curse!”

  Pietyr presses against her, as if to be a shield. Rho leaps deftly off the fishing boat and quiets Lane with her hands, too quickly for Katharine to see. Perhaps she merely knocked him unconscious. Perhaps she broke his neck. Either way, it is too late, for the crowd has latched on to the chant.

  “Undead Queen! Poisoner! Thief!”

  They advance on her as a mob. Some with only fists. Others with knives. Gaffs. Or short thick clubs.

  “Queensguard!” Antonin shouts, though the soldiers are already running to intervene, fending off the crowd with swords. They make a wall of themselves and their crossed spears.

  “It is all right, Kat. Get past them to the horses.” Pietyr presses her ahead and pulls Bree along in his shadow. Rho has disappeared with Lane back into the boat. Clever. Let the mob forget her. She will be safe.

  Katharine keeps her head high. The people do not really hate her, she tells herself. They are only afraid. As they should be. As she is. And when she saves them, when she quiets the mist, they will remember that.

  “Cursed queen!”

  A clod of mud and filth flies through the air and strikes her chin. It splashes down her neck and into the bodice of her dress.

  “Arrest them!” Pietyr growls. “How dare you!”

  More mud flies. And stones. Bree screams and Pietyr puts his arms up to try and shield them all.

  Katharine touches the mud on her chest. She listens to the hateful chants of her people.

  “Katharine! Run! The queensguard cannot hold them!”

  The first of the mob breaks through the line and charges with a raised club. Katharine draws one of her knives. She shoves Pietyr to one side and hooks the boy around the neck as he comes, plunging the blade up into his throat, up through his shouting tongue. His blood soaks into her glove, and she lifts him high, so strong, much stronger than he is. The dead queens rise to the surface, and Katharine feels as though she has doubled in size, tripled, that she and they are unending.

  When the boy ceases to kick, she drops him in a heavy heap. The noise is gone, the crowd silent. Those closest have slid to their knees and peer out around the legs of the queensguard with fearful tears on their cheeks.

  “Kat.”

  She looks at Pietyr. His hands are raised, palms out. She looks down at the boy, so very young and so very dead, his blood cooling on her arms.

  “Pietyr,” she whispers. “What have I done?”

  THE MAINLAND

  The night after the party at the governor’s estate, Mirabella and Billy sit in the kitchen after the rest of the house has gone to sleep.

  “I don’t like meeting like this.” He pushes their solitary candle closer to the center of the table and hovers over it, ready to blow it out at the first sound of footsteps. “You know how she hates it when we talk about her like she’s not there. But sometimes—”

  “Sometimes we need to talk about her when she is not here.” Mirabella stares into the tiny flame, resolute. But she says nothing more. She does not like it any more than he does.

  Upstairs, Arsinoe lies in her bed, sleeping, dreaming through the eyes of another queen. A queen from generations ago, hundreds of years.

  “Couldn’t they be . . . just dreams?” Billy asks.

  “They do not seem like ‘just dreams.’”

  “But you’ve never heard of this happening to any other queen before?”

  “No one knows anything about a queen after she leaves the island. Maybe this is common.” The candlelight flickers with her breath. It is hard to resist trying to test her gift, to see if she can push it higher, make it stronger. But she has tried and failed so many times that she is not brave enough to try anymore. “Besides, Arsinoe and I are different. Our destiny was to be dead. So who knows what lies ahead for us now?”

  “I still think it could be nightmares.” Billy rubs his eyes. “You have both been . . . uprooted . . . strangers in a new place, and she’s had a difficult time with my mother and Christine.”

  “Billy, I do not think—”

  “And before that, the entire bloody, traumatic year. These dreams might pass if we let them.”

  He is trying to make it so just because he declares it. She has heard him use the same tone with his mother and other young men. She thinks of it as Billy’s “mainlander” voice. But this is queen’s business. Fennbirn business, and when she slides her hand across the table, he is all too happy to take it.

  “From what she has told me, Arsinoe is no historian. She says . . .” She pauses, and smiles at the memory. “She says that Ellis Milone was the historian, so anything she needed to know was stored for safekeeping in his mind.

  “Yet she recalled the name of Queen Illiann’s king-consort, Henry Redville, and knew where he was from.”

  “Henry Redville,” Billy grumbles. “And what sort of man was he?”

  “He was a king-consort. A good one. He remained true to the queen. He led a fleet of ships into the last battle.”

  “Did he die?”

  Mirabella frowns. She gestures to the empty table.

  “Does it look like I have my stack of Fennbirn history books with me? And why do you sound like you hope that he did?”

  Billy leans back, dragging his forearm across the table.

  “You’re getting salty. I think you’ve been spending too much time with your sister.”

  She inhales. “No, I do not think that Henry Redville died. Queen Illiann ruled for another twenty years after the war ended.”

  “I didn’t mean to snap,” he says. “I’m just worried about her.”

  “I am worried for us all.” She reaches again for his hand. “If the dreams are only dreams, then how did she know about the king-consort? How did she even know Queen Illiann by name; the whole island only remembers her as the Blue Queen.”

  “Maybe from a story Ellis told. Or maybe she heard it somewhere else. You can’t be the only queen to know Blue Queen history. Poets must write of it. Your . . . bards must sing of it!”

  “That is true. That could be. But I cannot stop thinking . . .” She shakes her head. “I cannot help feeling like the island is reaching out for Arsinoe, ready to snatch her back.” She stares again into the candle, watches the flame flicker and weaken, mocking, as Billy’s eyes spark with curiosity.

  “Tell me more about the Blue Queen,” he says. “Tell me everything. Why was she so important?”

  “She created the mist.” Mirabella shrugs. “That is her legacy. To win the war, she created the mist to shroud and protect the island. She is the one who hid us away and turned us into legend.”

  “And now she’s after Arsinoe.”

  “Arsinoe thinks that the dreams are meant to show her something, about Daphne, the Blue Queen’s lost sister. She feels safe in the dreams. The only threat comes from the shadow of the Blue Queen herself.”

  Billy leans back and runs his hands roughly through his hair. “This is madness. I thought we’d left all this behind.”

  “It seems not. Low magic is everywhere, and the island has tracked us through Arsinoe’s link to it. The last of the magic in the mainland world.”

  “Low magic is everywhere. You keep saying that. But I’ve never seen it.”

  “You do not know where to look.” She takes a deep breath. “Arsinoe says that if I were to let her do a low magic spell with me, the dreams could reach me, as well.”

  “Is that wise? To let the island find you, too?”

  “Low magic is not for queens. She was a fool to turn to it in the first place. But if it means protecting her, then I will—”

  They f
reeze at a sound from the upper floors. The darkness of the kitchen feels like a cave, and the two of them huddle around their small circle of light. But every shift of the row house is a creak. On blustery nights, the walls sound like they are groaning.

  “If you had the dreams, too,” Billy goes on, his voice lower, “you could help her to—”

  Another thump from upstairs, followed by a short cry. Mirabella jumps to her feet with Billy right behind her.

  She gathers her skirt, but Billy still passes her on the stairs, taking them by two. They hurry down the hall as quickly as they can, past Jane’s room, where Mirabella hears her still faintly snoring.

  “Arsinoe.” He opens the door. Arsinoe’s cry has become a full-blown fit. She kicks and thrashes in the dark, and Billy yelps as he is caught by an unseen flying elbow.

  “I can’t see. Get a candle. Arsinoe.” He shakes her. “She won’t wake!”

  Mirabella dashes for the bedside table. Her hand closes around a candle; her fingers send matches rolling. Stupid things. She kneels and feels along the rug for them.

  “Mira, hurry!”

  “I am trying,” she whispers. But the matches have disappeared. She turns toward her frightened sister, but it is too dark to see. “Curse these matches,” she hisses, and feels her gift rise, an unexpected wave through her blood, out to the tips of her fingers.

  The candle lights. It flares up at twice the usual height, so bright it illuminates the room nearly to the corners.

  “I—” Mirabella exhales. What the flame has revealed nearly makes her drop the candle.

  The shadow is with Arsinoe in the bed. It crouches over her shoulder like a goblin of spilled ink, elongated legs folded over feet that sink into the edge of Arsinoe’s pillow. One dark, bony hand is wrapped around Arsinoe’s head, holding it fast as her body twists.

  “Are you seeing this?” Billy asks.

  “You can see it, too?”

  He does not respond. The paleness of his face is answer enough.

  Slowly, Arsinoe’s limbs still, and she begins to wake. The shadow remains until she opens her eyes. When it disappears, it disappears completely: there in one blink and gone in the next.