“Surrender all personal weaponry,” one of the soldiers calls down the line. “It will be returned to you as you leave.”
Arsinoe reaches for her belt and unbuckles the leather sheath that holds her small sharp dagger.
“Next, step up.”
She goes forward and turns over the knife, trying to keep her fingers from lingering. She has had that dagger for a long time. It survived the Ascension. It went with her to the mainland and back again. Now it is lost.
She holds out her arms, and a soldier runs her hands over them, flattening her sleeves and patting every inch of her vest before turning her attention to Arsinoe’s trouser-clad legs.
“What business do you have here at the Volroy?”
“Consultation,” Arsinoe answers quickly. The soldier’s brow furrows, and she starts to really look at Arsinoe’s face. Arsinoe turns her scarred cheek slightly away. “I’m an associate of one of the other merchants. I lost her in the line. She’s already come through.” None of it sounds any good. But before the guard’s suspicions can be raised any further, another soldier pulls Arsinoe along to clear the path for the woman behind her.
“That’s the armorer,” he says. “They’ve been waiting on her. Get her through.” He nods to Arsinoe. “Get on.”
Arsinoe walks through the raised gate and into the interior of the castle, falling into step with the rest of the line as they meander through the corridors. She takes a deep breath. She feels safer now in the shadows of the torchlit hallways. But she has to find an entrance to the passageways soon or a discreet staircase to slip up or down. If she does not, she will wind up nose to nose with her little sister, and a pair of buns is not a good enough disguise for that.
The good news is the queensguard escort seems to pay little attention to the merchants now that they are in the Volroy proper. So when they turn a corner, it is all too easy for Arsinoe to slip out of line and dash quickly around the next corner, moving so smoothly up a staircase of the West Tower that it is like it was meant to be. From there, it takes only a few moments to find the right ancient tapestry and open the right stone, allowing her into the walls to move about undetected.
All of that time she spent living Daphne’s life in the Volroy, dreaming those long-ago dreams, has finally come in handy.
Far up in the hills, the rest of the rebel party lies in wait, blended into the trees and snow-covered stones. They will wait there undetected until Arsinoe returns from the city, and then they will wait longer, until the parade is under way and Billy’s party springs the diversion.
“Do you think you kept me far enough back?” Jules asks sarcastically. From there in the hills, Indrid Down looks like a play city made of blocks. Something for a child to build and knock down on a whim.
There are not many there, tucked into their cloaks behind the rocks, sharing plates of bacon and barley mush. A small faction of soldiers, totaling twenty-five, not counting those six who went with Billy to hide for the night along the parade route. They are mostly warriors, but a few naturalists and giftless as well.
Jules growls deep in her throat. “We’re too far away.”
“We will move closer on the day of the parade,” Emilia says. “There is no reason to endanger you yet. You should have listened to me and not come at all.”
“Arsinoe and I never listen to anyone. Didn’t we tell you?” Jules pats the neck of her own mount, who is actually Katharine’s old gelding, and the horse flinches. Since Jules’s return, he has been shy of her, and only her naturalist gift allows her to come close enough to mount. She must have given him such a fright that day when she lost control at Innisfuil Valley.
Emilia pokes Jules hard between the eyebrows.
“Does all of Wolf Spring raise its children to be so stupid? You must fight smart, Jules. Fight to survive the war.”
“But it won’t really matter, will it? The memory of the Legion Queen is enough to unite the cities and the new council. You won’t need me.”
Emilia’s chestnut horse stomps closer at her urging, to bump against Jules’s gelding. “We won’t. But I will.”
Jules looks away, back toward the city. Thinking of Arsinoe alone in the Volroy makes her stomach clench in knots.
“I don’t like this plan of hers.”
“It is not a plan at all.”
Jules smirks. “That’s what all of Arsinoe’s plans are like.”
Emilia laughs. “Someday I must explain to you naturalists the difference between recklessness and calculated sacrifice.”
Emilia’s dark eyes sparkle. She referred to Arsinoe as a naturalist. Not a queen or a hated poisoner. The moment is warm, and Jules reaches out to touch Emilia’s cheek.
“Don’t be afraid.” Emilia covers her hand with her own. “You and I are tethered now. And I will never let you fall back into darkness.”
Jules takes her hand back.
“If I’d been fully myself, I never would have let you do that. To take on this burden.”
“You are not a burden.”
Emilia looks over her shoulder, back to their makeshift camp and Mathilde, who has polished a piece of ice to blow smoke across for visions. “We always knew it would not be easy. But it will be worth it.”
THE VOLROY
Katharine catches Rho as she is returning from her morning rounds in the soldiers’ barracks. The tall priestess is so focused on her task that Katharine must call out to her twice.
“Yes? What is it, Queen Katharine?”
“I would speak with you a moment. If you would follow me?”
Rho nods. She does not hesitate when Katharine brings her through the entrance to the Volroy cells. Nor does she hesitate when they go down stair after stair, deep into the belly of the fortress. Why would she? She has nothing to fear, the great warrior priestess, not from Katharine, who is only a pale and sickly poisoner and small for her age to boot. Katharine leads Rho down to the lowest floor, to the cells that have long stood empty and are rarely checked, except for rats. She brings her to the last cell and steps inside.
“What are we doing here, Queen Katharine?”
Rho inhales through her nose. Though she is not afraid, she is on alert. Her broad shoulders and neck give her the look of a bull about to charge.
Katharine hesitates. To make this request of Rho is to tell her all. And if she refuses . . . She looks down, gravely, her fingers dancing across the poisoned blades she keeps ever at her hip.
“In the time you have served on the Black Council, I have come to trust your advice. But I must ask. You are a priestess of the temple. Where do your loyalties lie?”
“With you,” Rho says, surprised. “And with the Goddess.”
“All gifts come from the Goddess,” says Katharine. “And the queens are of the Goddess’s line. Descended from her. We are the Goddess, on earth.”
“Yes. That is known.”
“So what if I could make your gift stronger? Do not mistake me. It is strong already. But what if I could make it . . . invincible?”
“What do you mean?”
“I was not a poisoner born, Rho.” Katharine walks around her, cutting off her exit. “I expect Luca has told you that already.”
The priestess lowers her eyes, as much of an admission as she is going to get.
“I was not a warrior born either,” Katharine continues. “Yet I can throw knives with perfect aim. The people say that when I came back from the Quickening at the Beltane Festival, I came back changed. And they were right.” As she speaks, the dead sisters slip to the surface, listening. They look at Rho through Katharine’s eyes and sense the strength of her gift.
“Changed how?”
“For the better,” Katharine says, and Rho gasps. The dead queens have begun to show through. Black rot rises on Katharine’s cheeks; she feels the softening of the skin across her forehead.
“What are you?”
“Do not be afraid. I am the keeper of the Goddess’s other daughters. She has sent them to me, to
look after her island. And I would share them with you. If you are willing.” The vessel must be willing. Or it must be weakened. Katharine’s hand again trails along her blades. “I need your help now, Rho. Genevieve and Renata tell me that their spies have indicated that the Legion Queen has left Sunpool. I fear that she may be here. That she may seek to sabotage the parade or worse, assassinate my sister.” Katharine waits as Rho studies the rot on her cheeks, and the sickly shadows swimming under her skin. Either Rho will draw her sword and try to run her through, or she will ask another question and Katharine will know she has her.
“What do you mean, share them with me?” Rho asks.
“There is only one way for you to truly know.” Katharine reaches up and touches Rho’s shoulder. “Kneel. Kneel, and receive them.”
Mirabella returns to the king-consort’s apartment with a throbbing headache. She had forgotten how much she dislikes dress fittings. All of the endless dress fittings she underwent at Westwood House, being made to stand this way or that way, to raise her arms and square her shoulders. To hold very still and avoid the pins. But what really bothered her was having the armor put on. Seeing herself in the mirror outfitted in shining silver, the breastplate etched with thunderheads and veins of grooved lightning, standing there as Mirabella Mistbane, ally of the Queen Crowned.
She walks through the room to the bedchamber. Perhaps if she lies down for a little while and gets some rest. If only she can keep from dreaming of Madrigal Milone choking on a mouthful of blood.
She spins at an odd sound of grinding and calls fire to her fingertips as someone steps out from behind the tapestry of the interior wall.
“Arsinoe!”
She shakes the fire out and runs to her sister, embracing her before the vision can dissolve. But Arsinoe holds firm. If indeed it is really Arsinoe; she hardly looks like herself in a bright yellow vest and her hair twisted prettily onto the back of her head.
“Thank the Goddess, you’re still breathing!” Arsinoe says, and pushes her away. “I half expected to arrive and find parts missing.”
“How?” Mirabella asks, and peers at the tapestry. “Where did you come from?”
“Remember I told you I know the hidden passageways in the Volroy?” Arsinoe taps her temple. “Daphne’s dreams.”
“But what are you doing here? You’re in danger every moment.” Mirabella’s stomach sinks. There could be an army of rebels hiding in the southern woods along the river. “She will know you have come. I have heard she has spies in Sunpool.”
“We know about the spies. They’ve been handled. Is that why you came? To be our spy? I’ve been trying to figure it out since we discovered you gone. And I can’t.” Arsinoe waits. The frustration in her eyes grows by the second. “Never mind. What matters is we’re here now, and we’ve got a way to get you out.”
“No. You cannot.”
“Of course I can. Grab some kind of disguise, and let’s get out of here! I can get us close to the servants’ entrance, almost all the way outside!”
“Arsinoe, the guards check my room constantly. More often if they do not hear me. We will be caught, and you will be killed!”
Undeterred, Arsinoe reaches out with pursed lips and tries to drag her. But Mirabella digs in her heels.
“If you don’t come with me now,” Arsinoe growls, “Billy’s going to create a diversion along the parade route. Just past the marketplace. When you see it, bolt for the market. Make it to the north end of the city on the main road toward Prynn. When you reach the old gate, Jules and Emilia will join you. And then you disappear.”
She shakes her head. “You have to stop him. I am to have my own detail of queensguard.”
“You’re telling me you can’t blow back a couple of queensguard?”
“Arsinoe . . . I left the note for you to find so you would not follow me!”
“Well, you should’ve known that wouldn’t work!”
Mirabella looks at her sister sadly. She should have known. She could have left a dozen notes from the capital scattered around her room. She could have written a goodbye letter in her own hand. It would not have mattered.
“What I said to Emilia before I left, the argument we had about Jules—”
“You didn’t mean it!”
“I didn’t mean it as much as I made it seem. But I did mean it. A little.”
Arsinoe steps back. “All right. Fine. But it’s time to stop messing about now. I can’t stay for much longer.”
Mirabella smiles. She has wanted to see Arsinoe for so long; she refuses to waste time arguing. “You are shivering.” She pulls a blanket off her bed and wraps it around Arsinoe’s rather dusty shoulders. “Those passageways must be freezing.”
“They are, in places. And they’re dark. I was sure I was going to get lost and die and Billy would have to tear this whole place down searching for my corpse.”
“How did you find your way?”
“I told you: I knew the way. And when I was in doubt . . . I just followed the rats. Them and me, we’re the only ones who know about the hidden passageways anymore.”
Mirabella glances at the tapestry hanging on the wall. It is old but not so old as the Blue Queen. Lucky that it was there for Arsinoe to hide behind.
“Brr,” Arsinoe says. “It doesn’t feel any warmer in here than it did in the walls. Don’t you like fire? Why isn’t there one burning?”
“Too much fire at my disposal makes the guards nervous.” But they have left her one log. One, lonely log. She turns her attention to it, and immediately it begins to smoke and then catches with a whoosh, flames licking hungrily up all sides.
“That’s better.” Arsinoe shrugs out of the blanket and goes to warm her fingers. “I suppose they don’t think you can freeze. You never shiver.”
“I never shiver,” Mirabella repeats. Then she stops. Katharine has visited her many times, and she does not shiver either. Bree is an elemental and almost equally resistant to the cold, but the guards are always in heavy cloaks, and poor little Elizabeth huddles inside her hood. But how could Katharine, a naturalist born and perhaps a forced poisoner, have any touch of the elemental gift?
“Will you tell me what you’re doing here at least?” Arsinoe asks. “Because I know you haven’t joined the crown.”
“Oh? How can you be so sure?”
“Because even if you didn’t want to fight for Jules, you would never fight against me. Katharine is dangerous, Mira. Deadly. You saw her put that bolt through my back. You watched her dump poison down my throat, as if that could do anything—”
“She is not like that now. The Ascension is over.”
“Is it?” Arsinoe says skeptically. “I’ve never heard of an Ascension ending with more than one queen alive.”
“Except that you have. Illiann’s. Queen Illiann lived side by side with her sister. Happily. And if there was a way for her, then perhaps . . .”
At Mirabella’s words, Arsinoe looks away, out the window as the sky begins to drop small snowflakes. December nears its end.
“It is almost our birthday,” Mirabella murmurs.
Arsinoe looks at the snow and snorts. “I guess it is. If the Ascension weren’t over, like you say, I guess they’d be getting ready to lock us up in—” She eyes the room. “Well, in here.”
“They would not lock us in the tower until after Beltane.”
But even so, she and Arsinoe eye the walls uncomfortably.
“It is unsettling, though, isn’t it? They’ve locked queens up in these very rooms. To kill each other. One might have died right there.” Arsinoe points. “Or there.” She points again. “Or over there.”
“Arsinoe, stop that.”
“Mathilde says that sometimes with the sight gift she can feel the place where someone died. That it lingers, like a stain. And Katharine lives here now.”
“So would you, and so would I, if we had won.”
Arsinoe shrugs. “I would’ve stayed in Wolf Spring. But her? The Undead Queen?
I suppose it suits her.”
“She is not like that. It was—”
“The Ascension, right. I heard you. Except what about that boy she killed? The one who stood against her and had his head ripped clean off?”
Mirabella closes her eyes. The Katharine she has come to know does not seem like she could ever have been so brutal. She cannot reconcile this Katharine with the stories she has heard. Yet she saw it herself at Innisfuil when she ran the long-bladed knife through Madrigal’s neck.
“She is a danger, but she is my puzzle to solve.”
“She isn’t a puzzle at all. This isn’t a game.”
“It is almost like she is two different people,” Mirabella says softly, and something about the words sticks. Katharine never shivers. There is some secret, that perhaps only Pietyr Arron knew, and that Madrigal somehow found out. She turns the pieces over in her mind. There are places where they almost fit. But there is something she is still missing.
“Two different people,” Arsinoe says. “Or she just grew up.” Her eyes lose focus, and she half laughs, remembering something. “I loved her, too, once, you know. That day they came for us at the Black Cottage, after you were gone, I scratched Natalia Arron’s face when she tried to take her. Camden would’ve been proud. But that was a long time ago. Now I’d throw her at Natalia Arron.”
Before she can reply, Mirabella hears movement from the hall: the guards shuffling position and telltale footsteps approaching in the corridor. She grasps Arsinoe by the arm and pulls her back toward the tapestry.
“You have to go!”
Arsinoe lifts the fabric and stops. “Not until you tell me you understand the plan for tomorrow.”
“There is no plan for tomorrow. Call it off. Get out of the city while you still can!”
“Mira, I won’t just leave you here!”
“You have to!” She shoves her sister a little harder, wishing she knew which stone to push or which to slide or kick to get the passageway to open. “I have made my choice, and I am safe here.”
“Have you gone daft? How can you be safe here when we’re going to war?”
Five Dark Fates Page 14
