Five Dark Fates (Three Dark Crowns, #4)(100)

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.