Five Dark Fates (Three Dark Crowns, #4)(20)

Above, the storm bears down upon the mist. She grits her teeth, sends it coursing through the center of the blemished gray whorl. She sends lightning to crack it from the inside. Gusts to churn the waves and force the mist back to sea. Her blood sings with the rage of the weather, rage this time, not joy or freedom; she is not running on the cliffs of Shannon’s Blackway or singing a sailor safe. Her rage is blacker than the clouds that pummel the mist, louder than the wind that screams in her ears. And before it, the mist recoils. It comes apart. It turns tail and runs.

Mirabella holds the storm high long after she could let it rest. She holds it until the last weak wisps of white disappear back into the darkness.

Katharine and the Black Council watch the battle from the safety of shore, gathered before their torches, dark clothing and cloaks giving them the appearance of a murder of crows. When the elementals had cast themselves out to sea, it had taken so long for the barge to reach its destination that Cousin Lucian and Paola Vend had grown bored and started to idly complain about the state of the docks. But since the mist rose, Katharine has heard nothing aside from faint, fast breaths.

She sees them in her periphery, watching, their sight extended by spyglasses. Katharine does not bother with one. The mist is vast. She sees it swallow the barge easily enough. And her sister’s storm is impossible to miss booming out over the water.

They feel it, too: as the wind flaps through their clothing, and the rain, stinging cold and miserable, sticks their cloaks to their bodies.

‘They are ditching into the water,’ Antonin says. ‘They have failed.’

‘How many are left?’ asks Rho. ‘We should have had launches ready to retrieve any who made their escape.’ She turns and barks to the queensguard, giving orders without waiting for Katharine to agree. But that is all right. She would have agreed, anyway.

‘There’s blood,’ Bree says, and gasps. ‘So much blood, on the deck.’

‘Come on, sister,’ Katharine whispers. ‘Save them.’

And as if she heard, Mirabella’s storm twists down upon the mist, joining the battle like lines of fresh cavalry. It batters the white down into the water and tears bits of it off to disappear. Just below her skin, Katharine feels the dead queens stretching toward Mirabella in awe. She cannot blame them. More than once she has wished that she were born the elemental. A storm like that would be a very useful pet to have. She watches the lightning strike and crackle across the sky in bright veins. She can see just when Mirabella tells it to attack and just what she asks it to do.

When the storm weakens, the torches on the barge relight, signaling that it is over, and that the elementals live.

‘Launch the boats, Rho, like you said.’ She turns to the stunned queensguard and claps her hands at them. ‘Now! Hurry! Make sure that they have aid!’

They go, and Rho goes with them. Katharine faces the rest of her Black Council. Bree looks so relieved that she may weep, and Luca’s lips curl in a small pleased smile. The others bow their heads, shivering in the winter wet.

‘I do not need you to say that I was right to bring her here,’ Katharine says. ‘But are you satisfied?’ She cranes her neck to the men at the rear. ‘Lucian? Antonin? Are you satisfied?’

‘Yes, Queen Katharine,’ they mumble, and nod contritely. She turns back toward the water. They will be safe now. Her port, and her people, will have nothing to fear. If she has to send Mirabella out as an escort to every fleet of ships, if she has to lash her to the prow like a living figurehead—then so be it. She will gift her sister jewels and the finest gowns. People say that she is small and vindictive, but they are wrong. She is willing to bury the past as long as the island is safe.

‘But it is only a temporary solution,’ Antonin adds. ‘Only a stalemate. And perhaps not even that. There is only one of her; she cannot protect the entire island.’

‘A stalemate is still preferable to the nothing you have suggested,’ Katharine says, and grits her teeth.

The barge returns, escorted by Rho and the queensguard boats. Mirabella steps onto the dock. Three elementals have survived and join her. Two appear uninjured, but the third, a young man not much older than the queens themselves, holds an arm that is bleeding and mangled to the shoulder. Seeing him, Katharine’s heart is heavy. Perhaps she should have refused Rho’s suggestion to test the other elementals. Yet it is a small price to pay, in order to know. Now no other elemental will be asked to do the same.

Mirabella walks to Katharine with her chin held high. She is soaked, and her cloak hangs askew. The simple dress they put her in has been stretched and torn, and her black hair is slicked down her back. But she is still beautiful.

‘You are pleased?’ Mirabella asks.

‘Of course I am pleased. You did it. You are everything that you promised. I could almost embrace you.’

‘I lost two. And Eamon requires a healer.’

‘He will have the best of them. Let us return to the Volroy to celebrate.’

‘And to keep your council from turning blue,’ Mirabella says, with a worried look at Luca. ‘But you are not shivering.’

‘How could I after the exhilaration of what I just witnessed?’ Katharine uses her unhurt arm to draw her cloak more tightly around her. She has grown careless these past months, showing the gifts she borrows from the dead. The dead elemental queens have made sure that tonight she feels no chill.