Five Dark Fates (Three Dark Crowns, #4)(58)

‘So you’ll get me out of here? You’ll let me loose?’

‘I wish I could. But I cannot. Not yet. Please understand,’ she says when his head hangs. ‘I wish this was not happening to you. I wish you had not come.’

‘But it is. And I did.’ To her surprise, and through all of his bruises, he smiles. ‘I suppose I missed you.’

At his unexpected kindness, Mirabella bursts out crying. ‘I would have much preferred meeting you somewhere else, though,’ he adds, and her tears change to laughter.

‘I missed you, too.’

‘Did you see Arsinoe?’ he asks softly.

Mirabella peers over her shoulder for listening ears. There are no guards visible, but they must take care so their voices do not carry down the corridor.

‘I have never been so happy to see anyone as I was when she popped out from behind that tapestry.’

‘I can’t believe she did that,’ Billy says. ‘I should’ve known. She can do just about anything.’

‘Whether she ought to or not.’ Mirabella takes up the wet cloth and wipes the dried blood from his jaw; she presses it against the swelling on his cheek. ‘I am sorry about your father. They told me what happened, when I first arrived.’

He nods.

‘I hated him,’ he says. ‘But I still thought he was immortal. Mira, if I don’t get out of here, will you write to my mother and Jane?’

‘Of course I will.’

‘Their lives will be so changed with both my father and me gone.’ Tears slip from the corners of his eyes, and she wipes them away as quickly as they come. ‘You have to get me out of here, Mira. I don’t belong here.’

She kisses his cheeks and his clammy forehead. ‘You will see Arsinoe again. You will see her even before I do. And when you do, you will tell her how much I love her. And how I never betrayed her.’

‘Mira, please!’

She kisses him again, as hard as she dares. And then she slips away.





THE VOLROY




Sometime in the night, a rebel warrior sacks Greavesdrake Manor. Edmund, Natalia’s loyal butler, says the warrior slipped out of the shadows like she was a shadow herself and slipped back into them just as easily. What staff members were not sleeping quickly found themselves tied to chairs or barred inside their rooms. Pietyr’s caretaker she knocked out with a blow to the back of the head. When the poor girl came to, she could not recall a moment of what had happened. But the bed in Katharine’s room was empty. Pietyr Renard was gone.

‘How is this possible?’ Katharine asks. ‘How did she dare?’ She sits stunned at the head of her Black Council table. She has summoned them all to the chamber. Even Mirabella. Even old Luca from her quarters in the temple, and now the wise High Priestess sits, just as useless as the rest of her advisers, looking like she was shaken from a very deep sleep.

Katharine runs her hand over the grooved wood of the table in an effort to remain calm. But she would very much like to remove her glove and dig gouges into the surface until what fingernails she has left are split and bloody. Inside her, the dead queens boil. Pietyr was theirs, they whisper. And no one had the right to take him.

‘Shut your mouth!’

Everyone startles as Katharine pounds her fist.

‘My queen,’ Cousin Lucian ventures meekly, ‘no one has spoken.’

‘No one has spoken,’ Katharine says. ‘Because no one ever speaks when I need them to.’ She takes a deep breath as they blink at her. Renata, Paola, Bree, and Lucian seem afraid. Genevieve and Antonin wearily apprehensive. Of all the people in the room, the only one who conveys any sympathy is Mirabella. Mirabella, who caused this, in a way.

‘Did you know,’ Katharine asks, turning to her sister, ‘that Arsinoe was capable of this? I thought you said she was good-hearted? I thought you said she was not devious.’

‘I never said she was not devious,’ Mirabella says, and Katharine does not know whether to listen or throttle her. ‘Though I doubt that she or anyone would have tried something like this had you not taken Billy captive. And even so, it does not seem like her. It seems too . . .’

‘Tactical,’ says Rho. ‘She has at once tied your hands and brought you to the bargaining table. This was not the idea of the upstart naturalist. This was the war gift. This was the plan of the Legion Queen.’

‘The war gift,’ Katharine whispers. ‘I want the army mustered. Now.’

‘How many soldiers?’ Antonin asks.

‘All of them. I want my army ready to march.’

No one moves to obey. They glance between each other.

‘The journey around the mountain would take us several weeks,’ Rho says. ‘Perhaps longer, in the deep snow of the northern valleys. By the time we reached them, we would be fatigued and cold. Frostbitten and low on supplies where they will be dug in and fortified. We lack the ships to transport that number of soldiers by water, and no one will dare the seas and the mist, anyway.’ She gestures to Mirabella. ‘Not even if we were to strap her to one of the hulls.’

‘And remember,’ Genevieve leans forward. ‘The rebellion will not hurt him. Not as long as we have the suitor. What feels like a loss is actually a stalemate.’

Katharine grits her teeth.