One Dark Throne (Three Dark Crowns #2)(21)

He kisses her forehead, and her cheek. He kisses her shoulder, still too nervous to kiss her properly, and that is her fault. Then he gently removes her arms and turns to walk away.

“Billy!” she calls out, and he stops. “Why did you choose me? Instead of one of my sisters?”

“Because I saw you first,” he says, and winks. “I’ll be back soon. But . . . just in case I die, I want you to remember that you could have kissed me that day in the meadow.”

Jules and Joseph load barrels of ale onto the back of an oxcart. It will be driven over the hill to the apple orchard northeast of the Milone house, where the feast to welcome the suitors will be held.

“You’re strong for someone so small,” Joseph says as they load the last one. He wipes sweat from his brow.

“What is that,” she asks, “a compliment wrapped in an insult?”

He laughs, and they move into the shade on the back steps of the Lion’s Head. Camden stretches out at their feet on the cool stone pavement, and Jules leans forward to scratch her belly.

“I can’t believe that Billy’s father is sending him to be a taster,” Jules says. “It feels like we shouldn’t let him go. Or that he should refuse.”

“He never refuses his father,” says Joseph, and cocks his head thoughtfully. “No one ever refuses his father. All that time I lived with them, I only saw folk kiss his arse and tell him what he wanted to hear. He’s used to getting the things that he wants.” He shrugs. “I wonder what that’s like.”

“It doesn’t sound like much to me,” says Jules. “Sounds like arse-kissing and lies. One of us ought to go with Billy. To ease Arsinoe’s mind, if nothing else.”

“I’m going with him, Jules,” he says, and she looks at him in shock.

“I didn’t mean you! And I was really only saying it to be kind!”

“I’m not staying,” he says, half-smiling at her outburst. “Just going to get him settled in. Make sure everything is on the up and up, like you said. So Arsinoe won’t worry.”

“She’ll worry anyway.” Jules crosses her arms. “Will you see Mirabella? Climb into her bed, maybe?”

“That’s part of the reason I’m going. To see her! Not the bed part!” he adds when Jules’s fists come up.

“Why do you need to see her?”

“To tell her that it’s over. To make sure she knows.”

“She doesn’t need to know, does she?” Jules asks, knowing how mean it sounds but unable to keep quiet. “It was never anything to start with. Mirabella will die or marry a suitor. You were never an option.”

“Jules.” Joseph takes her face in his hands and kisses her. “I love you. What I did was wrong, but I wronged her, too. This was my fault. She didn’t know about you until it was too late.”

Jules sighs.

“Go, then.”

“So you trust me?”

She turns and looks squarely into his handsome, storm-blue eyes.

“Not one bit.”





THE SUITORS ARRIVE





INDRID DOWN





The Highbern Hotel is the finest in the capital, a tall, imposing rectangle of gray brick and gold-gilded rainspouts fashioned into the likenesses of falcon heads, close enough to the Volroy to cast its morning shadow into the western gardens. The black-and-white flags above the doors have been replaced with pure black ones embossed with coiled snakes and poisonous flowers. A clear announcement that the poisoner queen is in attendance.

In the grand ballroom, Katharine sits restlessly between Natalia and Nicolas Martel as he oohs and aahs at the finery. It is nothing new for her. She has been to the Highbern many times, with Natalia for tea and for other banquets through the years. Personally, she has always thought the place smelled too old, as if it were rotting beneath its carpets. But today they have opened the doors and windows, so at least she can enjoy the lilac wafting from the Volroy’s courtyard fences.

“Have you heard the news from Highgate?” Renata Hargrove asks.

Natalia arranged the seating differently for the suitor’s feast, more intimately, around curving tables covered in deep red cloth. To Katharine’s great delight, it meant she was able to place Genevieve nearly all the way across the room.

“What news is that?” Natalia asks.

“Apparently, the elemental called not one but two storms. With fierce lightning and fires with smoke that was visible for miles.”

“Yet the naturalist lives,” says Lucian Marlowe, the only non-Arron male on the Black Council.

“A pity her carriage was only a decoy. We could have used the rain.” Natalia sips her tainted wine, and the guests chuckle. “Though with any luck, she will kill the naturalist, and we will never have to close our windows against the smell of bear.”

“But what fun is that for our Queen Katharine?” Lucian says, and laughs.

Katharine ignores them and leans toward Nicolas.

“You must think us awful with all this talk of death.”

“Not at all,” he says in his soft accent. “I have been educated in the ways of the queens. And I have seen death, and dying, on the battlefield. Coups in my country cost tens of thousands of lives. Your Ascension Year seems civilized in comparison.”