One Dark Throne (Three Dark Crowns #2)(3)

Katharine looks out her window from where she sits at her writing desk. To the east, below the last of the Stonegall hills, the capital city of Indrid Down glitters in the late-afternoon sun. In the center, the twin black spires of the Volroy jut up into the sky, the great castle fortress dwarfing everything else. Even the mountains seem hunched in comparison, backing off like trolls brought down by a shining light.

The belladonna berries roll in Katharine’s stomach, but she does not wince. It has been more than a month since she had to claw her way up and out of the heart of the island, and now Katharine can withstand anything.

She leans over and pushes the window open. These days her rooms smell slightly of sickness and whatever animals she is testing her poisons on. Many small cages of birds and rodents litter the room, on top of her tables and lined along the walls. A few lie inside dead, waiting to be cleared out.

She taps the cage on the corner of her desk to rouse the small gray mouse inside. It is blind in one eye, and mostly bald from Katharine’s rubbed poisons. She offers it a cracker through the bars of its cage, and it creeps forward, sniffing, afraid to eat it.

“Once, I was a mouse,” she says, and strips off her glove. She reaches into the cage to stroke the rodent’s tiny bald haunches.

“But I am not anymore.”





WOLF SPRING





Arsinoe and Jules are at the kitchen table slicing small red potatoes when Jules’s Grandpa Ellis bursts through the side door with his white spaniel familiar. He arches his graying brow at them and holds up a small black envelope bearing the wax seal of the Black Council.

Grandma Cait pauses just long enough in her herb-chopping to blow loose hair out of her face. Then all three women go back to the tasks at hand.

“Doesn’t anybody want to read it?” Ellis asks. He sets the letter on the tabletop and lifts his spaniel, Jake, to sniff at the potatoes.

“Why?” Cait snorts. “We can all guess what it says.” She gestures with her head to the other side of the kitchen. “Now would you crack me four egg yolks into that bowl?”

Ellis sets Jake down and tears the letter open.

“They make a point of noting that the suitors all requested first court with Queen Katharine,” he says as he reads.

“That is a lie,” Jules mutters.

“Maybe so. But it hardly matters. It says here that we are to welcome the suitors Thomas ‘Tommy’ Stratford and Michael Percy.”

“Two?” Arsinoe scrunches her face in distaste. “Why both of them? Why any?”

Jules, Cait, and Ellis trade glances. More than one suitor at the same time is a great compliment. Before the show of the bear at the Beltane Festival, no one expected that Arsinoe would receive any requests for first suit, let alone two.

“They are to arrive any day,” Ellis says. “And who knows how long they might stay on if they like you.”

“They’ll be gone by week’s end,” Arsinoe says, and chops a potato in half.

Jules takes the letter from Ellis.

“Tommy Stratford and Michael Percy.” So much of the Beltane Festival is a blur, but they were the two who came ashore on a barge together the night of the Disembarking. It seemed that they could not stop laughing. Billy had wanted to throttle them.

Arsinoe tosses her knife onto the table and piles the last of the potato slices onto a wooden platter.

“That’s done, Cait,” she says. “What’s next?”

“What’s next is you getting out of this house,” Cait replies. “You cannot hide in my kitchen forever.”

Arsinoe sinks in her chair. The people of Wolf Spring cannot get enough of their Bear Queen. They gather around her in the market and ask for tales of her great brown. They buy him huge silver fish and expect her to tear into it, too. Raw, right before their eyes. They do not know that the bear was a ruse, called onto the stage during the Quickening Ceremony to dance as if on a string. They do not know that it was Jules controlling it and a low magic spell. Only the family and Joseph and Billy know that. And still fewer know of Arsinoe’s biggest secret: that she is no naturalist at all but a poisoner, her gift discovered when she and Jules both ingested poisoned sweets from Katharine. Jules had sickened to near death, and the damage to her body gave her constant pain and a limp. But Arsinoe had not sickened at all.

That secret only she, Jules, and Joseph know.

“Come on,” Jules says. She claps Arsinoe on the shoulder and rises, stiffly. Beside her, her mountain cat, Camden, favors the shoulder that was broken by Arsinoe’s first false familiar, the diseased bear that scarred Arsinoe’s face. Not even two months passed between the crippling of Camden in that attack and the crippling of Jules by poison. It is as if the Goddess cruelly intended for them to match.

“Where’re we going?” Arsinoe asks.

“Out from underfoot,” Cait says as she tosses scraps of food up onto the cupboards for the crow familiars, Aria and Eva. The birds bob their heads appreciatively, and Cait lowers her voice. “Do you need some willowbark tea brewed before you go, Jules?”

“No, Grandma. I’m fine.”

Outside in the yard, Arsinoe follows Jules past the chicken coops as she and Camden stretch their sore limbs in the sun. Then she darts off into the woodpile.

“What are you digging for?” Jules asks.