One Dark Throne (Three Dark Crowns #2)(34)

“So you pushed me down that hole!” Katharine screeches through her teeth. Her whole body trembles with the rage of it. The shock and confusion when he shoved her.

It was a crime what he did. It was betrayal. She should slash his throat and watch his blood pool around her legs.

Instead, she draws back and throws the knife into the wall.

Pietyr crumples forward, his hand pressed to the shallow wound on his neck.

“You cut me,” he says softly in disbelief.

“I should have done worse.” He turns to look at her, and she relishes the fear in his eyes. “I still might. I have not decided yet.”

Clever, calculating Pietyr. He has dressed just so, in his dove-gray shirt and dark jacket, and he has kept his hair a little longer, the way she likes it best. Looking at him on her bed, she hates him, and is angry in so many ways. But he is still her Pietyr.

“I would not blame you. But I am sorry, Kat.” He looks at her full, round shoulders. “You look different.”

“What did you expect? One does not get pushed into the Breccia Domain and crawl out again unchanged.”

“I have wanted to come back to you for so long.”

“Of course you have. Back to the seat of Arron power.”

“Back to you.” His fingers twitch with wanting. He lifts his hand to caress her cheek.

Katharine slaps it away.

“You do not know what you have come back to,” she says. She grasps the sides of his head and kisses him forcefully, her lips hard enough to make it a punishment. She bites along his jaw. She licks the blood from the cut on his throat.

He wraps his arms around her waist and pulls her to him.

“Katharine,” he says, and sighs. “How I love you.”

“How indeed.” She shoves him hard. “How you must love me, Pietyr,” she says, and leaves to return to Nicolas. “But you will never have me again.”





WOLF SPRING





The house is quiet. An odd thing for a naturalist house to be. Usually, it is filled with barks and caws and someone in the kitchen or Cait talking to the flock as they cluck and honk through the yard. Jules takes a deep breath and listens to the air move in and out. She sips a hot cup of willowbark tea and strokes Camden’s head where it rests on her leg.

She and the cat have been even closer than usual since Jules’s legion curse became known. They cling to each other, unsure what it might mean for their bond. The thought that one day she could wake and find that Camden is not a part of her anymore—it is more terrifying than anything she could do with the war gift.

Madrigal walks in, back from the market with her arms full of baskets. Breaking the peace.

“Will you help me?” she asks. “I’m making chowder with fresh cream, and biscuits with that soft white cheese that you like.”

“What’s the occasion?” Jules asks suspiciously. She takes the basket of clams and dumps them into the sink to wash.

“No occasion.” Madrigal sets the rest of her shopping on the countertop. “But when it’s ready, you could float the bowls onto the table for us.”

Jules scowls.

“That isn’t how it works.”

“How do you know?” Madrigal asks. “The war gift has been weak for so long that nobody knows how it works.”

That is true enough. Everything Jules has ever heard about the war gift has been the stuff of long-ago legends. Of the recent there are only rumors. Folk in Bastian City who have uncanny accuracy with knives and bows. Near-impossible shots made so clean that it is almost as if the weapon were pulled on a string.

But it is not pull so much as push. Jules has worked at it, alone and mostly in secret, aghast and amazed at what she is able to do.

At the sink, Madrigal begins scrubbing clams, nearly managing to look like she has done it before. She wipes her forehead. Sallow circles mar the undersides of her eyes. And she is still breathless from the walk.

“Are you all right?” Jules asks.

“I’m fine. How are you? Is that willowbark tea? Is your leg paining you?”

“Madrigal, what’s going on?”

“Nothing,” she says. “Only that . . .” She pauses and heaps washed clams into a pot. “Only that I’m pregnant.” She twists at the waist and flashes a fast smile, then looks back down at her hands. “Matthew and I are going to have a baby.”

Aria flies nervously onto the table. Her wing feathers shift in the quiet.

“You,” Jules says, “and Aunt Caragh’s Matthew are going to have a baby?”

“Don’t call him that. He is not her Matthew.”

“That’s how we all think of him. That’s how we’ll always think of him.”

“Honestly, Jules,” Madrigal says, her tone slightly disgusted. “After what happened between Joseph and Queen Mirabella, I thought you’d have grown up a little.”

Jules’s temper rises, and on the countertop, Madrigal’s knife begins to rattle as if of its own accord.

“Don’t, Jules.” Madrigal backs away. “Don’t do that.”

The knife stops.

“I’m not,” Jules says quickly. “I mean, I didn’t mean to.”

“Your war gift is strong. You should let me unbind it.”