One Dark Throne (Three Dark Crowns #2)(94)

“I had to,” Mirabella says. “I—” Camden, who must have been guarding her, wrinkles her muzzle and slinks away to curl behind Jules’s legs.

Arsinoe looks around. It happened so quickly. Every guard is dead or unconscious. The room is full of sick-smelling smoke. Joseph is on one knee, panting from the exertion of the fight.

“Let’s get out of here,” Arsinoe mutters.

Joseph stands, his right side dark with blood.

“Joseph!”

Jules slips out from beneath Arsinoe’s arm and goes to him, pressing hard against the wound.

“Here.” Mirabella tears more strips from her skirt to bind it.

“I’m fine,” he says. “It’s just a cut. It’s not even that deep.”

Jules lifts his shirt. She and Mirabella wrap him up tight, using so much of the skirt that Mirabella’s legs are visible over the tops of her boots.

“I’m all right, Jules.” Joseph touches her face. His hand trembles.

“I know,” she replies. “You’ll be perfectly fine, as soon as we get out of here.” She puts his arm over her shoulders and nods to Arsinoe.

“Right,” Arsinoe says. But she swallows hard, looking at him. There will be plenty more guards to get through when they make it upstairs and into the Volroy proper.

She grabs a torch off the wall and takes up one of the fallen guard’s clubs.

“Mirabella, stay behind me,” says Jules. “You don’t need to be out front to use your gift, do you?”

Mirabella shakes her head.

As quickly as they can, they move through the last gate and creep up the stairs to the ground level. Near the top, Arsinoe sets down the torch before the light can give them away.

There are bound to be many guards here. Probably priestesses too. It will take all of them and the Goddess besides to get clear of the Volroy, and even then, they will probably be instantly stopped in the courtyard.

They turn the corner, ready to fight. But there is no one there. Only faintly burning candles in the sconces on the walls. And then they see the bodies.

Bodies of guards are littered across the ground. Arms and legs stick out from beneath tables and from behind half-closed doors.

“What happened here?” Joseph asks, and Jules crouches as a dozen cloaked figures run into view with weapons drawn.

The wind quickens through the windows as Mirabella gathers her elements. “Wait, wait!”

The cloaked leader pushes back his hood, and Arsinoe drops her club.

“Billy!” she cries, and runs into his arms.

“Arsinoe!”

He lifts her off the ground. He squeezes so tight that she can barely breathe and kisses her hair and the scars upon her face.

“Are you all right?” he asks. “I was terrified we would be too late.”

“I’m fine,” Arsinoe says, beaming. “But who is ‘we’?”

A girl steps forward wearing a red-lined cloak.

“I remember you,” Arsinoe says. “From the arena. You were at the duel.” She looks over the rest of them, barely a dozen in total, who have laid waste to every guard on the main floor of the fortress. “What are you doing here?”

The girl regards her with respect and bows slightly.

“We are warriors from Bastian City,” she says, and nods toward Jules. “And we came for her.”





GREAVESDRAKE MANOR





Katharine wakes in the dark to Nicolas thrashing, jerking, caught in the net of some horrible dream. She reaches out and touches his shoulder, and he eases back to sleep.

The room is full of shadows. The candles and lamps have gone out or been put out; she cannot remember. What she does remember sends heat to her cheeks. Nicolas was so different from Pietyr. But he is no less passionate. Afterward, he held her tightly, pressed together skin to skin.

She rolls toward him and slips her hand beneath the blankets.

“Nicolas? Are you awake?”

He does not stir. Her king-consort is exhausted. She walks her fingers up his chest, playfully.

Her finger slides in warm liquid. At first she cringes, thinking it is drool. But then she recognizes the scent in the air. The smell of so much warm and sudden blood.

Katharine sits up. She leans across to her bedside table for the candle and long matches. Her hands tremble as she lights it, even though she knows what she will see.

Nicolas lies dead, covered in blood. It pools atop his chest and in the wrinkles of the fabric, staining the sheet bright red. It has run from his mouth and from his nose. Even from his eyes. His veins are a swollen, angry purple beneath his skin, nearly everywhere she touched him.

Katharine sits back on her knees and stares down at her new husband. Poor Nicolas. Poor mainland boy, with no gift to help him withstand the toxins. She looks down at her skin, at her hands, at her whole body where the poison resides. The poison inside her must be strong indeed if it can produce such an effect so quickly.

Poor Nicolas. He lay with a queen, and he died for it.

Hoofbeats ring across the stones of the drive. Katharine gets quickly out of bed and stuffs her arms into her dressing gown.

“Natalia. Natalia will help me.”

She smooths and folds the tangled, blood-soaked bedclothes, breathing hard, beginning to weep. She touches Nicolas’s cooling cheek, and then pulls the sheet over his face. Natalia cannot arrive and see him that way.