One Dark Throne (Three Dark Crowns #2)(95)

“I am sorry,” she whispers as footsteps sound in the hall.

“Kat?” Pietyr says, and knocks. “I saw your candle from outside. Are you awake?”

“Pietyr!” Katharine cries. She runs to him and crushes herself to his chest as he comes through the door.

“You are trembling. What is—?”

She closes her eyes. He has seen it. Seen what she has done. He draws away to look at her. In the faint, shadowed light, he can only barely make out the crown of ink across her forehead. He touches it with his thumb.

“So you have done it,” he says sadly. “Tell me what has happened.”

It falls out of her mouth in a torrent. The farce of a duel. The crowning. The assassination of Arsinoe. Her wedding night, and the dead king-consort in her bed. When she is finished, she waits, sure that he will shove her away.

“My sweet Katharine,” he says, and wipes the tears from her cheek.

“How can you say that?” Her fingers have left streaks of red on his shirt. She tears free and returns to her bedroom, where the shape of Nicolas lies, what is left of his blood pooling in his back and legs.

“I killed him. Just by touching him. There is something wrong with me!”

Pietyr steps around her. He takes up a lamp from the table and pulls back the sheet. Katharine turns away when she sees how gray Nicolas’s skin has turned and how sunken his eyes. Pietyr picks up an arm and inspects the fingers.

“So much poison,” he whispers.

She is practically made of it. She is like they said she was, the Undead Queen.

She claws at her own face, disgusted, rubbing the fresh scab of her crown until it smears across her forehead, bloody and black.

Pietyr sets down the lamp and comes to her. He pins her arms to her sides.

“Stop. You are a queen. You are crowned. And none of this was your fault.”

“You are not surprised,” Katharine says. “Why?”

Pietyr looks deep into her eyes for a long time. Almost as if he expects to find someone else there.

“Because after you sent me away, I went to the Breccia Domain. I went down into it.”

His fingers dig into her skin, and she notices that they are cold.

“What do you really remember, Kat? From when you fell?”

“From when you pushed me,” Katharine says, and jerks loose. She lowers her eyes. “And I remember nothing.”

“Nothing,” Pietyr repeats. “Perhaps not. Or perhaps you are lying. What I saw there, or what I thought I saw there, made me scream like I have not screamed since I was a child.”

She looks up. He knows.

The dead queens had gnawed on the bones of their injustices for centuries before he had dropped Katharine right into their laps. That they were able to pour their wishes into her, filling her up with ambition and twisted strength, was his fault.

“At least I was not afraid for you anymore,” he says quietly. “The old sisters would never have let you be killed. Not when you were their way into the crown. Out of that hole.”

“But it was all for nothing.” She stares helplessly at Nicolas graying beneath the sheet. She has become poison. No mainland king may lie with her and survive. No mainland-fathered children could survive the long months in her belly.

“I cannot bear the triplets,” she whispers. “I cannot be the queen.”

She begins to weep, and Pietyr gathers her to him. “Natalia. How disappointed she will be. How disappointed you must be . . . how disgusted. . . .”

“Never.” Pietyr kisses her smeared crown. He kisses her cheeks and kisses away the tears that slip down them.

“Pietyr, I am poison.”

“And I am a poisoner. And you have never been more precious to me than you are right now.” He raises his head at the sound of an approaching carriage and wraps his arms around her tighter.

“I failed you once. I betrayed you once. But I will not again. From now on, I will protect you, Kat, whatever happens.”





INDRID DOWN





The warriors in the red-lined cloaks are led by a girl named Emilia Vatros and her father. She has the quick, dispassionate eyes of a hunting bird, and Jules likes her immediately.

“Why are you really helping us?” Jules asks.

“It is like I said,” Emilia replies, and Madrigal seconds her.

“It wasn’t hard to get them to come. You were the whole reason they were in the capital.”

“She should have been sent to us anyway,” says Emilia’s father, eyeing Madrigal. “You should have let her choose, to be yours or to be ours.”

“She was mine,” Madrigal says. “She was born to me.”

“The Goddess feels different.”

“How do you know what the Goddess feels?” Madrigal snaps, but Jules shushes her. Emilia’s father stands as straight as Cait, his hair dark brown and face lightly lined. And if Madrigal engages him in debate, they will stand in the shadows bickering until the sun comes up and their entire party is discovered.

“Let’s get moving, then,” Arsinoe says. Two warriors come to take Joseph from Jules’s shoulders. Jules looks to Arsinoe, and she nods. They will accept help now, and ask questions later.

Quickly and quietly, they slip through the main level of the Volroy, running and ducking through the castle keep and the inner cloister until they reach the arched, exterior gateway and hunch in the shadows.