Queens of Fennbirn (Three Dark Crowns 0.5)(25)

“Look.” Jules points.

Without Arsinoe noticing, they have come upon a clearing. The sun beams down upon an oblong stretch of green grass and moss, and shrub bushes with shiny, waxen leaves. In the center of it is a large, flat stone, just tall enough to climb on.

“I’ve never seen that before,” Arsinoe remarks.

Jules does not reply. Her face is set in concentration, her blue and green eyes intent on the stone. She wipes a bit of sweat from her upper lip. Bits of her wavy brown hair have come loose from her braid, and she looks as wild as anything in the woods.

Jules walks toward the stone. Arsinoe follows and watches as she scrambles up it to stand. Jules looks around, but it does not really make her that much taller, and certainly not tall enough to see over the trees.

“This is a strange rock.” Arsinoe lays her hands on it, flat and sun-warm. “So squared off and flat. Do you think it used to be something? Part of something old?”

Jules looks down at the stone.

“I think . . . if after today, we were to come looking, we would never find it again.”

Arsinoe swallows as a chill passes from her scalp to her tailbone. To hide it, she climbs up onto the rock beside Jules.

“Let’s just . . . stay here awhile,” Jules says, and sits. “I don’t feel like going home.”

With the heat of the stone against their backs, and the soft sunlight on their faces, it does not take long for Jules and Arsinoe to fall asleep. When Jules wakes, it is from a good dream that she cannot quite remember, but there was laughter in it, and warmth. She thinks that Joseph and Caragh might have been there.

In the brush to her left, back in the shady cover of the trees, something rustles, and Jules sits up. She holds an arm out over the queen, ready to protect her or tell her to run. Jules is not much to look at, with her short legs and funny eyes, but she is brave. She will not hesitate to fight for Arsinoe. She is not afraid to be hurt.

But after a moment, her apprehension fades. It changes to a sensation of deep calm. Peace. The brush and ferns rustle again, and Jules waits, holding her breath.

The fuzzy mountain cat cub creeps cautiously into the light. It blinks its eyes, so young that they are still a little blue, and stands on big, fluffy paws. Its coat is the spotted coat of a baby.

Anyone but Jules would still be afraid, for where a mountain cat cub goes, a mountain cat mother is not far behind. But as Jules and the cub stare at each other, something clicks into place.

“Camden,” Jules says, and the little cub bounds joyfully across the meadow and leaps into her arms.





No Sight no sound

No fault was found

No treason to be had

—

Yet every one

Would die that day

For Elsabet, the mad

—From “The Song of the Mad Oracle”





PROLOGUE

On a warm summer day, Queen Mirabella sat on the front steps of the Black Cottage at Midwife Willa’s feet, having her hair braided. Her little sisters—Queen Arsinoe, younger by mere minutes, and Queen Katharine, younger by a full half hour—played together in the yard.

“It is a good thing that black does not show grass marks,” Willa commented when Katharine tripped over her own feet and tumbled, dark skirt flying.

“Ha ha,” Arsinoe taunted. Katharine’s large eyes began to shine and wobble. Mirabella cleared her throat, and Arsinoe glanced at her guiltily. Then Arsinoe sighed and went to help their youngest sister up.

“Why do you not ever tell them to be nice?” Mirabella asked.

“I tell them to be polite.” Willa separated the little queen’s hair with gentle fingers. “It is so long now. So long and so shiny. When you are queen, you must wear it down often and never cover it with a veil.”

Mirabella fought the urge to jerk her head. Even at five years old, she knew that nice and polite were not the same things, though she could not explain exactly why.

Down in the grass, Arsinoe and Katharine had resumed chasing each other. They laughed breathlessly, and when they ran out of laughter, Katharine began to sing a song that Willa had taught them that morning.

“No Sight, no sound, no fault was found, no treason to be had!”

“Yet every one would die that day for Elsabet the mad!” Arsinoe finished the rhyme and raised a stick she had been carrying as a sword. Katharine squealed and ran.

“Why did you teach us that song?” Mirabella asked. It was a queen’s song, the tale of the last oracle queen, but Mirabella did not like it.

“Everyone on the island knows the story of the mad oracle. A queen certainly should.”

“It is only a song.”

“Songs preserve history. So people remember.” Willa lowered her voice, and Mirabella knew that what would follow was only for her ears. “They say that Queen Elsabet’s gift of sight turned on her. That it drove her mad, until in a fit of paranoia she ordered the execution of three whole houses of people.”

“What is ‘paranoia’?”

“Being afraid of or convinced of something that is not there.”

“Were they sure she was wrong?”

“They were sure. And for her crime, Queen Elsabet spent the last twenty years of her reign locked in the West Tower of the Volroy. And now we will have no more sight-gifted queens.”