Two Dark Reigns (Three Dark Crowns #3)(108)

Katharine wanders toward the windows. Her hand slips over the back of the sofa and over the desk. All her old, childhood things.

“Do you think Mirabella is on her way to me?” she asks softly.

“I do not know, Kat.”

“Do you think if she comes, Arsinoe might come, too? That they might stand behind me, united?”

“I do not know, Kat.”

Pietyr steps back, surveying his work. He wishes bitterly that Madrigal had not died. He does not know what he is doing. Perhaps she lied to him, and he is not doing anything at all. Katharine cocks her head at his crude circle, the ends of the rope set apart to allow them to step inside.

“Is that it?”

“Seems to be. Do you feel anything?”

Katharine rubs her arms and grimaces. “Only for the stones. They do not like them. They do not want them here.”

He looks at her. Fetching and queenly in black riding breeches, a smart black jacket, ready to do as he instructs.

“Do you trust me, Kat?”

She looks up at him in surprise. “Of course I do.”

“Even after . . .” he says, and looks down in shame.

“Even after,” she says, and smiles. Her smile, not the dead queens’. They were his doing—he was the one who pushed her down and let them in—but now he will make it right. He holds out his hand and leads her inside the circle. When he joins the ends of the rope, he thinks he feels something ripple through the room. Some slight shift in the air. Then it disappears, and he is not sure.

Perhaps he should have chosen another place to perform the ritual. The temple, perhaps, before the Goddess Stone. Or somewhere on the grounds of the Volroy. Sacred spaces. But Madrigal never mentioned any particular place, and Greavesdrake was somewhere private, where they would not be interrupted. The place where they first met. And to Katharine, the place that still feels the most like home. Greavesdrake has been the seat of Arron power for a hundred years. It must be good enough.

“Will it hurt, Pietyr?” she whispers.

“I think so.” He shows her the rune cut into his palm. “You are not afraid of that?”

She shakes her head, but her eyes are full of fear, even as she keeps her voice resolute.

“After that boy by the harbor,” she murmurs. “After Madrigal. We have no choice.”

He bends down to kiss her hand and slides a blade from his belt.

The first cut is the hardest. Seeing her pale skin split and the red run through her fingers. But he works quickly, and she makes not a sound, the room so quiet that he can hear the first drops strike the floor.

With her rune complete, he releases her wrist and turns to his own. Cutting through the scabs burns and he bites his lip, but though he cuts, not enough blood comes. The strength of his poisoner gift has healed them too well, and he will have to cut deeper.

“Pietyr,” Katharine says. “I feel strange.”

“Strange?” he asks, and she falls to her knees.

“Katharine!”

He falls beside her and holds up her arm. Dark veins stand beneath the skin, and the blood that pours out of her is less red than burgundy.

“They are afraid. They do not want to leave me.”

“Do not listen to them.” He cups her cheek and nearly recoils at the gray rot spread across her face. “They are only fighting,” he says, but in his mind, he remembers Madrigal’s warning.

Surely you must’ve considered that she may not be alive at all, except for them. She may truly be undead, and the moment she is emptied of the last of the queens, her body will break and shrivel up. Just like it would have had they not intervened in the first place.

“I am with you, Kat. You will be fine.”

Katharine screams and doubles over, and he presses his cut rune against hers, locking their hands together. The shock that goes through him sends him onto his back. And one of the Breccia stones rolls out of the circle.

“Pietyr, it hurts.”

“Hold on, Kat.” He grinds his teeth. Her blood splashes darkly onto the stones, and her screams fill the room. Another shock passes through him as the queens scratch for purchase inside Katharine, and his leg jerks, sending another stone rolling. He squeezes his eyes shut.

“So cold,” Katharine moans.

“You do not need them. Hold on.”

“I can’t.”

“You can.”

“I won’t.”

He opens his eyes as she lets go of his hand.

“Katharine?”

Every bit of exposed skin is gray and mottled black: the dead queens risen to the surface. He pushes himself up onto his elbows as she licks clean the wound in her hand and kicks the stones aside, clacking them together like marbles. Perhaps he did not know enough of low magic. Perhaps it was foolish for him to try. Or perhaps it would not have worked, even if Madrigal had done it herself.

“I had to,” he whispers as the dead queens stalk toward him wearing Katharine’s body like a costume. “I had to, for her.”

“You had to,” they say, and lift him to his feet. He looks into her eyes, searching, and what he sees makes him want to scream. But it dies in his throat as they press their lips to his, flooding him with black and cold, filling him up with them until his blood has nowhere else to run except straight from his ears and eyes.