Two Dark Reigns (Three Dark Crowns #3)(16)

“Nothing. I fell asleep and I rescued a dog. How was tea with Christine and the governor’s girls? Did you manage to put her off Billy?”

Arsinoe blinks innocently and gathers the dog into her arms. Something had happened. Mirabella would know it by the electricity in the air even if it were not written all over Arsinoe’s frightened face. But she also knows by the set of her sister’s jaw that she will get no more answers tonight.





CENTRA




When Arsinoe falls asleep, she dreams the same dream she had when she was sleeping beside Joseph’s grave. Which is odd, as she cannot remember ever having had the same dream twice. In it, she is again on a ship, not a ship like she is accustomed to, but an old ship, with one mast, the kind that merchants used to use and went out of fashion at least a century ago. And again, she is not herself but someone else: a girl dressed as a boy.

Also, she is up very high in the rigging, staring out at fast-moving waves that make her stomach lurch.

“David! Get down from that rigging!”

Yes, yes, let’s get down from this rigging, Arsinoe thinks, her own legs weak though the legs of her dream body navigate the ropes and nets without any trouble.

“Richard. You never let me have any fun.”

The girl whose body Arsinoe shares—whose name is actually Daphne, not David—lands on the deck and tugs her tunic down over her leggings. Old-fashioned clothes. Nothing like anything Arsinoe has ever worn, and not terribly comfortable either.

“You shouldn’t be here to begin with,” Richard says. “You know women are bad luck on a ship.”

“Keep your voice down,” Daphne says, with a glance toward the other sailors. “And it’s not as if you would have the nerve to steal the ship without me.”

“Borrowed. Only borrowed.”

The wind flags in the sail as the ship turns back toward the port. Daphne, and by extension, Arsinoe in Daphne’s body, looks to the stern where a boy has given up the wheel. He is Henry Redville—Lord Henry Redville from the country of Centra—and he makes his way to her and Richard and throws his arms around them.

“How are my two favorite wards?” Henry asks.

“She is not a ward,” says Richard. “She is a foundling. A foundling, scooped from the sea, the lone survivor of one wreck and sure to be the cursed cause of another with her penchant for sailing in disguise.”

“You know, Richard,” says Daphne, “when you were small, your nurses said you were sickly and wont to die.”

Arsinoe feels her own ribs squeezed as Henry hugs them together as though to reconcile them by force. And it works. Richard and Daphne laugh.

“I suppose she is not a curse,” says Richard. “How could she be, when she is already a sea monster stuffed into a baby’s skin.”

“And never forget it. Now stop calling me ‘she.’ I am still David, in tunic and hose. No more ‘she’ until we’re back in the castle.”

The dream moves forward, past the place where she last woke. Yet the strangeness does not abate completely; Arsinoe is still disoriented, and in awe, staring up at the white cliffs overlooking the bay, in a mainland country she has never been to, and in a time she does not know. But it is only a dream, and in any case, she cannot seem to will herself awake.

Daphne, along with Henry (they seem to have left Richard at the port) enter the castle via a hidden passageway through the cliffs, their way guided by lanterns until they reach the end, and Daphne steps behind a hanging curtain to change into her girl’s clothes. Off comes the tunic and scratchy hose, and on goes a high-waisted red dress.

Blegh. I change my mind. This dress is even less comfortable than the tunic.

But even worse than that is the long, black wig.

“Daphne. Your wig is askew.” Henry holds out the lantern and tugs the wig on properly. Then he tops it with a terrible veiled headdress. Trapped inside Daphne, Arsinoe grimaces.

As Daphne fumbles with the wig again, Arsinoe tries to look around. She cannot, of course, which is frustrating. But she is asleep and this is only a dream, so she is not bothered too much.

“I’m sorry, Daph,” says Henry. “Women’s wardrobes are truly a mystery to me.”

“The girls in the tavern tell a different story,” she grumbles, and prods him in the ribs.

I believe I would like to hear that story. This boy Henry is nearly as handsome as Joseph. Tall and lean, with straight, thick, brown hair the color of an oiled walnut shell. A pity he had not been the one changing clothes behind the sheet.

In the dream, Daphne and Henry step out of the passageway. In the corner of her vision, Arsinoe sees that they came from a door hidden behind a tapestry of hunting dogs. Daphne smooths the waist of her dark red gown, and Henry adjusts the fall of her white veil. He pulls his hands away quickly at the sound of a voice.

“My lord, your lady mother wishes to see you. To see you both.”

“All right. Where is she?”

“Waiting in her privy chamber, my lord.”

Privy chamber. What exactly is a privy chamber?

Arsinoe watches, carried easily along inside Daphne’s body as they make their way to the chamber. She studies the woman they bow to (must be Henry’s lady mother) as well as the relative plainness of the room. The woman is obviously high-born, dressed in a fine gown in cloth of silver, but the rug beneath their feet is thinner than Arsinoe is used to and the stone walls, very rough.