Two Dark Reigns (Three Dark Crowns #3)(24)
“Wait.” Katharine stops a servant as she passes with a tureen of soup. She dips a spoon and tastes it. “The little brat had better eat something today. This soup is too good to miss.”
The banquet progresses as banquets do until someone notices a commotion near the harbor. Katharine has almost relaxed enough to sample the desserts when cries of alarm begin to rise.
Pietyr nods to one of the queensguard, and several soldiers push through the crowd. Everyone has turned toward Bardon Harbor. Even the guards. “Pietyr, what is it?” Katharine asks, and stands.
The mist has risen thick over the water. So thick it might be a cloud, if clouds were known to creep quickly and deliberately toward land. At the sight of it coming closer, those nearest the docks start to back up and then to flee, walking quickly up the hill for higher ground. Katharine glances nervously around the square. There are so many people gathered. If they are not careful, there will be a panic.
She thrusts out her arm and snaps her fingers at High Priestess Luca.
“You and I must go there now.” She walks around the table, and Luca is already out of her chair following. “Bring horses for me and the High Priestess,” she says loudly. “And clear a path to the harbor.”
“Make way for the queen! Stand clear!”
In moments, her queensguard has opened the road to them. Katharine’s black stallion is ready for her, always nearby and saddled in case of emergency. She half leaps and is half thrown onto his back.
“That was good work,” Luca says when she is mounted and riding beside her. “Nothing curbs a panic like the courage of a queen. Natalia would be proud.”
“I am too distracted just now to wonder whether you mean that,” Katharine replies. Her eyes are ahead, on the approaching mist. She hears, behind them in the square, Pietyr and the Black Council mounting horses to follow. As they ride to the docks, she holds her stallion to a canter to keep from trampling anyone near the shore, but she need not have bothered. Her figure on horseback is enough to clear a path, hair a black flag and black gown billowing, and the gathered folk part like butter to a hot blade.
“Stay. Do not dismount.” Luca holds her hand out across Katharine’s reins. “The mist does not do this. I do not know what it means.”
“I am the Queen Crowned.” Katharine takes a breath and swings her leg over to land on the dirt. “I have nothing to fear. It is my mist.” Hers. Theirs. The mist has been the protector of the island ever since it was created by the last and greatest Blue Queen. It will not hurt her. It cannot. It was her bloodline that made it.
“Help me, old sisters.” She reaches out to them with her mind and feels their familiar surge in her veins. Katharine walks toward the shore as the dead queens fill her ears with shrieks. She walks until the sand is wet from the surf, and then they allow her to go no farther.
A wall of white and swirling gray stretches across the harbor from north to south. It has traveled into the shallows, closer than she has ever seen it and continues to advance, moving like the sea creatures do: smoothly and swiftly. The way it darts at times reminds her of a striking shark.
How badly Katharine wants to run. The mist is so thick. If it rushes upon the shore, she is sure it will knock her down and smother her. Choke her. She will die, and find the ghosts of Mirabella and Arsinoe waiting inside the gloom.
“No,” she whispers. “You must stop.”
The mist pushes forward, and the people behind her scream. Perhaps even the High Priestess. Certainly Genevieve. But before the cloud can touch the earth, it draws back and moves away, back out to sea to dissipate and break apart, gone so quickly, it is hard to believe it was there in the first place.
Katharine hears footsteps as Rho comes to stand at her shoulder, along with Pietyr, backed by a dozen queensguard.
“Queen Katharine, are you unharmed?” He examines her, but she pats his hand and moves him aside. She was not touched.
“What is that?” Rho draws her serrated knife and points into the waves. Something dark and heavy rolls through the water. A dark shape, soon joined by more, cresting and coming toward shore.
Screams and moans of terror sound from all sides as Katharine walks toward the water to see what the mist has brought.
“Keep them quiet,” she orders. “Keep them back!” The dead sisters hiss and spit; they scratch at her insides and retreat to the darkest corners of her mind. She does not care. Nor does she care when she steps into the water up to the ankles and catches waves across her knees.
The mist has brought her bodies. Ragged, water-logged corpses tossed heavily into the shallows.
Katharine splashes in deeper. The Goddess has answered her prayer. She has brought her the corpses of her sisters and the cursed naturalist. The mainland suitor and the Wolf Spring boy. Her hope to see what is left of Mirabella and Arsinoe is so strong that she convinces herself it is them, even though there are far too many. Far more than she sought. She convinces herself it is them until she turns the first one over and sees a stranger’s watery eyes staring back.
As the bodies beach themselves, Katharine searches up and down the sand, looking into one dead face and then another for some spark of recognition. But none are queens.
“Haul them out.” She points to the water. She shouts when her queensguard hesitates to move. “Haul them out and line them up on the sand!”
It takes several minutes for the task to be completed. Her soldiers grimace, and some will not touch the corpses or enter the water until Rho forces them to at knifepoint. “My priestesses are braver than you,” Rho barks, and several priestesses hurry into the surf to help, wetting their white robes to the waist.