Two Dark Reigns (Three Dark Crowns #3)(25)

Katharine and Rho survey the bodies lined up on the beach. Pieces of their crafts have been brought up as well, bits of curved hull and planks, an oar. Some on shore and others still bobbing in the waves. Scattered tidbits.

“What is this?” Katharine asks, and no one replies. “Bring me someone who might know.”

Rho shouts to the gathered crowd, and a man comes forward, wringing his hat between his hands. In the face of so much death, he almost forgets to drop to his knee.

“You are familiar with the harbor?”

“I am, my queen.”

“Can you tell me, then, who these people are?”

“They are—” He hesitates, looks up and over the wet shapes laid out. “They are the searchers. They sailed this morning at your request, to search for the remains of the traitor queens.”

Katharine clenches her jaw.

“Is this all of them?”

“I don’t know, my queen. It—it seems so.” He presses his handkerchief to his sweating, balding head and then again to his mouth and nose. The stench of rotting flesh is thick in the heat. But if they sailed that morning, they should not smell at all. Katharine dismisses the man and steps closer to the corpses with Rho.

“All sailed out today, he said,” Rho says in a low voice. “But some of these bodies are much older, as if—”

“As if they drowned weeks ago.”

Katharine stares down the line of wet, bloated dead, some large, some small, some missing parts. Women and men alike. Fishers and sailors who were doing her bidding. They had hoped to find Arsinoe and Mirabella facedown in the sea and net themselves a fine reward.

Now they remind Katharine of seals, spread out to lounge on the warm sand. The bravest of the gulls flaps down atop one of the farthest bodies and begins to tear at it like a thief after coin. Then it raises its head and flies away. Someone with the naturalist gift must have told it to wait.

“What could have done all this?” Pietyr turns to the balding man. “Did they all sail together? Travel as a fleet?”

“No, Master Arron. The Carroway sisters and their brother”—he gestures to three—“they set out in two small craft with crew.” He points to several more. “Mary Howe and her crew there, she has the elemental gift and a knack for storms. She’s never once sailed into bad weather, that one.” Mary Howe lies faceup and freshly dead, her blue shirt buttoned to the throat. What she wore on her bottom half is anyone’s guess. The entirety of her lower body is gone. Torn away. Katharine walks to her and leans down, pushes up her shirttails and lifts the torso to better look at the wound. It is ragged and there are errant tooth marks. A shark. The rest of the body is pristine.

“Odd for the shark to leave it so. Odd for a shark to have killed her at all in these waters.”

The bodies lying on the beach tell a strange story. Some are clearly drowned, with purple lips and bloated faces, while others bear signs of harm: a boy with one side of his head cleaved in as if from a heavy, sharp object, another with what looks to be a stab wound to the heart. Some bodies seem to have been dead so long that the flesh falls from them in whitened, water-logged chunks. Yet others, like Mary Howe’s, are so fresh she might have died only hours ago.

Katharine kneels and buries her gloved hands deep in the rot of some poor girl, her face unrecognizable.

“Queen Katharine,” Pietyr says.

“What?” She moves to the next body, and the next, turning their heads left and right, inspecting them. They are a message, she thinks. They have something to tell her if she will only look hard enough. “How . . . how did you die . . . ?” she murmurs, and Pietyr puts his hand on her shoulder.

“Kat.”

She stops and looks up, sees all the gathered staring faces. They have watched her pick through the bodies crouched like a crab, her black silk gloves slicked with blood to the elbows.

Reluctantly, Katharine rises.

“I am a poisoner, Pietyr. Taught by Natalia these many years. What do they think? That I am shy to what death does to flesh? That I have never seen a gut burst open?”

Pietyr’s mouth draws into a firm line. Even he, an Arron himself, looks slightly green.

Katharine stares out toward the sea. Clear now, calm and shining on a sunny afternoon. Gathered higher on the beach, the people whisper. Too many whispers and voices to identify, but she is able to hear one word above all.

“Undead.”





THE MAINLAND




At first when Mirabella hears Arsinoe muttering in her sleep, she thinks she must be having some scandalous dream about Billy. Mirabella has stayed awake, lying in the dark and listening to Arsinoe’s breathing slow. Listening to her drift off. Looking after her as an older sister should after a younger sister is frightened in a graveyard. So when she hears Arsinoe start to murmur happily, she smiles, torn between listening closer and pressing her pillow around her ears. She is reaching for her pillow when Arsinoe says:

“Centra.”

Mirabella sits up and turns toward her sister. She knows that word. She listens closer as the dream goes on, Arsinoe muttering faster and faster, her words becoming harder to hear. Sometimes it is only a snort. Lots of snorts, actually, and Mirabella bites her lip to keep from laughing.

Suddenly, after a moment of quiet, Arsinoe jolts up from her pillow, back straight as a board. Then she slumps and rubs her face with both hands.