Two Dark Reigns (Three Dark Crowns #3)(26)

“What a dream,” she whispers.

“Arsinoe.” She flinches when Mirabella says her name. “What was that?”

“It was . . . Why are you awake? Did I wake you?”

“I was not asleep.” Their room is so dark that Arsinoe is only shapes. Hints of bare arms poking out of her pale nightclothes. Mirabella climbs out from underneath her sheets and goes to sit at the foot of Arsinoe’s bed. She takes the candle from her bedside table.

Her fire feels close. She can almost sense the heat of it, curling around her ankles like a warm and loyal pet. A small pet now, after weeks on the mainland. Mirabella stares at the wick of the candle and calls the flame. Nothing happens. It is so slow and shy. Each time it takes longer and longer, and the muscle inside her mind goes slack.

“You can always use a match,” Arsinoe says.

“Elementals with gifts of fire do not use matches.” But she sets the candle down. “What were you dreaming about?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you keeping secrets?”

“No. I’m just not sure I’m ready to tell you I’m losing my mind.”

Mirabella touches the tip of the wick. It is not even warm, and shame creeps up the back of her neck.

“You said, ‘Centra.’ Is that what you were dreaming of?”

“You know it?” Arsinoe says, and then, “Of course you do. So what do you know about it?”

“Not much.”

“Most people on the island wouldn’t even recognize the name.”

Mirabella thinks back to her teachings. To afternoons with Luca in the temple, surrounded by stacks of books. Even all the way back to Willa and the Black Cottage.

“I know that Centra is the name of Fennbirn’s ally to the north. Before the mist came. That is all.”

“That’s all?”

“What else mattered? All nations that are not Fennbirn are the mainland now.”

“Do you know anything about their history?” Arsinoe asks.

“Nothing,” she replies.

“Think hard. Nothing about a missing Fennbirn queen called Daphne?”

“A missing Fennbirn queen? Of course not. Arsinoe, what are you dreaming of?”

“What about Henry Redville?”

“Arsinoe—” She turns to her in the dark to demand answers. But that name. Henry Redville. “Redville of Centra,” she says. “I think he was Queen Illiann’s king-consort. Queen Illiann, the last Blue Queen.”

“Queen Illiann.”

“Yes,” Mirabella says. She would say more, but everyone knows of Illiann, the last and greatest Blue Queen, who won a great war with the mainland and whose gift was so strong that she created the very mist that shrouds and protects them to this day. Everyone knows that legend. Even those who resist study as hard as Arsinoe.

Arsinoe gets out of bed and starts to pace, jostling the little dog at the foot of the bed that Mirabella had nearly forgotten about. “Her king-consort. But he loves Daphne. And if Daphne is nowhere in the history books . . . then did she stay behind or go back to the island to be killed? And if Henry Redville was a real person, then I really am—” She stops and turns back to Mirabella in the dark. “Dreaming through her eyes.”

“Dreaming through whose eyes?”

“Daphne’s.”

“Daphne,” Mirabella says doubtfully. “The lost Fennbirn queen?”

Arsinoe quiets, and Mirabella finally strikes a match to light the candle, tired of trying to decipher her sister’s expressions in the blackness. Yellow-orange light flickers through the room; she touches her candle to the lamp on Arsinoe’s bedside table, and the space glows brighter.

Arsinoe’s eyes are haunted. But even so, the corner of her mouth is upturned as though she is amused.

“Tell me what you dreamed.”

“I dreamed I was inside someone else.” Arsinoe touches the ends of her hair, down past her shoulder now. She touches her chest and her face, as if to make sure they are still hers. “Someone who sailed ships on Centra with Henry Redville and had black eyes and hair, just like ours.”

“On Centra,” Mirabella says. “With Henry Redville. Arsinoe, that was over four hundred years ago.”

“Four hundred . . .” She sits down beside Mirabella on the bed, pulling the dog into her arms when he wakes and begins to whine. “What does that mean? Why am I dreaming it?”

“It cannot be real. It must not be. Perhaps it is only a memory, from a book you forgot about reading.”

“Maybe,” Arsinoe whispers, but Mirabella can tell she does not think so. “Except I saw something else first. In the cemetery.”

“What?” Mirabella holds her breath. Finally, her sister is ready to tell her what happened. She has been patient, but her patience had started to wear thin.

“A dark figure. Like a shadow. She had on a crown made of silver and bright blue stones.” Arsinoe goes to her desk and rifles through it for paper and ink. The sound of the pen scratching across it in the dark sends unpleasant twitches down Mirabella’s spine. She hands the paper to Mirabella, who looks at it in the candlelight.

“The Blue Queen’s crown.”

“I saw the shadow of the Blue Queen,” Arsinoe says. “And it pointed back to Fennbirn.”