Two Dark Reigns (Three Dark Crowns #3)(39)

Unfortunately, the gesture did nothing to stem the nervous whispers that wind through the marketplaces daily: that the bodies the mist brought were a warning or that they were a macabre gift for the Undead Queen. Either way, the people are afraid it was a sign of more deaths to come, now that Katharine is on the throne.

“Queen Katharine. Your portrait has been completed. The master painter would like to present it to you.”

“Show him in.” She stands as the servants whisk away the fabric.

“This is a nice surprise,” says Pietyr. All day he has been sitting in the corner, poring over correspondence from the mainland. More payments to be made to Nicolas’s family, no doubt. “We did not expect a completed portrait for at least another week.”

They wait quietly as the painter and his apprentice enter and bow and set the covered portrait and easel in the center of the room.

“Master Bethal.” Katharine steps forward to greet the painter and take his hands. “How lovely to see you.”

Bethal drops to one knee.

“The honor is mine. It was a great pleasure to paint a queen of such beauty.” He rises and motions to his apprentice to remove the cloth.

Katharine stares at the painting, silent for so long that the smile on Master Bethal’s face begins to crack.

“Is something wrong?” He looks from the portrait and back to her.

Pietyr turns toward her.

“Kat?”

The portrait is perfect. The queen in the painting has her same pale, slightly hollow cheek, her same regal neck. Somehow it has managed to portray her smallness and the delicacy of her bones. Even the little coral snake, which when she posed was only a coil of rope, has been transformed into the very likeness of Sweetheart.

“My queen? If you are displeased—”

“No,” she says finally, and Bethal exhales with relief. “You have captured me utterly. It is so lifelike that I am tempted to ask if my snake also modeled for you in secret.” She steps closer, eye to eye with her image. The eyes are the only things he got wrong. The queen in the portrait’s eyes are serene. Pensive. Perhaps a little playful. There is nothing looking out from behind them.

“It will be hung in the throne room immediately.” Pietyr shakes the painter’s hand. In the throne room it will go, until her reign is over. Then they will pull it down and take it to be hung in the Hall of Queens.

The last in a long line, she thinks, and unconsciously touches her stomach. Her poison stomach and her poison womb, filled with poisoned blood that killed her first king-consort and may kill every king-consort who comes after.

“What is that?” She points into the painting’s background at a table piled high with a poisoned feast: glossy belladonna berries and sugar-crystallized scorpions, a roasted fowl glazed a sinister purple.

But poisoned food is not the only thing on the table. Mixed in with the feast are bones. Long thigh bones and rib cages, tainted with blood and shadow. And on the end, in plain view, is a human skull.

“It is for you,” Bethal stammers. “Our Undead Queen.”

Katharine frowns, but before she can object, Pietyr caresses her cheek.

“Embrace it. It is what sets you apart. It is your legacy.”

“A prosperous, peaceful reign is the only legacy I need.” But no one will listen. Queen Katharine, of the poisoner dynasty, the portrait’s plaque will read. And beneath that, Katharine the Undead.

On the way to the council chamber, Bree Westwood falls into step beside her.

“Good day,” says Bree as she tries and fails to execute a proper curtsy while walking.

“Good morning, Bree.” Katharine’s eyes move over the other girl’s burnished brown waves, her pale blue dress embroidered with lilies. “You are always so effortlessly lovely. I wonder, did you learn those tricks from my sister?”

Bree’s eyes widen but only for a moment.

“Or perhaps, my queen, she learned them from me.”

Katharine smiles. The girl has cheek.

Ahead of them, the doors of the Black Council chamber are swung wide. She can see Pietyr inside, his eyebrows raised in wonder at the sight of them walking together. And she hears the fractured murmurings of two sides at odds. It is suddenly too exhausting to bear.

“Will you walk with me a moment, Bree?”

“Of course.”

They take a sharp turn. Inside the chamber, Genevieve rises in alarm, and Katharine halts her with a finger. She knows they are eager to discuss the findings of the autopsies performed on the bodies of the mist victims even though nothing was found. Nothing. No answers. No solutions.

“Some air by the window, perhaps,” says Bree.

The window has been modernized, as some on the lower levels of the Volroy have been, and contains glass, but the panes have been opened to allow in the late-summer breeze. How Katharine misses Greavesdrake. The manor house is much more comfortable. More luxurious in so many ways. But it is nowhere near as grand. It is not the monument that the Volroy is.

Katharine and Bree look out the window together, as companionable as if they are old friends. In the courtyard, beneath the trees, that little priestess of Mirabella’s crouches near the hedge, feeding an enormous flock of birds.

“She spends quite a lot of time with birds,” Katharine says. “I am always seeing this bird or that flying past her. Black ones with smart little tufts on their heads.” Bree stiffens. “She must have had a strong naturalist gift before she took the bracelets for it to linger so.”