Two Dark Reigns (Three Dark Crowns #3)(42)

“We should disperse them,” Pietyr whispers. “I will notify the queensguard.”

“It was you!”

Katharine blinks at Maxwell Lane. He has stood, and points at her for all to see.

“You! Undead Queen! You are the curse!”

Pietyr presses against her, as if to be a shield. Rho leaps deftly off the fishing boat and quiets Lane with her hands, too quickly for Katharine to see. Perhaps she merely knocked him unconscious. Perhaps she broke his neck. Either way, it is too late, for the crowd has latched on to the chant.

“Undead Queen! Poisoner! Thief!”

They advance on her as a mob. Some with only fists. Others with knives. Gaffs. Or short thick clubs.

“Queensguard!” Antonin shouts, though the soldiers are already running to intervene, fending off the crowd with swords. They make a wall of themselves and their crossed spears.

“It is all right, Kat. Get past them to the horses.” Pietyr presses her ahead and pulls Bree along in his shadow. Rho has disappeared with Lane back into the boat. Clever. Let the mob forget her. She will be safe.

Katharine keeps her head high. The people do not really hate her, she tells herself. They are only afraid. As they should be. As she is. And when she saves them, when she quiets the mist, they will remember that.

“Cursed queen!”

A clod of mud and filth flies through the air and strikes her chin. It splashes down her neck and into the bodice of her dress.

“Arrest them!” Pietyr growls. “How dare you!”

More mud flies. And stones. Bree screams and Pietyr puts his arms up to try and shield them all.

Katharine touches the mud on her chest. She listens to the hateful chants of her people.

“Katharine! Run! The queensguard cannot hold them!”

The first of the mob breaks through the line and charges with a raised club. Katharine draws one of her knives. She shoves Pietyr to one side and hooks the boy around the neck as he comes, plunging the blade up into his throat, up through his shouting tongue. His blood soaks into her glove, and she lifts him high, so strong, much stronger than he is. The dead queens rise to the surface, and Katharine feels as though she has doubled in size, tripled, that she and they are unending.

When the boy ceases to kick, she drops him in a heavy heap. The noise is gone, the crowd silent. Those closest have slid to their knees and peer out around the legs of the queensguard with fearful tears on their cheeks.

“Kat.”

She looks at Pietyr. His hands are raised, palms out. She looks down at the boy, so very young and so very dead, his blood cooling on her arms.

“Pietyr,” she whispers. “What have I done?”





THE MAINLAND




The night after the party at the governor’s estate, Mirabella and Billy sit in the kitchen after the rest of the house has gone to sleep.

“I don’t like meeting like this.” He pushes their solitary candle closer to the center of the table and hovers over it, ready to blow it out at the first sound of footsteps. “You know how she hates it when we talk about her like she’s not there. But sometimes—”

“Sometimes we need to talk about her when she is not here.” Mirabella stares into the tiny flame, resolute. But she says nothing more. She does not like it any more than he does.

Upstairs, Arsinoe lies in her bed, sleeping, dreaming through the eyes of another queen. A queen from generations ago, hundreds of years.

“Couldn’t they be . . . just dreams?” Billy asks.

“They do not seem like ‘just dreams.’”

“But you’ve never heard of this happening to any other queen before?”

“No one knows anything about a queen after she leaves the island. Maybe this is common.” The candlelight flickers with her breath. It is hard to resist trying to test her gift, to see if she can push it higher, make it stronger. But she has tried and failed so many times that she is not brave enough to try anymore. “Besides, Arsinoe and I are different. Our destiny was to be dead. So who knows what lies ahead for us now?”

“I still think it could be nightmares.” Billy rubs his eyes. “You have both been . . . uprooted . . . strangers in a new place, and she’s had a difficult time with my mother and Christine.”

“Billy, I do not think—”

“And before that, the entire bloody, traumatic year. These dreams might pass if we let them.”

He is trying to make it so just because he declares it. She has heard him use the same tone with his mother and other young men. She thinks of it as Billy’s “mainlander” voice. But this is queen’s business. Fennbirn business, and when she slides her hand across the table, he is all too happy to take it.

“From what she has told me, Arsinoe is no historian. She says . . .” She pauses, and smiles at the memory. “She says that Ellis Milone was the historian, so anything she needed to know was stored for safekeeping in his mind.

“Yet she recalled the name of Queen Illiann’s king-consort, Henry Redville, and knew where he was from.”

“Henry Redville,” Billy grumbles. “And what sort of man was he?”

“He was a king-consort. A good one. He remained true to the queen. He led a fleet of ships into the last battle.”

“Did he die?”