Two Dark Reigns (Three Dark Crowns #3)(48)

“Emilia, don’t!” The knife flies, straight for the villager’s heart. Jules lurches across the table, hand flung out. She calls to the knife with her gift, fighting against Emilia’s good, solid throw. At the last moment, it veers off-course so hard that it winds up stuck fast in the ceiling.

Every face turns to Jules.

“Call her,” Mathilde whispers. “Call her now.”

Too stunned to disobey, Jules reaches out for Camden, and every eye darts to the stairs as the cougar bursts through the door. She bounds down the steps and leaps over the rail, landing on tables and upending cups and plates, her snarl ferocious until she reaches Jules and stands before her to roar.

“This is the Legion Queen,” Mathilde says to the frozen crowd. “The strongest naturalist in ten generations. The strongest warrior in two hundred years. She is the one who will fight for all the gifts. She is the one who will change everything.”





THE MAINLAND




The fortune-telling shop that Arsinoe finds has a brass bell over the door. A loud brass bell, and she grimaces as soon as she walks inside. But it seems that the shop is empty. No one there to see her. No one to stare. She reaches up and quiets the bell, and smiles as she thinks of Luke, whose bell back home is not so jarring.

Quietly, she unfurls the cloth sack she brought and begins roaming through shelves. It is easy to find three fat white candles, and into the sack they go, knocking together gently.

“You are not from here.”

Arsinoe spins and finds herself face-to-face with the shopkeeper, a woman in beads and silks, and dark, curling hair.

“No, madam. I’ve had to travel over half the city to find a shop like yours.”

The shopkeeper laughs.

“That’s not what I meant. How can I help you today?” Without warning, she tugs the cloth sack open and peers inside. Her mouth crooks down. “White candles. A less interesting purchase than I’d hoped.”

“I also need herbs. And oil.”

“You didn’t need to cross the city for those.”

“I suppose I could’ve swiped the herbs from the kitchen,” says Arsinoe. “But then my hosts would have complained when their meat was bland. I know you have the herbs here; I can smell them.”

The woman leads her toward the back, where there are racks and racks of dried herbs and mushrooms, kept in jars or bound in bundles with butcher’s string. Arsinoe selects which herb she needs, something that will give off plenty of smoke when burned. Something that will lend its aroma but not so strongly as to be distracting. Her hand hovers over a bundle of sage, then she changes her mind and frowns.

Low magic is the only link to the island that the Goddess can hear on the mainland. So Madrigal said. But it would need help to be heard so far away. Here there is no bent-over tree, no sacred valley to whisper her curses into. The oil and the herbs, the flames of the candles would lend her focus, raise her voice over the waves of the sea, all the way back to Fennbirn, perhaps even into the past, to the time of the Blue Queen.

“Have you tried burning amber or resins . . . ?” The shopkeeper reaches up onto a shelf. She hands Arsinoe a chunk that looks like Grandma Cait’s nut brittle but smells like an evergreen. “It will burn longer. Give you more time.” She laughs again at Arsinoe’s suspicious face. “So surprised to find a fortune-teller in a fortune-telling shop. Yes. I know what you’re up to.”

She drops more resin into Arsinoe’s sack and gestures for her to follow behind a curtain to a smaller room filled with crystals and clear orbs for seers.

“How does a shop like this exist here?” Arsinoe asks.

“It doesn’t. Not in the fine parts of town. But as long as we stay buried in the slums, and as long as we provide harmless diversions for the ladies—fortune-telling and séances—they don’t run us out.” She unlocks a cabinet and reaches inside.

“Are you . . . from here?”

“I am. But my grandmother . . . wasn’t.”

“Do you know who I am?” Arsinoe asks warily.

The woman peers at her.

“I know you are reaching out for answers. And I know that you don’t fear the price.” The last bit she said staring through Arsinoe’s sleeves, as if she could trace the scars from the low magic cuts. “Here. The last of what you will need.” She walks to Arsinoe and slides a bottle into her hand: Pretty blue frosted glass stoppered with a cork.

Arsinoe stares at it as she follows her back to the register. “How much is this?”

“How much do you have?”

She reaches into her trouser pockets, fishes out her handful of coins, and lays them on the counter.

“It is that much,” the shopkeeper says, and sweeps them away.

“It can’t be. Just the bottle must be worth more.”

“Take it,” the woman says. “And take care. Your journey begins. I do not see where it ends. Only that it does.”

Only that it does. The woman’s words echo through Arsinoe’s head all the way back through the city until she reaches the cemetery and Joseph’s grave, where she has arranged to meet Mirabella. The words could mean anything. Or they could be just the mumblings of a fake fortune-teller.

“Did you get everything?”

Arsinoe jumps when Mirabella steps out from behind one of the trees near the path.