Two Dark Reigns (Three Dark Crowns #3)(59)

In answer, the dark queen slides toward her. She drags across the ground and across the half-submerged sacred stones. Arsinoe steps back until she feels the hanging branches of the bent-over tree. She does not know what she fears most: Queen Illiann or it.

The Blue Queen draws closer, and as she comes, the darkness melts away at the edges until it is completely gone, and Arsinoe stands face to face with Daphne.

Daphne, the Blue Queen. Not Illiann.

“Daphne! It’s been you the whole time? How . . . Why are you wearing Illiann’s crown?”

She smiles at her, a smile Arsinoe has seen only through a looking glass. She touches her mouth, shakes her head.

“Right, right. You still can’t speak.”

Daphne cocks her head, and the dream shifts again, this time only a flash, a rush of colors. But it is all nightmare. Blood and swords and bodies rotting on the ground. Camden with her fur stained red. Jules—

“Jules!”

She jerks awake and finds Mirabella and Billy leaned over her. Mirabella holding her shoulders while Billy holds a candle so close it is likely to singe her eyebrows.

“Arsinoe,” Mirabella gasps. “What is it?”

“Jules.” Arsinoe swallows. The dream is still thick around her. She half expects to look into the corner and see Daphne standing there in Queen Illiann’s crown.

“Billy?” They hear his sister, Jane, call out from down the hall. “Is everything all right?”

“It’s fine, Jane. Just a nightmare. Go back to sleep.”

Arsinoe breaks away from him and swings her rubbery legs out of bed. “It wasn’t just a nightmare. It was a message.”

“What message?” he asks. “What did you see?”

“I saw Jules. On a battlefield. With Katharine.”

“A battlefield?” Mirabella’s brow knits. “The island has not seen a battlefield in a hundred years.”

“I know what I saw.”

“You do not have the sight gift—”

“I know what I saw,” Arsinoe snaps.

“All right. But it was still only a nightmare.”

Billy and Mirabella exchange that look, the one she has come to hate, that says they are worried and she is losing her mind. If she tries to tell them now, about Daphne, about the message, they will never believe her. Worse, they might try to stop her. So even though her heart is halfway into her throat, she forces herself to be calm.

“It felt very real,” she says.

“I’m sure that it did. Was it like . . . the other dreams you’ve had?” Billy sets down the candle. He pours her a cup of water from the pitcher on her bedside table.

“No. Not really.”

Arsinoe drinks down the water and runs her fingers through her hair. The dream of Jules felt like a warning. A consequence if she does not do what Daphne wants.

“Are you . . . going to be all right?” Billy asks.

“I guess so,” she says.

“Can you go back to sleep? We can talk more in the morning.”

Arsinoe nods, and begins to think of ways to pay for a boat back to the island.





THE VOLROY




After the attack of the mist in Rolanth, Katharine and her court quickly returned to Indrid Down. No one, not even Antonin and Genevieve, who love the capital as their own mother, really wanted to return. But there was nowhere else to go.

“They have still not found all of those who went missing,” Katharine says, lying in Pietyr’s arms in the safety of her rooms. “How long will it take? Or does the mist mean to keep them?”

Pietyr kisses the top of her head.

“I do not know, Kat. But whoever is found, and in whatever state, should be brought to the capital immediately. There are bound to be wild tales. And we will want to verify them.”

“We have to find a way to fight the mist, Pietyr. They think I am the cause of it!” All the way back to the Volroy, they had been dogged by whispers and shifting eyes. The mist or the queen, the people cannot decide who they ought to fear most. But they have decided who to blame.

“Pietyr.” She slides her fingertips between the buttons of his shirt to feel his heartbeat, and the warmth of his skin. “What if the mist is right?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if I am not supposed to be in the crown? What if it was not meant to be me and I stole it, like the people are saying?”

Pietyr props his head on his elbow, his ice-blue eyes soft, for once.

“No one knows why the mist is doing this. When people are afraid, they grasp on to the easiest answer.”

“But what if it was supposed to be Mirabella? Or even”—she makes a sour face—“Arsinoe?”

“Then it would be them. The crown of Fennbirn cannot be stolen. It must be won, and you won it.”

“By default. Because I was the only one who wanted it. I am the queen because they abandoned us and allowed me to be.”

“That is right.” He brushes a lock of black hair from her neck. “You are the Queen Crowned because you fought when they did not. Because you would have killed them as a queen does. You are not the one who does not belong in the crown.” He looks down to her chest, to the center of her.

“The dead queens. They are the ones who were never meant for it.”