Two Dark Reigns (Three Dark Crowns #3)(6)

“The first was a warning, Margaret. The next will go into your heart.”





BASTIAN CITY




Jules Milone places her hands on the stones of the city wall. Beneath her palms, the mortar is rough, warmed by the sun but cooling now in the early hours of twilight. Before her lie the sea and the beach, cast in gray by the stretching shadow. The sound of the waves and the smell of the salt air are a little like home, but nothing else is. The wind in Bastian is less wild, and the beach is not dark sand and flat black rock for the seals to lie on, but pale, fading into a beach of small red and white wave-polished stones. It is pretty. But it is not Wolf Spring.

Camden, her cougar familiar, rubs along the back of her, hard enough to press her to the wall, and Jules winds her fingers deep into the big cat’s soft, golden coat.

Their companion on this walk is Emilia Vatros, the eldest daughter of the Vatros clan, warriors who have led Bastian City for as long as anyone can remember. Emilia looks at Camden and frowns. She would have rathered the cat stay behind, in hiding. But Jules is a naturalist, gifted to make fruit ripen and fish swim into her net. And she does not like to go anywhere without her cougar.

Camden hops up and places her good front paw atop the stones, to look out at the waves like Jules is. Jules moves quickly to drag her back down, careful to avoid the cat’s bad shoulder, injured the past winter by an attacking bear.

“It is all right,” Emilia says. “No one is here, and with the sun at her back, anyone looking will mistake her for a big dog.”

Camden cocks her head as though to say, Big dog, my eye, and swats at Emilia half-heartedly when the warrior girl leaps up onto the wall’s edge. Jules gasps. The wall is high, and the ditch below full of unfriendly rocks.

“Don’t do that,” Jules says.

“Do what?”

“Just jump up there like that. You’re making me nervous.”

Emilia raises her eyebrows and hops from stone to stone. She spins on one foot.

“Be as nervous as you like. I’ve been running these walls since I was nine. The war gift gives balance. You could do it as well as I. Perhaps even better. Faster.” She smirks at Jules’s doubtful face. “Or perhaps you could had your naturalist mother not bound your war gift with low magic.”

Emilia spins away, miming sword slashes and dagger strikes with imaginary weapons. She has the grace of a bird. Of a cat.

Maybe Jules could do what Emilia does. She is legion cursed, after all. Cursed with two gifts: naturalist and war.

“Had Madrigal not bound the curse, I’d have been driven insane and been drowned a long time ago.”

“Yet you can use your war gift now. It is weakened, but it is there. So maybe you would have been fine all along.” Emilia spins again and thrusts an imaginary sword at Jules’s throat. “Maybe the madness of the legion curse is nothing but a lie spread by the temple.”

“Why would they lie?”

“To keep anyone from being as powerful as you could be.”

Jules narrows her eyes, and Emilia shrugs.

“I see you think it is not worth the risk.” She shrugs again. “Fine. You have the war gift, however muted, so I will hide you however long. Until you no longer want to hide.”

On tiptoe now, Emilia jumps to another stone. But the stone she lands on is loose, and she wobbles precariously.

“Emilia!”

Emilia grins and lowers her arms.

“I knew it was loose,” she says, and chuckles when Jules scowls. “I know every step of this wall. Every crack in the mortar. Every creak in the gates. And I hate it.”

“Why do you hate it?” Jules looks back at Bastian City, the light and shadow slatted across it by the setting sun. To her it is a marvel, fortified and ordered, built-up buildings of gray brick and timber. The marketplace with stalls covered over in red cloth, the shades as differed as the offered goods as the dye fades with age.

“I love Bastian,” says Emilia. She jumps down. “I hate the wall. We keep it up now because of the gift, because to be ever prepared is our way. But a wall isn’t needed when we have the mist. So it just seals us off.” She clenches a fist and pounds the stone. “Until we forget the rest of the island. The wall makes the people turn their backs, lazy and safe, and who cares if the gift grows weak? Who cares that another poisoner wears the crown?” She watches Jules run her fingers along the mortar lines. “I suppose there are no walls at all in Wolf Spring.”

“Not like these.” Only fences made of wood or pretty, piled rocks to mark the borders between farms. Easily jumped by a horse, or by a person with enough of a running start. “When we rode into Indrid Down to save Mirabella from Katharine in the duel, we passed what was left of the wall that once enclosed the capital. It was overgrown with grasses and weeds. Half-buried. There’s nothing else on the island like this. Not even the ramparts that protect the Volroy fortress.”

“I have heard they still have a fine border wall in Sunpool.” Emilia sighs. “Oracles. They are a paranoid lot. Are you going to do what you came out here to do or what?”

“Can we go down to the beach?”

“Not today. I did not send scouts. There could be others down there in the dunes. Others to recognize you and your cat and send word back to the Volroy. The longer the poisoner queen thinks you left on that boat with her sisters, the better.”