Two Dark Reigns (Three Dark Crowns #3)(86)

Tears gather at the corners of Jules’s eyes, and the cougar comes to lean against her legs.

“I wish I could see it.”

“Maybe you can, someday.”

“Well.” Jules blinks. “Someday seems like a far-off thing. Anyway, I’m glad Arsinoe and Billy were there. And you. I’m glad someone was there who loved him.”

“You loved him more. I always knew that. And he loved you.” Mirabella shakes her head. “He never really loved me.”

For a moment, Jules is silent. Then she turns and looks at her, dead-on.

“You must think I’m really small, to think that would make me glad.”

“I only meant—”

“You should get back inside, Mirabella. Even with that cloak and those clothes, it won’t take anyone long to figure out who you are if they get a good look at you.”

Jules picks up her ax and resumes chopping wood, even though Emilia has disappeared. Mirabella lingers, but Jules never again glances her way. Finally, she throws up her hands and leaves, not back into the castle as ordered but farther into the courtyard, where it wraps around to the rear.

She walks across the grass and climbs over stones that have fallen from the wall, intrepidly making her way to the top.

When she reaches it, the wind catches her cloak and presses it tight about her, like an embrace. How she longs to throw her hood back so the breeze can rake cold fingers through her hair. But she knows what Jules and Emilia would think of that. Besides, they are right. It is better for everyone if their presence remains a secret.

Still, she cannot resist calling a little more wind to swirl around her body. A few more clouds to darken the sky. The nearness of her gift, the ease and strength of it, is the only joy returning to the island has brought. Everything else—the rebellion, the Legion Queen—has only shown how unneeded she was. How easily replaced.

She is not even part of Arsinoe’s quest to stop the mist.

I am my sister’s keeper. Her protector.

But is that enough? For a girl who would have been queen? The people speak of Jules already as if a legend: a naturalist with a gift as strong as a queen’s.

No elemental queen in history has mastered all the elements so fully as I. Yet there will be no mural to remember me. Not even my name will endure.

She lets the wind die and thinks of Bree and Elizabeth. Her friends and her home, that she may never see again.

And then, as if it were a wish or a prayer, a black-and-white tufted woodpecker flies into her stomach, so hard she feels the slight puncture of his beak.

“Pepper!” She gathers the little bird in the crook of her arm and looks into his bright black eyes. He is panting and afraid. “Pepper? Is that really you?” But of course it is. She has no relationship with any other bird. She strokes his chest and looks around, hoping to catch a glimpse of Elizabeth ducked down behind a rock. But he is alone. Elizabeth sent him away the day she took her priestess vows, to keep him from being crushed by horrible, brutal Rho.

“Have you been alone in the north country all this time?” she asks, and holds him up to her face. “Poor Pepper. What luck to find me here. What luck that you saw me.”

In response, the woodpecker lifts his wing and thrusts out one tiny leg. A tiny leg with a roll of parchment tied to it.

Bartering for supplies in the midst of a rebellion is not the easiest thing on the island, but Billy manages to do it. Somehow, despite limited funds and the fact that everyone in the marketplace is hoarding goods for the cause, he secures them warm clothing, climbing tools, and what is hopefully plenty of dried meat for the leg of the journey above the snow line.

“There now,” he says to Arsinoe happily. “Ready to depart. Now aren’t you glad you brought me?”

“I suppose I am.”

He shrugs.

“Negotiation. Buying things. They’re the only skills of value my father ever taught me. Though you could say that my success is mostly due to charisma, and you can’t really teach that.”

“How long do you think it’ll take you to find him?”

“I don’t know. After we’ve finished on the mountain, I thought I’d sail around to the capital. I won’t go in,” he adds, seeing her expression. “I’ll send a letter or a messenger.” He sighs. “I’ll wager that he isn’t even here.”

“Where, then?”

“Sailing around the world. Having a grand holiday in Salkades, maybe. Drinking wine and teaching me a lesson about life without him and the price of disobedience.”

“He would put that hardship on your mother and Jane?”

Billy shrugs again, and Arsinoe spots Emilia passing in the street.

“There goes Emilia.”

“She doesn’t seem to have seen us.”

“Oh, she saw us,” Arsinoe says. And sure enough, the warrior drops down into the alley behind them only a minute later.

“You both should return to the castle.”

“We are. We’re done here.”

Emilia smiles a smile that never reaches her eyes. “Then allow me to escort you.”

She circles around and leads them through the side streets, taking shortcuts through rear alleys and jumping stacks of old crates. It is so quiet a route that Billy has to dodge a bucket of waste that someone empties out of an upstairs window.