Two Dark Reigns (Three Dark Crowns #3)(97)

“Are you mad? People are dying!”

“But not us!” Katharine drops her shield and draws a long knife out of her boot. The mist is everywhere. She cannot see anything in all the white. Not even the silhouette of a tree trunk. Her horse’s hooves prance and kick up wisps like smoke. They are pocketed inside it, and she need only wait for it to rush into her lungs. Will she feel it then, pull her heart out through her mouth? Or twist her arms from their sockets?

“Madrigal? Mother!”

Katharine whirls as the mist around them thins. Jules Milone and her cougar stand at the edge of the trees. Her hand is raised.

“I’ve come to trade.”

“No!” Madrigal shouts. “No, Jules, get out of here!” She tries to burst out of Katharine’s grip, but Katharine’s fingers are locked tight.

“You cannot run yet!” Katharine cries. “Not yet!”

“Let go of me!” In a flurry of black feathers, Madrigal sends her crow at Katharine’s face.

“Mother, stop struggling!” Jules calls, and Katharine looks at her through the haze. She is not alone. Mirabella is running up behind her. She is dressed in mainlander clothes, blue and gray, none of the black of queens. But her regal face is unmistakable.

At the sight of Mirabella, the dead queens surge through Katharine’s blood. Their rage is so pure that it turns her vision red, even through the white of the mist. She cannot calm them or speak to them, and when Madrigal’s bird flaps again in her face, the dead queens lash out. Katharine does not remember that she had drawn her knife until the blade is already buried deep in Madrigal’s neck.

“No,” she whispers as the blood begins to pour from the wound. She looks into Madrigal’s wide, surprised eyes. “I did not mean . . .” She presses her hand against the blood, but it is no use. The veins of Madrigal’s throat have been cut. Severed. Horrified, Katharine lets go, and Madrigal’s body tumbles limply to the ground, her panicked crow still tethered to the dying woman’s wrist.

The next thing Katharine hears is an otherworldly scream. The next thing she feels is herself blown backward to land hard upon the snow and her horse rolling over her foot.

When Madrigal falls, Mirabella dashes past Jules to try and catch her. She sends her storm out into the mist ahead, pushes wind through her fingertips, and feels the clouds gather over the valley.

She pushes harder, and the mist is blown back, creating a path for her straight to Madrigal. She is still strides away when an unseen force hits her from behind, throwing her forward hard to bounce against the ground. For an instant, everything is dark, and her storm begins to fizzle. But she shakes her head clear and goes on, scrambling on her hands and knees.

Not far ahead, Katharine is on the ground, struggling beneath her horse. The horse itself is dead or knocked cold by the unseen blast. Mirabella ignores her and hurries to Jules’s mother, lying in a bloody heap, her arm lifted by a crow desperately trying to fly away.

She kneels beside the woman and turns her over. Madrigal’s eyes roll toward her, white and panicked as blood pours out of her neck.

“It is all right, Madrigal. Do not move now.” Not knowing what else to do, she quickly unties the crow and lets her fly. It seems a relief, to the bird and Madrigal both. “We have to get you out of here.”

“No. She’s—” Blood bubbles over her lips. She says more, but it is nearly impossible to understand. “She is full of them.”

“Full of what? Who is?”

“Full of dead,” Madrigal gurgles, and grasps on to Mirabella’s shoulder. She spits blood into the snow, presses her hand into it. “Stop her . . . Jules . . .”

“Hush now.”

The storm above rumbles, and rain falls hard onto the snow, driving it down and melting it as it does the same to the mist. Her wind drowns out the sound of thunder as it clears the valley of white, revealing stunned soldiers on their hands and knees.

As the valley becomes visible once again, Mirabella turns back to Jules and the rebels, to see if they were hurt by the blast. But Jules is fine. Standing alone, with her hands thrust down in fists.

“Madrigal, we have to go,” Mirabella says. But when she tries to lift her, she is heavy and dead in her arms.

Jules screams again, as her war gift explodes into the meadow. It sends Katharine’s horse flying over the top of her to land behind. Mirabella gasps. The blast came from her. Both of the violent blasts came from Jules. Mirabella stands and tries to use her gift to further push back the mist when she hears Emilia shout.

“Mirabella, look out!”

Mirabella turns. Too late, she sees the fallen form of Jules’s familiar, lying limp at her feet, taken out by Jules’s own attack. Her war gift is out of control. It will not spare even her friends.

“Run!” Emilia screams, but not before Mirabella is thrown sideways into a tree.

Blackness swims before her eyes. She struggles to her elbows and squints. Jules has been taken to the ground. Emilia has pinned her and strikes her hard on the back of the head.

“Cover!” Emilia shrieks. “Give us cover, elemental!”

“Cover,” Mirabella grumbles, blinking her aching eyes. With her jarred, the storm has begun to fray at the edges, but she pulls it back together, her gift singing in her veins after so many months on the mainland unused. Her lightning strike lands in the valley, cutting off the queen’s army from pursuing any retreating rebels. There is no mistaking it for natural weather, and every eye in the meadow seeks out the source.