Three Dark Crowns (9 page)

Arsinoe closes her eyes. Jules and Joseph. They were inseparable since birth, until she came along. Until they tried to save her, and were parted for their trouble. The Black Council imposed no punishment on Arsinoe for her part in the escape. Except for guilt. And in the years since, guilt over Jules losing Joseph has punished her plenty.

Madrigal releases her arm, and Arsinoe bends at the elbow. The bleeding has lessened, and the cut begins to throb. Madrigal did not think far ahead enough to bring along anything to cleanse the wound, or bandages. So perhaps the price of the magic will be the loss of a queen's arm.

Madrigal slides the charm into a small black bag. When she hands the pouch to Arsinoe, her fingers are sticky and red, and the charm inside feels like a small heart beating.

“After it dries,” Madrigal says, “keep it somewhere safe. Under your pillow. Or braid it into your own hair, if you can keep from constantly cutting it.”

Arsinoe holds the charm in her fist. Now that the magic is made, it feels wrong. A crooked thing, twisted through with good intentions. She does not know why she did it. She has no excuse, except that it was easy, and nothing has ever come easily to her before.

“I can't do this to Jules,” she says. “I can't take away her will
like this. No matter the reason, she wouldn't want it.”

Before she can reconsider, Arsinoe throws the charm into the fire. The bag burns away like nothing, and Jules's hair and Joseph's dried scrap of shirt blacken and curl like the legs of a dying insect. The smoke that comes from it is foul. Madrigal cries out and jumps to her feet.

“Put the fire out and let's go home,” Arsinoe says. She tries to sound like a queen, but she is shaky and weak, as if she has lost a pint of blood rather than a few spoonfuls.

“What have you done?” Madrigal asks sadly. “What have you just done to our poor Jules?”

I
n the cloistered courtyard on the eastern side of the temple grounds, Mirabella can be alone. It is one of the few places the priestesses will let her go unescorted. One of the few places they feel is safe. Even when she prays at the altar, one or two of them are there, standing in the shadows. Only in the courtyard, and in her bedroom at Westwood House, may she be by herself. Free to think, or recline, and even to weep.

She has wept often since Rho's test in the cliffs. Most of the tears she has hidden. But not all. Word of her upset traveled quickly, and the priestesses have begun to give her suspicious glances. They cannot decide whether her weeping is a sign of weakness or of great mercy. Either way, they would prefer that she did not do it.

Mirabella tucks her legs underneath her on the cold stone bench. As she lifts her foot, a small, black-and-white tufted
woodpecker lands in her footprint and hops back and forth.

“Oh,” she says. It is a spritely thing, with smart black eyes. She pats the pockets of her skirt and gently shakes the folds of her cloak. “I am sorry. I have no seed for you.”

She ought to have brought some. The doves cooing would have been a welcome distraction.

“It is not seed he's after.”

Mirabella turns. A young initiate stands at the entrance of the courtyard, in the opening of the snow-crusted hedge. She holds her white hood tight against the chill of the wind.

Mirabella clears her throat. “What is it he is after, then?”

The girl smiles and walks into the courtyard. “He wishes to cheer you,” she says.

She releases her hood, and the woodpecker flits quickly from the ground to dive into her collar.

The queen's eyes widen. “You are a naturalist,” she says.

The girl nods.

“My name is Elizabeth. I grew up in Bernadine's Landing. I hope you don't mind the intrusion. It is only that you looked so sad. And Pepper always manages to make me smile.”

The little bird pokes his beak out from behind her hood and disappears again just as quickly. Mirabella watches with interest. She has never seen a familiar; in the temple, a priestess gives up her gift, and familiars are forbidden.

“How is it that you have managed to keep him?” Mirabella asks.

Elizabeth rubs her tan cheek against the bird's head. “Please
don't tell anyone. They would kill him on sight. I have tried to keep him away, but he will not go. I suppose I'm lucky that he is easy to hide. It is cruel to make us send them away, before we take our bracelets. What if I change my mind and leave the temple? Where will Pepper be, then? In the woods nearby? Or high in the mountains, where he may never hear my call?”

“It is cruel to make you give him up at all,” says Mirabella.

Elizabeth shrugs. “My mother says that once, priestesses did not have to. But now the island is so fractured. Naturalist against poisoner against elemental. Even those few with the war gift, or those fewer with the sight gift, are hostile to one another.” She looks at Pepper and sighs. “Giving them up unites us. And the sacrifice binds us to our faith. But you are right. It's still cruel.”

“Could I?” Mirabella asks, and holds out her hand. Elizabeth smiles, and the little bird flies quickly to perch on the tips of Mirabella's curled fingers.

“He likes you,” Elizabeth says.

Mirabella chuckles. “That is kind. But you are a naturalist. This bird will do whatever you say.”

“That's not exactly how the familiar-bond works. And in any case, you would be able to tell. He would be hesitant and less bright-eyed. He might leave droppings in your palm.”

“Lucky that he likes me, then,” Mirabella says.

Pepper blinks once and then shoots quickly back into the safety of Elizabeth's hood.

“Seeing you here alone, so sad, I had to see if we could
help.” Elizabeth settles down onto the bench beside her. “I know why you cry.”

“I imagine every priestess in the temple knows.”

Elizabeth nods. “But it means something special to me,” she says, “as I was almost the girl sacrificed.”

“You?”

“The way they make it sound,” she says. “The duty and the commune with the Goddess. I almost said yes. I thought I should. Her name was Lora. The volunteer. She died believing she had done a great service. And there are worse ways to die than that.”

Worse ways, like being burned alive by your sister priestesses. Mirabella tried that way of thinking. Telling herself that she had saved the girl from the flames. It did not work. It was not right, no matter how it happened.

“We are all dual-natured, Queen Mirabella. Every gift is light and dark. We naturalists can make things grow, but we also coax lobsters into pots, and our familiars tear rabbits to shreds.”

“Yes,” says Mirabella. “I know this.”

Elementals burn down forests as easily as they water them with rain. The war gift is for protection as well as slaughter. Even those with the sight are often cursed with madness and paranoia. It is for that reason that any queens born with the sight are drowned.

“Even the poisoners,” Elizabeth says, “are also healers.”

“Now,
that
I have not heard,” says Mirabella. Poisoners are
notoriously vicious. Every one of their executions is a mess, when every executed woman or man is put to death by flamboyant poisons that bring blood to the eyes and spasms so hard they break their backs.

“It's true,” Elizabeth insists. “They know the ways of healing. They have only forgotten it in the face of their hunger for council seats.”

Mirabella smiles slightly. Then she shakes her head. “But it is not the same, Elizabeth. It is not the same for queens.”

“Oh, I know that,” the priestess replies. “And I have only been here at Rolanth for a short time. But already I can see that you are a good person, Mirabella. I don't know if you will make a good queen, but that seems to me a promising start.”

A dark, black braid slides out of Elizabeth's hood, almost as dark as the queens' own. It reminds Mirabella of Bree, the way she wears it. Pepper the woodpecker ruffles his feathers. He seems to be a bird of few words.

“You are the only priestess here who has ever really spoken to me,” Mirabella says. “I mean, besides Luca.”

“Am I?” Elizabeth asks. “Oh dear. Yet another sign that I am not a very good priestess. Rho is always telling me so. Perhaps she is right.”

Bloodthirsty Rho. The terror of the temple. Mirabella cannot remember ever seeing her be kind or hearing her utter a word softly spoken. But she will be good protection once Beltane is over and the Ascension begins. Luca is right about that.

Elizabeth cocks her head. “You are feeling a little better now?”

“I am,” says Mirabella.

“Good. That rite, the rite of sacrifice—you can be sure it was Rho's idea. She wants to bring back the old ways and supplant the council once more for the temple. She thinks she can do this by force, as if she alone is the Goddess's hand. But she is not.” Elizabeth smiles brightly. “You are.”

“You said she did it,” the High Priestess says. “And so it is done.”

“I did not say that she did it well,” says Rho.

Rho picks up a trinket from the corner of Luca's mahogany desk—a shiny, polished orb of opal—and makes a face. She does not like the High Priestess's rooms, up in the top floor of the temple, overlooking the cliffs of Shannon's Blackway. They are too soft, lined with pillows and blankets against the drafts. They are too cluttered, full of things, decorative things that have no use, like mosaic vases and carved, gilded eggs. Like the little opal.

Luca watches Rho wind back her arm to cast it out the window.

“Do not do that,” the High Priestess cautions. “That was a gift.”

“It is only a rock.”

“It was still a gift. And close that window. The breeze is cold today. I cannot wait for spring. The fires of Beltane leading to hot summer nights. Will you take some soup? The kitchen tells me it is rabbit and cabbage and cream.”

“Luca,” says Rho. “You are not listening. The rite was a farce. Our queen was backed into a corner, and even then she would do nothing until we first let the girl feel the fire.”

Luca sighs.

“The sacrifice lies buried beneath a pile of fallen stones. She performed the rite. You cannot ask her to enjoy it.”

Luca herself did not enjoy it. She had listened when they cautioned her about being too soft. She believed them when they said it would be Mirabella who would be hurt by it in the end. And now an innocent is dead. Crushed under rocks that form a convenient monument to be prayed over.

“We will not ask her to do anything like this again,” Luca says. “You do not know her like I do. If we press her too hard, she will buck. And if Mirabella learns to buck . . . if she remembers how . . .”

Luca looks out her west-facing window, through the trees to the roof of Westwood House. Even at that distance, the copper-cored lightning rods are still visible, standing up like stiff hairs. The Westwoods knew better, too, than to take them down.

“You were not here,” Luca adds, “when they brought Mirabella from the Black Cottage. Neither was I. I was still in Indrid Down, fighting the Arron council for any scrap of power. I would not have believed Sara Westwood when she came and told me that our six-year-old queen was going to tear her house from beneath her feet had it not been for the look on her face.

“The island has not seen a gift like hers in hundreds of
years. Not since Shannon and the Queens of Old. We are its keepers but not its masters.”

“That may be,” says Rho. “But if she does not rise to her duty, the Black Council will keep its stranglehold for another generation.”

Luca rubs her face hard. Perhaps she is too old for this. Too exhausted from a life spent trying to wrest power from the Arrons. But Rho is right. If another poisoner queen sits the throne, the Arrons of the Black Council will rule until the next set of triplets comes of age. By the time that happens, Luca will be long dead.

“Mirabella will rise,” the High Priestess says. “And the temple will rein back the council. Full up with Westwoods, it will be much easier to control.”

Some days later, Mirabella wakes from another dream with her mouth tasting of blood. In the dream, she, Arsinoe, and Katharine had been children. She remembers black hair fanned out in water, and dirt on Arsinoe's nose. She remembers her own hands turned to claws and tearing Arsinoe and Katharine apart.

She rises up on her forearms from being facedown in her pillows. It is midday, and her room is empty. Perhaps there are not even any priestesses lurking outside her door since Sara, Bree, and the other Westwoods are all at home.

The dreams are coming more frequently. They wake her two, sometimes three, times a night. Luca said to expect them.
That they would show her the way. She did not warn her of the dread they would make her feel.

Mirabella closes her eyes. But instead of darkness, she sees the face of the sacrificed priestess in the rocks. She sees Arsinoe's dirty nose. She hears Katharine's laugh.

Queens are not supposed to love their sisters. She has always known that, even when they were together at the Black Cottage, where she had loved them anyway.

“They are not those children, anymore,” she whispers into her hands.

They are queens. They must die.

Bree knocks on her door and pokes her head in, her long brown braid swinging over her shoulder.

“Is it time?” Mirabella asks. Today they are to go into the city, where Rolanth's best artisans wait to present their finest jewels and gowns for the Beltane ceremonies.

“Nearly,” Bree says. “But do not sound so glum. Look who has come from the temple.”

Bree swings the door wide, and Elizabeth leans in from the opposite side. Mirabella smiles.

“Oh no,” she says. “People will start saying that I will only be friends with girls who wear braids.”

After Mirabella is readied and dressed, she, Bree, and Elizabeth climb into a coach waiting in front of Westwood House. Sara is already inside.

“Very good,” Sara says, and taps the roof, signaling the driver to depart. “It is kind of you to join us, Priestess.” She
smiles at Elizabeth. “The temple will surely approve of our choices today.”

“Oh, I am not here for temple approval.” Elizabeth grins happily, watching the city rumble past. “I'm only escaping my chores.”

Sara's lips draw into a thin line, and Bree giggles.

“We are happy to have you in any case,” says Sara. “Mira, are you well? You seem pale.”

“I am fine, Sara.”

Sara taps the roof harder, and the driver urges the horses to go faster.

“Perhaps you are needing something to eat. There will be plenty when we arrive at the park.”

Moorgate Park sits in the central district that runs alongside the channel. In spring it is pretty, full of trees and pale stones, with a gurgling ivory fountain. This time of year, the trees are bare and the grounds more open. Plenty of room for the jewelers and tailors to present their wares.