“What did you do to them? Jules looks ready to wilt flowers.”
“I didn’t do anything to them. We called butterflies and grew grass. Arsinoe grew nothing. She won’t last long, you know, if you keep treating her this way. She will be dead the moment the Quickening is over.”
“You didn’t speak to them of that?”
“Of course not.”
“Madrigal, they are too young. She is not ready.”
Madrigal crosses her arms. It has been more than two years since Arsinoe made any mention of her sisters. The memories have likely faded into nothing. But even if they have, she is still only a little girl. Too young a queen to start in with talk of the killing.
“Why is that your decision to make?” Madrigal narrows her eyes. “You are not Mother. You are not anyone’s mother. And if there is a guardian to the queen, it is clearly meant to be my Jules.” She says nothing else. She turns and walks with light steps onward up the road.
Neither Caragh nor Matthew move until Madrigal is gone. Caragh clenches her fists. She would like to jump up and down and scream.
“She thinks she can come here and upend everything! She arrives, ruins things, and leaves. That is what she does. And she never sees the consequences!”
Matthew slips his arm about her trembling waist.
“You’re still her aunt,” he says. “Jules still loves you. She always will.”
A heaviness forms in her throat as he speaks. She knows that. She knows she is being ungrateful, spurning the idea of being only Juillenne’s aunt after raising her for six years. To want Jules to run to her, not Madrigal, when she calls her first great fish or has a bad dream.
“Go home, Matthew,” Caragh says.
“What? Why?”
“Because that’s the first stupid thing you’ve ever said to me.”
For days and nights, the old tales of the queens haunt Jules’s every moment. She has heard the tales before—brutal, exciting stories of poison and wolves and fire. But they were only stories. Even when Arsinoe came to them and Arsinoe was real, her young mind could not fathom that one day Arsinoe would be a part of one of those stories. Joseph tries to distract her, but not even he can keep her from worrying.
“Your mum was probably fooling about. To scare us. Like around the Reaping Moon fires,” Joseph says. “And even if she wasn’t, Arsinoe’s tough.” He shoves Arsinoe, standing beside him, until she stumbles, to illustrate the point. “I wouldn’t want to fight her.”
But it is not just a fight. Arsinoe and Joseph would rather not know. They would rather forget the silliness that Madrigal said and go back to enjoying their summer. To believe it meant difficulty. It meant things that they were not prepared for.
It meant growing up.
Later that night, when Jules kneels down on the rug beside her grandpa Ellis’s chair, she is not sure what she wants to hear. She only knows she must find out where the truth lies, in all the tales.
“Grandpa,” she says, twisting a bit of the fine yarn he spins around her index finger. “What’s going to happen to Arsinoe?”
He looks down at her through the bottom of his spectacles. Unlike other adults, he does not tell her that it is nothing. He does not lie.
“You have heard something,” he says, “haven’t you?”
“Only thinking about the old stories. The queen stories. And Arsinoe is a queen. Is she a queen like that?”
“You are still young, Jules, and this will be hard for you to understand. But as the Ascension draws nearer, you will hear things. About the contest between the queens. About how they take their crown. The people will start to talk more as Arsinoe grows.”
His tone is calm. The Ascension is nothing new. The deaths of queens are nothing new. Jules feels deeply ashamed suddenly, of her youth and her ignorance. Her inability to understand what was true until now. Even knowing, it seems impossible when all the death she has ever known was the death of animals or of the old. Of fishers lost at sea or folk taken by illness or accident. But death cannot touch Arsinoe, who is young and careful. Who has become her best friend and foster sister.
“She has to?” Jules asks. “Can’t someone else?”
“No. It can only be her. Arsinoe is a queen, Jules. She is special. It is in her nature; you will see. It is her purpose.”
That night, lying in bed with Arsinoe snoring across the room, Jules cannot stop thinking about Grandpa Ellis’s words. Kill or be killed. That is her purpose. Her nature. But that is not fair. That cannot be.
“I will find a way to keep you safe, Arsinoe. I’ll protect you. I promise.”
THE AFTERMATH OF ARSINOE’S ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE
Two Years Later
INDRID DOWN
The foolish little naturalist queen tried to flee. She, a Milone brat, and a Wolf Spring boy were found stranded in the mists, floating in a pitifully small, stolen boat. After they were caught, they were brought under lock and key to the Volroy, along with Cait Milone and her family.
“They have arrived only just now?” Natalia asks as she and Genevieve walk quickly through the castle to the chamber where the trial is to be held. “A shame. They should have been allowed to languish a while in the cells.”
“The council was too eager to punish them,” says Genevieve.
“Then they may be disappointed. We cannot punish the queen. Queens are not to be touched until after the Quickening, and she is still only eleven years old. The island will view it as nothing more than youthful indiscretion.” Some will even admire her rebelliousness. The alliances of the island have begun to shift. Natalia has felt it ever since the elemental queen showed so strong a gift. The poisoners, her family, had ruled Fennbirn well. But they had been in power too long. Three poisoner queens, and it is easy for the island to turn restless.
Natalia and Genevieve climb the stairs and burst through the upper chamber door. The room is vast and open to the east with a railed balcony that overlooks the courtyard and on past the rooftops to Bardon Harbor. Members of her Black Council, which is finally truly hers now and not her mother’s, stand in small groups in their silk handkerchiefs and deep purple skirts. Where once they were all old poisoners—except for her cousin Lucian, and Paola Vend, from the strongest poisoner family in Prynn—now the council is filled with youth: Natalia’s brother Antonin and sister, Genevieve. Her younger cousin Allegra. The vivacious young poisoner Lucian Marlowe.
In the center of the room, pressed to their knees on the red, circular rug, are the naturalist queen and her co-conspirators. They are still children to her eye, though the queen and Juillenne Milone both glare at her with foolishly little fear. Natalia could have the little Milone poisoned. And the boy as well. They have committed a dire offense, and she would so very much like to give them to Katharine as a set to practice on.
As she thinks this, she glances at Juillenne Milone and nearly startles. The girl’s gaze is so intense that she must be able to read Natalia’s thoughts.
“We would speak,” says Cait Milone. It has been a long time since Natalia has seen her, but she seems as hard and proud as ever.
“Then speak,” Natalia says. “Though I do not know what you think you can say.”
Still, she listens as Cait pleads, insofar as Cait is capable of pleading, and turns a sympathetic ear to the tears of the boy’s mother, a woman named Annie Sandrin. Mostly though, she watches. She watches the way the two younger Milone women cling to the backs of chairs but not to each other. She sees the guilt-bent back of Cait’s husband. The confused, pale faces of the Sandrin men as they wonder how their boy got mixed up in a queen’s business.
And she watches the queen. Arsinoe. She has grown long and lanky in the five years since the Black Cottage. Her hair is chopped short, the ends uneven, and she is not a beauty, like her queen Katharine, or like the elemental Queen Mirabella is rumored to be. She is plain, with a stingy, downturned mouth, and the council’s spies in Wolf Spring say her gift has still to show.