Camille was a poisoner, like Queen Nicola, and Queen Sylvia before her. Three generations of poisoner queens. Almost a dynasty. But instead of growing stronger, it seemed that the blood of the poisoner queens grew thinner. The Arrons flourished in their power, as well as other poisoner families in Prynn and the capital, but Sylvia was stronger than Nicola, and Camille was the weakest of all. Over hundreds of years, the other gifts of the island had lessened: elementals lost their mastery over one or more elements, and the war-gifted lost the ability to guide their weapons with their minds. The naturalists’ familiars grew smaller and smaller. And the oracles . . . The true oracle gift was almost gone, thanks to generations of drowned oracle queens.
Something was changing on the island and within the line of queens. As a queen, Camille could feel that. Not that anyone would believe her. The Arrons never listened when she spoke of queenly instinct. They never listened to her about anything. They had been bullies her whole life, from the moment they claimed her from that very cottage. They shamed her when she failed. They did not let her rule. With each successive poisoner queen, the queen herself mattered less and less. The line of queens was not important, the Arrons said. It was the poisoners who the Goddess truly favored.
In their bassinets, the new triplets hummed with an aura of the gift each carried, that energy—like a scent or a heartbeat—that linked them to the Goddess and called to the queensblood in Camille. It was that which told her what she had given birth to, when she announced it to Willa, and named them, as though in a trance. It was like a trance. On Arsinoe and Katharine, the auras that lingered were weak. On Katharine it was barely a hint. But Mirabella still blazed with it.
“What are you doing here, Queen Camille?”
Camille flinched. Willa’s voice from behind her had sounded like Mistress Arron.
“Nothing.” She straightened her shoulders as Willa rose from her chair and came slowly to join her. “Only looking in on them. The messengers have been dispatched?” Messengers, summoned to the Black Cottage upon her labor, to ferry word to Rolanth, Indrid Down, and Wolf Spring. The elemental, poisoner, and naturalist cities, respectively.
“They have. They rode out at dusk.”
Camille sucked in her cheeks. A messenger to Indrid Down was hardly necessary anymore. The poisoners were so assured of their destiny.
Camille nodded to the baby in the storm-blue blanket.
“Her, there. Mirabella. She will be the next queen.”
Willa, still a servant of her temple teachings though no longer a priestess, made a pious gesture, touching first her eyes and then her heart.
“The Goddess decides,” Willa said. “Only she decides who rules her island.”
Camille took a deep breath. The walls of the cottage where the queens would spend their first six years, where she spent her own first six years, closed in, squeezing her out. Here they would play and have their hair braided. Here they would learn to walk and run, and if they were lucky, to not love one another too much.
“She decides,” Camille said. “But the queen knows. And I was mistaken about those two.” She pointed to poisoner Arsinoe and naturalist Katharine. “Arsinoe is a naturalist. Katharine . . . a poisoner.” She almost said war-gifted, to deny the Arrons a queen at all. But they would never believe it. They would investigate and look too closely.
“Camille . . .” Willa turned to her, and shook her head.
Camille clenched her jaw. She was still bleeding, and exhausted. For all she knew, she was slowly dying. But she willed herself to look strong. To look like the queen she was, for once.
“Mirabella will be queen. I can see that. Feel that. And she will be a great one. These other two will not survive long. Katharine’s gift is so weak, it will never fully quicken. And Arsinoe . . . Another poisoner queen will not sit the throne. But if the Arrons have a gifted poisoner, they will make her suffer. Training and belittling. Beating her when she gets it wrong. Like they did to me.”
“And what would they do with Queen Katharine?” Willa asked.
“What could they do with a giftless girl but leave her alone?” Camille swallowed hard. That was a lie. The Arrons could do plenty to a giftless girl. Everything they ever did to Camille, and worse. But at least they would fail. At least they would have no winning queen.
She looked down at little Katharine. The child was doomed already. “Change the queens’ gowns, Willa. So they are right.”
Willa looked from Arsinoe to Katharine. “If Mirabella is the chosen queen, then it will not matter.”
“It will not matter,” Camille agreed. She had known Willa since she was a girl. Willa had been a young woman then, deep in her midwife training, when she presided over the births of Camille and her sisters, and she was the one who raised them. She showered them with sweets and games. And they were happy.
“You cared for me so well, Willa,” said Camille. “You loved me.”
“I loved you all.”
“And you love me still.” Camille pressed her lips together. Through the nightmares, and the screaming fits, and the black blanket of depression that coiled round and round a queen’s neck as the birth neared. Through the days full of tremors, when Camille had tried to claw the babies out of her stomach. Willa was there. She brewed her teas to calm her. She told her it was normal. That the bearing of queens was always haunted by the fallen ones who came before, and the Black Cottage was full of ghosts. Even Camille’s own poisoned sisters.
It was the first time Willa had spoken of Camille’s sisters. After they were dead, fallen queens were never spoken of. They were forgotten, except by the families who had raised them, and the sister who survived. Camille had survived and become queen. Her sisters had not. The sisters of a true poisoner, they had died on the same day, in the same hour, writhing. Spitting blood.
“I love you still, and I will always, Camille,” said Willa. “But I cannot do this.”
“I am doing it.” Camille lay her hand on her Midwife’s shoulder. “I know that I took my crown off and threw it at you. But I am still the queen.”
In the morning, Queen Camille and her king-consort readied themselves to leave the island. It was a strange thing, to pack her own trunks and to dress her own sore body. But she would get used to it.
“Are you sure you are well?” Philippe asked. He glanced at the spots of blood on the floor, the pool of blood in her bed that had soaked through her clothes and cloth padding. “Our ship home can wait, if you need to rest longer. They won’t sail without us.”
“We go today,” Camille said. She felt weaker this morning than she had in the night, looking down on the new queens. But her time on the island was over. And she had done what she could to ease their paths.
It was not for them that you did it, her conscience amended. It was for you and for revenge.
“It was for the island,” she muttered. And it was not a terribly fulfilling revenge, anyway, when she would not be there to see it.
“What did you say? Camille—”
“I am fine, I said. The bleeding is normal.” She had begun to tremble slightly. The bleeding was a bit heavy, perhaps, but she was not sure. She had never birthed triplets before, after all.
Philippe watched her, then sighed and nodded. How relieved he would be to return to the world. His world, where men ruled. It gave her pause sometimes, wondering how he would change. He loved her on her island, but out there it might all be different. He might expect her to be something she had no idea how to be.
“I’ll take these to the carriage,” he said, and picked up the last of her cases. Camille followed, but she lingered in the hall near the open door of the nursery, where inside, Willa rocked and cooed to the new queens.
They said the old queen was glad to go. Glad to be done. That her queen-bearing, and her flight, was instinctual.
But when Camille looked at the babies, for just a moment she wished she had jaws like her beloved snakes, so she could unhinge them and swallow the girls back down under her heart forever.
“How can I go,” she whispered.
“You’ll forget,” Willa said gently. “The moment your feet cross the threshold. With every step you take across the island. When you set foot into the boat. You’ll forget.”