“Stay. Do not dismount.” Luca holds her hand out across Katharine’s reins. “The mist does not do this. I do not know what it means.”
“I am the Queen Crowned.” Katharine takes a breath and swings her leg over to land on the dirt. “I have nothing to fear. It is my mist.” Hers. Theirs. The mist has been the protector of the island ever since it was created by the last and greatest Blue Queen. It will not hurt her. It cannot. It was her bloodline that made it.
“Help me, old sisters.” She reaches out to them with her mind and feels their familiar surge in her veins. Katharine walks toward the shore as the dead queens fill her ears with shrieks. She walks until the sand is wet from the surf, and then they allow her to go no farther.
A wall of white and swirling gray stretches across the harbor from north to south. It has traveled into the shallows, closer than she has ever seen it and continues to advance, moving like the sea creatures do: smoothly and swiftly. The way it darts at times reminds her of a striking shark.
How badly Katharine wants to run. The mist is so thick. If it rushes upon the shore, she is sure it will knock her down and smother her. Choke her. She will die, and find the ghosts of Mirabella and Arsinoe waiting inside the gloom.
“No,” she whispers. “You must stop.”
The mist pushes forward, and the people behind her scream. Perhaps even the High Priestess. Certainly Genevieve. But before the cloud can touch the earth, it draws back and moves away, back out to sea to dissipate and break apart, gone so quickly, it is hard to believe it was there in the first place.
Katharine hears footsteps as Rho comes to stand at her shoulder, along with Pietyr, backed by a dozen queensguard.
“Queen Katharine, are you unharmed?” He examines her, but she pats his hand and moves him aside. She was not touched.
“What is that?” Rho draws her serrated knife and points into the waves. Something dark and heavy rolls through the water. A dark shape, soon joined by more, cresting and coming toward shore.
Screams and moans of terror sound from all sides as Katharine walks toward the water to see what the mist has brought.
“Keep them quiet,” she orders. “Keep them back!” The dead sisters hiss and spit; they scratch at her insides and retreat to the darkest corners of her mind. She does not care. Nor does she care when she steps into the water up to the ankles and catches waves across her knees.
The mist has brought her bodies. Ragged, water-logged corpses tossed heavily into the shallows.
Katharine splashes in deeper. The Goddess has answered her prayer. She has brought her the corpses of her sisters and the cursed naturalist. The mainland suitor and the Wolf Spring boy. Her hope to see what is left of Mirabella and Arsinoe is so strong that she convinces herself it is them, even though there are far too many. Far more than she sought. She convinces herself it is them until she turns the first one over and sees a stranger’s watery eyes staring back.
As the bodies beach themselves, Katharine searches up and down the sand, looking into one dead face and then another for some spark of recognition. But none are queens.
“Haul them out.” She points to the water. She shouts when her queensguard hesitates to move. “Haul them out and line them up on the sand!”
It takes several minutes for the task to be completed. Her soldiers grimace, and some will not touch the corpses or enter the water until Rho forces them to at knifepoint. “My priestesses are braver than you,” Rho barks, and several priestesses hurry into the surf to help, wetting their white robes to the waist.
Katharine and Rho survey the bodies lined up on the beach. Pieces of their crafts have been brought up as well, bits of curved hull and planks, an oar. Some on shore and others still bobbing in the waves. Scattered tidbits.
“What is this?” Katharine asks, and no one replies. “Bring me someone who might know.”
Rho shouts to the gathered crowd, and a man comes forward, wringing his hat between his hands. In the face of so much death, he almost forgets to drop to his knee.
“You are familiar with the harbor?”
“I am, my queen.”
“Can you tell me, then, who these people are?”
“They are—” He hesitates, looks up and over the wet shapes laid out. “They are the searchers. They sailed this morning at your request, to search for the remains of the traitor queens.”
Katharine clenches her jaw.
“Is this all of them?”
“I don’t know, my queen. It—it seems so.” He presses his handkerchief to his sweating, balding head and then again to his mouth and nose. The stench of rotting flesh is thick in the heat. But if they sailed that morning, they should not smell at all. Katharine dismisses the man and steps closer to the corpses with Rho.
“All sailed out today, he said,” Rho says in a low voice. “But some of these bodies are much older, as if—”
“As if they drowned weeks ago.”
Katharine stares down the line of wet, bloated dead, some large, some small, some missing parts. Women and men alike. Fishers and sailors who were doing her bidding. They had hoped to find Arsinoe and Mirabella facedown in the sea and net themselves a fine reward.
Now they remind Katharine of seals, spread out to lounge on the warm sand. The bravest of the gulls flaps down atop one of the farthest bodies and begins to tear at it like a thief after coin. Then it raises its head and flies away. Someone with the naturalist gift must have told it to wait.
“What could have done all this?” Pietyr turns to the balding man. “Did they all sail together? Travel as a fleet?”
“No, Master Arron. The Carroway sisters and their brother”—he gestures to three—“they set out in two small craft with crew.” He points to several more. “Mary Howe and her crew there, she has the elemental gift and a knack for storms. She’s never once sailed into bad weather, that one.” Mary Howe lies faceup and freshly dead, her blue shirt buttoned to the throat. What she wore on her bottom half is anyone’s guess. The entirety of her lower body is gone. Torn away. Katharine walks to her and leans down, pushes up her shirttails and lifts the torso to better look at the wound. It is ragged and there are errant tooth marks. A shark. The rest of the body is pristine.
“Odd for the shark to leave it so. Odd for a shark to have killed her at all in these waters.”
The bodies lying on the beach tell a strange story. Some are clearly drowned, with purple lips and bloated faces, while others bear signs of harm: a boy with one side of his head cleaved in as if from a heavy, sharp object, another with what looks to be a stab wound to the heart. Some bodies seem to have been dead so long that the flesh falls from them in whitened, water-logged chunks. Yet others, like Mary Howe’s, are so fresh she might have died only hours ago.
Katharine kneels and buries her gloved hands deep in the rot of some poor girl, her face unrecognizable.
“Queen Katharine,” Pietyr says.
“What?” She moves to the next body, and the next, turning their heads left and right, inspecting them. They are a message, she thinks. They have something to tell her if she will only look hard enough. “How . . . how did you die . . . ?” she murmurs, and Pietyr puts his hand on her shoulder.
“Kat.”
She stops and looks up, sees all the gathered staring faces. They have watched her pick through the bodies crouched like a crab, her black silk gloves slicked with blood to the elbows.
Reluctantly, Katharine rises.
“I am a poisoner, Pietyr. Taught by Natalia these many years. What do they think? That I am shy to what death does to flesh? That I have never seen a gut burst open?”
Pietyr’s mouth draws into a firm line. Even he, an Arron himself, looks slightly green.
Katharine stares out toward the sea. Clear now, calm and shining on a sunny afternoon. Gathered higher on the beach, the people whisper. Too many whispers and voices to identify, but she is able to hear one word above all.
“Undead.”
THE MAINLAND