“We nearly killed that naturalist with a prettily wrapped poison present,” Katharine counters in a low voice. She sighs. “But you are probably right. These are only a bit of fun.”
Natalia looks over the boxes. There are more than a dozen, of various sizes and colors. Each will likely be transported individually, by separate courier. Those couriers will be changed several times, in different cities, before arriving in Rolanth. It seems a lot of trouble to go to for just a bit of fun.
Katharine finishes inking a gift tag with dark stars and swirls. Then she sits on the gold-and-white brocade sofa and reaches for a plate of belladonna berries. She eats a handful, filling her cheeks, mashing them with her teeth until the poison juice shows at the corners of her lips. Genevieve gasps. She turns toward Natalia, but there is no explanation to give. When Katharine recovered from her wounds, she turned to the poisons and began to devour them.
“There is still no word from Pietyr?” Katharine asks, wiping juice from her chin.
“No. And I do not know what to tell you. I wrote him immediately after you returned, to summon him back. I have also written to my brother inquiring about what is keeping him. But there has been no response from Christophe either.”
“I will write to Pietyr myself, then,” says Katharine. She presses a gloved hand to her stomach as the belladonna berries take effect. If Katharine’s gift had come, the poison should not cause her pain. Yet she seems able to bear more than she ever could before, taking in so much that every meal is like a Gave Noir. Katharine smiles brightly. “I will have a letter ready before I leave for the temple this evening.”
“That is a good idea,” Natalia says. “I am sure you will be able to persuade him.”
She motions to Genevieve so they might leave the solarium. Poor Genevieve. She does not know how to behave. No doubt she would like to be mean, to pinch the queen, or slap her, but the queen before them looks like she might slap right back. Genevieve frowns, and drops a lazy curtsy.
“Has her gift come, then?” Genevieve whispers once she and Natalia have mounted the stairs. “The way she ate those berries. But I could feel that her hands were swollen through the gloves. . . .”
“I do not know,” Natalia replies quietly.
“Could it be the gift developing?”
“If it is, I have never seen any gift develop similarly.”
“If her gift has not come, she must take care. Too much poison . . . she could harm herself. Damage herself.”
Natalia stops walking.
“I know that. But I cannot seem to stop her.”
“What happened to her?” Genevieve asks. “Where was she for those days?”
Natalia thinks back to the shadow of a girl who walked through her front door, gray-skinned and cold. Sometimes she sees the figure in her dreams, lurching toward her bed on the stiffened limbs of a corpse. Natalia shivers. Despite the warmth of the summer air, she craves a fire and a blanket around her shoulders.
“Perhaps it is better not to know.”
Katharine’s letter to Pietyr consists of only three lines.
Dearest Pietyr,
Return to me now. Do not be afraid. Do not delay.
Your Queen Katharine
Poor Pietyr. She likes to imagine him hiding somewhere. Or running through scratchy brambles and twigs that sting like lashes, just as she did the night he met her beside the Breccia Domain. The night he threw her down into it.
“I must take care with my words, Sweetheart,” she says softly to the snake coiled around her arm. “So he will still think me his gentle little queen.” She smiles. “I must not scare him.”
He probably thinks that he will be put into the cells beneath the Volroy when he returns. That she will allow some war-gifted guard to beat his head against the walls until his brains run out. But Katharine has not told anyone about his role in her fall that night. And she has no plans to. She told Natalia that she stumbled into the Breccia Domain on her own as she fled in a panic from Arsinoe’s bear.
Katharine looks out her window from where she sits at her writing desk. To the east, below the last of the Stonegall hills, the capital city of Indrid Down glitters in the late-afternoon sun. In the center, the twin black spires of the Volroy jut up into the sky, the great castle fortress dwarfing everything else. Even the mountains seem hunched in comparison, backing off like trolls brought down by a shining light.
The belladonna berries roll in Katharine’s stomach, but she does not wince. It has been more than a month since she had to claw her way up and out of the heart of the island, and now Katharine can withstand anything.
She leans over and pushes the window open. These days her rooms smell slightly of sickness and whatever animals she is testing her poisons on. Many small cages of birds and rodents litter the room, on top of her tables and lined along the walls. A few lie inside dead, waiting to be cleared out.
She taps the cage on the corner of her desk to rouse the small gray mouse inside. It is blind in one eye, and mostly bald from Katharine’s rubbed poisons. She offers it a cracker through the bars of its cage, and it creeps forward, sniffing, afraid to eat it.
“Once, I was a mouse,” she says, and strips off her glove. She reaches into the cage to stroke the rodent’s tiny bald haunches.
“But I am not anymore.”
WOLF SPRING
Arsinoe and Jules are at the kitchen table slicing small red potatoes when Jules’s Grandpa Ellis bursts through the side door with his white spaniel familiar. He arches his graying brow at them and holds up a small black envelope bearing the wax seal of the Black Council.
Grandma Cait pauses just long enough in her herb-chopping to blow loose hair out of her face. Then all three women go back to the tasks at hand.
“Doesn’t anybody want to read it?” Ellis asks. He sets the letter on the tabletop and lifts his spaniel, Jake, to sniff at the potatoes.
“Why?” Cait snorts. “We can all guess what it says.” She gestures with her head to the other side of the kitchen. “Now would you crack me four egg yolks into that bowl?”
Ellis sets Jake down and tears the letter open.
“They make a point of noting that the suitors all requested first court with Queen Katharine,” he says as he reads.
“That is a lie,” Jules mutters.
“Maybe so. But it hardly matters. It says here that we are to welcome the suitors Thomas ‘Tommy’ Stratford and Michael Percy.”
“Two?” Arsinoe scrunches her face in distaste. “Why both of them? Why any?”
Jules, Cait, and Ellis trade glances. More than one suitor at the same time is a great compliment. Before the show of the bear at the Beltane Festival, no one expected that Arsinoe would receive any requests for first suit, let alone two.
“They are to arrive any day,” Ellis says. “And who knows how long they might stay on if they like you.”
“They’ll be gone by week’s end,” Arsinoe says, and chops a potato in half.