Five Dark Fates (Three Dark Crowns #4) - Kendare Blake Page 0,17
if it happened to me or Jules. Just not to you.” He chuckles without much humor. “Maybe you should start intensely caring about Emilia.”
“That’s not funny,” Arsinoe says. “And besides, I don’t think it would work.”
She takes his hand and kicks at the sad blanket crumpled up on the floor. “Let’s go find something to eat. And get some fresh air.”
“Let’s go to the great hall,” Billy suggests. “There’s bound to be stew. There’s always stew. And we’ll probably find Luke, and Matthew and Caragh if the baby is sleeping. They found Braddock; did Luke tell you? Someone reported seeing him down the beach, and there he was, picking for shellfish during the low tide.”
“They didn’t bring him inside?” Arsinoe asks with alarm.
“No. Caragh caught some fish for him, and they let him be. Warned the people here to give him plenty of space. They said that with you so distracted by the rebellion he might be close to wild.”
Poor Braddock. He should be off somewhere in a warm den. Instead, the scent of her blood kept him pinned to Sunpool.
They leave her small workroom and walk through the courtyard, where Arsinoe spots Emilia in her bright red cloak. She is standing at the center of a cluster of people, and they are agitated, with crossed arms and broad stances. Poor Emilia. The success of the rebellion hinged upon the strength and the legend of Jules. In the city, work continues: laborers fortify the wall using picks and pulleys and harnessed horses to reclaim stone that has rolled away. Food stores are loaded into the granaries as more people arrive in Sunpool and must be fed. So much being done and so much still to do, but no matter how defiant Emilia is, or how determined, it is not for her that the people come, and it is not her they will follow.
Arsinoe and Billy turn down a quiet alley, in no rush to join the discussion.
“Do you think the rebels are asking about Jules? Or Mirabella?” Arsinoe wonders.
“Probably both. They’re growing unsatisfied with Emilia’s tales. She’s losing her hold on it. On all of it. I wouldn’t expect her to keep quiet about Mirabella for much longer.”
“I was sure Mirabella would send word by now. To tell us what she’s doing. What her plan is.”
“Maybe she can’t.”
“Or maybe there is no plan,” Emilia says, stepping out from around the next turn. “And she has abandoned you both to ally with the queen.”
Billy shudders and takes a step back. “Gad, how did you get here? Are there two of you?”
“Good Goddess, don’t let there be two of her,” Arsinoe says, and Emilia cocks an eyebrow.
“I saw you slip away when you spotted the crowd, so I followed you. You ought to be careful, talking in these corridors. The sound carries from one end to the other.”
“What was happening out there?” Arsinoe asks. “It seemed tense.”
“They want answers. They want their queen.” Emilia sighs. “Some of our soldiers are losing faith. If we tell them we face not one but two queens, without a single queen of our own . . .”
“Hey,” says Arsinoe, “I’m a queen.”
“Of course you are. Forgive me. It is so easy to forget. You have still not gone back to wearing the blacks, and your hair is always full of filth.” Emilia reaches out and picks at it. “Is it black? Is it gray?” She pulls out a long piece of yellow straw. “Is it blond?”
Arsinoe swats the straw out of her hand. “Soldiers, you say. Don’t you mean farmers and laborers?”
Emilia sighs. “How is Jules?”
“Unchanged.”
“Unchanged? But you have been locked up with your poisons and her mother’s low-magic curse for days. What is taking so long?”
“It’s a binding, not a curse,” Arsinoe says, and shoves her aside this time. “And it’s not like following a recipe.”
“Gather the Milones and meet me in the keep. I want to know everything that you know about the binding.” Then she turns on her heel and is gone.
“Grab the Milones and meet me,” Arsinoe grumbles through her stew in the great hall. “Like she’s the commander of the whole rebellion or something.”
“Well, she sort of is,” says Billy, grabbing a torn piece of bread from a table as they pass and spreading butter onto it.
Despite Arsinoe’s grumbling, they do as they were bid and take Cait, Ellis, and Caragh to meet Emilia in the room outside Jules’s chamber in the castle keep.