Five Dark Fates (Three Dark Crowns #4) - Kendare Blake Page 0,24

wet.

“I do not need you to say that I was right to bring her here,” Katharine says. “But are you satisfied?” She cranes her neck to the men at the rear. “Lucian? Antonin? Are you satisfied?”

“Yes, Queen Katharine,” they mumble, and nod contritely.

She turns back toward the water. They will be safe now. Her port, and her people, will have nothing to fear. If she has to send Mirabella out as an escort to every fleet of ships, if she has to lash her to the prow like a living figurehead—then so be it. She will gift her sister jewels and the finest gowns. People say that she is small and vindictive, but they are wrong. She is willing to bury the past as long as the island is safe.

“But it is only a temporary solution,” Antonin adds. “Only a stalemate. And perhaps not even that. There is only one of her; she cannot protect the entire island.”

“A stalemate is still preferable to the nothing you have suggested,” Katharine says, and grits her teeth.

The barge returns, escorted by Rho and the queensguard boats. Mirabella steps onto the dock. Three elementals have survived and join her. Two appear uninjured, but the third, a young man not much older than the queens themselves, holds an arm that is bleeding and mangled to the shoulder. Seeing him, Katharine’s heart is heavy. Perhaps she should have refused Rho’s suggestion to test the other elementals. Yet it is a small price to pay, in order to know. Now no other elemental will be asked to do the same.

Mirabella walks to Katharine with her chin held high. She is soaked, and her cloak hangs askew. The simple dress they put her in has been stretched and torn, and her black hair is slicked down her back. But she is still beautiful.

“You are pleased?” Mirabella asks.

“Of course I am pleased. You did it. You are everything that you promised. I could almost embrace you.”

“I lost two. And Eamon requires a healer.”

“He will have the best of them. Let us return to the Volroy to celebrate.”

“And to keep your council from turning blue,” Mirabella says, with a worried look at Luca. “But you are not shivering.”

“How could I after the exhilaration of what I just witnessed?” Katharine uses her unhurt arm to draw her cloak more tightly around her. She has grown careless these past months, showing the gifts she borrows from the dead. The dead elemental queens have made sure that tonight she feels no chill.

She gestures for Mirabella to walk ahead to the waiting carriages and feels the dead queens surge toward her, like a wave. They rise so forcefully that she feels them in her throat, as she did the day they escaped from her and entered Pietyr, and the thought of them taking over Mirabella fills her with dread. Mirabella is far too strong a vessel. In her their wickedness would be unleashed and unstoppable. She had thought, perhaps, that her sister could in time help her shoulder the burden of the dead queens. To help her control them, or find the strength to banish them back to the Breccia Domain for good. But she sees now that is impossible. She must find another way.

The dead queens stretch their necks toward her sister and she snaps them back.

“No,” she says, and clenches her teeth together. “You cannot have her.”

SUNPOOL

The morning that they are to perform the tethering spell, Arsinoe leaves the city and goes to look for her bear. Inside the gates, there are too many faces and questions that she has no answers to. So as soon as she can get away, she stuffs a small sack with dried apples and swipes a few of the larger fish from the kitchen before heading out to the woods.

Thanks to the low magic that ties them together, Braddock knows that she is coming, and it is not long before the shrubbery rustles and he bursts through to stand up before her on his hind legs.

“Come down, boy,” Arsinoe squeaks. She holds out a dried bit of apple, and his big lips take it from her fingers, gentle as a baby. He shoves his head into her chest and she hugs him, burying her nose in his fur until she feels him rooting around her sack for more apples and the fish.

“Hold on, hold on. Let’s find us a nice rock to picnic on.” They walk together toward the beach, and the flat black stones that