Five Dark Fates (Three Dark Crowns #4) - Kendare Blake Page 0,47

her iris, a small collection of tics belonging to many different queens—but she can see when they have drifted out of her blood and into her skin.

What word? they ask, and hiss. What threat?

“The war-gifted move against us. They would turn from the crown and join the rebellion.”

The rage of the dead queens ripples across her face.

They must not. They cannot.

“They will unless we stop them.”

Yes. Stop them. Kill them.

“But I cannot go. I am needed here.”

We must ride. Ride with the army.

“Yes,” Katharine says carefully. “But you must go alone.”

We cannot go alone. We have no body and no blood. You are our vessel.

“What if I gave you another one?”

Mirabella . . .

Katharine’s voice hardens. “No. Not Mirabella. Never my sister,” she says, and clenches her teeth as the dead queens continue to whisper Mirabella’s name. “Someone else. Can you move into someone else?”

Not permanent. A lasting vessel must be of the blood.

Of the blood. Queensblood.

“Temporarily, then. How is it done?”

They fall silent. Katharine tenses.

They must be willing. Or they must be weakened.

“Weakened? Like I was when I fell down the Breccia Domain.” They say nothing. She hears only the multitude of their breaths. “No. I cannot do that. The temporary vessel must be willing. And you will still obey me when you are with them?”

You are our permanent vessel. You are a queen. Of our blood. Queen Katharine. Beloved.

“Good,” Katharine says. “I have the perfect soldier in mind.”

SUNPOOL

A few days after the Sandrins depart with baby Fenn, Arsinoe and Billy are roused from their room by a sight-gifted girl in a yellow cloak.

“Queen Arsinoe, Master Chatworth, please come with me.”

“Why?” Arsinoe asks, swinging her legs out of bed. “And why so early?”

“Um, Arsinoe,” Billy says, buttoning his shirt and looking down at the square from their window. “We’d better go. Everyone’s down there already—Jules, Emilia, Mathilde, even Cait and Caragh Milone. As my mother would say, something’s afoot.”

Curious, they ready themselves and go down to the square. They follow Jules and her entourage through the courtyard, past the now-working fountain with its statue of leaping fish. Parts of Sunpool have come alive again, cleaned and refurbished after the influx of new, skilled labor. Yet as they pass a few of the scattered oracles in yellow cloaks, Arsinoe feels a pang of guilt. The oracles were ghosts before as their numbers dwindled. And they are still ghosts now, their quiet and stillness overrun, pushed aside to make way for the war.

“Isn’t it strange?” Arsinoe says quietly to Billy. “They invite the rebellion here, yet they don’t seem to want a say in it.”

“Maybe it’s because they already know what’s going to happen,” he replies. “But it is odd. Since we’ve been here, I’ve only seen Mathilde speaking with Jules and Emilia. But Mathilde isn’t even a Lermont. The Lermonts are like the Arrons of this city, right?”

“She has Lermont blood,” Caragh says, overhearing. “Through her father’s side. I asked her about this very same thing just after I arrived. They let her take the lead because of all the oracles she is the most warlike. It’s sad. The sight-gifted have been made to feel so weak and unwelcome for so long that not even they always trust themselves anymore.”

“Somehow I think they trust themselves today.” Arsinoe and the others stop behind Jules as two oracles step out from behind the pillars of the colonnade. The cloister that they stand in and its rows of pillars are called the sight garden, a place within the castle walls for seers to commune and practice their gift in quiet. Arsinoe finds it both pretty—with its green grass and rows of flowering shrubs—and strange. It is full of scrying bowls filled with water or sometimes wine, and the pillars in the center of the green space support nothing, each with two stone benches at their base.

Arsinoe elbows her way to the front.

“Josephine, Gilbert,” Jules says, nodding to each of the seers. “Is Mathilde on her way?”

“I am here.” Mathilde approaches through the garden and embraces both oracles: one a tall, blond woman who looks a little like Mathilde and another an older man with hair nearly the same sandy shade as Billy’s. “I already know what they have seen.”

“Well?” Emilia asks. “What is it?”

The woman, Josephine, speaks. “We have seen a battle in Indrid Down. Forces swarming even to the base of the Volroy.”

Emilia smiles. “Good. When?”

“There was no snow. Beyond that, I cannot say. But I have also seen something else: Mirabella,