Five Dark Fates (Three Dark Crowns #4) - Kendare Blake Page 0,89

Down. He can carry her to safety. He leaps the last strides up onto the cliffs.

And Mirabella loses her grip and tumbles from the saddle.

Dazed, she rolls onto her stomach and grimaces, fist pressed to her belly. She is bleeding badly. Weakening. But what she sees when she looks back makes her claw and shove against the ground to get away. Katharine has come up the path. Only it is not Katharine. This is what she meant when she said the dead queens wore her like clothing. The rotting skin mottling her cheeks. The milky eyes. The blackness seeping from her and rising like smoke.

“Katharine!”

The dead queens shake their head. When they smile, dark wetness shows between their teeth, as if their mouth is watering.

Mirabella calls her storm; she has no choice. She gathers her lightning as the queens lift her up by the arms, but her gift slips through her fingers like so much blood. They have done it. Weakened her, and made her a ready vessel.

“Katharine,” she cries, and touches her sister’s face. “You can’t let them have me!”

The dead queens recoil. The eyes close, and when they open, they are Katharine’s again, clear and black and suffering. Afraid.

“Little sister.” Mirabella smiles. “Do not let them have me.”

“I am so sorry, Mira.”

Katharine starts to cry, and Mirabella exhales. The blade against her throat is only a sting, and then Katharine shoves her clear, over the side of the cliff face. The wind at her back as she falls is like the wind atop Shannon’s Blackway. When she strikes the rocks below, it only hurts for a moment.

Katharine rides back to the Volroy alone. She could not remain on the beach, watching Luca weep and hover over Mirabella’s body, looking this way and that, back to the cave, up the path to the cliffs, as if there were something to be done. Nor could she stay and listen to the dead queens snapping their jaws, muttering bitter nonsense as they stared down at their broken vessel on the rocks.

As she storms into the Volroy, one of her guards bows and hurries forward to meet her.

“Queen Katharine. We found the commander this afternoon unconscious—”

“Get away from me!” Katharine bellows. “Leave me alone!”

Except she is never alone. Not in the empty halls, not when she presses her hands to the sides of her head so hard she thinks she will crack her skull. Nor when she slams the door of her rooms closed behind her and listens to her breathing in the quiet.

She tried to rid herself of the dead queens. To distance herself from them. Appease them. She has tried to control them and lull them into silence. They had won her a crown. But they had cost her Pietyr. And they had made her murder her sister.

We are you now, they whisper as they twist themselves back into her veins.

Do not fight us, anymore.

In the quiet shadows of the throne room, Billy lies on his stomach, hands bound behind his back. His feet are bound to his hands. He has stopped being able to feel either set hours ago.

He turns his head to the side, which makes it easier to breathe. He is not sure what poisons they gave him today. Perhaps they did not give him any. But every time food or drink passes his lips he imagines for hours that he can feel the effects: his throat closing, his stomach and chest tightening. At night, he weeps with silent panic, alone and tied and hating that it is only his imagination making him suffer.

But it is not all in his head. The Black Council has been inventive in his torture. Renata Hargrove is a master of knots and continues to find new ways to twist and truss him. Paola Vend prefers setting him to impossible tasks and laughing and kicking him when he fails. She challenged him to find a sewing needle in a bowl of grain using only his tongue. She made him try for an entire day. When he failed, Antonin Arron dipped the needle in wasp venom and stuck it in each of his fingers, and the swelling made it much more difficult to serve the bastards their tea.

Mirabella has not visited him since the first night. And he has had to admit that Arsinoe is not coming either. He is glad of that. He would never have her risk herself. But at night, in the dark, fearing his tongue is beginning to thicken,