Five Dark Fates (Three Dark Crowns #4) - Kendare Blake Page 0,75
you doing here?”
“Well, I was sleeping.” Jules nods toward two more lumps on the floor. “Just like Granddad and Luke.”
Arsinoe blinks. Ellis and Luke are asleep, snoring softly under their blankets and familiars: the white spaniel, Jake, curled up between Ellis’s feet and Hank, the rooster, clucking peacefully on Luke’s chest.
“Don’t you remember?”
Arsinoe rubs her eyes. “I remember everyone celebrating in the great hall, and then we came up here and Luke brought more ale.”
“A lot more ale,” Jules says, and shuts her eyes. “The room is still tilting.”
All of Sunpool had celebrated the taking of Pietyr Renard. Mathilde even flexed her barding muscles and sang the tale of his capture. It was a good story. Emilia breaking into Greavesdrake Manor and silently rushing the halls, incapacitating servants with the blunt handle of her dagger. Then pulling Pietyr Renard from the queen’s own bed. She just threw him over her shoulder and carried him out. With him unconscious, she said it was a little like kidnapping a rolled-up rug.
“What were you dreaming about?” Jules asks.
Arsinoe frowns. She dreamed that she had received a package from Katharine. But she had been too afraid to open it. It had been prettily wrapped in soft blue paper and tied with a black bow, but she knew that if she opened it, she would find Billy. Dead, folded up or in pieces.
“Nothing. I don’t really remember.”
“How long have I known you?” Jules asks.
“What?”
“How long?”
Arsinoe sighs. “Since we were six.”
“Since we were six,” Jules repeats. “And you don’t think I know when you’re lying?”
Arsinoe gets to her feet. The dream has left her with a chill. She craves some crispy, fatty bacon and eggs fried in the same pan. “I think you know me so well that it doesn’t matter whether I lie or not. You know what I was dreaming about anyway.”
Jules purses her lips, but she stands, too, satisfied. Then she doubles back over. “You had far more ale than I did; how are you so spry?”
“Poisoner constitution.” Arsinoe pats her belly. “It would take a lot more than that to give me a headache.”
“I need more sleep. Go without me.”
Arsinoe leaves the room, careful not to disturb the sleeping men, dog, and fowl. She arrives in the great hall and finds it a wreck: upended bottles spill wine and ale across tables to drip puddles on the floor, and half-eaten chunks of bread lie here and there, along with bones from a roasted bird. There are plenty of people, too, who did not make it to their beds and settled for a bench or a tilted-back chair.
“You will have to serve yourself.” Emilia is seated at a table alone, in the slanting shadow of early morning.
“I didn’t see you there. Is that some unknown warrior trick?”
“Becoming invisible?” Emilia grins. “That would be a very good trick. Here.” She pushes her plate of food across the table. Some of it is eaten, but she must have overloaded it in the kitchen, because there is plenty left. “I think we are the only ones awake in this entire city.”
“If that’s true,” Arsinoe says, and picks up a bit of fried potato, “then who cooked the food?”
“Where is Jules?”
“Hungover. She went back to bed.”
“She left me for you last night.” Emilia smiles ruefully. “As always.”
“I didn’t ask her to choose.” Arsinoe takes up a fork and shovels down egg, still good even if it is cold. “But if I had, she would have chosen me.”
“For now.”
“For”—Arsinoe pokes her with the fork—“ever.”
It feels odd, arguing with Emilia over Jules like this. She does not care for Jules the way that Emilia cares for Jules. She knows that it is different. But she cannot help feeling possessive.
Possessive for who? she wonders. Am I guarding Jules for myself or for Joseph’s ghost? Shouldn’t it be for Jules to decide when it is time to let him go?
It should be. And it will be. And maybe when she does, things between Arsinoe and Emilia will have to change. She squints up at her between bites of food, and Emilia gives her a haughty, know-it-all wink. Maybe not.
“Where’s the hostage?”
“At the Lermont house, under the protection and guard of the seers. Mathilde is there with him now.”
“The Lermont house?” Arsinoe asks. Long ago, the castle was the Lermont house. But as their numbers dwindled, it was abandoned for a large white manor house in the southwest corner of the city. “Why not put him under guard here?”