Three Dark Crowns (Three Dark Crowns #1) - Kendare Blake Page 0,11

pats Jules’s arm and changes the subject. “The sea catch is impressive.”

Jules turns to the head table, thoroughly stocked with fish and crabs. Her catch forms the centerpiece: an enormous black cod accompanied by two equally huge silver stripers. She called them from the depths early that morning, before Arsinoe had even gotten out of bed. Now they lie on piles of potatoes, onions, and pale winter cabbage. Most of their juicy fillets have already been picked clean.

“You shouldn’t brush it aside,” Jules warns. “It matters.”

“The disrespect?” Arsinoe asks, and snorts. “No, it doesn’t.” She eats another crab claw. “You know, if I make it through this Ascension Year, I would like a shark as my centerpiece.”

“A shark?”

“A great white. Don’t be cheap when it comes to my crowning, Jules.”

Jules laughs. “When you make it through the Ascension, you can charm your own great white,” she says.

They grin. Except for her severe coloring, Arsinoe does not look much like a queen. Her hair is rough, and they cannot keep her from cutting it. Her black trousers are the same ones she wears every day, and so is her light black jacket. The only piece of finery they could get her into for the occasion was a new scarf that Madrigal found at Pearson’s, made from the wool of their fancy, flop-eared rabbits. But that is probably for the best. Wolf Spring is not a city of finery. It is of fishers and farmers and folk on the docks, and no one wears their fine blacks except on Beltane.

Arsinoe studies the tapestry hung behind the head table and frowns. Normally, it hangs in the town hall, but it is always dragged out for Arsinoe’s birthday. It depicts the crowning of the island’s last great naturalist queen. Bernadine, who weighed orchards heavy with fruit when she passed, and had an enormous gray wolf for a familiar. In the weaving, Bernadine stands below a tree sagging with apples, with the wolf beside her. In the wolf’s jaws is the torn-out throat of one of her sisters, whose body lies at Bernadine’s feet.

“I hate that thing,” Arsinoe says.

“Why?”

“Because it reminds me of what I’m not.”

Jules bumps the queen with her shoulder. “There is seed cake in the dessert tent,” she says. “And pumpkin cake. And white cake with strawberry icing. Let’s find Luke and go have some.”

“All right.”

On the way, Arsinoe pauses to chat with people and to pat their familiars. Most are dogs and birds, common naturalist guardians. Thomas Mintz, the island’s best fisher, gets his sea lion to offer Arsinoe an apple, balanced on its nose.

“Are you leaving?” Renata Hargrove asks.

Jules and Arsinoe turn, surprised Renata has bothered to come down from the head table.

“Only to the sweets tent,” Arsinoe says. “May we . . . bring something back for you?”

She glances at Jules awkwardly. No member of the Black Council has ever shown any interest in Arsinoe, despite being annual guests at her birthday. They eat, exchange pleasantries with the Milones, and depart, grumbling about the quality of the food and the size of the rooms at the Wolverton Inn. But Renata looks almost happy to see them.

“If you go, you will miss my announcement,” Renata says, and smiles.

“What announcement is that?” Jules asks.

“I am about to announce that Joseph Sandrin’s banishment is over. He is already set to return to the island and should arrive in two days.”

Sealhead Cove laps at the end of the long wooden dock. The weathered, gray boards creak in the brisk wind, and the rippling, moonlit sea mirrors the quiver of Jules’s breath.

Joseph Sandrin is coming home.

“Jules, wait.” Arsinoe’s footsteps rattle across the dock as she follows Jules to the point, with Camden trotting reluctantly alongside. The cat has never cared for the water, and a thin, bent wooden board does not seem to her the most trustworthy barrier.

“Are you all right?” Jules asks, out of habit.

“What are you asking me for?” Arsinoe asks. She tucks her neck down against the wind, deep into her scarf.

“I should not have left you.”

“Yes you should have,” Arsinoe says. “He’s coming back. After all this time.”

“Do you think it’s true?”

“To lie about this, at my birthday celebration, would take more nerve than even the Arrons have.”

They look across the darkening water, across the cove, past the submerged sandbar that protects it from the waves and out into the deeper currents.

It has been more than five years now since they tried to escape the island. Since Joseph stole one