in exchange for letting Joseph stay. In exchange for keeping Caragh out of that cottage.”
“They wanted to kill us all,” says Jules. “Natalia Arron would have had us poisoned and jerking, frothing on the council floor. Right there in the Volroy.”
She would have paraded their bodies through the city square in Indrid Down, if she had thought she could get away with it. They were only eleven years old at the time.
“That may still be our fate, if we step out of line,” Arsinoe says. “And it will be bad. They’ll craft something so we die over days. With blood running from our eyes and mouths.” She spits onto the gravel. “Poisoners.”
Jules sighs and looks down at the town she grew up in. Close-together wooden buildings cling around the cove like a mass of gray barnacles. Wolf Spring seems ugly today. Nowhere near grand enough for Joseph, or anyone, to come home to.
“Do you think he’ll have a gift?” Arsinoe asks.
“Probably not much of one. None of the other Sandrins do. Except Matthew, charming the fish.”
“I think Matthew just told your aunt Caragh that to impress her,” Arsinoe says. “His true gift is charming girls, and all the Sandrin boys have that. Even Jonah’s started to chase them around.”
Jules curses under her breath. That is just what Madrigal said.
“Is that what you’re afraid of?” asks Arsinoe.
“I’m not afraid,” Jules retorts. But she is afraid. She is very afraid that Joseph has changed and that her Joseph is gone. Disappeared in the five years they have been apart.
Camden trots ahead, paces the edge of the road, and yawns.
“I just don’t know what to do with him. We can’t exactly go catch frogs and snails in Welden Stream anymore.”
“Not in this weather,” Arsinoe agrees.
“What do you think mainland girls are like?” Jules asks suddenly.
“Mainland girls? Oh, they’re terrible. Horrible.”
“Of course. That’s why my beautiful mother fit in so well with them.”
Arsinoe snorts. “If they are anything like Madrigal,” she says, “then you have nothing to worry about.”
“Maybe she was right, though. Maybe I should not have come.”
Arsinoe shoves her forward, hard.
“Get down there, idiot,” she says. “Or you’ll be late.”
So Jules goes, down toward the dock, where his family stands in their best black coats. Joseph’s boat is not on the horizon yet, but his mother, Annie, is already up on a crate straining to see. Jules could wait with them. She has been welcome with the Sandrins ever since she and Joseph were children, even before her aunt Caragh and Joseph’s brother Matthew were to be married. But instead she detours up through the square to watch from afar.
In the square, the tents are still up. They have been partially cleaned out but not entirely. Since the festivities ended, Wolf Spring has been nursing a collective hangover. Nothing much has gotten done. Through the open tent flaps, Jules spies platters still on the head table, covered by the shifting black wings of birds. The crows have found what is left of her cod. After they have had their fill, someone will toss the bones back into the water.
Back at the docks, more people have gathered, and not only on the pier. All around the cove, curtains and shutters have been moved aside, and here and there, folk have ventured out to pretend to sweep their porches.
There is a nudge at her waist, and she looks down into Camden’s hungry yellow-green eyes. Her own stomach groans as well. On Jules’s bureau in their bedroom sits an untouched tray of tea and buttered bread. She could not think of eating then. But now she has never felt so empty.
She buys a fish for Camden in the winter market, a nice, clear-eyed sea bass with a curved tail, as if it froze while still swimming. For herself she buys a few oysters from Madge’s morning catch, and shucks them with her fat-bladed knife.
“Here,” Madge says, and hands her a dipper of vinegar. She jerks her head toward the cove. “Shouldn’t you be out there, clamoring with the rest?”
“I don’t care for crowds,” Jules says.
“I don’t blame you.” She presses another shellfish into Jules’s hand. “For the cougar,” she adds, and winks.
“Thanks, Madge.”
Down at the docks, the crowd stirs, and the movement carries all the way up the hill and into the market. Madge’s neck stretches.
“Aye, there it is,” she says.
Joseph’s ship has entered the harbor. It sneaked up on them; already it is close enough that Jules can make out the crewmen on the