Three Dark Crowns (Three Dark Crowns #1) - Kendare Blake Page 0,24
will come to be.”
Arsinoe plunks her stool down near the fire. She does not mention that the Milone house is much more than a drafty cottage by the sea. That is all Madrigal will ever think of it as.
“Why did you come back?” Arsinoe asks. “If you are so dissatisfied? You were six years on the mainland, and you could have stayed there.”
Madrigal prods the flames with a long stick. “Because of Jules, of course,” she says. “I couldn’t stay away and let her be raised by my dull sister.” She pauses. She knows she has spoken out of turn. No one in the family will hear one word spoken against Caragh. Not since she took Jules’s place in the Black Cottage. How that must annoy Madrigal, who hardly has a kind word to say.
“And you,” Madrigal says, and shrugs. “A new queen. I wasn’t even born when the last one was crowned, so I could not miss this. You are the only excitement this island has seen in all that time.”
“Yes, excitement,” says Arsinoe. “I imagine my death will be very exciting.”
“Do not be so dour,” Madrigal says. “I am on your side, unlike half these people. Why do you think I’ve brought you all the way up here?”
Arsinoe sets her crossbow and bolts beside her foot and stuffs her chilly hands into her pockets. She should have refused to come. But with Jules in Wolf Spring with Joseph, it was either this or chores.
“What do you think my Juillenne is doing down in town?” Madrigal muses, fiddling with something in her coat. She pulls out a small bag and sets it in her lap.
“Welcoming home an old friend,” Arsinoe says. “Her best friend.”
“You are her best friend,” Madrigal says slyly. “Joseph Sandrin has always been . . . something else.”
She pulls four things out of her bag: a curving braid of hair, a strip of gray cloth, a length of black satin ribbon, and a sharp silver knife.
“Low magic,” Arsinoe observes.
“Don’t call it that. That is the temple talking. This is the lifeblood of the island. The only thing that remains of the Goddess in the outside world.”
Arsinoe watches Madrigal set out the items in a careful row. She cannot deny being fascinated. There is a peculiar bend to the air here, and a peculiar feeling in the ground, like a heartbeat. It is strange that she has never stumbled across this place, and this bent-over tree, before. But she has not. If she had, she would have known immediately.
“Be that as it may,” Arsinoe says, “low magic is not a queen’s gift. We aren’t like everyone else. Our line is . . .” She stops. “Sacred,” she almost said. Of the Goddess. It is true, but the words turn the inside of her mouth bitter. “I shouldn’t do it,” she says. “I should go down to the water and yell at a crab until it prostrates itself before me.”
“How long have you tried that?” Madrigal asks. “How many times have you called for a familiar who hasn’t come?”
“It will come.”
“It will. If we raise your voice.”
Madrigal smiles. Arsinoe never thinks of Madrigal as beautiful, though many, many people do. “Beautiful” is too gentle a word for what she is.
“Jules will help me to raise it,” Arsinoe says.
“Don’t be stubborn. Jules may not be able to. For her, things come too easy. The gift is there, at her fingertips. She reminds me of my sister that way.”
“She does?”
“Yes. Caragh opened her eyes one day and had the gift. All of it. Just like Jules. It was not as brutally strong as Jules’s is, but it was strong enough to turn my parents’ heads. And she did it without work.” Madrigal stokes the fire and sends up sparks. “I have wondered sometimes if Caragh isn’t somehow really Jules’s mother. Even though I remember giving birth to her. They were so close after I returned to the island. Jules even looks more like her.”
“So, uglier, you mean.” Arsinoe frowns.
“I didn’t say that.”
“What else can you mean? You and Caragh look similar. And Jules looks nothing like either of you. The only feature she and Caragh share is that they are both less pretty than you. Jules bonded with Caragh, but what can you expect? You were gone. Caragh raised her.”
“‘Raised her,’” Madrigal repeats. “She was scarcely nine years old when I returned.”
She takes up the cloth in her lap and tears away errant threads until the edges are clean.