Three Dark Crowns (Three Dark Crowns #1) - Kendare Blake Page 0,28

a promising start.”

A dark, black braid slides out of Elizabeth’s hood, almost as dark as the queens’ own. It reminds Mirabella of Bree, the way she wears it. Pepper the woodpecker ruffles his feathers. He seems to be a bird of few words.

“You are the only priestess here who has ever really spoken to me,” Mirabella says. “I mean, besides Luca.”

“Am I?” Elizabeth asks. “Oh dear. Yet another sign that I am not a very good priestess. Rho is always telling me so. Perhaps she is right.”

Bloodthirsty Rho. The terror of the temple. Mirabella cannot remember ever seeing her be kind or hearing her utter a word softly spoken. But she will be good protection once Beltane is over and the Ascension begins. Luca is right about that.

Elizabeth cocks her head. “You are feeling a little better now?”

“I am,” says Mirabella.

“Good. That rite, the rite of sacrifice—you can be sure it was Rho’s idea. She wants to bring back the old ways and supplant the council once more for the temple. She thinks she can do this by force, as if she alone is the Goddess’s hand. But she is not.” Elizabeth smiles brightly. “You are.”

“You said she did it,” the High Priestess says. “And so it is done.”

“I did not say that she did it well,” says Rho.

Rho picks up a trinket from the corner of Luca’s mahogany desk—a shiny, polished orb of opal—and makes a face. She does not like the High Priestess’s rooms, up in the top floor of the temple, overlooking the cliffs of Shannon’s Blackway. They are too soft, lined with pillows and blankets against the drafts. They are too cluttered, full of things, decorative things that have no use, like mosaic vases and carved, gilded eggs. Like the little opal.

Luca watches Rho wind back her arm to cast it out the window.

“Do not do that,” the High Priestess cautions. “That was a gift.”

“It is only a rock.”

“It was still a gift. And close that window. The breeze is cold today. I cannot wait for spring. The fires of Beltane leading to hot summer nights. Will you take some soup? The kitchen tells me it is rabbit and cabbage and cream.”

“Luca,” says Rho. “You are not listening. The rite was a farce. Our queen was backed into a corner, and even then she would do nothing until we first let the girl feel the fire.”

Luca sighs.

“The sacrifice lies buried beneath a pile of fallen stones. She performed the rite. You cannot ask her to enjoy it.”

Luca herself did not enjoy it. She had listened when they cautioned her about being too soft. She believed them when they said it would be Mirabella who would be hurt by it in the end. And now an innocent is dead. Crushed under rocks that form a convenient monument to be prayed over.

“We will not ask her to do anything like this again,” Luca says. “You do not know her like I do. If we press her too hard, she will buck. And if Mirabella learns to buck . . . if she remembers how . . .”

Luca looks out her west-facing window, through the trees to the roof of Westwood House. Even at that distance, the copper-cored lightning rods are still visible, standing up like stiff hairs. The Westwoods knew better, too, than to take them down.

“You were not here,” Luca adds, “when they brought Mirabella from the Black Cottage. Neither was I. I was still in Indrid Down, fighting the Arron council for any scrap of power. I would not have believed Sara Westwood when she came and told me that our six-year-old queen was going to tear her house from beneath her feet had it not been for the look on her face.

“The island has not seen a gift like hers in hundreds of years. Not since Shannon and the Queens of Old. We are its keepers but not its masters.”

“That may be,” says Rho. “But if she does not rise to her duty, the Black Council will keep its stranglehold for another generation.”

Luca rubs her face hard. Perhaps she is too old for this. Too exhausted from a life spent trying to wrest power from the Arrons. But Rho is right. If another poisoner queen sits the throne, the Arrons of the Black Council will rule until the next set of triplets comes of age. By the time that happens, Luca will be long dead.

“Mirabella will rise,” the High Priestess says. “And the temple will