Three Dark Crowns (Three Dark Crowns #1) - Kendare Blake Page 0,41

water to collect them anymore. It is too cold, she says. It makes her old joints ache.

“Willa won’t save you,” Arsinoe says.

“Yes, she will,” says Katharine. “Because I am her favorite. It’s you she won’t save.”

“I will save you both,” Mirabella promises, and runs her fingers through Katharine’s long black hair. It is smooth as satin, and shines. Little Katharine. The youngest of the triplets. She has been Mirabella and Arsinoe’s treasure since they were old enough to hold her hand.

“How?” Arsinoe asks, and drops cross-legged into the grass. She plucks a flower and rubs pollen onto Katharine’s nose until it turns yellow.

“I’ll call thunder to scare them away,” Mirabella replies, twisting Katharine’s hair into a fat braid. “And wind so strong it will blow us up onto the mountain.”

Arsinoe considers this, her small brow furrowing. She shakes her head. “That will never work,” she says. “We will have to think of something else.”

“It was only a dream,” Luca says. They are high inside the temple, in her cluttered room of pillows and trinkets.

“It was not,” says Mirabella. “It was a memory.”

Luca dodders about beneath a fur shawl, trying not to be irritated at being shaken from bed before dawn. When Mirabella’s eye snapped open in her bed at the Westwood House, it was still dark. She waited for as long as she could stand to before coming to the temple to wake Luca, but the light peeking through the temple shutters is still the palest of grays.

“Come down to the kitchens,” says Luca. “There is no one awake to call for tea at this hour. We will have to make it ourselves.”

Mirabella takes a deep breath. When she lets it out, it shakes. The memory, or the dream, if that is, indeed, what it was, still clings to her, as do the feelings it stirred.

“Be careful here,” Mirabella says as she guides Luca down the steep temple stairs. She pushes the flame of their lamp up higher. Luca ought to take a room on a lower level. Perhaps a warm one, near the kitchens. But Luca will not admit that she is old. Not until she is dead.

In the kitchen, Mirabella starts a fire in the stove and heats water in a kettle while Luca searches shelves for the leaves she likes best. They do not speak again until they sit with two steaming cups of tea, sweetened with honey.

“It is only something your mind has made up. Because you are nervous. It is not surprising with the Quickening drawing near. And with you so haunted by the death of that sacrifice. Rho should never have made you do that ritual.”

“It is not that,” Mirabella insists. “I did not make it up.”

“You were a child when you last saw your sisters,” Luca says gently. “Perhaps you have heard stories. Perhaps you remember a little, about the cottage and the grounds.”

“I have a very good memory.”

“Queens do not remember these things,” Luca says, and takes a sip of tea.

“Saying so does not make it true.”

Luca looks into her cup solemnly. In the orange light of the table’s lamp, every line, every furrow, in the old woman’s face is visible.

“You will need it to be true,” the High Priestess says. “For it is too cruel otherwise, to force a queen to kill that which she loves. Her own sisters. And for her to see that which she loves come at her door like wolves, seeking her head.”

When Mirabella is silent, Luca reaches across and covers her hand with her own.

The echoes of Luca’s words are so loud in Mirabella’s ears that Elizabeth is almost on top of her before she hears her calling.

“You didn’t hear me?” Elizabeth asks, slightly out of breath.

“I am sorry,” Mirabella says. “It is so early; I was not expecting anyone to be awake.”

Elizabeth gestures up the trunk of a nearby evergreen. “Pepper rises with the sun. And so I do as well.”

Looking at the young priestess, Mirabella cannot help but smile. Elizabeth has a way of making it impossible to be sad. Her hood is down, and her dark hair has not yet been braided. Her tufted woodpecker darts onto her shoulder, and she feeds him a palm of seed.

“It is nice also,” she says, “to be up so early that we don’t have to worry about being seen.”

Mirabella grasps Elizabeth gently by the wrist. The bracelets the priestess wears are only that: bracelets made from black ribbon and beads. She is only an initiate and