Three Dark Crowns (Three Dark Crowns #1) - Kendare Blake Page 0,51
have no recognized fathers.
Arsinoe leans back. With the cheese and fruit in her belly, she is warm again and no longer shaky. She stretches her legs out and pushes the soles of her shoes near the coals.
“Joseph is so handsome,” Madrigal says wistfully.
“He is,” Arsinoe agrees.
“Seeing him and Jules together makes me realize how long I have been on my own. Perhaps I ought to work a spell. To bring a lover like that to me.”
“Hmph,” Arsinoe snorts, eyes half closed. “You don’t need low magic for that, Madrigal.”
“Perhaps not. But if I used just an inch off one of these cords,” she says, and pats the black bag in her lap, “I could have the best-looking man on the island.”
Arsinoe eyes her sideways, to make sure she is joking before beginning to chuckle. Before long the chuckle becomes a laugh, and then they are both laughing. But even had they not been, they would still not have heard Camden and Jules’s silent approach.
The mountain cat arrives at the fire before Jules does, but it is not enough warning to try to feign innocence.
Jules looks from her mother to Arsinoe.
“What is this?” she asks.
Arsinoe grimaces. They sit below the sacred stones, surrounded by rags soiled by queen’s blood. Arsinoe’s sleeve is drawn up above her elbow and shows the bandage clearly.
“This is what you do?” Jules half shouts at her mother. “The moment I turn my back? You bring her here and cut her open? You teach her low magic?”
“Jules,” Arsinoe says, and stands. She stretches an arm out, as if to shield Madrigal, which only makes Jules angrier. Camden begins to growl.
“I am helping her,” Madrigal says.
“Helping her?” Jules reaches for Arsinoe and tugs her so hard Arsinoe nearly trips over the log she was seated on. “You cannot do this. It is dangerous.”
Madrigal shakes her head. “You don’t understand it. You don’t know anything about it.”
“I know that there’s always a price,” Jules says. “I know it is for the simple, and the desperate, and the weak.”
“Then it is for me.” Arsinoe rolls her sleeve down to cover the bandage and the cuts of the runes on her palm.
“Arsinoe, that is not true.”
“It is true. And I will use it. It’s all I have.”
“But you don’t know what it will cost.”
“It will be fine, Jules. Madrigal used it when she was on the mainland, and she is safe.”
“Those who speak against it are only coughing up temple superstition,” Madrigal agrees as she douses the fire.
She and Arsinoe walk around the hill silently, eager to get Jules out of their sacred place. Jules follows behind, angry.
For as long as Arsinoe can remember, she and Jules have not quarreled over anything more important than the size of a slice of cake. Her shoulders slump.
“It will take time,” Madrigal says softly. “But she will come around.”
THE WESTERN COAST
It is better when there are no carriages or carts and she can travel by the roadside. At least the air is open there and she can see a patch of unobscured sky. Mirabella looks up at the fading light. It has been two whole days of walking since she fled Rolanth, separated by a few uncomfortable hours of dozing against this broad trunk or that. The country to the south is not meadows and sheer cliff sides. It is made up of denser forest and softly rolling hills. So many trees. Even in winter, without their leaves, they box her in. She does not understand why naturalists love the woods so.
She picks up her skirt to step over a mostly thawed puddle in the ditch, trying to preserve it even though the priestess’s cloak that Elizabeth loaned her is edged with dark watermarks and mud. The journey has not been easy. Her legs ache, and her stomach is empty. Yesterday, she used a bit of lightning to stun a trout, but she is not skilled at hunting without the priestesses and their hounds.
She misses Bree and Elizabeth. Luca and Sara. Even Uncle Miles and excitable little Nico. But she will bear it. She cannot stop for too long in any one place, and she cannot go often into cities. Soon though, she will have to trade for new clothes and a meal with a vegetable in it so her teeth do not fall out.
Mirabella steps quickly up the ditch as something approaches on the road. Whatever it is sounds large. Several carriages perhaps. A search party from Rolanth?