Three Dark Crowns (Three Dark Crowns #1) - Kendare Blake Page 0,64

of Renata Hargrove and Margaret Beaulin, but the whole time watching Katharine jealously. She does not want to think so, but it would be easier if Pietyr were not there at all.

“Billy,” she says, “would you care to see more of the manor?”

“It would be a pleasure.”

No one objects when they move into the hall together, though there is a momentary hush in the already hushed conversation. The second they are free of the drawing room, Katharine takes a great, heaving sigh. When the mainlander looks at her strangely, she blushes.

“Sometimes I think I have had so much ceremony I could scream,” she says.

He smiles. “I know what you mean.”

She does not think that he does. But he will soon enough. The entire Beltane Festival is one ritual after another: the Hunt, the Disembarking, and the Quickening. His poor mainland mind will addle trying to remember all the rules and decorum.

“There will be no break from it, I suppose,” he says. “Not even from meetings of this kind. How many suitors will there be, Queen Katharine?”

“I do not know,” she says. “Once, there were many. But now Natalia thinks it will only be six or seven.”

But even that number seems a burden when she thinks of Pietyr. How can she ask him to stand aside and watch? It is what he says he wants, but she knows that he is lying.

“You don’t sound excited,” Chatworth says. “None of you queens seems to want to be courted. The girls I know back home would go mad to receive so many suitors.”

Katharine tries to smile. She is letting it slip, leaving him open to be snatched up by Mirabella and the Westwoods. She forces herself to step in close and to tilt her face up to his.

When she kisses him, his lips are warm. He moves them against hers, and she almost pulls away. She will never be lost in him the way she is in Pietyr. There is no point even in hoping. She will have many more moments like this when she is queen. Passionless moments spent silently screaming until she can return to Pietyr.

“That was lovely,” Chatworth says.

“Yes. It was.”

They smile awkwardly. He did not sound like he meant it any more than she did. But they lean forward anyway, to do it again.

WOLF SPRING

“You hate her, don’t you?” Joseph asks, sitting with Arsinoe at the Milones’ kitchen table as Madrigal washes fresh rune-cuts on Arsinoe’s hand. They are all the way up her wrist now, with bloodletting wounds on the inside of each arm.

“Mirabella, you mean?” Arsinoe asks. “Of course I hate her.”

“But why? When you don’t even know her?”

For a moment in the forest, when Mirabella held out her hand, she almost made Arsinoe believe something different. And then the priestesses came, looking more like soldiers than temple servants, and whatever flicker was there vanished. Her sister is cunning and strong. She came very close. It must take all those soldiers to keep her in check. To keep her from stealing away and killing her sisters too soon.

“I don’t think it is strange at all,” Arsinoe says. “Don’t you see? It has to be one of us. It has to be her. My whole life I have heard that it has to be her. That I have to die, so that she can lead. That I do not matter, because she’s here.”

Across the kitchen, Grandma Cait throws a towel over her shoulder, shooing off her crow, who flies into another room and returns with a jar of salve. She lands on the table and knocks it against the wood.

“I’m not touching that,” says Madrigal. “It’s oily and it smells.”

“I’ll do it then,” Cait says gruffly, and uses the same towel to shoo her daughter out of her chair.

Cait’s hands on Arsinoe’s wounds are rough as she works the salve into the cuts. Rough because they are worried, but she says nothing. No one has said anything about Arsinoe’s use of low magic. Since it brought Joseph home, even Jules has kept her mouth shut.

It is not in Cait’s nature to hold her tongue. But chastising Arsinoe would do no good. She has been indulged for too long and has become used to doing as she pleases.

“You ought to let this air awhile. Before you wrap it up again.”

Cait holds Arsinoe’s hand a moment and then pats it firmly and sets it on the table. Arsinoe frowns. The Milones have loved her well, but they have loved her