Three Dark Crowns (Three Dark Crowns #1) - Kendare Blake Page 0,65

as one loves a doomed thing. Only Jules ever thought differently. And now Madrigal.

“I don’t suppose it matters that none of those things are Mirabella’s fault,” Joseph says, and Cait smacks him with her towel.

“Stop defending that queen, Joseph Sandrin,” she snaps.

“But she saved my life.”

“Is that all it takes to buy your loyalty?” Cait asks, and Joseph and Arsinoe smile.

Joseph stands when Jules comes through the front door. He leans down and kisses Arsinoe on the forehead.

“You saved me too,” he says. “You found me.” He rests his hand on Arsinoe’s shoulder. “But I don’t want to see any more cuts on Jules, do you understand?”

“Not even if you go missing again?”

“Not even then.”

She harrumphs. “You sound like a temple acolyte.”

“Maybe so,” he says. “But there are worse things to sound like.”

Arsinoe does not see Jules again until much later, when Jules slips into their shared bedroom, with Camden behind her. Were it not for the sad dragging of the mountain cat’s tail, Arsinoe might never have known that something was wrong.

“Jules? Are you just coming back?”

“Yes. Did I wake you?”

Arsinoe sits up and searches her bedside table until she finds her matches. She lights the candle to see Jules’s troubled face.

“I wasn’t sleeping that well, anyhow.” Arsinoe holds her hand out to Camden, but the big cat only groans. “What’s the matter? Has something happened?”

“No. I don’t know.” Jules climbs into her bed without changing clothes. “I think that something might have happened with Joseph.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s different since the accident.”

Jules sits back quietly against her pillows, and Camden jumps up to lie beside her, and rests her large paws on her shoulder.

“Do you think,” Jules starts. “Do you think something could have happened with your sister?”

“My sister?” Arsinoe repeats. Jules almost never refers to the other queens that way. It sounds near accusatory, though Arsinoe cannot believe that is how she means it. “No. Never. You are imagining things.”

“He keeps finding ways to mention her,” Jules says.

“Only because she saved him.”

“They were together for two nights.”

An uncomfortable ball forms in Arsinoe’s gut. She wishes that Jules would stop talking about this. She does not want to know it.

“That doesn’t mean anything. She was . . . she was likely using him to find me. Perhaps she even sent the storm.”

“Maybe,” says Jules.

“Have you asked him?” Arsinoe asks, and Jules shakes her head. “Then ask. I’m sure he will tell you there was nothing. Joseph has been waiting for you for years. He would never . . .”

Arsinoe pauses, and glances down the hall toward Madrigal’s room. When Joseph came home, they had worked a spell. Soaked in her blood and then knotted together. But she had destroyed it before it could be finished. Or at least she thought she had.

“Sleep, Jules,” Arsinoe says, and puts out the light. “It will be better in the morning.”

That night, neither girl sleeps well. Jules and Camden compete for space in the bed, grunting and pushing at each other with paws and knees. Arsinoe listens to the rustle of blankets for a long time. When she finally closes her eyes, her dreams are of Joseph, drowning in a bloodred sea.

In the morning, Cait sends Jules and Arsinoe down into town, on orders to procure proper festival clothes. Gowns, she said, and grimaced when she said it. Cait, like Arsinoe, has no use for gowns. The brown and green wool dresses she wears to tend her household are all she needs. But even she will need one. This Beltane will be the elder Milones’ first since Jules was born. As Arsinoe’s stewards, every Milone must attend. Beltane, Cait says, is for the young and the obligated.

“Will we see Joseph first?” Arsinoe asks.

Jules wrinkles her nose.

“To make him come shopping?”

“There is no reason we ought to suffer alone. He and I can try on jackets and get kicked out of Murrow’s for eating crab claws. It’ll be grand.”

“All right,” Jules says. “He will not be on the boats, anyway.”

Joseph will not be on the boats for a very long while. It did not sit well with anyone to nearly lose him so soon after he was regained. Least of all with his mother. She has grounded him and Jonah both and set them instead to working in the shipyard. Even Matthew has been restricted from going out too far on the Whistler, though that means sacrificing his best runs.

Arsinoe inhales warming morning air. Wolf Spring has begun its thaw. Soon enough, the