Three Dark Crowns (Three Dark Crowns #1) - Kendare Blake Page 0,87
a jar of black.
At first, she does not know what to paint. And then she does.
She dips four fingers and drags lines down his shoulder. She dips them again and drags lines down his right cheek, before doing the same to herself.
“For Arsinoe,” she says.
“That is perfect,” he says. “But just one more.”
“One more?”
He takes her by the wrist.
“I would wear your handprint, over my heart.”
Jules’s hand hovers over his chest. Then she covers her palm with paint and holds it against his heartbeat. As she does, she presses her lips to his.
She missed his touch. The heat of it, and the strength of his arms around her. Since Mirabella, sometimes it has felt like Joseph had never come back to the island at all. But he is there, even if Arsinoe is not, and even if their promises to each other about Beltane, and being together for the first time, have been spoiled.
Joseph holds on to Jules tightly. He kisses her as if he is afraid to stop.
She raises her hands to his chest and pushes him away.
“Joseph. I was wrong to do that.”
“No,” he says breathlessly. “You weren’t. We can stay here all night, Jules, we don’t have to hunt.”
“No.”
He touches her face, but she will not look in his eyes. What she would see there might change her mind.
“Will you never forgive me?” he asks.
“Not now,” she says. “I do not want to feel like everything between us has been ruined. I want it to be right again and to go back to the way it was.”
“What if it never does?” he asks.
“Then we will know that it was never meant to be.”
THE BRECCIA DOMAIN
“It is so black,” Katharine says.
“Yes,” says Pietyr. “But you ought to know what black is, being a queen.”
His voice comes from a distance behind her. He refused to go so close to the edge. But the moment Katharine saw the Breccia Domain, she dropped onto her belly and slithered up to it like a snake.
The Breccia Domain is the deep chasm in the ground that they call “the heart of the island.” It is a sacred place. They say it has no bottom, and seeing it, Katharine cannot describe its darkness. It is so black that it is almost blue.
Pietyr sneaked her out as soon as Natalia and Genevieve were distracted by the Hunt. They slipped quietly into the deep southern Innisfuil woods, where hunting is forbidden, until the trees opened up on the stark gray rocks and the dark fissure in the island, like the wound from a jagged blade.
“Come out here with me,” she says.
“No thank you.”
She laughs and hangs her head over the edge. Pietyr cannot feel what she feels as a queen. This place is for her kind.
She takes another deep, deep breath.
The Breccia Domain feels. The Breccia Domain is, in that way that so many other sacred places on Fennbirn are, but the Domain is where all those other places connect. It is the source. Had Katharine been raised in the temples like Mirabella, she might have better words for the hum in the air and how it makes the back of her neck prickle.
The cold, dense air of it rushes into her blood and makes her so giddy that she laughs.
“Kat, come away from it now,” Pietyr says.
“Must we go so soon? I like it here.”
“I do not understand why. It is a morbid place in the middle of nowhere.”
She rests her head on her hand and continues to look down into the fissure. Pietyr is right. She should not like it so well. In generations past, the Domain is where they would throw the bodies of the queens who did not survive their Ascension Years. Genevieve says that at the bottom of the hole, they lie in piles. Shattered.
But now Katharine does not think so. The Breccia Domain is so vast and deep. Those queens cannot be broken at the bottom. They must all still be falling.
“Katharine, we cannot stay here all night. We must return before the Hunt is over.”
She takes one last, long look into the blackness and sighs. Then she stands and brushes dust off her gown. They had better go back. She will need rest before tomorrow.
Tomorrow, they will prepare for the Disembarking at sunset, when she and Mirabella will see their suitors for the first time, as well as each other. She wonders whether the pretty elemental will be surprised to see her weak poisoner sister looking so healthy.