Arsinoe gestures to her weary face. “I think the cost is these big black circles underneath my eyes.”
“I don’t think you know the cost. Just like Madrigal didn’t know that hers would be a knife stuck through her throat.”
Billy’s eyes are so serious, he hardly looks like himself. Madrigal’s death might have been a turn of luck. Murder at Katharine’s hands. Or it might have been the low magic. There is simply no way to tell.
“Are you asking me to stop?”
“But I can’t ask that, can I? Not when you’re doing it for Jules.”
“It’s not because I want to,” she says, but even she hears the lie. Low magic is dangerous, true, but it is potent, and thanks to her queensblood, hers is more potent than most. How can she stop now, in the middle of a war, when she is full-up with one of their best weapons racing right beneath her skin?
“But it will have a price,” Billy says. “There’s no way around that. No . . . loophole in the contract.”
“Maybe it’s different for queens.”
“Maybe it is,” Billy says quietly. “Maybe they pay through the people they love.”
Arsinoe swallows hard. The people she loves. Joseph, dead. Jules, out of her mind. Billy takes her by the arms.
“I didn’t mean that. I shouldn’t have said it. I only thought it because I almost hope that it’s true.”
“How can you hope that it’s true?”
“Because I’m selfish. And it would be better for me if it happened to me or Jules. Just not to you.” He chuckles without much humor. “Maybe you should start intensely caring about Emilia.”
“That’s not funny,” Arsinoe says. “And besides, I don’t think it would work.”
She takes his hand and kicks at the sad blanket crumpled up on the floor. “Let’s go find something to eat. And get some fresh air.”
“Let’s go to the great hall,” Billy suggests. “There’s bound to be stew. There’s always stew. And we’ll probably find Luke, and Matthew and Caragh if the baby is sleeping. They found Braddock; did Luke tell you? Someone reported seeing him down the beach, and there he was, picking for shellfish during the low tide.”
“They didn’t bring him inside?” Arsinoe asks with alarm.
“No. Caragh caught some fish for him, and they let him be. Warned the people here to give him plenty of space. They said that with you so distracted by the rebellion he might be close to wild.”
Poor Braddock. He should be off somewhere in a warm den. Instead, the scent of her blood kept him pinned to Sunpool.
They leave her small workroom and walk through the courtyard, where Arsinoe spots Emilia in her bright red cloak. She is standing at the center of a cluster of people, and they are agitated, with crossed arms and broad stances. Poor Emilia. The success of the rebellion hinged upon the strength and the legend of Jules. In the city, work continues: laborers fortify the wall using picks and pulleys and harnessed horses to reclaim stone that has rolled away. Food stores are loaded into the granaries as more people arrive in Sunpool and must be fed. So much being done and so much still to do, but no matter how defiant Emilia is, or how determined, it is not for her that the people come, and it is not her they will follow.
Arsinoe and Billy turn down a quiet alley, in no rush to join the discussion.
“Do you think the rebels are asking about Jules? Or Mirabella?” Arsinoe wonders.
“Probably both. They’re growing unsatisfied with Emilia’s tales. She’s losing her hold on it. On all of it. I wouldn’t expect her to keep quiet about Mirabella for much longer.”
“I was sure Mirabella would send word by now. To tell us what she’s doing. What her plan is.”
“Maybe she can’t.”
“Or maybe there is no plan,” Emilia says, stepping out from around the next turn. “And she has abandoned you both to ally with the queen.”
Billy shudders and takes a step back. “Gad, how did you get here? Are there two of you?”
“Good Goddess, don’t let there be two of her,” Arsinoe says, and Emilia cocks an eyebrow.
“I saw you slip away when you spotted the crowd, so I followed you. You ought to be careful, talking in these corridors. The sound carries from one end to the other.”
“What was happening out there?” Arsinoe asks. “It seemed tense.”
“They want answers. They want their queen.” Emilia sighs. “Some of our soldiers are losing faith. If we tell them we face not one but two queens, without a single queen of our own . . .”
“Hey,” says Arsinoe, “I’m a queen.”
“Of course you are. Forgive me. It is so easy to forget. You have still not gone back to wearing the blacks, and your hair is always full of filth.” Emilia reaches out and picks at it. “Is it black? Is it gray?” She pulls out a long piece of yellow straw. “Is it blond?”
Arsinoe swats the straw out of her hand. “Soldiers, you say. Don’t you mean farmers and laborers?”
Emilia sighs. “How is Jules?”
“Unchanged.”
“Unchanged? But you have been locked up with your poisons and her mother’s low-magic curse for days. What is taking so long?”
“It’s a binding, not a curse,” Arsinoe says, and shoves her aside this time. “And it’s not like following a recipe.”
“Gather the Milones and meet me in the keep. I want to know everything that you know about the binding.” Then she turns on her heel and is gone.
“Grab the Milones and meet me,” Arsinoe grumbles through her stew in the great hall. “Like she’s the commander of the whole rebellion or something.”
“Well, she sort of is,” says Billy, grabbing a torn piece of bread from a table as they pass and spreading butter onto it.
Despite Arsinoe’s grumbling, they do as they were bid and take Cait, Ellis, and Caragh to meet Emilia in the room outside Jules’s chamber in the castle keep.
Mathilde greets them at the door and shows them inside.
“You won’t be able to use this room for much longer,” Arsinoe says. “Soon, you’ll need a space the size of the Black Council chamber.”
“Soon we will have the Black Council chamber.” Emilia smiles. She motions for Cait to sit, but it is Ellis who takes the chair. Cait always prefers to stand, so much so that Arsinoe suspects that when she dies, they will have to erect a special pyre that will allow them to burn her upright.
“I have asked you here because I wish to know what Arsinoe has discovered regarding the legion curse. It has been several days since she was given the low-magic spell and the letter, and I hoped to hear of some progress.”
For a moment, Cait stares at Emilia as if she, too, is annoyed by the summons, and Arsinoe hopes she will give Emilia an earful. Even Emilia, a warrior and so full of bluster that she nearly blows herself over, would shrink in the face of stern words from Cait Milone.
“I admit,” says Cait, “that I am curious about that as well.” She looks at Arsinoe, and Arsinoe swallows. “What have you found, shuttered away in that room of yours?”
Several times Arsinoe opens and closes her mouth before she can find the words to speak. “Not as much as I’d like.” Every eye in the room drops with disappointment, and she reaches into her pocket for the vial of blood-infused tonic. “But maybe this.”