“It is all right to remember,” says Luca. “You will not be punished for remembering.”
“Why are you here?”
Luca cocks her head. She kicks a little, playfully, at the water of the lake.
“I go where the Goddess wills me.” She smiles at the queen. “As we all must. As surely you do. Someone with a gift as strong as yours must feel her with every beat of your heart.”
“The Goddess,” Mirabella murmurs thoughtfully. “Willa said she was my . . . our mother.”
“The Goddess is mother to us all. But to you, especially. You are her body, here, on the island. Her hand. As I am her ears and eyes. And her voice to the people.”
“Why are you here?” Mirabella asks again, brow furrowing, and the lake shudders suddenly, the entire surface contracting, as if an earthquake struck someplace down deep.
“To meet you, of course. I am here because you are sad.”
“What is that?” From the shore, Sara points down into the water. Luca cannot see what she means, but from the way everyone backs away, it cannot be good. “There’s something in the lake!”
Mirabella draws the creature out of the water, and Luca gasps. The translucent, liquid body is oddly beautiful as it hovers above the surface. Perhaps it is the water spirit of Starfall Lake, given form. But if it is, then Mirabella can do something no elemental has been able to do in recent memory.
“I am not sad,” Mirabella says, and Luca looks at her and sees dots of perspiration on the little girl’s forehead. “I am angry.”
“Queen Mirabella—”
“Give me back my sisters!”
The water creature dives onto Luca, stabbing watery fingers into her eyes and into her nose and ears. She hears the Westwoods screaming as the water forces its way down her throat. Luca wishes she could scream, but all she can do is flail, and fall to the ground, and get her arms wet as she tries to fight.
“Mirabella, stop!” Sara shouts. But the queen will not. There is steel in her spine, and ice in her heart that will not be melted by one dead priestess. But Luca knows that her murder will force them to say Mirabella is mad. The people will storm Indrid Down and demand she be put to death.
With a gargantuan effort, Luca wills herself to stop panicking. She looks at the queen with compassion. She holds out her hand. For a moment, she thinks it will not work, that the burning in her lungs will increase until her vision goes dark. But then the water splashes to the ground. She coughs it up until her throat is raw and her muscles sore, but she can breathe again.
The Westwoods circle around Mirabella, ready to drag her from the lake and lock her back where they found her.
“No!” Luca shouts in between her coughing. They back away, and Luca looks up at the queen fondly. “No one touches our chosen queen.”
WOLF SPRING
Arsinoe follows Jules as Joseph leads them on a merry chase through the woods. Try as he might, he cannot leave them behind. Both are still as slim-hipped as he is, and what Jules lacks in length of leg she makes up for in quickness. All three run for the sheer childhood delight of running and never seem to tire, though their cheeks are flushed red. It has been three years since Arsinoe joined them, and while she is still far more serious than Jules or Joseph, she will laugh now, and a mischievous, sarcastic edge has crept into her voice. She is happy. Jules and Joseph have become her friends, and if some part of her remembers that they are not to be replacements for others . . . Well, that part has fallen very quiet.
“Joseph, not so fast!” Arsinoe shouts from the back.
Joseph cackles and yells, “Faster!” He twists his head to look. She and Jules are right on his heels, and he smiles as though proud of them. Ahead, the path leaves the woods and broadens into the tall, sunlit grass of the meadow beside Dogwood Pond. Jules takes her chance, surging ahead of Arsinoe, short legs flying. She overtakes Joseph at the last moment and bursts through first, into the daylight.
“That’s practically cheating!” Joseph says, and Arsinoe laughs. Her strides slow, and her muscles relax to weak-kneed slackness.
“She does it every time. You ought to know by now. You ought to expect it.”
Arsinoe slaps Joseph on the back. But he does not reply or slap her in return like he usually does. He has stopped dead behind Jules, and both are staring at something across the field. Arsinoe blinks against the summer sun and puts a hand up to shield her eyes.
It is a young woman. A beautiful young woman in a vibrant green dress, and golden brown hair loose to her waist. Arsinoe thinks she knows this woman somehow, from somewhere, though she is certain she has never met her. And something about the way Jules is staring sets Arsinoe’s teeth on edge.
Across the meadow, the woman holds out her arms and calls, “Juillenne!”
“Mother!” Jules shouts, and runs to her.
Caragh stands at the kitchen sink, scrubbing tender, fat carrots from her garden. This year, she and Jules have spent more time than ever in the fields coaxing crops, and the entire harvest is strong. Jules’s gift has almost reached fullness. Ellis teases that when she is grown she will be able to feed Wolf Spring all by herself.
“Here, let me,” says Caragh’s mother, Cait, elbowing her way in. “You’re too slow. Should be done already.” Should have been done hours ago, while Caragh was out doing who-knows-what with that Sandrin boy, is what Cait means. But stolen hours with Matthew are worth all the snide comments that her mother wants to make. “Where’s Juillenne?”
“Where she always is,” says Caragh. “Playing with Joseph and Arsinoe.”
“You should mind them. Nine is a mischievous age.”
“So it is. And it goes too fast. They might as well have a bit of fun.”
Cait scowls, a beautiful woman turned handsome by the years. She is tall, like all the Milone women save for Jules, and her bones are straight and strong.
“Is that what you’re having with Matthew? A bit of fun?”
Caragh pours more water into the sink. “No. Matthew is different. Matthew, I intend to marry.”
“Different,” Cait says sadly. “Like it was for my aunt Phillippa. Like it was for my sister Rosaline.”
Caragh squeezes the carrots almost hard enough to break them. Phillippa and Rosaline. She has heard those names so many times. Whispered in another room, or spoken right to her, as if she was them. Phillippa, who married Giuseppe Carlo. She threw herself off Hawthorne Bridge in the middle of winter, and her body cracked like a champagne flute against the ice. Rosaline, who married no one but could not face the fertile womb of her sister Cait, and died alone in Portsmouth on the eastern coast.
The unlucky Milone sisters. The cursed ones who bore no children. No one knows where the curse came from. They only know that it is the curse of all Milones. Two girls are born each generation. And one is barren. Sasha and Phillippa. Cait and Rosaline. Madrigal and Caragh. And Madrigal has already had Juillenne.
“It’s not the same for me,” says Caragh.
“It’s not,” Cait agrees. “Because you’re a Milone. A naturalist. And barrenness for us is”—she takes a quiet breath—“like tearing our hearts out.”
“It’s not the same for me because I have Jules,” Caragh says. “I have Jules, and I’ll be fine. Matthew loves her like she’s his own.” She does not say that she loves him. It is too much of an admission, and Caragh has always kept her feelings to herself.