“He’s too young to be a father to Jules.”
“He loves Jules,” says Caragh, her voice far away.
“He is only a boy. He doesn’t know what he loves.” Cait scrubs the carrots hard, and Caragh knows that her mother is only saying these things because she is afraid to lose her to madness and solitude—or worse, to the ice beneath a winter bridge—when she has already lost one daughter to the mainland.
“You’re so sure, are you?” Caragh jokes lightly. “Have a bit of the sight now, like little Joseph?”
“We all do on Fennbirn,” says Cait. “We just blind ourselves to it when it suits us. When we need it most.”
Caragh sighs. She starts to say more, but her mother has stopped listening. Cait stares out the window over the kitchen sink, into the yard and the garden that borders their long driveway.
“By the Goddess,” Cait whispers, and dries her hands on a towel. She tears off her apron and throws it onto the countertop. “Ellis! Ellis, where are you?”
“What’s wrong?” Caragh asks as Cait shoves past her and dashes into the yard. She follows to the door and looks out. If it is Jules, showing up again in head-to-toe mud, she will scrub the girl raw. But it is not Jules running up the drive to leap into Cait’s arms.
It is Caragh’s sister, Madrigal. It is Jules’s mother.
No one leaves or is allowed to find the island if it is not by the will of the Goddess. That is what Caragh has always been taught. So she tries to accept it with a little bit of grace that her sister has returned. Surely the Goddess must have a purpose, beyond upsetting Caragh’s carefully ordered and relatively happy life.
She watches through the window as her mother weeps and her father lifts Madrigal in a whirling embrace, like he used to do when she was a little girl. Madrigal, they cry. Madrigal is home.
For how long, and for what, Caragh wonders. No one has heard from Madrigal since she left the island six years ago to go to the mainland, and no one expected to. It is said that once a woman leaves Fennbirn, she begins to lose her memory. And then, slowly, her gift. Indeed, when Madrigal finally sees Caragh through the kitchen window, it is almost as if she does not recognize her.
“But I recognize you,” Caragh whispers, and at her knee, Juniper growls. Whatever Madrigal has been up to on the mainland, it has only made her more beautiful. She is still slender, but rounded now in just the right places. Her light brown hair shines, and her eyes sparkle. Her familiar has already returned to her and perches on her shoulder: Aria, a pretty black crow. Madrigal cocks her head, and so does the bird.
“Caragh,” she says in a tone that is somehow familiar and insulting. Oh Caragh, there you are. Where else would you be?
Caragh brushes her hands nervously against her skirt and goes to meet her sister at the front steps. Madrigal is dressed like an outsider, in a strangely cut dress of green silk. There are gold hoops in her ears, and gold bangles on her wrists. She holds on to Jules with one hand, and Jules holds on tight, as though afraid she will disappear if she lets go.
“I hope you don’t mind that I didn’t come straight here,” Madrigal says. She wraps an arm about Jules’s small shoulders. “I wanted to find my daughter first.”
My daughter. The words swirl in Caragh’s stomach like blood from a punch. She wonders whether on Fennbirn all sisters are meant to hate one another. Not only the queens.
“She has not grown tall.” Madrigal cups Jules’s face. “But she has certainly changed since I saw her last.”
“She was a baby when you saw her last,” Caragh says, and Cait and Ellis look at her sharply.
“A baby.” Madrigal smiles. “She was three and a half. Walking and talking and even slightly gifted. A baby. Caragh, what can you be thinking?”
Not far away in the grass, Arsinoe’s pale face peeks out from behind Joseph. He seems curious, and confused, like he thinks he should be happy but cannot remember why. Arsinoe looks suspicious.
“Are you home for good, Mother?” Jules asks. “Home to stay?”
“I am, my Jules.” Madrigal plants kiss after kiss into Jules’s hair, and the family closes around them in a circle, all smiles and tears. No one sees Caragh press her fists into her middle, where it hurts so badly it must surely be bleeding.
GREAVESDRAKE MANOR
Greavesdrake Manor rests at the western end of the capital city of Indrid Down and spills across woodland and meadow. The great house stands on a low central hill and has grown larger as the years passed, expanding steadily, as if the house has somehow learned to feed. One more poisoner queen, and Greavesdrake will spill over into the streets.
Its pitched roofs have been washed black, to show the Arrons’ devotion to the crown. That is what Natalia told little Katharine that first day, more than three years ago, when the carriage drove up to it. But Katharine has come to believe that the roof is black for another reason: it screams down to the capital, and all across the island, This is where your queens are raised.
Katharine sits at her vanity table and lets her maid brush out her long black hair. Her eyes are hollow and haunted, and she is painfully thin. She has simply lost the taste for eating. It is not easy to pretend to relish the poisoned food they serve. Nor to keep from crying when they put her to the scorpion’s sting or lash the nettles across her back. But she tries. It is all part of being a poisoner queen. Natalia says it is her duty to become strong, her obligation—to the Arrons who house and clothe her and to the island that worships her like the Goddess. Take the pain into yourself, Natalia tells her, and you will grow strong.
But sometimes it feels like her gift will never be strong. Like it will never come, and she will never revel in the poisons like the Arrons do. It feels like she has been poisoned forever. She cannot even remember anything that came before.
“Shall we braid you, miss?” her maid asks, and Katharine does not reply. The maid will do it anyway.
A short while later, Katharine walks alone to the dining room for breakfast with Natalia. Her hair is done, and she has been fitted into a soft, fine dress of black muslin. When Natalia sees her, she smiles. Even drawn and miserable, Katharine is still very pretty, and all Natalia sees is a perfect poisoner queen.
“Good morning, Queen Katharine.”
“Good morning.” Someone pulls a chair out for her, and she sits in front of a bowl of oatmeal and a plate of cut strawberries.
“How are your studies?” Natalia looks severe as she always does, but not unkind. A red-and-black-striped coral snake is twisted around her wrist like a bracelet.
“Does it have a name?” Katharine asks.
“No.” Natalia kisses it on the head. “But it is very beautiful. Now. How are your studies? Is your new tutor more to your liking?”
“We are reading from Toxicology: The Use of Poisons in Modern Medicine.”
“Very good.” Natalia lifts the silver off her own dish. She eats a soup for breakfast, a bitter broth steeped with poison mushrooms. For lunch she might enjoy blowfish or a salad of bloodroot. Dinner is meat tenderized and tainted with scorpion venom. Poison for every meal. Such is her strength.
Natalia promises that one day, Katharine will eat the same. But Katharine cannot imagine it.