On the island, he would have been burned on a pyre and his ashes spread in Sealhead Cove. They would have stood together on the deck of the Whistler while the people of Wolf Spring threw petals and grain from the docks. Instead, he is here, under the dirt and far from home. But Arsinoe is glad of that now. At least buried, there is a place that she can come and talk to him.
“We went to the races today. We didn’t win.” She lowers herself to the ground and balls up her gray dress for something to lie upon. “And then I had to run away when Christine Hollen was at our door. Not that I wouldn’t have come to see you anyway. Christine Hollen. The governor’s daughter. Did you know her?” Arsinoe turns her head.
“I’m sure you knew her. She probably fancied you to begin with, didn’t she? Probably fainted dead away at the sight of you; it doesn’t take much. But you weren’t from here, and you weren’t staying. And Billy’s rich and”—she clears her throat—“not bad to look at.”
In her mind, she hears Joseph’s laughter. And then a low rumble of thunder as clouds begin to roll from over the sea.
“It’s going to rain. I wonder if that means Mirabella’s upset about something. She swears that her gift has all but left her, but I’ve seen her close her eyes, and then felt the coolness of a breeze. And then there’s the fact that her melancholy days always seem to wind up overcast.” She snorts. “A gift like hers is too strong to be stifled. Even by the mainland.”
She looks up at the sky. She has nothing but time now. Time to wait for Billy to make a life for them, and the thought of his needing to do that sends her stomach into knots. Who is she here? Not Queen Arsinoe, raised as a naturalist and discovered to be a poisoner. Now she is nothing. A rogue queen with no crown.
She turns toward Joseph’s marker. “Christine is much prettier than me.”
Lots of girls are much prettier than you, Joseph replies in her mind. But none of them are you.
Arsinoe smiles. So he would say if he were here. If he could put an arm about her shoulders and squeeze. If he were not in a box, in the ground.
“I miss you, Joseph,” she says, her head resting on the ball of her dress. “I miss you so much.” And then she falls asleep.
Who knows how long later, Arsinoe wakes with a start. Her arms fly out to her sides, certain for a moment that she will find not ground at all but the water of a bay.
“What a strange dream.” She was a girl, dressed as a boy, on a boat. It had been vivid, as vivid as being there, but as she lies still and tries to remember, it comes apart, driven back by the fading orange light and a soreness in her back from sleeping on the grass. She pushes up onto her elbow with a groan and looks toward Joseph’s grave marker.
There is a woman in a long black dress standing behind it.
She scrambles up onto her knee and rubs her eyes, thinking she is still dreaming. But the vision does not waver. The woman in black is darker than a shadow. Arsinoe cannot see her face or the details of her clothing. Only her shape, and her long black hair.
“Who are you?”
The figure raises her skeletal arm and stretches one long finger to point.
Arsinoe turns and looks over the hilltop, toward the harbor. Nothing there but ships in the evening. At least, nothing in that direction that any mainlander would know about.
“No,” Arsinoe says, and the woman’s sharp finger extends farther.
“No!” She squeezes her eyes shut. When she opens them, the woman is gone. If indeed she was ever really there.
THE VOLROY
“It was never going to be an amicable meeting,” Pietyr says, seated upon Katharine’s sofa. “No one likes to have power wrested from them. And Luca’s choices were . . . unexpected.”
“Unexpected!” Genevieve scoffs as she storms back and forth with her arms crossed. “They were intentionally antagonizing.”
Katharine sighs. Pietyr has poured her a cup of tea and even added a splash of oleander milk, but she does not want it. She has been listening to him argue with Genevieve since they returned to her rooms after the meeting of the Black Council.
“Intentional or not,” says Pietyr, “you squawked like an upset bird. Is that how Natalia would have reacted? You have none of your sister’s composure, Genevieve. Absolutely none of it.”
Genevieve spins. “How dare you speak so to me. I am her sister. Her sister, not some errant nephew. And I am the head of the family now. Not your father.”
“I never said it would be my father.”
“Oh, enough of this.” Katharine rises with a huff and goes to the window to throw open the shutters and let in the warm summer air. She breathes it in and looks down. All that sea and sky. The treetops and bright green spaces. All the good people. All hers. “Can you not see the beauty of these days? The gold in the sunlight? The crown etched into my head?” She turns to them, her smile wide. “We won! You are too entrenched in the chaos of the Ascension still to see it, but we won. And my reign will not be a time of bitterness and contention.” She steps toward them with her hands out. Pietyr scrunches his brow; Genevieve goes pale as if unsure Katharine is not about to fling a knife at her head.
“It will be a reign of ease and prosperity.” She takes Genevieve’s hand, lightly, so she will not flinch. “And new beginnings.”
“Are you so ready to forget the past?” Genevieve asks.
“I am ready to set old grudges aside. And so should you. I will need the two of you in harmony now to make sure Bree Westwood does not get into any trouble.”
Pietyr stands and straightens his cuffs. He considers shaking Genevieve’s hand but at the last moment changes his mind, and they settle on a curt nod.
“The queen is to be commended for her optimism,” he says. “I hope she is right.”
“I hope so, too,” says Genevieve.
“You will see.” Katharine rises on tiptoe to kiss Pietyr fully on the mouth, her mood lifting along with her words, as though that, too, can be changed by sheer will. “To set the tone, we will hold a welcome banquet in the square. A warm gesture for the High Priestess and the Westwoods. To signal to the people that the crown is settled.”
Pietyr cocks an eyebrow. “If Luca and the others will agree to it.”
“Of course they will agree to it,” Katharine says, and laughs. “I am the queen.”
Katharine invites High Priestess Luca on a tour of the capital, to reacquaint her with it after being so long away. It could be taken as a jibe, she supposes. The out-of-touch High Priestess, with her heart still in Rolanth. But she does not mean it like that.
When she arrives at Indrid Down Temple on her fine black stallion, she and her queensguard find Luca already mounted and waiting beside three priestesses. Katharine’s eyes linger on the slivers of exposed blade at each priestess’s waist.
“Is it the practice now that all priestesses be armed?”
“Not all,” Luca replies. “But certainly those who are escorting the High Priestess and the Queen Crowned. Rho insisted.”
“Did she?” Katharine swallows. War-gifted Rho. Somehow Katharine knows that, had the plan to cut off her arms and head after the Quickening come to pass, it would have been Rho doing most of the carving.