“I . . . worry for them.”
“Even though you know which one will be crowned?” Willa looked up; Camille looked away. Mirabella was the strongest child, true. And last night with the birthing blood rushing through her veins, she thought she had seen something in the little queen’s future. Something chosen. But in the daylight she remembered that she was only a used-up vessel. She knew what the queens were, but their fates were their own. She was no oracle.
“Will you change them back, after I am gone?” Camille asked, and then a pain tore through her, and she cried out. Willa left the babies to their bassinets and came to hold her by the elbows.
“Your skin is cold,” she said. She looked at Camille’s face and embraced her suddenly, kissing her forehead. “I will do as my queen wishes.”
THE DAY OF THE CLAIMING
Six Years Later
WOLF SPRING
Juillenne Milone stares at the colors swirling through the pearl, plucked fresh from an unlucky oyster that morning. She holds it up to the sun to admire the greens and pinks and gentle golds. It is very beautiful, and truth be told, she would rather not give it up. But Aunt Caragh says an offering is no use if it is something you do not want anyway, so she purses her lips and chooses the spot, directly in the middle of her patch of yellow daffodils. She digs deep and buries the pearl, getting dirt on her cheeks and somehow managing to sprinkle some into her dark brown hair. She prays to bless the young queens she and her aunt Caragh depart from Wolf Spring to see today, because Aunt Caragh told her to.
For a moment, the soil under her palm pulses with heat, stronger than the sun shining down on her head, and she feels the Goddess of the island rush into her blood, making her one with everything the soil touches: the roots and the pearl and the wind. And then the moment passes, and Jules gets to her feet.
Juillenne is six years old. Six and a half, really. She was born in December, like the queens themselves were, nine months after the Beltane fires. On the island, fall passes with heavy bellies painted for the reaping moon, in the hopes that babies conceived at Beltane will be nearly as strong as the queens. The Beltane Begots, those lucky children are called, and her grandpa Ellis says that bearing one was the only thing her mother, Madrigal, ever did by the island’s rules. Even so, the magic did not take. Jules was born a pretty child, with one blue eye and one green, with tan skin and thick, dark curls. But she was also born small, and weak, and sick almost the second she breathed the air. A bad sign for a child born into the strongest family of naturalists on Fennbirn, who in three generations had had only half a dozen cases of illness to split among them.
Or so her grandparents say. Jules of course does not remember, any more than she remembers her mother, who left Jules and the island when Jules was three years old. Another unlucky sign.
Jules steps away from the daffodils and wipes the dirt from her hands onto her pants, on the sides and the back, so Aunt Caragh will not see. Behind her, the grass rustles, and her best friend, Joseph Sandrin, shoves her and says, “Boo!”
“I heard you coming,” she says.
“Did not.” He bends to inspect the spot where she buried the pearl, and Jules waits with held breath for his nod of approval. Even at six years old, she knows that something about Joseph is special. Something that is not like other boys, and her stomach clenches around the feeling—it is exciting and scary. Then he squints up at her, and whatever it was disappears, and he is just Joseph again.
“It was the one I said, wasn’t it,” he says.
“Maybe.”
“It was. It was the oyster I chose. The one I brought you.”
The oyster he brought her was delicious and salty, but it held no pearl. Though he was born to a mostly giftless family (his oldest brother Matthew is able to charm fish), Joseph thinks he has a touch of the sight gift, and no one on the island can convince him any different.
They stand together in her aunt Caragh’s garden of radishes, green tomatoes, daffodils, and sunflowers. Two children with dirty trouser legs and matching blue shirts. Joseph and Jules, inseparable since birth.
“When do you have to go?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Pretty soon.” Jules looks back at the house. The season has started off hot, and Aunt Caragh’s familiar, a lean brown hound named Juniper, lies in a patch of dirt to stay cool. It is only the four of them in the house now, only Jules and Aunt Caragh, Grandma Cait and Grandpa Ellis. Great-Grandma Sasha died in her sleep and was burned before the first snow. Her ashes feed the daffodils on which Jules and Joseph now stand. Jules reaches out and strokes a yellow, velvet petal. Birth and death and rebirth. These are words she knows, and she thinks with sudden panic that they are words she should understand. That somehow they are tied to this day and these queens in a way that is important.
“I don’t know why you have to be the ones to take her,” says Joseph. He has never much cared for change and has spent most of the last few weeks trying to figure a way out of Jules taking in another girl.
“Because she’s a naturalist,” says Jules. “And because we’re the guardians.”
“My ma and pa say that it doesn’t look like she’s anything.”
“Well, Aunt Caragh says that’s what being a naturalist looks like,” she says, and shoves him.
Joseph scowls. “She won’t be with us all the time,” he says, half a question, half a demand, and looks at Jules with stormy blue eyes.
“Hardly at all. She’s a queen. But we have to be kind to her.”
“Because she’s a queen.”
Three dark queens are born in a glen. But only one will rule. Jules knows the rhyme by heart. But in her young mind it is only a rhyme. She has not thought about the other queens and who they are. Where they must go.
Aunt Caragh calls for Juillenne through an open window.
“Guess you have to go put on a dress,” says Joseph. “Glad I don’t have to.”
“Me too,” says Jules, and they laugh.
“Want to take the boat out and swim when you get back? Or we can just swim off the dock.”
“I don’t know. Aunt Caragh says the journey will take a long time. And when we get back, she’ll be here.”
Joseph frowns. “Well . . . you’ll have to bring her along, then, I guess. She can’t be that bad.” He walks through the yard and waves when he gets to the edge of it, and Jules waves back. She can’t be that bad, he says, but what does he know? The girl is a queen. Even though they say she is a naturalist, she could still be terrible.
Jules stretches her hand out toward the patch of blue oat grass that grows beside the daffodils, in the shade of the trees. For a moment, gentle energy moves from the center of her out to her fingertips, and she breathes in, unafraid, mostly impatient that she cannot ripen the fields yet like her grandparents or bloom a rose in her palm like Caragh.
The oat grass turns to her like she is the sun, but it grows no taller. Not yet. When she comes into the fullness of her gift, she will be able to grow a garden as lush as this one, with nothing more than wishes and coaxing. Grandpa Ellis says that the naturalist queen Bernadine, whose familiar the city of Wolf Spring was named for, could bring a field to harvest with a thought. But that was a long time ago, and besides, Jules is no queen.
“Juillenne!” Caragh shouts. “Stop dallying in the garden!”
Jules runs to the house and scoops up her grandpa Ellis’s familiar-dog, Jake, to use as a furry white shield against Caragh’s impatience.
THE BLACK COTTAGE
Willa watches the young queens as they ready themselves in eldest triplet Mirabella’s bedroom. Though the bedroom belongs to all of them, really. Neither Arsinoe nor Katharine has spent a full night in her own room since . . . well, since they traded their cradles for beds.