“And this Daphne . . . she knows nothing?”
“Nothing,” Arsinoe says sadly. “She doesn’t even know she’s an elemental. Her gift has been so long stunted. But I’ve seen her moods affect the weather. Subtle changes. Her gift is dormant from so many years away from the island, but it’s still there.”
“Wait. If Daphne truly is—was—a lost elemental queen, then why is she speaking to you? Why not me?”
Irritation flickers across Arsinoe’s face.
“I do not say that because it should be me,” Mirabella explains, “because I should be chosen. Only that like speaks to like. Elemental to elemental.”
Arsinoe nods. “I don’t know why. Maybe she’s more like me than like you. She smuggled herself off Centra by dressing in boy’s clothes and sneaking onto a boat to Fennbirn along with Henry’s horses. I’ve never smelled so much manure in one place.
“And then there’s the fact that she’s essentially an orphan, at the mercy of Henry’s family’s charity.”
“That makes her like both of us,” says Mirabella with a frown.
“Maybe it’s something else, then.” Arsinoe rises to her feet and trails her hand along Joseph’s headstone. She pauses on the inscription, on the line that reads, “A friend to queens and cougars.” Then she clenches her fist. “The low magic. It has to be the low magic. And I’m marked through.”
She turns toward Mirabella with a devious glint in her eyes. “Perhaps if we marked you with it as well. . . .”
“Absolutely not.”
“Well, what do you want me to do, then? Stop dreaming? Stop sleeping?”
Mirabella sighs. She cannot very well ask that. And besides, she knows her sister. Arsinoe will follow this queen to whatever answers and whatever end there may be. No matter the risks.
“Just promise me that you will not keep secrets? That you will tell me everything, no matter what it is.”
THE VOLROY
Katharine walks through the rose garden on the east side of the castle. A small cloistered space, very private, with full bushes of roses of every color. It has been difficult to find a moment of peace in the days since the mist brought the bodies. Everyone is afraid. And no one has answers. Examination of the bodies themselves has yielded no explanations, and the mist continues to behave strangely, rising when it should not rise, thicker and closer to the shore than normal.
Katharine reaches out to cradle a large red bloom in the palm of her hand. It is the dead naturalist queens who have lured her into the garden, craving sunshine and the scent of green, growing things.
But Katharine cannot bloom the rose. She cannot make it grow, any more than she can make it wither and die. The borrowed gifts are not true gifts, after all. The borrowed naturalist gift gives her a sure hand with the royal horses and hounds, but she cannot command them. The borrowed war gift makes her skilled with knives, but it does not let her move them. The dead poisoners let her eat the poison but could not stop the poison from corrupting her.
“Queen Katharine.”
Katharine releases the rose and turns. It is High Priestess Luca with Genevieve, of all people.
“An unlikely pair,” she says as they bow.
“Unlikely indeed,” says Luca. “Genevieve stepped into my shadow the moment I stepped outside the castle. Almost as if she does not trust me to be alone with the queen.”
Genevieve sighs but says nothing. It is not worth denying.
“We have decided to release the bodies of the searchers for burning,” Luca says.
“But,” says Katharine, “we still do not know why or how—”
“And we may never. But the bodies will reveal no more secrets. And the families have waited long enough. The longer they are kept, the more time the people will have to murmur wild speculation and incite a panic.”
Katharine frowns, her mind a flicker of images from the day of the banquet. So many bodies rolled onto the sand: fish-bitten and mutilated or pristine and pale. As she thinks, a bee lands upon the back of her hand, and Luca’s eyes flicker to it. Katharine lets it crawl a moment and then brushes it off.
“There are still questions unanswered, questions that the people will not just forget.”
“The people will accept the explanation of the temple. That the searchers fell to a tragic accident at sea.”
“And the mist?”
“The mist delivered them home.” Luca looks to Genevieve as though for support, and to Katharine’s surprise, she acquiesces.
“People want the soothing answer,” Genevieve says. “They want the answer that allows them to go on with their everyday lives. Let the temple give a statement. Let the High Priestess wield what influence she has. It is, after all, why we allowed her a seat at the table.”
“Well put,” says Luca, her expression sour.
“Go ahead.” Katharine says, and clenches her jaw. “But though the people may forget, I will not. I will not forget that my searchers met with violent ends. That they sailed and died within days yet some appeared to have been dead for weeks.”
The High Priestess gazes over the line of rosebushes. She gazes over them for so long that Katharine thinks she will change the subject and comment instead on the blooms or the weather.
“I remember when your sister tried to flee through the mist,” says Luca. “Do you remember? You were separated by that time, of course, but you must have heard, living here with the Arrons. I was there, when they found them bobbing in their boat. They could not have been gone from Sealhead Cove for more than a night. Yet their little faces were gaunt. And they had drunk all their water.”
Katharine swallows as the High Priestess looks back at her.
“No one spoke of it then. There were too many other things—pressing things—to distract us. But even those who the mist allows to pass through remark on it. Those who sail from the mainland. Those who trade.
“Time and distance do not mean the same things within the mist. Nothing means the same thing within the mist. As much as we would like to know what befell your searchers, we will probably never know.”
And with that the High Priestess bows and walks away.
“She is an irksome old thing,” Genevieve says after Luca is gone. “But I think she is right. Better to put this incident behind us. The people see the mist as the guardian of the island. For it to behave so alarmingly . . . We are lucky it has been quiet since then. And who knows? This story the High Priestess spins about the mist bringing the bodies home to you, maybe it will work. Maybe it is even true.”
“In case it is not,” says Katharine, “I would learn more about the mist. Perhaps even about the Blue Queen who created it. Will you look into it for me, Genevieve? Discreetly?”
“If you wish it.” One of the bees hovering near the roses buzzes too close to Genevieve’s hair, and she waves her hand at it. Then she cries out when it stings her on the finger.
“Now you have killed it.”
“It stung me!”
“And how many times did you sting me as a child? Stop being such a baby about it.”
Genevieve bows and stalks out of the garden, sucking on her wounded finger. As a poisoner with a strong gift, the venom from the bee’s sting will not even cause swelling. It will not be more than a momentary pain.
Katharine looks back at the roses. The dead naturalist queens always make her feel the calmest, drawing her into the flowers or urging her toward the stables to ride. But the talk of the mist has put all the dead sisters on edge.
“You know as well as I do,” she says to them. “The mist is not finished.”
THE MAINLAND
In the morning, Arsinoe and Mirabella get ready for the governor’s wife’s birthday party.
“We must try to be polite,” Mirabella says as she stands behind Arsinoe at their vanity table, trying to pin Arsinoe’s short black hair to the sides of her head. “We must try to smile at Mrs. Chatworth and Miss Jane.”