“No, she wouldn’t.”
“Yes, she would. It is in her triplet blood. And we are not rising to put the traitor queens back on the throne. We are rising for ourselves. For Fennbirn.”
“Would you have done the same if Katharine had not won?” Jules asks. “Would you have still tried to overthrow Mirabella? Or Arsinoe?”
“It doesn’t matter,” says Emilia softly. “That is not what happened.”
When the stew arrives, it is good, though perhaps not good enough to attract so many diners on its own. Despite her hunger, Jules cannot manage more than a few bites. Her stomach will not stop buzzing.
“No appetite?” Emilia asks as she licks her bowl.
“I’m going to bring the rest up to the room, for Camden.” They snuck the big cat in near dusk through the rear entrance. The water in the second tub was still warm and fairly clean, and not a single one of them caught a claw to the face when they dunked Camden into it.
“Camden can eat it herself.” Mathilde stands. “Off this very table.”
“Wait,” Jules stammers as Emilia rises, too. “What am I supposed to do?”
“All you have to do is be you.” Emilia smiles and draws her long knives. She drags the point beneath Jules’s chin, soft as a caress. “And be ready to use your gifts.”
Mathilde throws back the folds of her gray-and-yellow cloak. Her voice, though soft, seems to fill the room.
“A moment, friends,” she says, and steps before their table. “I am called Mathilde, from the city of Sunpool far to the west. I am a seer, and I am a bard, and I would tell you a tale, if you will hear it.” She extends an arm toward Emilia, who flashes her blades. “This is Emilia, a warrior, and witness to the Ascension, to the debacle of the traitor queens and their escape.”
“A band of warriors aided them, or that’s the way I heard it,” says a woman in the back. “Are you one of them?”
“I am,” Emilia replies.
“Then you would fetch a fancy price delivered to the capital tied and trussed.”
“I would. And after we are through, you are welcome to try.”
The woman squints her eye. She has no weapons that Jules can see. But she does have a table full of friends.
As Mathilde recounts Katharine’s crimes, most in the room seem curious. They nod when she calls her the Undead Queen, and a few pound their fists on their tables over the murdered boy. But others keep their lips tight. There are loyalists here, to be sure, and if whispers of Emilia’s uprising have not reached Katharine by now, they will after tonight.
“We’ve heard the songs,” a young man calls from the crowd. “We’ve heard the tales from other bards in yellow cloaks. A rebellion, they said. Led by a new queen. But there is no new queen. Unless you’ve plucked the elemental from the bottom of the sea and brought her back to life!”
“Then we would have two Undeads for the price of one!” the woman from the rear calls, and people start to laugh.
“Another poisoner on the throne,” Emilia shouts, and the crowd falls quiet. “Is that what you want?”
Jules tenses along with everyone else. Eyes dart to Emilia’s knives, but no one draws their own. A man with a black cat on his shoulder sits at a table with a boy sharing bread with a sparrow, but past that, Jules sees no evidence of gifts. Perhaps a few elementals, as the wind outside has stilled to nothing.
“Is that what you would have, for another generation?” Emilia narrows her eyes. “Another corrupt council, surrounded by death? Who will poison us until our blood runs from our mouths, and cuts the heads from children? The triplet queens have been abandoned by the Goddess.”
“But someone with a legion curse has not?” the young man asks. “That’s the queen you speak of, isn’t it? The Legion Queen.”
“That is the one we speak of,” says Mathilde.
“A mad queen on the throne?”
“She is not mad.”
“She is not real!” The woman in the rear says, and her table laughs.
“She is real,” Mathilde says, her voice carrying into the farthest corners. “And she is different. The Legion Queen is no queen of the blood. But she is blessed just the same. Gifted so strongly by the Goddess, so as to be Her champion—our champion—who will vanquish the last of the fading queens and beside us will forge a brighter tomorrow.”
It is like Emilia said. Mathilde’s words land in the crowd’s ears and make them itch with the flicker of possibility. All Jules can do is sit awkwardly as they stare, knowing what they must be thinking, that this small girl cannot be this fabled soldier. It takes all her restraint not to open her mouth and agree with them.
“This little thing?” The woman in the rear of the inn stands and gestures with her mug to Jules, splashing what little ale is left in it across the top of her table. “This little, vagrant wretch is supposed to be our champion?”
Her friends laugh. But this time, only her friends, and Emilia sheds her cloak and jumps deftly onto a nearby table.
“I have had near enough of you,” Emilia growls.
“Emilia,” Jules whispers.
“The Legion Queen will fight for the people. Even loudmouthed cowards.”
The woman scowls. “You’ll find no cowards here.” She waits until Emilia lowers the tip of her knife and then stands and throws a hidden hatchet she had stuck into the wood of her bench.
Emilia ducks and pushes it off course. It clatters to the ground behind her, harmless, but the warrior lifts her knife to throw. And Jules knows that she will never miss.
“Emilia, don’t!” The knife flies, straight for the villager’s heart. Jules lurches across the table, hand flung out. She calls to the knife with her gift, fighting against Emilia’s good, solid throw. At the last moment, it veers off-course so hard that it winds up stuck fast in the ceiling.
Every face turns to Jules.
“Call her,” Mathilde whispers. “Call her now.”
Too stunned to disobey, Jules reaches out for Camden, and every eye darts to the stairs as the cougar bursts through the door. She bounds down the steps and leaps over the rail, landing on tables and upending cups and plates, her snarl ferocious until she reaches Jules and stands before her to roar.
“This is the Legion Queen,” Mathilde says to the frozen crowd. “The strongest naturalist in ten generations. The strongest warrior in two hundred years. She is the one who will fight for all the gifts. She is the one who will change everything.”
THE MAINLAND
The fortune-telling shop that Arsinoe finds has a brass bell over the door. A loud brass bell, and she grimaces as soon as she walks inside. But it seems that the shop is empty. No one there to see her. No one to stare. She reaches up and quiets the bell, and smiles as she thinks of Luke, whose bell back home is not so jarring.
Quietly, she unfurls the cloth sack she brought and begins roaming through shelves. It is easy to find three fat white candles, and into the sack they go, knocking together gently.
“You are not from here.”
Arsinoe spins and finds herself face-to-face with the shopkeeper, a woman in beads and silks, and dark, curling hair.
“No, madam. I’ve had to travel over half the city to find a shop like yours.”
The shopkeeper laughs.
“That’s not what I meant. How can I help you today?” Without warning, she tugs the cloth sack open and peers inside. Her mouth crooks down. “White candles. A less interesting purchase than I’d hoped.”
“I also need herbs. And oil.”
“You didn’t need to cross the city for those.”
“I suppose I could’ve swiped the herbs from the kitchen,” says Arsinoe. “But then my hosts would have complained when their meat was bland. I know you have the herbs here; I can smell them.”