“Yes. Since before the oracle was brought.” Since she has begun to pursue the legion-cursed pretender. The quiet mist must be a sign. She must be doing the right thing.
Katharine reaches for a bottle of perfume and shoves away from the table so quickly that she knocks Giselle down onto the carpet.
“Queen Katharine? What’s the matter?”
Katharine stares in horror at her right hand. It is dead. Wrinkled and decaying to the wrist. She makes a fist and watches the skin stretch and crack.
“Mistress?”
“Giselle, my hand!”
The maid takes it and turns it over.
“I see no cut, nothing to cause a sting.” She strokes Katharine’s palm and presses her lips to it, those pretty red lips to that wet, rotten skin. “There. Is that better?”
Katharine tries to smile. The maid sees nothing. And indeed, when Katharine looks again, her hand is just her hand, pale and scarred but alive as usual.
“You still treat me as a child.”
“To me, you will always be a little bit a child.”
“Just the same,” the queen says, “I think I will finish up by myself. Would you go and see that my council is roused?”
Giselle curtsies deep and leaves her alone. As much as she is ever alone.
“What was that?” she asks the dead queens. “A warning? A mistake?” But though she can feel them listening, they do not respond. “Or was it a threat?”
Katharine sits back down before her mirror, and with shaking fingers, lifts the styled black waves from her shoulders to tie with a length of ribbon.
“Pietyr is right. After this battle is won, I will find a way to lay you to rest.” She slides her hands into black gloves. “Perhaps I truly will.”
Before Katharine goes into the Volroy cells, she calls for Pietyr and Bree and the High Priestess. It takes them time to assemble, having been exhausted by revelry the night before. Pietyr is the last to arrive, and he does so looking wretched.
“Such tired faces,” she says as they lean against the wall. “Perhaps I should go alone to see the Legion Queen’s mother.”
“We are fine.” Luca straightens her shoulders. “Some of your council should be there for the questioning.”
“Very well. Try not to vomit in the corridor.” She turns and leads the way, relishing the cold rush of stale air closing over her head. She has always liked this part of the Volroy, from the first time that Natalia brought her there to help with the poisoning of prisoners to the last time she descended to show her sisters her crown.
They reach the cell and guards place extra torches to illuminate the straw-covered floor. Madrigal Milone sits with her back pressed to the rear wall. Or at least Katharine assumes it is Madrigal Milone. The guards have not taken the sack off her head. Beside her, another sack lies on the straw, with something inside flapping weakly. The naturalist’s familiar, no doubt.
“Go in,” Katharine says. “Remove the bag. Both of them.”
Jules’s mother groans when the guard tears it away.
“Now unbind her hands.”
They do, and the prisoner rubs her wrists. They will need treatment. They have been rubbed raw to the point of bleeding. Finally, the guard dumps the last bag into the straw, and a crow tumbles out. Instead of flying, it hops on wobbly legs into the naturalist’s lap.
“You are indeed Madrigal Milone,” says Katharine, leaning forward. “Even under all that dirt, your pretty face is unmistakable.”
“Where am I?”
“In the cells beneath the Volroy. Where your daughter was, not long ago.” Katharine lets the woman ponder that as she blinks at her new surroundings. At the walls of dark, cool stone that collect dampness in the corners and the wisps of stale straw on the floor. It is not the same cell that held Jules and her cougar. That one was many floors down. But it does not matter. Every cell in the Volroy holds an equal amount of terror and the same dank smell.
“What am I doing here?”
“Asking too many questions,” says Pietyr irritably.
“Forgive him,” Katharine says as Pietyr studies the naturalist warily. “He has a headache and got little sleep.”
Madrigal does not respond. She continues to rub her wrists, and stretch her fingers.
“Will you not speak?”
She jerks her head toward Pietyr. “He just said I was talking too much.”
“Why were you in the mountains?” Katharine asks.
“I was on an errand for my mother. Your soldiers jumped me with no explanation.” She looks at Luca. “I thought I was being robbed. Or killed.”
Katharine and Luca look at each other skeptically, and in the uncertain silence, the crow hops out of Madrigal’s lap to pace back and forth before the cell bars.
“I think your bird would like to leave you,” says Bree.
“Of course she would. She’s a survivor. And she’s never been much of a familiar.” Madrigal’s eyes linger on the bars as well, and Katharine frowns. The mother is not like the daughter. Jules Milone is fierce. Too much loyalty and not enough brains. But Madrigal . . . perhaps Madrigal could be used.
“What can you tell me about your daughter, Juillenne?”
“Only what you already know. That she’s legion cursed with naturalist and war. That she escaped with Ar—” She stops. “With the other queens and disappeared.”
“You have not seen her since?” Pietyr asks.
“No.”
“You think her dead, then?”
“Yes.”
“You are lying.”
Katharine puts a hand on Pietyr’s arm. “What do you know about the Legion Queen?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Madrigal says, with the barest hint of a smile. “We don’t get much news in Wolf Spring. I confess that, the day of the escape, I was the one who freed the bear. After Jules and . . . the others sailed away into the storm, I brought him back north and released him into the woods there.”
“Hmm.” Katharine touches her chin with a gloved finger. “The day of the escape was the last day I saw her, too. Down here in these cells. When I came to poison my sister Arsinoe to death. When I frightened them so badly that they chose to die at sea instead.”
“If you’re convinced that my daughter is alive, then what makes you think the other queens aren’t also?”
Katharine’s eyes glitter, and Madrigal recoils. The dead queens do not like her. They would stomp down hard on her pretty black bird and leave nothing but a red mess and feathers.
“Tell me about the blood binding.”
“How do you know about that?”
“The same way we knew how to find you,” says Katharine. “We questioned someone. Unfortunately, that someone did not survive the questioning. So speak. If Jules is dead, like you say, then it will not matter.”
“Very well.” Madrigal draws her knees up to her chest. “We discovered Jules’s curse when she was a baby, and I was told to drown her or leave her in the forest. But I couldn’t. So I bound the legion curse through low magic. Bound it in my blood. To keep it from harming Jules and keep her from being found out.”
“But she was found out,” says Katharine. “And she is legion cursed. It seems your low magic is not very strong.”
“Or Jules’s gifts are so great that they overcame it.”
“Hmph,” says Pietyr. “You must truly want to die.”
Katharine wraps her fingers around the bars. “You know she is alive. You were riding from the north, where her rebel army is. We have spies. We have seen.”
“If that’s true, then why haven’t you stopped her?”
Katharine’s hand slides down her side; she raises her boot and reaches for the small knives she always keeps there.
Madrigal crouches against the back wall. “Spill my blood and the binding is broken. Whatever remains to hold my Jules in check will disappear. And if you’re afraid of her now, wait until you see what she can really do.”
“I am a poisoner,” Katharine snaps, her hand drifting away from the knife. “I will poison you so your insides boil, but not a drop of blood will be lost. It will not be clean, but it will be contained.”
“That won’t work either. Murder by poison counts as blood spilled. That’s how it is with low magic.”
“Is that true?” Bree asks. “Or is she lying?”