“Perhaps. But, Madrigal, the binding will stay.”
“Stay. But it will not hold. It weakens even now. I could release it if I chose. Her blood is my blood. I am her mother. And I will do what I think is best.”
THE ASHBURN WOODS
When Arsinoe gets tired of walking, she stops and builds a sizable campfire by the side of the road. Mirabella’s scout comes upon her as she lies beside it, her head resting on her sack of clothes.
She or he is fairly good at stealth. Arsinoe does not hear them until they are so close that she does not need to shout to be heard. Of course, a truly stealthy scout would not have come so close in the first place.
“Tell my sister I’m here,” Arsinoe says without moving. “Tell her I’m waiting.”
“Mirabella.” Elizabeth shakes her shoulder gently. “Mira, wake up. The scout has returned.”
It is still too dark in the deep woods to see anything but a shape. Mirabella thought she had fallen asleep against the trunk of a tree, but as she dozed, she must have fallen over into the dirt. Her cheek is gritty with it.
Somewhere to her right, Bree grumbles, and then her face is illuminated by orange flames as she lights a small pile of sticks on fire.
“Well,” Bree says, her eyes puffy. She flicks her wrist and the fire grows. “What’s so important that we must wake from our spots on the hard ground?”
The scout dismounts and takes a knee. He seems nervous. Confused.
“What is it?” Mirabella asks. “Is the way through to Wolf Spring barred?”
“That is unlikely.” Bree yawns.
“It is Queen Arsinoe,” the scout says. “She is waiting for you on the main road.”
No one reacts, except for Bree, who comes fully awake and inadvertently sends her small flames rushing into the air.
“How did she know we were coming?” Elizabeth wonders. “She must have better spies than we thought.”
“Did you see the bear?” asks Mirabella.
“I did not. I looked for it everywhere, but not even my horse ever seemed to catch its scent.”
Mirabella looks eastward. Dawn is beginning to gray through the trees. The thought of the bear is like ice in her stomach. She remembers claws and roars and screams, and swallows hard.
“I will leave as soon as it is light enough to keep from tripping over roots,” she says. “Do I need Crackle, or is it walkable?”
“Mira!” Bree and Elizabeth exclaim together.
“You cannot go if we do not know where the bear is,” says Bree.
“Let us scout ahead more, in the daylight.”
“No,” Mirabella says. “If she has hidden her bear, then she has hidden it. I will be ready.” She looks at her friends’ faces in the firelight and is careful not to show her own fear. “She is here. It is time.”
Joseph travels as fast as he can along the dark, tree-covered stretch of the Valleywood Road. He is exhausted after a long day working the boats and had barely closed his eyes to sleep when Madrigal started throwing pebbles at his bedroom window.
He thought she was looking for his brother Matthew, but when he opened the sash, she called to him and waved her arms. So now he is running through the dark, hoping that he has gone the right way after Jules and Camden. They do not have much of a head start, and the pain in Jules’s legs may slow her down after a while.
But what Madrigal told him about Jules cannot be true. That Jules is legion cursed and touched with war. Joseph saw a legion-cursed child once, and the poor boy was half mad, holding his hands over his ears and dashing his shoulder against a wall. Joseph and Matthew had come across them in Highgate as the boy’s family was traveling to Indrid Down Temple, where the boy would be mercifully poisoned and put out of his misery.
That is not Jules. To hear Madrigal tell it, the low magic spell that bound Jules’s curse is weakening, and the war gift may show itself any time she loses her temper. But Jules has lost her temper often, and he has seen no evidence of that.
He does not know what Madrigal is up to, telling him such lies. But he went after Jules anyway, to keep her out of the queens’ business. Because if she intervenes, the Council will have her hide, legion cursed or not.
Arsinoe screams when Mirabella brings her dying campfire roaring back to life. She cannot help it. The flames are so hot. The wood is charred to embers in seconds, and when she rolls away, she smells burned hair, and her mask is so hot for a moment she fears it melted to her cheek.
“You,” Arsinoe sputters. She rolls up against a tree trunk and scrambles to her feet. Mirabella is barely on the other side of the road. Arsinoe did not hear so much as a footstep or a snapped twig. “You’ve gotten quieter.”
“Perhaps you just sleep harder.”
Arsinoe glances down at her makeshift pillow, singed black now and full of lumpy clothes and hard cheese.
“That’s not likely.”
“Where is your bear?” Mirabella asks.
“I left him behind.”
“You are lying.”
Arsinoe swallows. The poisoned knife is a comforting weight in her vest, but she does not want to use it. She will have a hard time getting close enough to use it, anyway. That blast of fire was no trifle. Mirabella has found her nerve.
“You had better bring him out,” Mirabella warns, and a strange pulse settles over Arsinoe’s skin. She looks down. The hair on her arms is standing straight up.
The bolt of lightning shines bright white in the foggy morning, and the tree behind Arsinoe erupts in sparks. The jolt goes through the bottoms of her feet, and she drops into a tight crouch as it slams her teeth together. Pain rushes from her toes to the roots of her hair.
Talk, she thinks, but she can barely force her jaw apart. So she runs instead, one leg dragging as she makes for the cover of the trees. She hurls herself over a low shrub, and Mirabella’s fire eats it away behind her in an explosion of orange and hissing steam.
“Stop, stop!” Arsinoe shouts.
“You had your chance to stop,” Mirabella shouts back. “And you sent a bear for me instead.”
The wind changes direction, circling around Arsinoe’s collar, tossing her hair into her eyes. Mirabella is gathering a great storm overhead. The first gust shoves Arsinoe against a tree. A branch whips into her eyes, and a section of the burning shrub cracks loose and strikes her in the side, singing a hole through her vest and shirt. She winces, and looks down into the carved rune of low magic in her hand. She can feel the bear is on his way. She should have called him long ago.
The next bolt of lightning knocks Arsinoe off her feet. Pain, then stars, then blackness before her eyes, and she rolls bonelessly back into the road.
Jules is not far away when the first lightning strikes. The ground shakes, and the wind follows soon after.
Jules and Camden start to run.
“Jules, wait!”
She turns. Joseph hurries toward her in a wrinkled shirt.