Madrigal walks in, back from the market with her arms full of baskets. Breaking the peace.
“Will you help me?” she asks. “I’m making chowder with fresh cream, and biscuits with that soft white cheese that you like.”
“What’s the occasion?” Jules asks suspiciously. She takes the basket of clams and dumps them into the sink to wash.
“No occasion.” Madrigal sets the rest of her shopping on the countertop. “But when it’s ready, you could float the bowls onto the table for us.”
Jules scowls.
“That isn’t how it works.”
“How do you know?” Madrigal asks. “The war gift has been weak for so long that nobody knows how it works.”
That is true enough. Everything Jules has ever heard about the war gift has been the stuff of long-ago legends. Of the recent there are only rumors. Folk in Bastian City who have uncanny accuracy with knives and bows. Near-impossible shots made so clean that it is almost as if the weapon were pulled on a string.
But it is not pull so much as push. Jules has worked at it, alone and mostly in secret, aghast and amazed at what she is able to do.
At the sink, Madrigal begins scrubbing clams, nearly managing to look like she has done it before. She wipes her forehead. Sallow circles mar the undersides of her eyes. And she is still breathless from the walk.
“Are you all right?” Jules asks.
“I’m fine. How are you? Is that willowbark tea? Is your leg paining you?”
“Madrigal, what’s going on?”
“Nothing,” she says. “Only that . . .” She pauses and heaps washed clams into a pot. “Only that I’m pregnant.” She twists at the waist and flashes a fast smile, then looks back down at her hands. “Matthew and I are going to have a baby.”
Aria flies nervously onto the table. Her wing feathers shift in the quiet.
“You,” Jules says, “and Aunt Caragh’s Matthew are going to have a baby?”
“Don’t call him that. He is not her Matthew.”
“That’s how we all think of him. That’s how we’ll always think of him.”
“Honestly, Jules,” Madrigal says, her tone slightly disgusted. “After what happened between Joseph and Queen Mirabella, I thought you’d have grown up a little.”
Jules’s temper rises, and on the countertop, Madrigal’s knife begins to rattle as if of its own accord.
“Don’t, Jules.” Madrigal backs away. “Don’t do that.”
The knife stops.
“I’m not,” Jules says quickly. “I mean, I didn’t mean to.”
“Your war gift is strong. You should let me unbind it.”
“Grandma Cait says the binding might be all that’s keeping me sane.”
“Or all that’s holding you back.”
Jules looks at the knife. She could make it move. Make it fly. Make it cut. Nothing about her naturalist gift has ever felt so wicked or out of control.
Madrigal picks up the knife, and Jules breathes easier with it safe in her hand.
“I suppose this means you’re not happy about the baby. But you can’t hate him, Jules. Just to spite me. You won’t, will you?”
“No,” Jules says darkly. “I will be a good sister.”
Madrigal looks at her. Then she rolls potatoes onto the counter and starts to chop them.
“I thought I would be so happy,” she mutters. “I thought this baby would make me so happy.”
“Pity for you, then,” says Jules. “Nothing is ever as good as you want it to be.”
A second crow, larger than Aria, flies into the kitchen and lands on the table with a letter in her beak. It is Eva, Grandma Cait’s familiar, and the letter bears the seal of the Black Council. Cait comes in behind her and sees the scowl on Jules’s face.
“I take it that you’ve told her about the baby.”
“Why does everyone in this family know things before I do?” Jules asks.
“Never mind that, Jules. You’ll get over it.”
Jules nods toward Eva’s letter. “What does it say?”
“That Wolf Spring is about to be crowded. It seems that both of the other queens and their households are coming for Midsummer. Where has Arsinoe gotten off to?”
“The woods, I think, with Braddock.”
“You’d better go, then, and tell her.”
Jules gets up from the table, and she and Camden head outside. They hurry down the path to the road, stretching the muscles in their bad legs. They meet Joseph as they reach the hilltop fork.
“What’s got you in such a hurry?” he asks as she slips her hand into his and tugs him along.
“News for Arsinoe. I’m glad you’re here. It saves us a trip.”
“Oh no,” Arsinoe says when Jules and Joseph come into the meadow. “What news is there now?” She had been watching Braddock pluck blackberries off a vine, his flapping lips nearly as good as fingers.
“Mirabella and Katharine are coming here,” Jules says. “For Midsummer. And they’re each bringing an army of supporters besides. The letter from the Council just arrived.”
Arsinoe’s shoulders slump. The other queens, here. Wolf Spring will be flooded with strangers.
“A lot of good it did, my trying to keep Mirabella out of my city.”
“I don’t like it,” Jules growls, and at her side, Camden snarls. “We won’t be able to guard you. It’ll be chaos.”
“It won’t be easy,” Joseph agrees. “But at least we’ll be here, at home. Where we know how things lie.”
“Midsummer is in less than a week,” Arsinoe says. “And there was no letter of warning from Billy. What good is having a spy in Rolanth if he can’t even tell us about this?”
“Rolanth might not have gotten more notice than we did,” says Jules. But that is unlikely. Even if it was an Arron plot, the temple would have needed to agree.
Arsinoe sighs.
“Naturalists. We are always the last to know.”
“After you’re crowned, there will be naturalists on the Council,” Joseph says. “Wolf Spring will finally have a say again in how Fennbirn is run.”
Arsinoe and Jules trade glances. Joseph, the look says. Ever the optimist.
“Has Billy written?” he asks. “Is he well? Is he safe?”
“He’s written twice. He promised to write daily.” Arsinoe crosses her arms. Two letters, and both were formal and stilted, containing none of the awful personality that she misses so much.
She looks at her friends standing in the meadow where they have stood so many times before. The summer sun casts their shadows onto the ground, and those shadows seem like the ghosts of their childhood, forever running through these trees.
“Our happy ending,” she says quietly.
“Arsinoe,” says Jules. “You have to do something. You know why they’re coming.”
Not to talk. Foolish to have thought that talking would stop Mirabella from searing blisters up and down her back.
Arsinoe watches Braddock foraging in the bushes. She does not want to put him in danger. Or Jules. Or Joseph. But they are all she has. Only her friends and her low magic.
GREAVESDRAKE MANOR
Katharine holds Sweetheart carefully as she extracts the snake’s venom, pressing the glands. The yellow poison runs down the sides of the glass jar. There is not very much. Sweetheart is a small snake, and even in a small jar, her venom barely coats the bottom.