Jules takes the letter from Ellis.
“Tommy Stratford and Michael Percy.” So much of the Beltane Festival is a blur, but they were the two who came ashore on a barge together the night of the Disembarking. It seemed that they could not stop laughing. Billy had wanted to throttle them.
Arsinoe tosses her knife onto the table and piles the last of the potato slices onto a wooden platter.
“That’s done, Cait,” she says. “What’s next?”
“What’s next is you getting out of this house,” Cait replies. “You cannot hide in my kitchen forever.”
Arsinoe sinks in her chair. The people of Wolf Spring cannot get enough of their Bear Queen. They gather around her in the market and ask for tales of her great brown. They buy him huge silver fish and expect her to tear into it, too. Raw, right before their eyes. They do not know that the bear was a ruse, called onto the stage during the Quickening Ceremony to dance as if on a string. They do not know that it was Jules controlling it and a low magic spell. Only the family and Joseph and Billy know that. And still fewer know of Arsinoe’s biggest secret: that she is no naturalist at all but a poisoner, her gift discovered when she and Jules both ingested poisoned sweets from Katharine. Jules had sickened to near death, and the damage to her body gave her constant pain and a limp. But Arsinoe had not sickened at all.
That secret only she, Jules, and Joseph know.
“Come on,” Jules says. She claps Arsinoe on the shoulder and rises, stiffly. Beside her, her mountain cat, Camden, favors the shoulder that was broken by Arsinoe’s first false familiar, the diseased bear that scarred Arsinoe’s face. Not even two months passed between the crippling of Camden in that attack and the crippling of Jules by poison. It is as if the Goddess cruelly intended for them to match.
“Where’re we going?” Arsinoe asks.
“Out from underfoot,” Cait says as she tosses scraps of food up onto the cupboards for the crow familiars, Aria and Eva. The birds bob their heads appreciatively, and Cait lowers her voice. “Do you need some willowbark tea brewed before you go, Jules?”
“No, Grandma. I’m fine.”
Outside in the yard, Arsinoe follows Jules past the chicken coops as she and Camden stretch their sore limbs in the sun. Then she darts off into the woodpile.
“What are you digging for?” Jules asks.
“Nothing.” But Arsinoe returns with a book, brushing bits of bark off the soft green cover. She holds it up and Jules frowns. It is a book of poison plants, lifted discreetly from one of the shelves in Luke’s bookshop.
“You shouldn’t be messing about with that,” Jules says. “And what if someone sees you with it?”
“Then they’ll think I’m trying to get revenge, for what was done to you.”
“That won’t work. Reading a book to out-poison the poisoners? You can’t even poison a poisoner, can you?”
“Say ‘poison’ one more time, Jules.”
“I’m serious, Arsinoe.” She drops her voice to a hissing whisper even though they are alone in the yard. “If anyone finds out what you really are, we lose the only advantage that we have. Is that what you want?”
“No,” Arsinoe says quietly. She does not argue further, tired of listening to Jules talk of advantages and strategies. Jules has been considering their options since before she was even able to get out of bed from the poison.
“You sound hesitant,” Jules says.
“I am hesitant. I don’t want to kill them. And I don’t think they really want to kill me.”
“But they will.”
“How do you know?”
“Because every queen we have ever had has done the same. Since the beginning.”
Arsinoe’s jaw tightens. Since the beginning. That old parable, that the Goddess sent gifts through the sacrifice of queens, triplets sent to the island when the people were still wild tribes. The strongest slew her sisters and their blood fed the island. And she ruled as queen until the Goddess sent new triplets, who grew, and killed, and fed the island. They say it was an instinct once. The drive to kill one another as natural as stags locking horns in the autumn. But that is only a story.
“Arsinoe? You know they will. You know they’ll kill you whether they want to or not. Even Mirabella.”
“You only think that because of Joseph,” Arsinoe says. “But she didn’t know and . . . she couldn’t help it.” I did it, she almost says, but she still cannot, even after all that her botched spell has cost them. She is still too much a coward.
“That’s not why,” Jules says. “And besides, what happened with Joseph . . . it was a mistake. He doesn’t love her. He never left my side during the poison.”
Arsinoe looks away. She knows that Jules has tried hard to believe that. And to forgive him.
“Maybe we should just run,” Jules goes on. “Go to ground and hide until one destroys the other. They wouldn’t hunt for you too hard with each other there to choose from. Why bother searching the scrub brush for a grouse when there’s a deer standing in the clearing? I’ve been squirreling away food, just in case. Supplies. We could take horses for distance and trade them for provisions when we go on foot. We’ll circle around the capital, where no one will look. And where we’ll be sure to hear of it when one of them dies.” Jules looks at her from the side of her eye. “And for the record, I hope it’s Katharine who dies first. It will make Mirabella easier to poison if she’s not on the lookout for it anymore.”
“What if Mirabella dies first?” Arsinoe asks, and Jules shrugs.
“Walk up and stab Katharine in the throat, I suppose. She can’t hurt you.”
Arsinoe sighs. There is so much risk, no matter which queen falls first. Mirabella might kill her outright, without a bear to defend her, but if Katharine were to cut her with a poisoned blade, her poisoner secret would come out. Then even if she won, the Arrons would claim her, and she would be yet another poisoner queen seated on the throne.
There must be a way, she thinks, a way out of this for all of us.
If she could only talk to them. Even if it was forced. If she could force a stalemate and they were locked together in the tower. If they could only talk, she knew it could be different.
“You have to get rid of that book,” Jules says stubbornly. “I can’t stand the sight of it.”
Arsinoe slips the book guiltily into her vest.
“How would you feel if I told you to hide Camden?” she asks. “If you hate the poisoners, you hate me.”
“That’s not true,” Jules says. “You are ours. Haven’t you been raised a naturalist all this time? Aren’t you truly a naturalist, at heart?”
“I am a Milone,” she says. “At heart.”