“We’ll keep you safe just to spite you, Arsinoe,” Jules says darkly. “Camden, Joseph, and I.”
“You mean to use your war gift? You can’t! If they see that they’ll . . .” Arsinoe pauses and drops her voice low as if the Council might already be listening. “They’ll take you back to Indrid Down and lock you up. They’ll kill you. The island doesn’t trifle with madness.”
“Maybe I won’t go mad. Maybe it should be unbound, and this is why I have it, to protect you when you won’t protect yourself.”
“I don’t want you in this, Jules. Please.”
“This is your life. Don’t tell me to stay out of it.” Jules glares at her, hard, and stalks away down the drive.
“Jules!”
“I’m just going to find Joseph,” she says over her shoulder. She slows, and her voice softens. “Don’t worry. We’ll only keep an eye on what the Arrons and the temple are up to.”
Arsinoe escapes for a few moments alone with Braddock beside Dogwood Pond before the chaos begins. But moments alone are not to be. Billy surprises her, returned from Rolanth.
“Arsinoe,” he says.
“Junior!” Her whole body jerks toward him. She leaps at him and throws her arms around his neck. His hands press into her back, along with something else that rustles.
“This is a better welcome than I expected,” he says.
“Then don’t ruin it by talking.”
Billy laughs, and they draw apart. He looks unchanged, unscarred by poison. Safe and back home with her where he belongs. Her eyes move over his face, his shoulders and chest. Before she blushes, she looks at his hands.
“Junior,” she says. “You have a wreath.”
And a lovely one too: whip-smooth vines curled round and round, twisted through with purple butterwort and blue-eyed grass.
“I made it.” He holds it out. “For you.”
Arsinoe takes it and turns it over between her fingers.
“I mean, I didn’t make it,” he amends, “but I told the girl from the market what to put in it. It’s not meant to be like a bouquet,” he adds hastily. “I know you’re not the type. Naturalist or not.”
“But you brought me a bouquet, once. Remember? Last winter, after we were attacked by the old, sick bear.”
“Those were from my father.”
Arsinoe smirks. She slides her finger over the bit of pale blue ribbon attached to the wreath, used to hang it on a door in the days before the festival.
“This is . . . very nice,” she says with an uncharacteristic lack of sarcasm. “It will be the first one I release onto the water.”
Then she laughs when Braddock comes to inspect it, sniffing and sniffing with his large brown nose.
“Will he be with you at the festival?” Billy asks, reaching down to scratch him between the ears.
“Yes. But I’ll keep him near the docks, away from most of the crowds.”
“Will he be safe, though? So near the other queens? After what happened at Beltane . . .”
“I think it will be fine.” She forgets sometimes that Billy witnessed the attack at the Quickening. He is so at ease with Braddock now, ruffling his fur and cooing to him like a kitten.
“You spoiled bear.” Arsinoe pats Braddock on the shoulder, and he waddles away, his coat as glossy a great brown’s as she has ever seen. Wolf Spring has made him fat and sleek, well-fed on only the best of the catch.
“Tell me you have a plan,” says Billy. “Some weapon or action that no one knows about.”
“I have a bear. Some would say that’s enough.” She looks down at her wreath. “Do we have to talk about this? You’ve only just returned.”
“Just returned,” he echoes, “as part of Mirabella’s entourage.”
This stupid festival. His being back is the only good to come out of it. She turns toward him and touches his neck.
“I’m glad to see you’re all right. Luke’s tailor friends told us horrible stories of poison in Rolanth. Disfigured priestesses . . . poisoned livestock . . . Was any of it true?”
Billy nods. He says no more, but he seems so haunted suddenly that she knows it must have been, and worse.
“I should have written,” he says. “But truly there was nothing to tell, and anything I wanted to say, I couldn’t get down.”
“We are both that way. I can never find words that don’t sound stupid on paper. Jules can write for days.”
“We must always be sure to come face-to-face, then. So there are never any misunderstandings.”
He runs his fingers along the edge of her mask, down to her jawline where the smallest bit of scar shows from behind the lacquered wood.
“I don’t know how much I’ll get to see you,” he says.
“Aren’t you staying with the Sandrins?”
“Even in Wolf Spring, I’m still Mirabella’s official taster. I will have to stand beside her during the festival ceremonies.”
Arsinoe’s throat tightens. To see Billy standing behind her sister will hurt, even if it is only for show.
“So you won’t do what you did at Beltane. Leave Mirabella and come to me.”
“Things are different now,” he says quietly.
“How different?”
Billy takes her by the shoulders, and she holds her breath. There is no poison on her lips this time. If he kisses her, she will kiss him back. She will never let him go.
But instead, he crushes her to his chest.
“Arsinoe,” he says, and kisses her hair and her shoulder, everywhere but where she wants. “Arsinoe, Arsinoe.”
“I hope we can talk once more at least,” she says. She buries her nose in his shoulder. “Before one of my sisters gets to me.”
“Don’t say things like that. For her part, Mirabella has no particular plan here, except to stay alive.”
“Or you just don’t know of one,” Arsinoe counters, drawing back. “Would you tell me, Junior? If you did? Would you tell her if you knew a plan of mine?”
He looks away.
“Don’t answer,” she says. “They were unfair questions. Mirabella isn’t just a name to you now or a face atop a cliff. I don’t expect that you would hate her for me.”
Billy takes her hand in his and threads their fingers together.
“Perhaps not,” he says. “But I will never let anything happen to you. And that will never change.”
WOLF SPRING TEMPLE
Luca runs her finger along the windowsill in the temple cottage and holds it up to Rho.
“It is clean at least.”
“At least.” Rho chuckles. “You have grown soft and spoiled as a cat, High Priestess.” Luca chuckles as well. That is true enough. She has been the High Priestess for a long time and enjoyed all the trappings that came with it. If she sets all of that aside, the modest dwellings are perfectly sufficient.
The Rolanth priestesses have done a fine job cleaning and clearing out needed space. They could not say much about the security of the temple grounds, but Rho will take care of that. The difficult thing will be keeping Mirabella close. Already Luca has seen her wandering the edges of the temple garden, eyes cast toward the town and the harbor. Their soft-hearted queen is curious about the life that her sister has led here. And she is yearning to see the boy, Joseph Sandrin.
“I like it here,” says Rho, inhaling deeply. “It is harder than Rolanth. And more honest.”