“Good. Then you can leave.” Willa takes down a bowl filled with dough she prepared that morning, and Arsinoe snorts.
“Were you always this affectionate? Or did you put us on swaddle boards and hang us off doors?”
Willa scoffs.
“We have not swaddled queens in seven ages.” Then she pauses in her kneading, and fixes Arsinoe with a sharp eye. “It isn’t that I want you to go. I never imagined I would see you again, after the day they took you. But if the Black Council finds you here, they will have my old neck and Caragh’s as well.”
“Not for long,” Arsinoe says. “Once Mirabella is crowned and replaces the Arrons on the Council with Westwoods, everything will change. They might even let Caragh go.”
“Perhaps.” Willa presses her lips together, but cannot quite hide her smile.
Arsinoe cocks her head.
“Is that what you want to happen? Why you did it? Why you switched us as babies?”
The old woman slaps the dough onto the counter and shakes flour down over it.
“What makes you think I was the one who switched you?”
“Who else?”
“Who else was here?” Willa asks. “The Queen. Your mother. I was only the Midwife, and the Midwife does as she is told.”
“But why would she?”
“Do you wish she had not?” Willa looks at Arsinoe sharply. “And in any case, she did not say. I gather that the Arrons were not kind. And during her rule, I do not think she liked what she saw within the poisoner Council. Besides, in Mirabella she saw the queen to come, and the queen always knows what she has. So there was little harm in sabotaging the other two.”
“Sabotaging the other two,” Arsinoe repeats, and her lips twist wryly.
“Queen Camille was a sweet girl. But the only one who ever loved her was her king-consort. She was glad to leave. She was glad to have done with her duty.”
“Hmph,” Arsinoe says. “It should sting, hearing that. But it doesn’t.”
“It does not because you are a queen. You are not like other mothers or other daughters. You are not like other people.”
Arsinoe takes up a knife and begins slicing onions. Seeing Willa work the dough has started to make her hungry.
“Did she go, then?” Arsinoe asks. “With her king-consort, to live happily off the island?”
“How should I know? Perhaps. It is what she wanted. Though they say that the weak ones do not live long after their triplets are born.
“A queen’s life is glorious and short. Whether she rules or dies in her Ascension Year. This is the way things are. Being put out by it will not change it.”
“The weak ones,” Arsinoe says, and stabs a mushroom. “But Mirabella will be a queen who rules into her fiftieth year. She’ll have her triplets and leave and die somewhere grand, an old woman.”
“Don’t crush me between your buttocks,” Caragh says gruffly, and slaps the rump of one of the chestnut saddle horses that Joseph and Madrigal rode in on. He and the other horse have had to share a stall in the small stable, and the close quarters have made them pushy.
“You used to use your gift instead of your hands. Or have you lost it, being here so long?”
Caragh sets her jaw and looks up at her pretty sister.
“I’ve never used my gift for something as frivolous as cleaning a stall.”
She opens the stall door and leaves, resting the pitchfork against the wall before moving down the line. She places a measure of grain into the black horse’s bucket and strokes his nose.
“Frivolous,” Madrigal says. She sucks her cheek indignantly. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t. Frivolity is strictly my domain, is that it?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Of course you didn’t. You never say what you mean.”
Caragh clenches her jaw. She looks back at the black horse and smells the savory scent of his breath as he chews the grain.
“I haven’t seen a horse this well-bred in a long time. And those saddle horses, did you borrow them from Addie Lane? They aren’t bad at all.”
Madrigal puts her hands on her hips. She taps her foot. She has barely been at the cottage for a week and already she has climbed on Caragh’s last nerve.
“What do you want, Madrigal?”
“To look after my daughter.”
“That isn’t what I meant. I meant right now. Is there something you want to say?” Her eyes drift down to Madrigal’s belly. “If it’s that you’re pregnant, I can see that already.”
Madrigal glances toward her waist. It is early yet, but on her slight frame it shows enough for Caragh to know.
“Jules must be glad to be a big sister,” Caragh goes on. “I’m so proud to see her grown up strong and happy. And Joseph . . . He looks so much like Matthew. For a moment, I almost ran and jumped into his arms.”
Madrigal swallows. She murmurs something under her breath.
“Maddie, speak up.”
“Don’t call me Maddie,” Madrigal snaps.
But there is something that Madrigal wants to tell her. Some unpleasant thing, from the way she stands there, toeing annoying patterns into the dirt.
“The baby,” Madrigal says. “It’s Matthew’s.”
Caragh’s fingers grip the stall door. Every horse in the barn stops eating and looks at her, even Willa’s mean brown mule. Matthew. Her Matthew. But he is not her Matthew anymore.
“I just wanted to be the one to tell you,” Madrigal says, her voice uncertain. “I didn’t want Jules or Joseph to blurt it out.” She steps closer, soft, hesitant steps in the dust and straw. “Caragh?”
“What?”
“Say something.”
“What do you want me to say? That I’ve been waiting here like a fool, when I knew there was no hope in waiting? That things change out there, but nothing changes here? You don’t need me to tell you those things. I’ll leave here old and bent, like Willa. And you don’t need my blessing if you want to live my life for me.”
“That’s not what I’m doing,” Madrigal says as Caragh’s brown hound starts to howl.
“Quiet. The howl means company. And company means you have to hide.”
The old man and his pony cart take their time coming down the path to the Black Cottage. It is a good thing, for it gives Arsinoe plenty of time to get comfortable in her hiding spot, seated beneath a window. Peering out, she sees Jules and Joseph dart into the stables. Who knows where Madrigal is.
When old Worcester reaches the house, Willa helps him to unload his sacks of grain and jugs of wine, along with three or four wrapped parcels. They talk for what feels like an eternity before he finally turns his cart back down the path. Much of what they discussed seems to be about a letter he gave to her. She stands in the middle of the supplies and reads it again and again until Arsinoe loses her patience. She gets to her feet and throws up the sash.
“Willa! What is that?”
Willa walks the letter back into the cottage. The others emerge from the stable like squirrels from their burrows.
Arsinoe takes the letter and reads.
“What is it?” asks Jules as she comes inside.
“It’s an announcement,” Arsinoe says. “Mirabella is challenging Katharine to a duel.”
“Is that wise?” Madrigal asks. “A hunt is a risk, but a duel is riskier still. A show of frontal assaults. Both could die.”