Jules nudges her plate toward the cougar, who lies with her head on Jules’s knee. Camden will not even sniff at it.
“She won’t take it either.” She strokes the cat’s broad, golden head. She cannot believe that they will pass their last hours like this. She is numb. Not even afraid. She has not been able to feel anything since the guard came to tell them that Arsinoe had been executed. And that they would be tied to posts in the morning and executed as well, their bodies left out for Mirabella to see.
She hears Joseph moving in his cell, turning against the bars.
“I keep thinking of what we should have done,” he says. “What we could have done differently. But maybe there was nothing.” He snorts. “Sometimes you just lose. After all, someone has to.”
“I want Cait,” Jules says, her throat tightening with tears. “And Ellis.” She wants Aunt Caragh and even Madrigal.
“I know,” Joseph says. “I want them too. I wish we were anywhere else but in the belly of this castle. But Camden’s here. And I’m here. Don’t cry, Jules.”
“I have to tell you something.” She wipes at her cheeks. “I have to tell you what Arsinoe told me. About the low magic.”
“What low magic?”
“The night you came back, she did a love spell for us. But she did it wrong. She ruined it, and she thinks that’s why . . . why you and Mirabella . . .” She stops. Joseph is quiet for a long time.
“Joseph? Don’t you have anything to say?”
“Like what, Jules?” he asks softly.
“Well . . . do you think that’s why it happened? Arsinoe’s low magic is so strong. It could’ve been. It really could have been.”
“I know what you’re doing.”
“What?”
“Trying to forgive me,” he says, and she can hear the smile in his voice. “You don’t want to go out there tomorrow still hating me.”
“I don’t hate you.”
“I hope you don’t. But what happened with Mirabella was my fault. Maybe the magic put us in each other’s path, maybe it even helped us along, but that doesn’t make me blameless, Jules. I made a mistake. I wish I hadn’t, but it doesn’t change what I did.”
Jules knew all that, deep down. But she feels freer somehow now that he has said it.
“Well, anyway,” she says cheekily. “I was just trying to make you feel better about it, since we’re about to die.”
Joseph laughs.
“How I love you, Jules.”
Footsteps echo down the hall, and Jules wipes her tears on her sleeve. No guard on patrol will see tear streaks on her face. Not ever.
“What now?” Joseph asks.
Jules stiffens when she hears a sound like a body falling. Camden’s ears prick, and she gets to her feet, tail ticking back and forth.
“Jules!” Arsinoe hisses. “Jules, are you down here?”
“Arsinoe!” Jules and Camden scramble up to the bars as Arsinoe runs to them. They embrace her as well as they can with hands and paws. Camden purrs and licks her face.
“Camden, blegh.” Arsinoe grins and wipes her cheek.
“I might have licked you as well, I’m so happy to see you.” Jules gasps. “I thought you were dead. I thought they killed you.”
“Aye, they tried. But they tried the wrong way. They sent that sister of mine to poison me.” Arsinoe fumbles with a ring of keys until she finds the one that opens the door. Then she tosses the ring to Mirabella to open Joseph’s. “Are you and Cam all right?”
Jules steps out of the cell just as Joseph collides with them and kisses them each in turn: girl, girl, cougar.
“We’re okay.”
“Good. We have to get out of here now. Are you strong enough? Can you fight?”
Jules clenches her fists.
“That’s a silly question.”
She looks across the corridor, at Mirabella, and nods to her. Then she slips out of her friends’ arms and lets Arsinoe lead the way out.
GREAVESDRAKE MANOR
Nicolas helps her out of the carriage, and Katharine looks up nervously at the light from her bedroom windows. Her maids will have prepared the room, setting out vases of poisonous flowers and lighting candles with perfumed wax. They will have turned down the bed.
Katharine takes a deep breath. No carriage ride from the city has ever been over so quickly.
Nicolas pulls her up the path to the house, and Natalia’s butler opens the door.
“Edmund,” she says. “Is Natalia at home?”
“She has not yet returned from the Volroy, my queen,” he replies. “But all has been made ready according to her specifications.”
“That is good.” Katharine stalls a little as he takes her cloak. The air on her shoulders makes her feel very bare. “Though I expected that she would be here . . . or if not her, then Genevieve . . . Yet I suppose I should be glad that she is not here. . . .”
“Enough,” says Nicolas, and pulls her close to kiss her neck. He takes up a lamp from the foyer table and leads her quickly down the hall.
As they pass by the rooms, Katharine is gripped by an unexpected sadness. Soon she will say good-bye to Greavesdrake, to its ancient, creaky floors and sunless rooms full of cold spots. After tonight, she will not return. Not as she does now. Greavesdrake will no longer be home.
“Nicolas, slow down. I will turn my ankle!”
“You will not.” He laughs.
The house seems so empty. Where are the tittering maids, the spying servants? There is not so much as a rustling skirt darting out of their way. They reach her bedroom, and Nicolas tugs her through the doorway so hard that she nearly falls.
Inside, the space is lit softly with candles. The carpets and bed are strewn with red flower petals. She has imagined this night before. But it was never Nicolas she imagined beside her.
Nicolas turns her to face him. Her breath is already fast.
“I do not know why I am so nervous,” she says.
“Do not be.”
He kisses her.
It is not like Pietyr’s kisses. Not like a dam breaking. It will take some getting used to, but at least his lips are soft. He strips her of her gloves.
“These scars.” He stares at her hands. “Will they fade?”
“I do not know,” she says, and tries to pull her hands away. But instead of being disgusted, the sight of the scars only seems to arouse him further. He bites them and traces them with his tongue. He kisses her neck and her collarbone, and his touch is rough, as though their wedding has made him bold. She has heard it is like that sometimes with mainland men. Though she does not remember where she heard it. From Pietyr, perhaps, during her education. Or from Genevieve, meaning to frighten her.
Nicolas takes himself out of his shirt and works his fingers into the fastenings of her gown.
Katharine turns away.
“Stop. Wait.” She walks through the anteroom and into her bedchamber. It has all happened so fast. The duel, her crowning, poisoning Arsinoe. She has had barely a moment to breathe, and now she feels all those missed breaths clawing at her throat.