Queens of Fennbirn Read online

  “Queen Mirabella, please!”

  Shutters tear loose from the house. Windows rattle and threaten to shatter. Lightning strikes so close that the foundation shakes, and every elemental inside feels the electricity through the bottoms of their feet.

  “I will not!” Mirabella screeches. “I will never, I will never, I will n—”

  The storm eases when she falls to the floor, after Miles leaped behind her and used a heavy lamp to strike her on the back of the head.

  GREAVESDRAKE MANOR

  Queen Katharine walks through the hallways of Greavesdrake Manor, holding tight to the seam of Edmund the butler’s pant leg. The great house that the Arron family occupies is easy to get lost in and makes Katharine feel even smaller than she already is. Last week in the library she had to fight her way out of the folds of a curtain. And the ballroom is so large that the entire Black Cottage could fit inside.

  As they go down the halls, their footsteps echo, and Katharine keeps glancing behind them, sure that Miss Genevieve is lurking about, ready to jump out and frighten her. The game was funny at first, but grows less so due to its frequency, and Miss Genevieve pinches hard enough to leave marks.

  “There is no one back there, little queen,” Edmund says. He looks down and winks at her over the top of his silver tray. “Miss Genevieve is already in the courtyard with the others. They have been playing croquet.”

  “She must like that game very much,” says Katharine. “Since it lets her use such a big mallet.”

  Edmund chuckles, and she giggles back, though she does not know what is funny. Genevieve would like things with big mallets. She seems to like anything that allows her to hit.

  They wind through the rear kitchens and step outside to make their way to the courtyard. The Arrons had erected black-and-white tents; more shade for visiting family than the alder trees could provide. Edmund leads her to the largest tent, where Natalia sits, watching her sister, Genevieve, and brother, Antonin, play a round with the younger cousins.

  “There you are,” she says as Katharine enters. Edmund places the silver tray down onto the table, and Katharine curtsies to Natalia and sits on the chair opposite. “And you have brought the May wine. How lovely.”

  “May wine,” says Katharine. “Is it called that because of the month? Are we only to drink it in May?”

  “May wine is a poisoner tradition.” Natalia takes hold of the clear pitcher, full with bright, golden liquid. “We drink it always, but it is especially for the children. Let me show you.”

  She pours the wine into a silver cup and holds it out for Katharine to sniff. The scent is acidic and sweet, slightly grassy. Katharine wrinkles her nose.

  “The toxin is from the woodruff plant,” Natalia explains. “But it is not too much. That is why even those early in their gift are safe to drink it. Like children. And also because it is best served like so.” She takes up a set of tongs and drops three lumps of sugar into the cup. She pauses, raises an eyebrow at the queen, and then drops in a fourth, making her giggle. “Almost done,” Natalia says, but first she takes a large strawberry and makes fast slices into the tip, then uses her fingers to spread the fruit like a fan. She dips the berry into a bowl of honey and then drops the whole sticky mess into the cup of wine.

  Katharine holds the cup in both hands and sips as Natalia licks her fingers. She can still smell the grassy bitterness, but the drink is sweet and wonderful.

  “Well? What do you think?”

  “It is delicious,” Katharine says, and takes another sip. Natalia smiles and goes back to watching the cousins at their game. To Katharine’s eyes, no woman in the world could be more beautiful than Natalia Arron. Her blond hair blazes like sunlight, and her lips are as red as summer apples. Everything about her is regal and elegant. Every step she takes is sure. The other Arrons, and the servants, are more than a little afraid of her, but since Katharine arrived at Greavesdrake, Natalia has been nothing but kind.

  Katharine sips her drink and watches the croquet balls tumble across the lawn. No one asks her to play. No one pays her much mind at all, except to glance at her occasionally with curious looks on their faces. But that is fine with Katharine. The day is sunny and pleasant, and the May wine is cool in her belly. She has never cared for croquet anyhow; Arsinoe would never follow the rules when they tried to play at the cottage, and the mallets are too tall for her to swing comfortably.

  After some time, Natalia stands and calls to Genevieve.

  “I am going inside to settle some accounts,” she says to her sister. “And then into the capital. I will not return until suppertime. Can you play the hostess until then?”

  “Of course, sister,” Genevieve replies, her mallet resting against her shoulder, and her pretty, lilac eyes sparkling.

  “Serve more May wine to the children. It is weak enough for them. But do not taint it with anything else. The littler cousins have no gift at all yet, and we do not want there to be vomit in the grass.”

  It is on her third glass of May wine that Katharine’s stomach starts to hurt. At first, she tries to conceal it, thinking that the pains will pass, like the time that she and Arsinoe ate all of Willa’s plum tart and could not walk for hours. But then her head begins to throb, and her vision darkens. She is vaguely aware that she is throwing up, just as her body thumps against the soft, green grass beneath the black-and-white tent.

  When she wakes later she is nauseous and shivering, but at least she is in her bed inside the manor and no longer stretched out on the lawn for everyone to see. She half opens her eyes in the candlelight. It is dark. Nighttime. Of the same day? She hopes so.

  Natalia and Genevieve stand just outside of her bedchamber, in her sitting room. Their voices are hushed but angry. Perhaps frightened. She moans, so they will know they do not need to be quiet, and so they might come in and see her. Their talking pauses, but they remain outside.

  Curious and a little more awake, Katharine rolls and looks through the doorway. Just the sight of Natalia calms her: back straight, wearing a dove gray shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. The front of her black trousers are messed, and Katharine realizes with horror that she must have thrown up on her.

  “She is weaker than Camille ever was, and now the whole family knows it,” Genevieve hisses.

  “And whose fault is that? How many cups of May wine did she have? Did I not tell you to watch her? To mix the wine weak? Now we have a sick queen and two sickening cousins in a carriage back to Prynn.”

  “This story will spread. The people will dive upon it. Especially with the tales coming out of Rolanth about the elemental queen. How strong she is. The storms she produces. Queen Mirabella—”

  There is the sound of a slap, and Genevieve cries out.

  “How many times must I say not to speak their names? Nowhere that she might overhear.”

  “She is unconscious,” Genevieve says.

  “I do not care. No one speaks their names. They do not exist. A queen’s memory is short at this age, and in a year or two, she will have forgotten them entirely, as long as we do not help her to remember. Ignore her when she asks of them, as if you had not heard. And never speak the names!”

  Clothing rustles, and Genevieve squeaks again. Even disoriented and sick, the sounds frighten Katharine, and she huddles down into her blankets.

  “We will have an easier time of it, once she forgets,” says Natalia.

  “We will have an easier time of it once her gift strengthens,” says Genevieve. “Let me train her. Let me coax it out. Such methods have worked before, and even if the gift is slow to show, at least she will build natural tolerances.”

  A long pause, and Katharine raises her head to find Natalia staring in at her. Katharine sinks back on her pillows and feels safe. Natalia will not leave her. She will probably stay by her bed all night. Her eyes drift shut. Nothing bad can happen as long as Natalia is there.

  WOLF SPRING

  The house of the naturalist Milone family rests on t
he outskirts of the village of Wolf Spring. It is an agrarian land, some residents with more of a gift than others, but the strongest magic in the region bears a naturalist slant. Crops and livestock grow well, and fish are plentiful in the waters outside Sealhead Cove, named not for its shape but for the propensity of seals to bob up and down in the waves.

  Joseph’s family lives on the cove. His father builds ships and occasionally sails them, though most of his crafts run along the coast to the richer families of Prynn and Beckett. Neither he nor the three Sandrin sons have any gift, though Matthew insists he can charm the fish and dolphins like his mother, and Joseph claims to have the sight. Little Jonah is not likely to show a gift either, though he is only a toddler and it is too early to say.

  Juillenne and Joseph bob in the water alongside the seals in the warm waves. From the tip of the dock, the landmass of the island stretches out in both directions. Fennbirn Island. Called so by the outsiders who find their way across the sea and through the mists. To its inhabitants, it is only the island, and Grandpa Ellis says that its true name is guarded on the tongues of the eldest women. They bite down on it, angry that the young cannot even pronounce it, let alone understand what it means. Their anger will swallow the word whole, and in a generation or two, the island’s true name will be forgotten entirely.

  Juillenne doubts that the island cares, one way or the other, what it is called. To her it is only home, vast and unending, dotted with mountains and inland lakes, streams and cities of varied people of varied gifts. Caragh says that Jules’s mother, Madrigal, ran away from the island for bigger things. But Jules does not understand how anyone could want something more than the island and its Goddess.

  On the dock, nearer to shore, Caragh sits with Matthew, with their legs dangling in the water, pant legs rolled to their knees. Beneath the surface, Joseph tugs on one of Jules’s ankles, and she tries very hard to keep from kicking him in the face.

  He comes up and spits water.

  “Race you to the dock,” he says. Jules shakes her head. She is in no mood to be beaten today. Today she would wish she had a shark for her familiar, to drag Joseph under and give her time to pass, and she has heard a hundred times from the old folk of Wolf Spring that such wishes are dangerous, for the Goddess might grant them true.

  Jules presses her finger to her lips and nods toward Matthew and Caragh, ripe for splashing. She and Joseph skim side by side through the cove, smooth and silent as water striders. Then they hang off the dock wood and wait for their moment.

  “Is that what it’s like every time, do you think?” asks Matthew. “The lightning. The crying. Pulling them apart. I know I said so to Jules, but I really did think that was only a story.”

  “I don’t know,” Caragh replies. “Goddess willing, it will be the only claiming we ever have to see.”

  “Maybe it was the Midwife’s fault. Maybe she didn’t prepare them right.”

  “How do you prepare a child for something like this? How will we prepare her now? Queen Arsinoe’s been with us a week, and all she does is stare out toward Rolanth. In case her sister sends up a bolt.” Caragh nods down the dock, where Arsinoe stands scanning the sky.

  “Let her have those lightning bolts. Because one day they’ll stop. Then Arsinoe won’t see her lightning again until the Ascension, and it will be for a totally different reason.”

  Jules grasps Joseph’s shoulder, and he looks at her, brows creased. She pulls them both under the cover of the dock.

  “Three dark sisters, all fair to be seen,” says Matthew.

  “The way it’s always been,” says Caragh. “And it never seemed cruel until I saw it firsthand.”

  “It isn’t cruel. It’s in their nature. Always three, always in December, conceived at Beltane, always daughters. A queen isn’t like us. They aren’t normal people with normal gifts. It’s just how it is.”

  “Not always,” Caragh whispers. “Sometimes there is a fourth. A Blue Queen. Do you remember the year of the birth? Some of the oracles spoke of that. They thought the lack of omens meant something special.”

  Matthew throws something into the water. It splashes beside Joseph, and he and Jules retreat farther along the dock.

  “Something special,” Matthew mocks. “Now the lack of omens is an omen in itself?”

  Caragh’s expression is distracted, lost in some memory. Then she shakes her head, hard. “You’re right. It’s foolish. Omens and oracles. Means nothing.”

  “It would have been better if it had. But there hasn’t been a Blue Queen since . . .”

  “Queen Illiann,” says Caragh. “Born ten generations of queens ago. Reigned in harmony until the birth of her triplets forty-six years later. A long reign. I asked Dad.”

  “What’s a Blue Queen?”

  Arsinoe’s low voice is a surprise to all. Jules had not heard her footsteps even from underneath the wood.

  “Nothing,” Caragh answers quickly. “Only a very lucky and rare queen.”

  “Only one of my sisters or I will be the real queen,” says Arsinoe. “So if she is so lucky, is it always her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what happens to her sisters?”

  Above the wood, Caragh clears her throat. “Why don’t you go into the market? The catch should be cleaned and the stalls frying them up for sandwiches by now.”

  Arsinoe says nothing. She walks away, back down the dock, and Jules and Joseph swim along in her shadow. By the time she stops, they are in such shallow water that they can almost touch the bottom.

  She is so sad, Jules thinks, and Joseph frowns, as if he can read her mind. He takes a breath and dives down with a great splash, loud enough that Arsinoe must know they are there, so Jules swims out a few strokes and smiles at her, squinting into the sun.

  It has been strange, sharing the house with the sullen, black-haired little girl. She spends most of her time staring out the window for Mirabella’s lightning, or whispering Katharine’s name over and over under her breath, like a spell they do not know. But she eats (a lot), and she sleeps, and she is always polite. And to think that Jules feared the young queen would be constantly underfoot, hanging on her sleeve and getting in the way of her and Joseph’s fun.

  Joseph surfaces and surges up and out onto land like a seal, grabbing the dock and rolling onto the wood beside Arsinoe without much grace. Still, he does it in one try. It takes Jules a lot longer, scrambling and huffing. Then they sit on either side of Arsinoe, and Joseph spreads out the things he has carried up from the bottom of the cove: three curved shells, black and white and speckled brown. He taps the shell in the middle, and a hermit crab’s legs poke out of its oversize home. He prods it again, and it waves its tiny antennae.

  Jules taps one of the other shells, and the crab inside scuttles back. Joseph pulls Arsinoe to her knee. It takes a moment, but finally she gets curious enough to tap the last crab. For the next few minutes at least, her sister’s lightning is forgotten as the three children prod their crabs to see whose will be first to make it back into the water.

  Six weeks after the Milones took the young queen into their house, Caragh lies on her back in the meadow beside Dogwood Pond, with her head on Matthew Sandrin’s stomach. Her familiar, Juniper, rests her brown snout in the crook of her arm, the hound’s back covered with yellow and white wild-flower petals that Matthew shook over them both. The day is warm and lazy, and Caragh traces patterns along Matthew’s forearm, wrapped around her chest. It is not often that she gets a day to herself. Usually, she is too busy raising her younger sister’s daughter.

  Jules is Madrigal’s child, but it has been years since Caragh has thought of her as anything but her own. Caragh watches her every day as she walks through the flowers and vegetables in the garden, coaxing their stalks and stems to grow up straight, urging their roots to run deep. She sees her love for the island, and for the Goddess who runs like water through the heart of it all. Jules is hers. The Goddess’s and Caragh’s. Jules is nothing like Madrigal.
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  “What are you thinking about?” Matthew asks.

  “Nothing.”

  He smiles, that rakish smile that Caragh worries will someday get Juillenne into the same kind of trouble with Joseph that she is in with Matthew.

  “Nothing,” he repeats, and pulls her farther into his arms. “Liar.”

  Caragh kisses him, pressed against his chest, and it is not long before Matthew’s hands change from gentle to searching. Juniper growls and grabs Matthew’s shirt, but before she stalks off, she licks his hand. Juniper is Caragh’s familiar, and because Caragh loves Matthew, so does she.

  “Caragh Milone,” he says against her lips, and again as he kisses her neck, as she arches to meet his hands, fumbling at the buttons of her shirt. “Marry me.”

  Caragh’s heart pounds between them. She slips her arm around his back and holds him fast when she says no.

  He is not surprised. He has asked before and heard the same. His hand slides down, along her leg, and she holds her breath.

  Afterward, when they lie entwined, half dozing in the late-afternoon sun, he asks why she said no this time.

  “Because you don’t mean it,” she says quietly. “You’re only seventeen, Matt. And I have five years on you.”

  “I don’t know why you keep telling me that. Like you think I haven’t heard. Or can’t count.”

  Caragh smiles. Matthew thinks their ages are just right. Strong-gifted naturalists live long lives, so she will be one hundred and he will be ninety-five, and they will die together in their bed, on the same day. Caragh touches his face.

  “If you can count, then count to three. And ask again then.”

  “Three days?”

  “Matthew.”

  “Three months?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Three years, Caragh,” he says, “is forever to wait.”

  “To you it is. And that’s why I’m saying no.”

  Three Years Later