“Stay? Here?”
“Yes,” he says. “With you. I am to become your very great friend, Queen Katharine.”
Katharine cocks her head. This all must be some elaborate joke of Natalia’s. Katharine has never understood her sense of humor.
“Oh,” she says. “And what sort of things will we do?”
“I suppose we will do all the sorts of things that friends do.” Pietyr slides his arm around her waist. “When you are well enough to do them.”
“I already know how to dance.”
“There is more to it than dancing.”
He leans forward to kiss her, and she jerks back. It was so sudden. She stammers an apology. Though she does not know why she should be the one to apologize, when it was he who was too forward. But in any case, he does not seem angry.
“You see?” he says, and smiles. “You have been too long in the company of my aunts and your maids. They have not prepared you to court your suitors any better than they prepared you for your poison feast.”
Katharine blushes scarlet. “Who do you think you are,” she asks, “to say such a thing?”
“I am your servant,” he answers, and touches her cheek. “I am your slave. I am here to make sure every one of the suitors does not think of either of your sisters before they think of you.”
WOLF SPRING
The day of Joseph’s return dawns overcast and ugly. Jules watches the whole gray affair lying in her bed in the room she shares with Arsinoe. She has hardly slept.
“They have known he was coming for weeks,” she says.
“Of course they did,” says Madrigal. She stands behind her as Jules sits at her dresser, pulling a brush through Jules’s wild, dark brown hair.
“So why send him home now, two days after Arsinoe’s birthday? He will have missed the celebration and return just in time to see the trash in the streets and the gulls and crows fighting over the leftover food.”
“That’s exactly why,” says Madrigal. “And now they got to spring him on us, and watch us scramble like upset chickens. Poor Annie Sandrin must be out of her mind.”
Yes.
Down in his family’s house by the pier, Joseph’s mother will be nearly overwhelmed, making things ready and barking at her husband and at Matthew and Jonah. Barking happily but barking nonetheless.
“What if he doesn’t come?” Jules asks.
“Why wouldn’t he come?” Madrigal tries again to pin Jules’s hair up onto her head. “This is his home.”
“What do you think he will be like?” she asks.
“If he is anything like his brother Matthew, then all the girls of Wolf Spring are in danger,” Madrigal says, and smiles. “When Matthew was Joseph’s age, he had half the town swimming after his boat.”
Jules jerks under the brush.
“Matthew never cared for anyone besides Aunt Caragh.”
“Yes, yes,” Madrigal mutters. “He was devoted as a hound to my serious sister, just like Joseph will no doubt be to you.” She throws her hands up and sends Jules’s hair flying. “It’s hopeless to try anything with this mess.”
Jules looks sadly into the mirror. Madrigal is so effortlessly beautiful, with her honey-chestnut hair and lithe, graceful limbs. People never guess that she and Jules are mother and daughter. Sometimes, Jules suspects that Madrigal likes it that way.
“You should have slept more,” Madrigal chides. “You have dark hollows beneath your eyes.”
“I couldn’t, not with Camden getting up and turning around every few minutes.”
“And why do you think she could not sleep? Your nervousness kept her awake. If she runs into the table and breaks anything today, it will be your fault.” Madrigal steps out from behind her daughter and studies herself. She touches the ends of her soft, tan-gold waves and dabs perfume onto her long white throat.
“I have done all I can,” she says. “He will have to love you as you are.”
Arsinoe comes up the stairs and leans against their door. “You look great, Jules,” she says.
“You ought to let him come to you,” says Madrigal.
“Why? He’s my friend. This is not a game.” Jules twists away from the dresser and heads downstairs. She is out the door and partway down their long dirt path before she notices that Arsinoe has stayed near the house.
“Aren’t you coming?”
The queen shoves her hands into her pockets. “I don’t think so. This should just be you.”
“He will want to see you.”
“Yes. But later.”
“Well, walk with me for a little way at least!”
Arsinoe laughs. “All right.”
They walk together down the narrow, winding hill road that leads from the property and into town, past the docks, and into the square and the winter market. As they crest the last hill before the cove, Arsinoe stops.
“Do you ever wonder,” Arsinoe asks, “what we would be doing if it had gone different?”
“Different how?” asks Jules. “If we had never tried to run away? If we had made it? Or if they had banished us, too?”
But they only banished Joseph. Jules’s sentence was to be the solitary Midwife and nurse to the queens. To live alone in the Black Cottage as a servant to the crown, her only company the queen and her king-consort during the pregnancy, and the triplets until they grew to the age of claiming. She would be in the Black Cottage now, had her aunt Caragh not volunteered to take her place.
“They should have killed me,” Arsinoe whispers. “I should have offered, in exchange for letting Joseph stay. In exchange for keeping Caragh out of that cottage.”
“They wanted to kill us all,” says Jules. “Natalia Arron would have had us poisoned and jerking, frothing on the council floor. Right there in the Volroy.”
She would have paraded their bodies through the city square in Indrid Down, if she had thought she could get away with it. They were only eleven years old at the time.
“That may still be our fate, if we step out of line,” Arsinoe says. “And it will be bad. They’ll craft something so we die over days. With blood running from our eyes and mouths.” She spits onto the gravel. “Poisoners.”
Jules sighs and looks down at the town she grew up in. Close-together wooden buildings cling around the cove like a mass of gray barnacles. Wolf Spring seems ugly today. Nowhere near grand enough for Joseph, or anyone, to come home to.
“Do you think he’ll have a gift?” Arsinoe asks.
“Probably not much of one. None of the other Sandrins do. Except Matthew, charming the fish.”
“I think Matthew just told your aunt Caragh that to impress her,” Arsinoe says. “His true gift is charming girls, and all the Sandrin boys have that. Even Jonah’s started to chase them around.”
Jules curses under her breath. That is just what Madrigal said.
“Is that what you’re afraid of?” asks Arsinoe.
“I’m not afraid,” Jules retorts. But she is afraid. She is very afraid that Joseph has changed and that her Joseph is gone. Disappeared in the five years they have been apart.
Camden trots ahead, paces the edge of the road, and yawns.
“I just don’t know what to do with him. We can’t exactly go catch frogs and snails in Welden Stream anymore.”
“Not in this weather,” Arsinoe agrees.
“What do you think mainland girls are like?” Jules asks suddenly.
“Mainland girls? Oh, they’re terrible. Horrible.”
“Of course. That’s why my beautiful mother fit in so well with them.”
Arsinoe snorts. “If they are anything like Madrigal,” she says, “then you have nothing to worry about.”
“Maybe she was right, though. Maybe I should not have come.”
Arsinoe shoves her forward, hard.
“Get down there, idiot,” she says. “Or you’ll be late.”
So Jules goes, down toward the dock, where his family stands in their best black coats. Joseph’s boat is not on the
horizon yet, but his mother, Annie, is already up on a crate straining to see. Jules could wait with them. She has been welcome with the Sandrins ever since she and Joseph were children, even before her aunt Caragh and Joseph’s brother Matthew were to be married. But instead she detours up through the square to watch from afar.
In the square, the tents are still up. They have been partially cleaned out but not entirely. Since the festivities ended, Wolf Spring has been nursing a collective hangover. Nothing much has gotten done. Through the open tent flaps, Jules spies platters still on the head table, covered by the shifting black wings of birds. The crows have found what is left of her cod. After they have had their fill, someone will toss the bones back into the water.
Back at the docks, more people have gathered, and not only on the pier. All around the cove, curtains and shutters have been moved aside, and here and there, folk have ventured out to pretend to sweep their porches.
There is a nudge at her waist, and she looks down into Camden’s hungry yellow-green eyes. Her own stomach groans as well. On Jules’s bureau in their bedroom sits an untouched tray of tea and buttered bread. She could not think of eating then. But now she has never felt so empty.
She buys a fish for Camden in the winter market, a nice, clear-eyed sea bass with a curved tail, as if it froze while still swimming. For herself she buys a few oysters from Madge’s morning catch, and shucks them with her fat-bladed knife.
“Here,” Madge says, and hands her a dipper of vinegar. She jerks her head toward the cove. “Shouldn’t you be out there, clamoring with the rest?”
“I don’t care for crowds,” Jules says.
“I don’t blame you.” She presses another shellfish into Jules’s hand. “For the cougar,” she adds, and winks.
“Thanks, Madge.”
Down at the docks, the crowd stirs, and the movement carries all the way up the hill and into the market. Madge’s neck stretches.
“Aye, there it is,” she says.
Joseph’s ship has entered the harbor. It sneaked up on them; already it is close enough that Jules can make out the crewmen on the deck.
“Black sails, all,” says Madge. “Someone from the mainland is trying to kiss our arses.”
Jules stands as tall as she can. There is the ship. Carrying with it the moment she has been dreaming of, and dreading, for the last five years.
“You had better get down there, Jules Milone. We all know it’s your face he will want to be seeing.”
Jules flashes Madge a smile, and she and Camden dart out of the winter market. Her feet pound through the square, past the slack, flapping tents.
There are so many people gathered around, come to the harbor after their curiosities got the better of them. She will not be able to get through. Not even with Camden cutting a path, not unless she resorts to swatting and snarling, which Grandma Cait would never approve of and would surely hear about.
Jules paces uneasily on the slope where she watches. They unload trunks at first. Belongings and perhaps goods for trade. Gifts. Jules peers at the mainland boat. It looks out of place in Sealhead Cove, painted bright white and with plenty of gold and silver around the windows and rigging. Beneath the bleak Wolf Spring day, it practically glows.
And then Joseph steps onto the gangway.
She would know it was him even without his mother’s wail. She would have known it even though he is taller, and older, and all the boyhood softness in his face has melted away.
The Sandrins throw their arms around him. Matthew picks him up in a great hug, and his father claps both of their backs. Joseph ruffles Jonah’s hair. Annie has not let go of the edge of Joseph’s jacket.
Jules takes half a step back. Five years is a long time. A long enough time to forget about someone. What will she do if he sees her on the hill and smiles politely? If he nods to her as he walks past with his family?
She is already backing up when he calls out her name. And then he shouts it, loud, over everyone. “Jules!”
“Joseph!”
They run toward each other, him fighting through the crowd, and her headlong down the slope. His black jacket flies open over a white shirt, and they collide.
It is no fairy-tale meeting, nothing like she imagined or daydreamed about in all the time he was away. Her chin runs into his chest. She does not know where to put her arms. But he is there, real and solid, both changed and not changed at all.
When they pull apart, he holds her by the shoulders, and she him by the elbows. She has started to cry a bit, but not from sadness.
“You’re so . . . ,” she says.
“So are you,” he says, and wipes her cheek with his thumb. “My God, Jules. I was afraid I wouldn’t recognize you. But you’ve hardly changed!”
“Haven’t I?” she asks, mortified suddenly that she is so small. He will think her still a child.
“I didn’t mean that,” he amends. “Of course you’ve grown. But how could I ever worry that I wouldn’t recognize these eyes.”
He touches her temple, beside her blue eye, and then the other, beside her green. “For the longest time I was certain I would see you, if I just looked hard enough.”
But that was impossible. The council had allowed for no correspondence between them. Jules and his family had known only that he was on the mainland, fostered, and alive for the time being. His banishment was absolute.
Camden slips around Jules’s leg and purrs. The movement almost seems shy, but Joseph jumps back.
“What’s the matter?” asks Jules.
“Wh-what’s the—?” he sputters, and then laughs. “Of course. I suppose I have been away a long time. I had forgotten how strange Fennbirn can be.”
“What do you mean ‘strange’?” she asks.
“You would understand if you left.” He holds his hand out to Cam for her to sniff, and she licks his fingers. “He’s a familiar.”
“She is a familiar,” Jules corrects him. “This is Camden.”
“But,” he says, “it can’t be . . . ?”
“Yes,” Jules says, and nods. “She is mine.”
He looks from the girl to the cougar and back again. “But she should be Arsinoe’s,” he says. “To have a familiar like this, it must make you the strongest naturalist in the last fifty years.”
“Sixty, or so they say.” Jules shrugs. “A naturalist queen rises, and the gift rises with it. Or have you forgotten that as well?”
Joseph grins and scratches Camden behind the ears. “What does Arsinoe have, then? And where is she? There are people here I want her to meet. One more than the others.”
“Who?”
“My foster brother, William Chatworth Jr. And his father. They have a delegation this year.”
He regards her with mischief. The temple will not like that they are here. Delegations are not allowed to arrive until the Beltane Festival, and suitors are not allowed to converse with the queens until after the Quickening is over. She wonders who these men are to have been able to bend the rules.
Joseph nods at someone over her left shoulder, and Jules turns to see Autumn, a priestess from Wolf Spring Temple, approaching with a somber expression.
“Juillenne Milone,” she says gently. “Forgive the intrusion. The temple wishes to welcome Joseph Sandrin back to his home. We would take him and his family to the altar to receive a blessing.”
“Of course,” Jules says.
“Can it not wait?” Joseph asks, and grumbles when the priestess does not reply.
On the eastern hill of Wolf Spring, Wolf Spring Temple sits tucked, a white circle of brick surrounded by small priestess cottages. Autumn is one of only twelve priestesses who reside there. It has seemed to Jules a lonely place, whenever she has gone to pray. Except on festival days, the temple is mostly empty save for Autumn, tending the grounds, and the others in the gardens.
“And as always,” Autumn says, “we extend an invitation to Queen Arsinoe, to receive a blessing.”
Jules nods. Arsinoe
has never set foot inside the temple. She says she will not pray to a Goddess with a turned back.
“Listen,” Joseph says. “I will come to you when I’m ready. If I come at all.”
Autumn’s serene face falls to a scowl. She turns on her heel and leaves.
“That was not much of a welcome,” Jules says. “I’m sorry.”
“This is all the welcome I need.” Joseph puts his arm across her shoulders. “You. Here. And my family. Come and say hello to them. I want you all with me, for as long as I can have you.”
Madrigal tells Arsinoe that they are going into the hills after pheasant. She will charm them, and Arsinoe will shoot them.
“You have never gone hunting in your life,” Arsinoe says, shouldering her small crossbow and bag of bolts. “What are we really going to do?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Madrigal replies. She tosses her pretty, light brown hair, but the way she glances through the kitchen window, where Cait stands preparing a stew, tells Arsinoe that she is right.
Together they walk far north of the house, up the trail past the clearing and Dogwood Pond, and into the cover of the forest. Arsinoe sinks past her ankles into snow. Madrigal hums a little tune, graceful despite the drifts. Her familiar, Aria, flies far ahead above the trees. She never sits on Madrigal’s shoulder, like Eva sits on Cait’s. It is almost like they are not familiar-bonded at all. Or perhaps it is only that Aria never matches the outfits that Madrigal likes to wear.
“Madrigal, where are we going?”
“Not far.”
It has been far already. They have walked up high, where large gray stones break through the ground. Some are only rocks, and some are the mostly buried remains of monoliths from back when the island was truly old and wore a different name.
In winter, though, they are hidden under snow, and slippery. Arsinoe has almost fallen twice.
Madrigal changes her course and walks along a rise to the leeward side, where the snow is less deep. It is an odd little spot where the thick trunk and bare branches of a tree bend over to form a sort of canopy. At the base of the hill, Madrigal has hidden a cache of dry wood, and two small three-legged stools. She hands one of the stools to Arsinoe and begins arranging the wood for a fire, weaving in slender pieces of kindling. Then she pours oil from a silver flask onto the lot of it, and lights it with a long match.