Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake

Author:Kendare Blake
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

THE ROAD FROM WOLF SPRING

Jules uses her gift to urge the horses faster. They have never been so game in their lives. Even so, they and their riders must all rest for the night in Highgate, and upon reaching the outskirts of Indrid Down, Arsinoe uses Billy’s father’s money to wheedle them new mounts, as well as a cart-lead back to Wolf Spring for the horses loaned to them.

Jules pats each of their old mounts and kisses their cheeks. They were good, and they will be sore from the speed of the journey.

“All right,” Arsinoe says. “Let’s go.”

“Wait a minute, at least,” Billy says, stretching his back. He is a pampered city son, unused to haste and dozing in the saddle. “I haven’t even adjusted my stirrups.”

“You can ride without them.”

“Not as well as if I use them.”

He reaches for the leathers and the girls give in, taking a moment to adjust their own stirrups. They check and double-check their girths, and Jules feeds Camden a strip of dried, smoked fish.

Arsinoe would like to be on the road. Whenever they stop, Jules looks miserable. But they are nearly there. The point where Joseph would have sailed around Cape Horn, and where the storm might have come upon him.

“We take to the woods now,” Arsinoe says.

“Why’s that?” Billy asks.

“You’ll see.”

She swings into the saddle and turns around to face the spires of the Volroy. Indrid Down is her sister’s city, for now, and as such, Arsinoe is forbidden to enter without an invitation. But after Beltane, that will change, and if she ascends, those spires will be hers, even though it makes her dizzy just to look at them.

They ride fast through the maze of cobblestone streets, out to where the roads change to gravel, and then to dirt, until they jump the last ditch and disappear into the trees. The going is slower in the forest, and the Indrid Down horses do not like it—fancy, jet-black things that they are—but Jules manages to keep them moving. Camden is tired, and rides draped across the front of Jules’s saddle, massive and purring and clinging to the horse’s neck. It is a testament to the strength of Jules’s gift that her horse does not drop dead from fright.

“We should have kept to the roads,” Billy says. No one answers, and he says no more. Since they left Wolf Spring, no one has said what they all know to be true: if Joseph went into the frigid water, he is gone. Dead within minutes, and no amount of searching will bring him back. They will know soon. If Arsinoe’s spell leads them to the water’s edge, they will know for sure.

When they step into a clearing large enough to hold them all, and a fire besides, Arsinoe halts her mount.

“All right,” she says. “Let’s gather wood.”

“Gather wood? We’ve only just started on these horses,” says Billy.

Arsinoe pulls together fallen branches. The fire does not need to last long. Jules strips birch bark with her knife and drops a mound of white- and peach-colored curls over the top of the pile.

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