Read Online Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake - Free Book Online Page A

have you come? Everyone from the ball has already gone.”
    â€œNot me,” he says, and raises his eyebrows. “I have just been talking with my aunt, and apparently, I get to stay.”
    He steps toward her only to divert at the last moment to inspect the perfume bottles on her dressing table. His smile speaks of mischief, and a shared secret between them, or perhaps of secrets to come.
    â€œStay? Here?”
    â€œYes,” he says. “With you. I am to become your very great friend, Queen Katharine.”
    Katharine cocks her head. This all must be some elaboratejoke of Natalia’s. Katharine has never understood her sense of humor.
    â€œOh,” she says. “And what sort of things will we do?”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œI already know how to dance.”
    â€œThere 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.
    â€œYou 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?”
    â€œI 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

    T he 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.
    â€œThey have known he was coming for weeks,” she says.
    â€œOf 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.
    â€œSo 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.”
    â€œThat’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 willbe nearly overwhelmed, making things ready and barking at her husband and at Matthew and Jonah. Barking happily but barking nonetheless.
    â€œWhat if he doesn’t come?” Jules asks.
    â€œWhy wouldn’t he come?” Madrigal tries again to pin Jules’s hair up onto her head. “This is his home.”
    â€œWhat do you think he will be like?” she asks.
    â€œIf 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.
    â€œMatthew never cared for anyone besides Aunt Caragh.”
    â€œYes, 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.
    â€œYou should have slept more,” Madrigal chides. “You have dark hollows beneath