Arsinoe follows Jules as Joseph leads them on a merry chase through the woods. Try as he might, he cannot leave them behind. Both are still as slim-hipped as he is, and what Jules lacks in length of leg she makes up for in quickness. All three run for the sheer childhood delight of running and never seem to tire, though their cheeks are flushed red. It has been three years since Arsinoe joined them, and while she is still far more serious than Jules or Joseph, she will laugh now, and a mischievous, sarcastic edge has crept into her voice. She is happy. Jules and Joseph have become her friends, and if some part of her remembers that they are not to be replacements for others . . . Well, that part has fallen very quiet.
“Joseph, not so fast!” Arsinoe shouts from the back.
Joseph cackles and yells, “Faster!” He twists his head to look. She and Jules are right on his heels, and he smiles as though proud of them. Ahead, the path leaves the woods and broadens into the tall, sunlit grass of the meadow beside Dogwood Pond. Jules takes her chance, surging ahead of Arsinoe, short legs flying. She overtakes Joseph at the last moment and bursts through first, into the daylight.
“That’s practically cheating!” Joseph says, and Arsinoe laughs. Her strides slow, and her muscles relax to weak-kneed slackness.
“She does it every time. You ought to know by now. You ought to expect it.”
Arsinoe slaps Joseph on the back. But he does not reply or slap her in return like he usually does. He has stopped dead behind Jules, and both are staring at something across the field. Arsinoe blinks against the summer sun and puts a hand up to shield her eyes.
It is a young woman. A beautiful young woman in a vibrant green dress, and golden brown hair loose to her waist. Arsinoe thinks she knows this woman somehow, from somewhere, though she is certain she has never met her. And something about the way Jules is staring sets Arsinoe’s teeth on edge.
Across the meadow, the woman holds out her arms and calls, “Juillenne!”
“Mother!” Jules shouts, and runs to her.
Caragh stands at the kitchen sink, scrubbing tender, fat carrots from her garden. This year, she and Jules have spent more time than ever in the fields coaxing crops, and the entire harvest is strong. Jules’s gift has almost reached fullness. Ellis teases that when she is grown she will be able to feed Wolf Spring all by herself.
“Here, let me,” says Caragh’s mother, Cait, elbowing her way in. “You’re too slow. Should be done already.” Should have been done hours ago, while Caragh was out doing who-knows-what with that Sandrin boy, is what Cait means. But stolen hours with Matthew are worth all the snide comments that her mother wants to make. “Where’s Juillenne?”
“Where she always is,” says Caragh. “Playing with Joseph and Arsinoe.”
“You should mind them. Nine is a mischievous age.”
“So it is. And it goes too fast. They might as well have a bit of fun.”
Cait scowls, a beautiful woman turned handsome by the years. She is tall, like all the Milone women save for Jules, and her bones are straight and strong.
“Is that what you’re having with Matthew? A bit of fun?”
Caragh pours more water into the sink. “No. Matthew is different. Matthew, I intend to marry.”
“Different,” Cait says sadly. “Like it was for my aunt Phillippa. Like it was for my sister Rosaline.”
Caragh squeezes the carrots almost hard enough to break them. Phillippa and Rosaline. She has heard those names so many times. Whispered in another room, or spoken right to her, as if she was them. Phillippa, who married Giuseppe Carlo. She threw herself off Hawthorne Bridge in the middle of winter, and her body cracked like a champagne flute against the ice. Rosaline, who married no one but could not face the fertile womb of her sister Cait, and died alone in Portsmouth on the eastern coast.
The unlucky Milone sisters. The cursed ones who bore no children. No one knows where the curse came from. They only know that it is the curse of all Milones. Two girls are born each generation. And one is barren. Sasha and Phillippa. Cait and Rosaline. Madrigal and Caragh. And Madrigal has already had Juillenne.
“It’s not the same for me,” says Caragh.
“It’s not,” Cait agrees. “Because you’re a Milone. A naturalist. And barrenness for us is”—she takes a quiet breath—“like tearing our hearts out.”
“It’s not the same for me because I have Jules,” Caragh says. “I have Jules, and I’ll be fine. Matthew loves her like she’s his own.” She does not say that she loves him. It is too much of an admission, and Caragh has always kept her feelings to herself.
“He’s too young to be a father to Jules.”
“He loves Jules,” says Caragh, her voice far away.
“He is only a boy. He doesn’t know what he loves.” Cait scrubs the carrots hard, and Caragh knows that her mother is only saying these things because she is afraid to lose her to madness and solitude—or worse, to the ice beneath a winter bridge—when she has already lost one daughter to the mainland.
“You’re so sure, are you?” Caragh jokes lightly. “Have a bit of the sight now, like little Joseph?”
“We all do on Fennbirn,” says Cait. “We just blind ourselves to it when it suits us. When we need it most.”
Caragh sighs. She starts to say more, but her mother has stopped listening. Cait stares out the window over the kitchen sink, into the yard and the garden that borders their long driveway.
“By the Goddess,” Cait whispers, and dries her hands on a towel. She tears off her apron and throws it onto the countertop. “Ellis! Ellis, where are you?”
“What’s wrong?” Caragh asks as Cait shoves past her and dashes into the yard. She follows to the door and looks out. If it is Jules, showing up again in head-to-toe mud, she will scrub the girl raw. But it is not Jules running up the drive to leap into Cait’s arms.
It is Caragh’s sister, Madrigal. It is Jules’s mother.
No one leaves or is allowed to find the island if it is not by the will of the Goddess. That is what Caragh has always been taught. So she tries to accept it with a little bit of grace that her sister has returned. Surely the Goddess must have a purpose, beyond upsetting Caragh’s carefully ordered and relatively happy life.
She watches through the window as her mother weeps and her father lifts Madrigal in a whirling embrace, like he used to do when she was a little girl. Madrigal, they cry. Madrigal is home.
For how long, and for what, Caragh wonders. No one has heard from Madrigal since she left the island six years ago to go to the mainland, and no one expected to. It is said that once a woman leaves Fennbirn, she begins to lose her memory. And then, slowly, her gift. Indeed, when Madrigal finally sees Caragh through the kitchen window, it is almost as if she does not recognize her.
“But I recognize you,” Caragh whispers, and at her knee, Juniper growls. Whatever Madrigal has been up to on the mainland, it has only made her more beautiful. She is still slender, but rounded now in just the right places. Her light brown hair shines, and her eyes sparkle. Her familiar has already returned to her and perches on her shoulder: Aria, a pretty black crow. Madrigal cocks her head, and so does the bird.
“Caragh,” she says in a tone that is somehow familiar and insulting. Oh Caragh, there you are. Where else would you be?
Caragh brushes her hands nervously against her skirt and goes to meet her sister at the front steps. Madrigal is dressed like an outsider, in a strangely cut dress of green silk. There are gold hoops in her ears, and gold bangles on her wrists. She holds on to Jules with one hand, and Jules holds on tight, as though afraid she will disappear if she lets go.
“I hope you don’t mind that I didn’t come straight here,” Madrigal says. She wraps an arm about Jules’s small shoulders. “I wanted to find my daughter first.”
My daughter. The words swirl in Caragh’s stomach like blood from a punch. She wonders whether on Fennbirn all sisters are meant to hate one another. Not only the queens.
“She has not grown tall.” Madrigal cups Jules’s face. “But she has certainly changed since I saw her last.”
“She was a baby when you saw her last,” Caragh says, and Cait and Ellis look at her sharply.
“A baby.” Madrigal smiles. “She was three and a half. Walking and talking and even slightly gifted. A baby. Caragh, what can you be thinking?”
Not far away in the grass, Arsinoe’s pale face peeks out from behind Joseph. He seems curious, and confused, like he thinks he should be happy but cannot remember why. Arsinoe looks suspicious.
“Are you home for good, Mother?” Jules asks. “Home to stay?”
“I am, my Jules.” Madrigal plants kiss after kiss into Jules’s hair, and the family closes around them in a circle, all smiles and tears. No one sees Caragh press her fists into her middle, where it hurts so badly it must surely be bleeding.