Later that day, Queen Elsabet, the Oracle Queen, sat in her green rectangular garden on the southwest side of the Volroy castle. She was reclined in a soft chair at a gray stone table, playing cards with her closest companions, shaded from the sun by a black cloth canopy.
“Gilbert, are you going to discard? Or wait until I simply forget what game it is we are playing?”
Gilbert’s thin lips drew together, thinning them still further, as he considered his hand. He lay a card, and she grinned and snatched it up.
“Just what I needed.”
“Blast.” He frowned and tousled his dark gold hair. “I’m out of practice. Few of these fools will take a card game with someone sight-gifted. As if that is how it works.”
“Indeed. One does not need the sight to beat play as bad as yours.” With a light laugh, Elsabet set her winning hand before him on the table.
“Blast.”
She smiled as he gathered up the cards and began to shuffle. Gilbert Lermont was her foster brother; they had grown up together in the white city of Sunpool, and she could count on one hand the number of times he had beaten her at cards. But let him blame it on lack of practice. She knew how he felt, alone in a new city with few other oracles.
“I have been thinking often of home,” she said.
Gilbert glanced at her from beneath his dark eyebrows. So did Bess, her favorite maid and constant companion, and Rosamund Antere, always nearby as her Commander of Queensguard.
“Indrid Down is home now, Elsie.”
Elsabet frowned. “Can one not have two homes? I just . . . I miss being there, before all of this.” She gestured to her head, to the silver crown set with cloudy stones that felt melted to her head. “I miss being near those who know what the sight gift is and how it works. People here look at me like an oddity. And they expect every day at court to be a wonder. As if I ought to be spouting grand prophecy twice in the afternoon and once before breakfast.”
She took up her freshly dealt cards and set them down again when Bess pushed more of Gilbert’s tonic toward her in a cup.
“I do not want any more. It’s bitter.”
“Please,” Bess said. “Your illness worries everyone.”
“It was only a headache. Only dust in my chest from the hunt.” But Elsabet drank the tonic down even if just to see Bess smile. “Besides, they were not worried so much as irritated.”
“Perhaps if you would not arrive late so often,” Gilbert said as he arranged his hand.
“That wouldn’t change a thing. My Black Council does not like me because I do not do things the way they want me to. But weren’t you the one who told me, Gilbert, that I should make my mark as queen the instant I arrived at the Volroy? The moment I took my crown. Weren’t you the one who warned me that young queens are not taken seriously? That it could take years before I was truly the ruler of my island?”
“Was it not also me who warned you that a queen is only as good as her advisers?”
“Yes.” She crooked her mouth at him. “But you were wrong. That may be true of other queens, but an oracle queen is only as good as her gift.”
At the corner of the canopy, ever watchful, Rosamund Antere cocked her head of bloodred hair.
“Rosamund? What is it?”
“Your king-consort approaches.”
Elsabet’s heart thrummed in her chest, and she cursed it silently. She was a queen, not some village girl who could let her heart dictate her behavior. But with William, her king-consort, that was a difficult thing to remember. Every time he walked into a room she held her breath. Every time he looked at her, she wanted to hide her unattractive face behind her hand.
William was from Centra, a country across the seas to the northeast. It boasted a fine army and bountiful croplands. A king-consort from Centra was always a politically savvy selection. Though to tell the truth, Elsabet would have chosen William even if he had come from nothing.
Other suitors had been handsome. All of them, actually. And several had been dashing. But none of them looked at Elsabet the way William had. No one in her whole life had looked at her like that. Like she was beautiful. Desirable. And certainly no one as attractive as he was, with his bright blue eyes and midnight hair. When they were courting, he used to say that on the throne their black hair would make them as finely matched as a set of carriage horses.
He entered the canopy and one of Elsabet’s attendants quickly brought him a seat. Though it was probably a waste of time. William never stayed in one place for long. He was a man of sport. It had been at his insistence that they rose before dawn to hunt for grouse that morning.
He bent and kissed the queen’s cheek, but when she frowned, he turned her face and kissed her lips instead. “These are for you.” He set a bundle of wildflowers on the tabletop, pretty blooms of pink and white and yellow, their stems cut evenly by his dagger and tied with a length of striped ribbon.
“I picked them from the riverbank near where I was swimming,” he said as Elsabet sniffed, and indeed, the cloth around his collar was still wet.
Elsabet fingered the ribbon. It was an expensive adornment, a new fashion that she had seen many of the daughters from well-gifted families wearing.
“Where did you get the ribbon?” she asked, and William swallowed. “Did you go by the market?”
“Yes! I couldn’t very well present you with a loose bundle.”
Elsabet tried to smile. She gestured to the cards. “Shall we deal you in?”
“No.” William chewed his lip. “I crave some music. I think I’ll go and secure us a few musicians.” Then he was gone, with no more than a glance, and Elsabet half rose out of her chair to follow him. But he did not disappear completely. He lingered in the garden, chatting with a few of the people who had gathered near the queen’s party in small conversational parties of their own. Elsabet’s throat tightened as he touched the chin of a very pretty elemental girl with a bright blond bun.
“You know he has always been flirtatious,” Gilbert said quietly. “That was one of the qualities that drew you to him when he was only a suitor.”
Elsabet tore her eyes away from William and forced herself to play a card. “Gilbert, does your sight gift now extend to mind reading?”
“No, my queen.”
“I didn’t think so.” Gilbert’s gift was for visions in smoke, along with the uncanny ability to find things he sought, that manifested in a near-trance state and caused him to sway strangely back and forth. His sight gift did not extend to hearing the thoughts of others or sensing their emotions. Her gift did not extend to that either, and she was glad of it.
Forcing herself to ignore William, Elsabet leaned back to look up at the grandness of the castle. Or rather, the grandness that was to come. The great fortress of the Volroy had been under construction for a hundred years, and still the heights of the towers were not complete. For a hundred years, black stone had made its way across the island, over land and down river and around the sea to Bardon Harbor. A hundred years and countless changes of master builders and craftsmen and laborers. But under Elsabet, it would be finished. She knew it, because she had seen it. In the same vision that showed her she would best her sisters and become the Queen Crowned. She saw herself in a vision wandering the rooms of the completed West Tower, with a crown upon her head.
“There will be black spires atop them soon,” she said, and Bess followed her gaze upward. “Did you know, Bess, that it was the war queen, Aethiel, who began construction of the Volroy?”
“I know it,” Gilbert answered before Bess could reply. “Aethiel began it, and elemental Elo, the fire breather, continued it, and so did our last queen, the warrior Emmeline.”
“Of course you know that.” Elsabet shoved him playfully to knock the smugness out of his expression. “You are a historian. But make sure the commonfolk know it, too, will you? I think they are beginning to resent the expense.”
“Your reign is bound to be less expensive than those of the war queens,” Gilbert said, “with their constant raids and battles.”
At the mention of war, Rosamund spoke quickly, surprising them all that she had been bothering to listen. “The people understand war. They understand its costs. Its glory.” She shrugged. “And the spoils don’t hurt either.”
“Would you have me be a war queen, then, Rosamund?”
Rosamund turned her head and regarded the queen with steady green eyes. She smiled. “I would not have you be anything but what you are.”
“Good.” Elsabet smiled back, her gaze flitting past William, who was returning with his found musicians. “Because the time of the war queens is over. Now we shall have peace. The island has earned it.”