“But I am not anymore.” WOLF SPRING Arsinoe and Jules are at the kitchen table slicing small red potatoes when Jules’s Grandpa Ellis bursts through the side door with his white spaniel familiar. She reaches into the cage to stroke the rodent’s tiny bald haunches. “Once, I was a mouse,” she says, and strips off her glove. She offers it a cracker through the bars of its cage, and it creeps forward, sniffing, afraid to eat it. It is blind in one eye, and mostly bald from Katharine’s rubbed poisons.

She taps the cage on the corner of her desk to rouse the small gray mouse inside. A few lie inside dead, waiting to be cleared out. Many small cages of birds and rodents litter the room, on top of her tables and lined along the walls. These days her rooms smell slightly of sickness and whatever animals she is testing her poisons on. She leans over and pushes the window open. It has been more than a month since she had to claw her way up and out of the heart of the island, and now Katharine can withstand anything. The belladonna berries roll in Katharine’s stomach, but she does not wince. Even the mountains seem hunched in comparison, backing off like trolls brought down by a shining light. In the center, the twin black spires of the Volroy jut up into the sky, the great castle fortress dwarfing everything else. To the east, below the last of the Stonegall hills, the capital city of Indrid Down glitters in the late-afternoon sun. Katharine looks out her window from where she sits at her writing desk. She told Natalia that she stumbled into the Breccia Domain on her own as she fled in a panic from Arsinoe’s bear.

But Katharine has not told anyone about his role in her fall that night. That she will allow some war-gifted guard to beat his head against the walls until his brains run out. “I must not scare him.” He probably thinks that he will be put into the cells beneath the Volroy when he returns. “So he will still think me his gentle little queen.” She smiles. “I must take care with my words, Sweetheart,” she says softly to the snake coiled around her arm. Or running through scratchy brambles and twigs that sting like lashes, just as she did the night he met her beside the Breccia Domain.

One dark throne kendare blake