Three Dark Crowns

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of emotional abuse and death.

During the very first interaction between Queen Mirabella and Elizabeth, the temple initiate, Elizabeth offers an insight that captures the ambiguity of power in the novel. She says: “We are all dual-natured, Queen Mirabella. Every gift is light and dark. We naturalists can make things grow, but we also coax lobsters into pots, and our familiars tear rabbits to shreds [….]. Even the poisoners […] are also healers” (90). The novel reveals that the gifts themselves and the people who possess them have both creative and destructive potential.

Elizabeth uses “light and dark” as metaphors for each gift’s capacity to both nurture and harm. For instance, naturalists can prolong the life of plants, urge flowers to bloom, and fruit to ripen; they can even communicate with animals. Each also has an animal familiar—like Jules’s Camden—that reacts based on the naturalist’s feelings. However, these same abilities can be weaponized. When Joseph confesses that he slept with Mirabella, Jules grows angry and warns him: “[I]f you do not leave now, my cat will tear your throat out” (228). Naturalists can also prompt an animal to act against its own interests or for deadly or evil purposes, such as when Jules manipulates the bear to act as Arsinoe’s familiar and unleashes it on Mirabella.