Lady Hotspur

by Tessa Gratton

  Hal intended to nod very seriously, to put on the appearance that she would search hard for such a thing. But she did not need to: she knew exactly what single thing in her life was exceptionally true and right, exceptionally bright. Simply exceptional.

  Standing, the prince of Aremoria swayed. The floor tilted, and Hal grabbed the arm of Ianta’s chair. “Oops,” she said. “I have to find Hotspur!”

  “Tomorrow,” Ianta said, and shoved Hal away.

  The prince stumbled, grunting as her stomach knotted, and fell upon the bed. She rolled, fully dressed, until she lay sideways in the center, hugged a pillow to her stomach, and passed out.

  HOTSPUR

  Tenne-Tiras, midsummer

  HOTSPUR WAS FINE.

  That was not a lie, nor a story, but simply the truth. Though she’d have preferred a posting with more direct action, Hotspur recognized the importance of helping Hal Bolinbroke, even if that aid came in the form of what amounted to taking a holiday at Tenne-Tiras.

  Though to most, the schedule Hotspur set would not have suited leisure.

  Hotspur and Banna Mora led the retainers and knights in daily battle drills, they foraged in the woods and hunted, they rarely spent time off their feet—but to Hotspur, that was relaxing. She could not simply drink and read all day, or wander with Lady Ianta in idle philosophical argument the way Hal could. Mora said, when she heard Hotspur’s frustration, “Perhaps that is what makes her suitable to be the prince of Lionis.”

  “She’s the lion, regardless of the rest,” Hotspur said in complete seriousness. The two glanced across the courtyard at Hal, who was stretched in the sun with a smile that showed off her teeth.

  “Prickly and proud,” Mora said. “But mostly a glutton. Yes, she is certainly the lion.”

  Hotspur wondered what made Mora a dragon, and if she was wrong to make such assumptions—or to be thinking of this at all!

  Within a few days of settling into the prince’s company, Hotspur had earned her reputation for ferocity. Even beyond the distant legends they’d heard of the Wolf of Aremoria. Isarna Persy was more intense in person; while everyone there had skills for war, Hotspur never seemed to spare thought to her personal safety. She’d dive for an opening even if it risked a bone-bruising hit, used her body for leverage to push past the defenses of men larger than herself, leapt from her horse before it went down, or chose the most precarious position for ambush if it also provided the best concealment. Lady Ianta reminded her again and again from the sidelines that an injury would leave her unable to do her duty, but Hotspur snapped back that injury was better than drunkenness.

  She liked best sparring with Hal—not because of the prince’s sly smile, nor the whip of Hal’s thick black hair, nor Hal’s breathless gasps when she was nearly skewered. It was not even for the entertainment factor, as Hal told stories when she sparred, painting the details of an epic as she and her opponent circled.

  The sky is bare and black and the sun obscured, as from either side of the field two champions walk! A whisper of their names courses along with the shaky wind; the hopes of one nation versus the despair of the other. If only the champion Persy were not favored so by the wolves of earth, perhaps she might be felled by a mere mortal of county Bolinbroke!

  Here Hal might put on a face of stark fear, backing slowly from Hotspur, while the circle of retainers and knights leaned in for the next word: A star streaks suddenly across the sky, from the north to the east where Bolinbroke was born! A sign from the heavens—maybe this time, maybe now, the champion of fire will fall! And we, who love her and fear her, shall—

  Hotspur rarely allowed Hal the time to finish her wild tales, jumping impatiently in with a surprise attack. It didn’t matter: Hal beat Hotspur back at least as often as the prince ended up on her ass with the blade of Hotspur’s practice sword at her neck.

  And that was why Hotspur preferred to be partnered with Hal: because working together pushed them both to grow. With everyone else, Hotspur was either the superior fighter, or overly concerned with teaching. Unless she fought Mora, in which case Hotspur concentrated too hard on not dying, for Mora held within her a deep, rigid fury that, when it blazed up during combat, promised to devastate the world. (This, Hotspur thought, would be what made her the dragon.)

  But with Hal, she was so well matched, so in tune, they could almost be dancing, and each got a little bit faster, a little bit stronger.

  The first time Hal kissed her, the two were hiding from rain in the keep armory, treating leather in companionable silence. Hal lowered the leather greave into which she’d been rubbing oil and touched Hotspur’s cheek, and when Hotspur looked over, Hal put their lips together.

  It was warm, soft, and dry. Hotspur liked it.

  She said as much, then told Hal to do it again. Hal smiled, and the smile turned mischievous. “I will,” the prince promised, and directed her attention back to the greave. She did not kiss Hotspur again at that moment, a fact that twisted Hotspur’s stomach up in knots.

  For an entire day she worried she’d done something wrong, been a bad kisser, and then kicked herself for even caring. She was the Wolf of Aremoria, and refused to be drawn into the games of a consummate flirt.

  That evening Hotspur made the retainers under her command go out in full armor for a march. They exhausted themselves climbing hills, pitching tents, clearing the road of a tree that had fallen in the light storm. If one could do it in armor, Hotspur promised, how much easier would it be in mere gambeson and uniform?

  When the company returned, late into the night, only Ianta remained awake. The old knight leaned against the wide door to the hall, a bottle of wine in one hand. She laughed at Hotspur, a gentle rumble of humor that put Hotspur’s back up. Stomping past, Hotspur was glad her rattling steel plates could wake up the entire keep. But then Ianta offered her the wine, and Hotspur took it. She jerked the cork free and drank. The cool white wine was a surprise, sugary and tart. Hotspur blinked and gave it back.

  “Wolf,” Ianta said affectionately.

  Hotspur opened her mouth, but did not yet know if she counted Ianta Oldcastle enemy or ally. For Hotspur, there was little in between.

  Ianta said, “You should decide if her attention is going to make you angry, or make you happy. Both together will drive her mad, and we cannot afford a mad prince.”

  “I have to decide? She is the one who …” Hotspur stopped at the look in Ianta’s eyes. The old knight had been fishing for information, and Hotspur had just provided it. She bared her teeth. “You watch out, Ianta Oldcastle.”

  “For Hal, always.”

  Hotspur did not sleep soundly. She tossed in her narrow bed, ground her fists into her eyes, and wished she had something to punch. When she did doze, her dreams were rampant with war—but not sex, thank the saints.

  At dawn she launched out of her room and had been stretched and working with her horse for an hour before anyone else appeared.

  When Hal had arrived, Hotspur glanced hopefully at her, then away, hiding her face until the prince wandered on. Hotspur ought to march over and demand another kiss—no, an explanation. She didn’t need pity kisses.

  Burying her face against the strong muscles of her horse’s neck, Hotspur felt a prick of fear.

  “Hotspur,” Banna Mora called. “Come show me the underarm twist you used to disarm Belavias two days ago.”

  Hotspur gathered herself and said, “It will be harder for you, because you’re taller.”

  Mora said nothing else, only tossed Hotspur a practice sword.

  “Did you work on this with Vindus?” Mora asked when they paused to dip water from the well. “He used some similar footwork, seeming to retreat before a strong blow as if he were unconcerned with appearance, only winning, and I admired it. Or perhaps all Persys have this way in your blood.”

  Hotspur said, “Yes, we learned the basics together, and I suppose it’s a bit of both.”

  The lady of the March nodded, glancing up at the sky: it was
streaked with white-gray clouds but would not rain. A cool breeze fell against their cheeks.

  Though Mora would never admit so aloud, she very clearly missed Vin.

  “You were lovers?” Hotspur asked. She’d suspected but not known.

  “We were.”

  “So you think … it’s all right to have another knight for a … lover?”

  “Of course. Better a knight than a footman or attendant, or someone with so much less power that neither can find comfort. Are you looking for a lover? You’re nineteen?”

  “Just,” she whispered.

  “A merchant’s son, perhaps, or one of the queen’s many cousins. Though you ought to take care with fellow nobility—marriage will always be a consideration. And get yourself prophylactics. You can have a lover when you’re a lady knight, but not a baby.”

  Hotspur bit her lip, thinking about that kiss. If she got what she was nearly certain she wanted, she wouldn’t need to worry about quite a few things.

  “But you said another knight.” Banna Mora moved closer, taking her mentoring role very seriously. “Is there one who’s caught your eye? I haven’t noticed you … oh.”

  Hotspur’s freckled cheeks blushed, and she inadvertently fluttered her eyes as she looked away.

  “Did Hal proposition you?” Mora demanded, but gently. “She flirts with fence posts, you know.”

  “It is wrong?” Hotspur burst out.

  “Does it feel wrong?”

  Squirming, Hotspur said, “Maybe we should fight again.”

  Mora agreed, but as they took their stances, she said, “Hotspur … Isarna. It’s only wrong if it feels wrong. Or if Hal pushes you where you would not go.”

  Hotspur wrinkled her nose and shook her head in denial; as if anyone could make her do a thing she did not want to do. She attacked suddenly, and after a flurry of back and forth, locked her sword with Mora’s and said, “Don’t call me Isarna out of tenderness.”

  With a laugh, Mora freed herself and pressed her advantage.

  That night, near midnight, Hal gently shook Hotspur awake, leaning close to whisper in her ear, “Don’t make a sound, and come with me.”

  Though exhausted from the calisthenics she had put herself through before bed, hoping to sleep hard—which Hotspur had been, or Hal never would’ve slipped unnoticed into her room—she silently pulled on jacket and trousers and boots and followed Hal through the corridors of the keep.

  “Where are we going?” she whispered once they were outside.

  Hal smiled, and in the moonlight her eyes were vivid black pools against her white skin. “Shhh!”

  The prince led the knight across the midnight courtyard and into the trees. They walked along a deer path cutting narrowly through the underbrush. When they were what Hal deemed sufficiently distant from the keep, she said, “We are going to find the witch tree.”

  Hotspur nearly laughed. It was a ridiculous mission, but this was the first time Hal had chosen Hotspur for antics. Thin moonlight flickered as they passed under leaves. Shadows pulled in blurry shapes all around, frogs sang, and crickets, too. She and Hal moved quietly, though their shoulders brushed young trees with little whispers, and spring-green blackberry brambles snapped back.

  “Listen for her heartbeat,” Hal said, pausing suddenly. She was taller, and bent her head toward Hotspur’s so her loose black hair fell like shadows around her face. “Remember?”

  “I do,” Hotspur whispered, though it was her own heartbeat she could hear.

  Hal touched a finger to Hotspur’s collar where the skin was exposed. “Buh-dum, buh-dum, buh-dum.”

  Hotspur swatted her hand away. “I said I remember.”

  “It’s said,” Hal said merrily, walking on, but with a glance back over her shoulder so Hotspur could see the flash of a smile, “that if two people meet under a witch tree, when the moon is high, their promises will last forever.”

  It was a half-moon tonight, only just risen, sending oblong streaks through the trees.

  Hotspur reached forward and brushed her fingers against the nape of Hal’s neck. The tips of her fingers tingled, and Hotspur drew a long, quiet breath.

  They said no more, but their movements became part of the midnight forest, the rhythm of it all, and Hotspur wished to stop Hal and touch her again.

  Some two miles from the keep, they walked out of the trees onto the bank of the Whiteglass River.

  “Oops,” Hal said. “I guess I was listening to the gall of the river, not the heart of a witch tree.”

  Hotspur laughed. Loudly. This was exactly where Hal had intended to bring her. The river rushed, catching moonlight and pulling it into the water with little reflecting ripples. Against the rocky bank, tiny whitecaps sloshed. They were south of where the royal road bent away from the Whiteglass.

  “Hotspur,” said Hal. She took both of Hotspur’s hands, pulling their bodies flush together.

  “Look up,” the prince whispered.

  The sky glowed with stars: bright silver, white and pink and yellow, pinpricks of illusory color, a rainbow shattered and tossed into billions of points. There the half-moon, a chunk of magic that hung, only the saints knew how, so near one could count its gray freckles and pockmarked shadows. Hotspur took a deep breath, her body filling up with a sensation she hardly knew how to name: awe, peace, longing. Love, maybe.

  And then Hal kissed her a second time.

  ROWAN

  Innis Lear, early autumn

  ROWAN LEAR WAS more attuned to the whims and will of his island than any who had ever lived, and thus he alone recognized the ghost for exactly what it was.

  He’d been aware of her for years—first as a goblin story told to frighten children into behaving (If you don’t come inside this instant, the Ashling Lady will steal you away and hide you beneath the roots until you are dead!) and later as an unsettling voice in the wind, not quite in rhythm with the rest of the island.

  She was a discordant wail, a note of Innis Lear’s melody gone sharp.

  Unlike most parental threats, and unlike the slippery, disinterested spirits that flitted and ducked between shadows in the White Forest, the Ashling ghost did sometimes murder children. First she seduced them, lulling them into a fantasy of comfort and friendship, then she grew jealous of their other loves, and finally she drew the child into the darkness of night with longing words and dancing lights. Until the child tripped over a cliff or became caught in the river and drowned.

  Over the years parents began weaving garlands of thin ash branches to hook over their babies’ rockers, to show the Ashling Lady their children already loved her. Perhaps it kept some safe, perhaps not. Rowan was inclined to believe that performing love never satisfied anybody, but a ghost was nobody, and magic liked a sympathetic display.

  Because the island did not worry overmuch about the Ashling ghost, Rowan did not, either—until he was eighteen and she tried to kill him.

  Rowan had been the heir to the hemlock crown from the moment he was born to the queen’s sister—the queen herself choosing to remain childless. He’d spoken the language of trees before he said his first words of Learish, a thing his father, Earl Glennadoer, resented strongly enough to forbid Rowan the whispering tree tongue whenever he lived in the north with the earl’s people. (And Rowan was doubly forbidden from revealing this stricture to his mother or aunt.) The Glennadoers had been cursed for generations never to birth strong magic in their line, and the arrival of Rowan ought to have been viewed as an end to such malediction. Except that Rowan was a boy, and for a hundred years only queens had taken up the hemlock crown, since the last king’s broken mind had nearly broken the island, too.

  It put young Rowan in a strange position: the hopes of the entire Learish people rested on his not falling to madness. He fought the pressure by giving himself entirely to Innis Lear, stealing secretly away to eat hemlock under the stars. He survived only by the grace of the rootwaters, and the winds named him their Poison Prince for his devotion. Though the isl
anders did not know why he’d earned the appellation, they liked their prince’s dangerous nickname. Rowan became the island’s vessel: he bled for the rootwaters, he breathed for the wind, he understood the calculations of star prophecy, and he worked every spare moment to be exactly as the island wished.

  This meant that—as well as being Solas’s heir—Rowan ended up serving as translator, priest, judge, farmer, or shepherd if someone required it of him. He also strove to meet his father’s pitiless expectations, becoming, too, a warrior. Though not so bearish and brutal as a Glennadoer should be, Rowan had mastered sword, bow, and some tricks of battle magic by the time he was an adult.

  But dedication to being the best king Innis Lear had ever seen left little space for friendships.

  If asked, Rowan might have said he was content with the companionship he had, counting on the roses in the queen’s garden at Dondubhan, a small book written by Elia the Dreamer, the island itself—and Connley Errigal.

  It was for Connley that the Ashling ghost tried to kill the Poison Prince of Innis Lear.

  The two young men were friends firstly because they both were wizards; the sort who balanced each other perfectly. While Rowan acted always with purpose, moving in tandem with roots and stars toward a future approved by Innis Lear, Connley lived in moments. Like the wind, he was one thing against the shimmering leaves of birch and another pressed to the black stones of the Summer Seat. He smelled of whatever nature surrounded him, changed the tune of his sighs often, and was always in motion: a slight sway as he sat upon a bench in the great hall, fingers tapping one after another, pacing slow steps along the coastal road for no reason other than refusing to still or settle. Butterflies drifted in his wake, and he often fell to sleep embraced by the roots of a tree instead of recalling where to find his bed.

  While Rowan was a practical wizard—suiting a prince—Connley earned a reputation for stranger witchcraft. Perhaps because he tended to wander and appear where he most was needed.