Mora found her heart racing, and her body dissolved, skin and hair and bones, her blood and her thoughts scattering with the stars, turning with the earth.
She sighed, and in that sigh was sewn a word for longing. Stars pooled around her, hanging down like chandeliers and spinning like waterwheels; they were inside her, cleansing her body and mind by stripping away anything of shadows, leaving behind only streaks of sharpened will.
It was cold and clear.
The sort of clarity that tells you who you are meant to be, with such a pristine righteous voice that if you close your eyes seven years later, you’ll always hear it again.
Banna Mora did not have a word for who she was meant to be, but she sensed it. There was a pull in her heart, hooking her like a fish, and she ached to grow and grow and grow until she found—
The Dragon of the North curled free and clear of the earth, every pinprick of its form revealed to her. Mora was on her feet, staring and gasping.
Hello, the wind said to her. Which means, I ask that you welcome me, and Mora wished she could answer.
How can I welcome the wind and trees, worms and stars?
And then it was over: the dragon dipped its nose beneath the black horizon again.
Banna Mora fell to her knees.
SHE WOKE SUDDENLY. The mountain rumbled under her shoulder. She whispered Rowan’s name and pressed her hand to his chest; she’d been sleeping curled against his side, her head on his shoulder and his arm wrapped tightly about her.
The prince did not move.
Beneath her, the mountain did. Mora heard shifting rocks and the clatter as quartzite shards tumbled down the slopes to either side. She sat up; the air was cold and still, the stars gleaming everywhere but in the east where a line of silver dawn threatened.
“Rowan,” she said again. And again he did not respond, though he breathed deeply and turned into her warmth.
The entire summit of the Mountain of Teeth suddenly rose like a cap lifted off a giant’s head. She stumbled back, gaping, as a dragon of pink and gray lifted its head to the crescent moon. Great wings stretched, blotting out the light of the stars. Mora could hardly breathe. Dust filled her mouth.
With a tiny cry she leapt over the sleeping prince, standing broadly across his body. “Stop,” she cried, “you’ll crush him!”
A massive, stony arm crashed down beside her, diamond claws digging into the mountain like the mountain was soft flesh. Banna Mora, said the dragon in a voice as huge as the sky, so that her name pushed at her from every direction. I ask that you welcome me, Banna Mora.
“What?” Mora wished for a sword in her hand, but they’d brought no weapons on this pilgrimage. She gripped her bare hands into fists. She yelled, to make certain her own measly voice could reach the dragon’s ear so high above. “You are welcome! If that is what you want!”
What do you want, Banna Mora of Aremoria and Innis Lear?
Moonlight edged the dragon in silver, glinting off polished garnet scales and veins of bright copper.
She shook her head. She did not know what she wanted. Half the mountainside was gone, transformed into this dragon before her, as if it had been sleeping, had been curled so long against the earth that it became part of it—and Mora did not know what she wanted!
The dragon reared onto its hind legs and turned its massive, long head to put one eye toward her; that eye was a swirl of orange-and-pink fire, the inner landscape of a mountain’s hot heart. Mora felt it as her own heart flared to life.
What do you want, Banna Mora? the dragon intoned again. Its mouth opened and black teeth shone sharp and tall as her, the tongue a flicker of living moonlight.
“I don’t know!” she yelled.
You know.
She shook her head, gasping for breath, and put her heel tighter against unconscious Rowan, to be sure he remained, to ground herself.
All dragons know what they want, the dragon said.
“I’m a woman, not a …”
The air shook with heat as the dragon laughed.
Mora laughed, too, stunned and disbelieving. Her chest ached, and over her heart the Blood and the Sea blazed.
When your whole world burns, you must learn to breathe fire.
“How? Tell me how!”
You are a dragon, Banna Mora.
She flung out her arms, let her head fall back and her eyes close.
Mora breathed deep and sighed: her breath was hot. This freezing island could not cool her, nor tame her—the wind was her breath and the earth her bones, the rootwaters her blood. And a piece of her was a piece of Aremoria, too. This island had been sheared away from its own body centuries ago, an amputation, a wild, broken thing, raging apart from itself.
Just as Banna Mora was in pieces.
“That is what I want,” she said softly. Then, louder she screamed, “I want to be whole again!”
With a stroke of powerful wings, the dragon lifted off the mountain, gusting wind at her. Mora braced, bared her teeth, and did not close her eyes as the dragon flew up and up into the stars. It radiated heat and fire, rippling the air in thick waves, and she caught it all, tasting it on her tongue, swallowing it down her gullet into a smoldering mass inside her belly; a fire for herself to call on. It was a seed of power.
Banna Mora laughed in the crystalline night.
“Mora. Mora!”
Her name woke her.
Rowan bent over her, hands cold on her face; she was so very hot, feverish even, but Mora laughed again.
The world was the same. The mountain whole and unmoved beneath her, its gray, rocky skirts falling away to either side, and silvering dawn shadows pulled from the east where the sun smiled against the horizon.
Mora sat, and she stared at Rowan’s concerned face, and brushed wisps of white-gold hair back behind his ears. There was the charm she’d knotted in. She grasped it, then dug her fingers deep into his hair, pulling at his scalp. Rowan Lear gasped, and Mora said, “I have something to show you. Untie my collar, Rowan, and bare my skin.”
He obeyed with graceful hands, holding her gaze determinedly. His fingers brushed her collarbone, and the expanse of her breast, exploring along the length of chain until he found the leather pouch. And he knew that was what she needed: for if she was the island, he was her wizard.
With her hands still gripping his skull, twined in his hair, Mora murmured, “Take out the ring.”
Rowan did, and he cupped the Blood and the Sea between them like the precious heirloom it was. “I know this,” he said thickly. And with one hand he reached for hers, drawing it out of his tangled hair. Carefully he slid the heavy ring over her forefinger, and though it did not fit perfectly, it knocked firmly to her knuckle where it belonged.
Mora kissed him, deep and hungry, and Rowan put his arms around her waist, pulling her into his lap. The heat in her belly expanded, filling her limbs, her mouth, the tips of her fingers, and she surrounded him with it, reaching, tugging, grasping at his body. To give her fire to him, into him. Only together could they contain it, Mora thought distantly, where thinking still existed, and she thought, too, laughing as she bit his tongue, as she tasted and sucked at his mouth, I am not repressed anymore. Rowan only stripped what little he had to, opening both their clothes, baring skin, until they were joined and moving together there on the summit of the Mountain of Teeth.
HOTSPUR
Perseria, winter
THE STORM SUMMONED her out of Red Castle.
It built to the south, as well as inside her; an undercurrent of heartache mirroring the slow churn of clouds.
Hotspur Perseria had left her heart in Lionis weeks ago, and her chest was an empty cavity that no winter obligations or family traditions had even begun to fill. Though usually she lived these darkest weeks with her family at Annyck, she’d fled to Red Castle, which was hers alone.
The wind arrived three days past the Longest Night, hissing at the cracks beneath doors. Then it slammed suddenly into the shutters, startling the hunting dogs
asleep in the great hall. There’d been no snow yet this season, but frost glossed the fields every morning with bright white light and the air was cold.
When the wind moaned late this afternoon, long and high with sorrow, Hotspur stilled, hearing her own lament in that grieving draft.
The castle servants and Persy retainers all looked to Hotspur. They knew she’d say if a storm approached. Everyone at Red Castle was good at pretending there was nothing strange about their earl’s daughter reading weather. Some folk simply knew such things.
Hotspur told her steward they should probably bring in the horses.
Then she stood and went to the field herself, but instead of joining the men in rounding up the beasts, she stared south, grabbed a pale mare, and mounted up.
The horse seemed to know where she needed to go. Hotspur only felt the urge to seek.
They rode for hours, and the wind picked up. Ecstatic gusts dragged Hotspur’s hood down, eagerly dancing along her pink-chapped cheeks. The mare kept its head down, driving forward steadily, and Hotspur could raise her face to the rolling black clouds, the flashes of light—a dark/light answer to the desperate question she had no words to voice.
Except why why why.
Hotspur slid off her horse, reckless, staring up at the crackling clouds. She patted its rump, then stepped into the weedy dead grass sloping away from the road. Black winter trees bowed to her, pushed by the wind. She stomped over scraggly bushes and kicked piles of shattered brown leaves, then moved beneath the skeletal canopy.
The rain was coming. She heard it in the cadence of the wind and smelled it, too.
Hotspur could love anyone. Why did it have to be Hal Bolinbroke?
Her breath hitched as her body recalled the grief her mind strove to ignore. The wind echoed her little gasps and gave her sympathetic cries in return. She was the Wolf of Aremoria; she should be better than this.
Soon bone-branches waved hard, scratching at the black clouds. The sky tore open and frozen rain sliced down. It cut against the trees and marked cold lines down her face.
(Does she see us yet?)
The whisper jerked her shoulders back and Hotspur spun, seeing nothing. She ran back toward the road—only it was not the right direction. She stumbled and fell into freezing hard mud, but scrambled up, charging forward again. She slapped branches from her path, palm stinging from the whiplike bite of twigs.
A roar sounded, approaching like the furious maw of the Lion of War—Hal’s lion—and the tearing wall of rain burst through the forest. Rain soaked her wool coat and slid beneath, plastering her shirt to her body; rivulets of cold water poured down her spine, her face, and dragged her curls into long red snarls.
She stared out through streams of rain at black tree-shadows, whipping branches.
Golden light flickered ahead, then was gone.
(Yes yes her eyes are open!
This way!)
What way, Hotspur wondered, dazed, cold, trapped between refusing to think and refusing to feel.
The only part of the world not trembling and gnashing with the storm was the steady ground beneath her boots.
Hotspur wished to be like the stones of Aremoria, the solid land, the rooted trees; all of it in rhythm, the seasons changing and always the same, earnest, true, passionate, brave! Aremoria was unto itself only itself, and had survived centuries, had survived wars and bad kings, glory, wrathful storms, even the cleaving of its body in two.
“That is all I want to be,” she whispered to herself, spitting water to the muddy ground. “That is all I want to be,” she said aloud, staring through the slashing shadows and bending trees toward a golden glow. “As strong as Aremoria.”
Lightning flashed, blasting her eyes and gilding the world with silver.
“That is all I want to be!” she screamed.
Thunder clapped.
Hotspur sank to her knees, face covered, and listened, listened, listened.
(Wolf!)
Lightning flashed again, and thunder at its heel. She felt it crack through her body, electrifying her bones and blood—the very air revived, tingling. Gasping, she jerked her head up.
Ahead again, the gilded glow. A burning tree, maybe, at the heart of the storm.
Hotspur dashed forward through the sheets of rain, catching herself on rough tree trunks when she tripped over roots or slid through muck. She panted, eyes wide on the light. Desperate, plagued by a dread that she’d made a terrible mistake, that nothing would ever be good again.
She ran, striding hard, and crashed a shoulder into a tree, spun and kept going; Hotspur forgot if she was running toward or away.
And then she fell into the small pocket of yellow-gray light.
It was a massive oak tree, rain-black branches lifting in arcs and spread in every direction, sheltering itself with layers of thick golden leaves.
Wind played at the edges of the grove, teasing with none of the storm’s temper. But Hotspur still heard the storm, and its mirror in her chest: pounding, lashing, and desperate.
She could breathe under the oak limbs: this was the inside of a spiraling seashell, a cavity of peace.
The oak creaked. It groaned, and Hotspur stepped closer as if she could almost understand a word hidden in the low cry. Her eyes locked on a fissure in its middle, a sable crack drawing her nearer. She crouched at the entrance with one hand on the oak’s trunk for balance. Her fingers curled against the thick, wrinkled bark and she leaned in, peering at—
Hotspur reached inside and found the grip of a sword.
It fit her hand, leather already warm and soft from age. Hotspur pulled, and the sword slid free of the oak.
She fell backward, cradling the blade. A plain weapon, but marked with a tiny Errigal stamp in the steel just over the crosspiece.
In this gilded storm-light, washed and expectant, the sword was dull gray, sharp with clarity.
Hotspur carefully stood, her body a bruise, and trembled. She held the sword before her, understanding something impossible in the pit of her stomach: who she was, and what she was.
(One for Aremoria.)
The
LION
PRINCE HAL
Lionis, midsummer
THE UNCOURT OF Lionis met in the guts of what had been a cave cathedral centuries ago, before the kings of Aremoria turned away from the stars and roots.
Stalactites slick with milky residue hung from the shadowed ceiling. This cavern had been carved by rainwater and underground channels of the Whiteglass River; the royal palace perched on the bluff above, separated by a hundred feet of limestone and chalk.
The Uncourt met when its prince felt so moved, sometimes on a dark of the moon, sometimes before lunch, sometimes at sunset, but always beginning when Lady Ianta of Oldcastle was heavily asleep.
Prince Hal sprawled on a sturdy wooden throne placed upon the worn-down stub of a stalagmite, mirror to the sharp spear of limestone dangling overhead. The spear pointed down at Hal, as if directing the attention of every person and spirit toward her.
Hal tipped her face to look up at the stalactite. It pierced out of the layered shadows, a white brilliance of blame, that at any moment might fall and destroy her.
Probably not for a few centuries more, she supposed—but Hal often contemplated her own death, and the stranger, more ridiculous or ironic a death it was, the more it plagued her attention.
In this instance, she imagined the point of stone spearing past her skull, slicing her ear, and burying itself in her shoulder to cleave her body in two. Gruesome. Would she die instantly, or feel the stone pushing her apart from inside? Hal rather supposed it would be dreadfully painful.
Head lolled back, one black-clad leg thrown over an arm of the throne, hands folded together across her stomach, she was the picture of indolence and disinterest, which was not the way for even the Prince of the Uncourt to hear a petition. And as she remained yet alive, Hal supposed she’d have to perform.
She straightened in a fluid motio
n, smoothed the russet velvet of her tunic, and put on an expression of interest. “I apologize, Docker: gas, you know.”
Laughter sputtered and sparked from the audience like candle flame.
The man, Docker, who’d come complaining about his neighbor’s insistence on turning his name into a curse word and spreading it about the street, pursed his lips. “It’s a relief to know such a malady affects even our prince.”
Hal tipped the circlet of dry vines and pink river-bored stones that served for her crown in the Uncourt. From a crouch beside the throne, Nova reached up to offer Hal an overflowing cup of Ispanian sugar wine. The cheap stuff. Hal took it, and Nova curled her hand around Hal’s calf, sliding her grip slowly down to Hal’s ankle with exactly enough pressure for Hal to feel it through the soft leather of her boot. Nova was slighter than handsome Hal, and better breasted, better waisted, with lovelier yellow curls cut short at her chin, but sensitive to the pock scars on her forehead.
Rolling her shoulders to hide the shiver of lust, Hal drank, patted her lips dry with her sleeve, and spoke, “Docker, I like your suit muchly, and think you may even win our trial this evening. Docker.” Hal licked her lip, bit it, then said the name again, soft and haunting. “Docker.” She smiled ruefully. “You must admit, it’s got the right snap for a good curse.”
“Yes, my prince,” Docker said reluctantly, clearly torn between chagrin at the situation and gladness that the prince would suggest he might triumph. It was rare for Hal to express such favoritism before the voting began.
The Uncourt had nothing to do with justice, or rather, nothing to do with legality. It was instead the heart and home of wicked justice, of humor, and, many suggested, of vice. When Hal summoned her Uncourt, the message passed through the twisted streets in every lower district of the city, via whispers and ragged red flags tucked into belts or tied into hair or dropped in the gutter like cords of blood.
Red was Hal’s best color. It brought out the merriment in her brown eyes, the pearls in her white skin, and the black in her dark flounce of hair. She rarely wore the color entire, preferring to accent her wardrobe with it. A red linen shirt, or a belt of scarlet, or garnets at her ears and on her fingers. Bright paint on her lips.
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