When the red message spread through Lionis, those seeking the wicked, the fools, the wise, the terrible, and some just an evening of ridiculous entertainment, gathered in the old cave temple. They brought cheap liquor—moonshine and sack mostly—and candles to light the way. When the congregation had gathered, cradling candles in the dark until the cave was lit by more pinpoint flames than the starry sky, the Uncourt began. Three or four stepped up to tell their complaints to the prince, and if she approved, they drank from the abalone cup and waited until the vote was called. The winner received a different prize every time: once it had been one of those very garnet rings that graced the prince’s hand; once a kiss; often just infamy.
Hal bent over her throne and lifted the abalone cup by its rim. She stood and, with an air of exaggerated ritual, held it out for Docker in both hands. “To the Uncourt, and to the tides of ridiculousness; for the lords and ladies of misrule, and for keeping our minds all on riot!”
The audience lifted their candles, some drinking, others whistling or snapping their applause.
Docker accepted the cup, drank, and offered it back to the prince.
“Who’s next?” Hal called, waving for Docker to take a bench on the sidelines with the rest of the audience. She flopped back down on her throne. For eight months she had nurtured this game, and if occasionally she found herself growing frustrated or bored with it, at least it never hurt.
“Hal!”
Folk parted as Lady Ianta pressed her way through, a lantern of round Diotan design in hand. Her leather coat pulled exactly tight enough over her fat body, and she wore very fine brown boots and an overdress in blue that swung as she walked like the skirt of a bell. The hat that covered her puffed roll of silvering blond hair flopped around her face, and a curled peacock feather floated beside her ear. “What time is it, girl, that you should get this farce court on without me?”
“Time?” Hal leapt to her feet again, grinning as she dragged the mantle of performance tighter around her shoulders. “What do you know of time? Time is not cups of sack in the morning, Ianta, or a bench to sleep on at noon, or a woman to drink from your well after you’ve had your supper! Those are how you mark your progress from day to day, so what need you know of time?”
The old lady knight nodded, bobbing the lantern in hand, too; light moved in the rhythm of her agreement. “You go by a maddening moon to mark your occasion.”
“Are you still asleep that you dream, dear old Ianta, or have you forgotten: the Uncourt follows only the sun of my pleasure. I am the sun here, shaded now and again for my own pleasure … or occluded, like any sun, by such a sumptuous cloud as yourself!”
Lady Ianta laughed once, then performed a magnificent sigh. “Come, bring me drink, and let me sit, ah, my old knees are turning to dust and you would not see me crawl, my prince.”
“No, no, not on the ground, or how will we get you up again? Where is your chair?”
“Here, sir,” said Lady Ianta’s squire, Essa, a thin girl of thirteen with a chair slung over her back. She hugged the shadows near the tunnel entrance.
“Come then, turtle, bring your shell for the Lady Knight.”
The girl dashed forward, flipped the chair with easy familiarity, and set it to the right of Hal’s throne. Ianta sank, groaning, into it.
“Here, my love,” Hal said, offering Ianta her own cup of wine.
“Ah, my love,” said Ianta—to the wine.
Hal curled her lips in what was not a grin, but neither quite a sneer. “We will return to the business of the Uncourt now, if you don’t mind?”
“The sun asks the cloud for permission to shine? Ah well, then.” Ianta waved her hand in a perfect imitation of Hal’s earlier gesture. “Go on, court of riot.”
But a new figure already stood in the center of the cavern: cloaked and hooded, narrow of shoulder. Their hands were peacefully folded where they broke free at the front of the cloak.
Hal frowned in surprise. Usually the audience cheered forward each contestant, shoving them toward the center. The audience now was quiet. Hal glanced toward Petus and Barda at the open mouth of the cavern, where the dull black glow of moon and stars and lights from the city reflected off the slow-moving river. Barda shook her head and Petus had his eyes fixed on the stranger.
The cloak shivered with tiny lights: Hal realized mirrors had been sewn into the dark material, reflecting fire. This was a star priest from Innis Lear.
“Welcome, priest,” Hal said quietly, but with enough authority to cast the words throughout the cavern.
The priest lifted their hands and pushed back their hood.
It was a woman.
A girl, even, for by her features Hal guessed she was little more than sixteen, if even so old. “Prince,” she said, approaching with silent steps. The cloak parted to reveal the simple grayish undyed wool of a star priest’s uniform. Hers took the shape of a long tunic, skirted full enough to be a dress had it not stopped at her knees, then trousers of practical hemp and leather walking shoes. Her belt was braided rope and she wore one stark ring, a thin silver band cradling a chunk of iron upon her left forefinger. And she had none of the small white dots painting her cheeks that adorned most star priests every day; but then, she did not need them, for her tan skin was scattered with a hundred or more ember-red freckles. Her hair was a blushing brown, kinked and waved like a choppy sea, and pulled into a loose bun. She gazed at Hal intensely, pink lips parted as if anxious, and her hazel irises were rimmed with a circle of deep gray, giving them an eternal look, like wells plunging deep, impossible not to fall into.
“You come a long way to speak at the Uncourt of Lionis.” Hal smiled.
“Are there no star priests in Aremoria, that you assume I come from far?”
“None so obviously marked by the blessings of our cousin island.” The prince did not add that she knew a Learish family that occasionally spat out children with faces and coloring like this, and would certainly wear a strange iron ring. Let the girl keep her anonymity if she preferred. Hal blinked, and came up with a name: Era, the youngest granddaughter of the acting duke of Errigal, given to the star priests as a child.
Hal knew details and names from every noble family in Aremoria and Innis Lear. It was self-preservation that the heir to a stolen throne become familiar with all the bloodlines of her rivals, even one such as this with no known relation to Aremore royalty, either proven or legendary.
Nova, still at her prince’s knee, cleared her throat impatiently; Hal was staring.
Amusement spread through the cavern and the prince smiled ruefully. Her Uncourt knew her desire template thoroughly. “Well, well, settle down,” she said with a chuckle.
“This one is too young for you!” called a voice.
“No younger than Hal’s mother was to her father!” another teased.
“Better not collude with a girl from Innis Lear!”
The freckled girl tucked her chin reflexively, but kept her haunting eyes on Hal.
“Is that what you’ve come to do, girl?” asked Lady Ianta as she dipped a finger in her cup of sack and flicked it at the priest in benediction. “Collude with our prince? My blessings, then, and good luck settling Hal’s riot.”
Hal said, “Come, give us your petition.”
“And your name!” cried Barda from the mouth of the cave.
The girl said, clear and ringing, “I am Era of Innis Lear, you have spied me true. I come to read your stars.”
Hal raised the thin black lines of her eyebrows. “I have already had my stars read, and my birth chart is gilded and bejeweled, hanging in my mother’s study high above us now.”
“Does it say you are a lion, and that you would be queen?”
There was silence, and Hal gritted her teeth. She pressed through with a hard smile and said, “My mother and these people around you say so enough.”
Lady Ianta raised her cup. “Long live our lion Hal, prince now, queen to be! May we all be fortunate when she reigns. Or
rather, when she shines.”
“To our sun!” yelled Barda, and all the others lifted the blessing high.
Hal shrugged as if she could not stop their celebration, watching Era carefully. Dread slowly cuffed her throat as she curated her thoughts according to who she made herself now: slovenly Prince of Riot, nothing more. Never more. It had been nearly half a year since anyone had reminded her of that prophecy, or called her a lion with anything but disbelieving laughter. She’d made it so with deliberate behavior. Fall far and hard, she’d thought when Hotspur left.
Hal would fall so low as to allow no space to fall further.
The Learish priest pushed her cloak back from her shoulders and knelt suddenly upon the rough stone ground. With a thin charcoal stick that appeared in her hand, she drew a wide arc before her. The black line wavered in the candlelight. “Here, the sky, Prince, and here—” She dotted the stone with marks and constellations. “Here and here.” Era worked efficiently, as if practiced at drawing this exact star map.
“And there, and there,” Hal murmured. She reached toward Nova, and a cup was put into her hand. Hal drank it all down, eager for the light head that came with sack to cushion her memories.
“Is that the Worm of Fools?” Nova asked.
Petus, who’d come up from the cave entrance and clutched his fiddle to his side, answered, “There are no worm stars in Hal’s chart. She’ll none of worms, nor swords.”
“Crowns and wells are more her shape,” Nova said.
Hal found herself unengaged in their banter.
Lady Ianta, too, was quiet. Hal knew the old knight would be murmuring a silent prayer or saint’s blessing as this star priest painted a sky onto the floor of the cave.
“Here,” Era said, leaning back on her ankles. “Here is the Dragon’s spine, all of it we can see near midsummer, and here the Lion of War beginning to ascend for the waning half of this year. And the rest of the major constellations above us now.” She reached into a pocket of her skirt and tossed nine polished holy bones: three of glass, three of black rock, three of bleached bone. They clattered and spread over her chart. Pointing to a glass bone, she said, “The Crown of Birds falls here and takes the Autumn Throne upside down, making it the Spring Throne, and do you know this star in the line of the Spring Throne? It is the Wolf Star. Every time I cast a prophecy based on autumn stars, the Wolf finds a way to appear. So it has been ever since you became a prince, Hal Bolinbroke of Aremoria.”
“And?” Hal asked, belligerent because what else could she be? “If you cast based on spring stars?”
“The Dragon’s tail instead of its head appears, and Calpurlugh is made dominant.”
“The Eye of the Lion,” said Ianta.
Hal glared at her for being so helpful.
Era Errigal nodded. “Every prophecy cast on Innis Lear for two years has contained the dragon, the lion, and the wolf.”
The audience pressed nearer, murmuring and curious.
“What is the prophecy, then?” the prince demanded.
“Here?” She pointed to a black rock, then to a bleached bone. “The hemlock queen will die. A prophecy I have seen before, and all queens die eventually. Here is another repeat: the saints must be planted and the heart be reborn, and this, beware the fox that knows your name, or perhaps it is beware the fox that has no name; hard snow seventeen days after the wheel; the heart-shaped cloud brings a double marriage; the cats will sing together on the sand. That last, to be perfectly honest, I’d like to see.” Era shook her head in frustration. “Sometimes I get nothing but open. Open the gates of the dead, open the trunk in the left corner of your room, open the wizard’s mouth. Open—again and again. But of all the messy, strange prophecies, the worst is that I cannot see anything past this coming Longest Night, and I do not know what that means. No matter what question I ask, or how I pull at a more distant future, everything stops on the Longest Night. So it always falls when I cast—for you, Lion Prince, and for everyone.”
“Prince of Lionis,” Hal corrected breathlessly.
“Do you understand?” Era pushed to her feet. “Always the bones fall in exactly this way. Even here in Aremoria. I hoped … but no. There is nothing like this written of in the libraries of the star priests, or in our stories. The dragon, the lion, the wolf, for two years. And now cacophony, as if the stars are blinded, confused, or disagreeing? It is the same for every priest I know, even the Poison Prince. All the prophecies are turning into babble. We see nothing past the Longest Night, five months from now. The queens of my land, and also the queens of yours, must be prepared.”
“For what?” Hal asked, unable to stop herself.
“The end.”
Hal shook her head.
“You are the Lion, and I know of the Dragon, but where is the Wolf?”
Dropping her empty wine cup, Hal forced a laugh. “There are wolves all around me, Era of Innis Lear, as well a girl even so young as you should know.”
Lady Ianta said, “Hal,” softly. Too softly. But Hal did not look at Ianta. She could not.
“Why are you here?” Hal demanded, closing the space between herself and Era. “This is no game, no unruly petition that belongs in my Uncourt. What do you want?”
“I asked the rootwaters and wind of Innis Lear what to do. They said, One for Innis Lear, one for Aremoria. Again and again like a chant. I thought to come here, to bring our prophecies here in search of the lion and the wolf.”
“There will be no answer here. The trees do not speak in Aremoria.”
Era of Innis Lear held her mesmerizing hazel eyes on Hal’s, chiding and oh so sure. “They used to. They might again. If the greatest king were to reunite our lands. That is what Morimaros the Great said, and his birth star was the Lion of War, too. Perhaps it falls now to another lion?”
“I am no lion,” the prince said, summoning a bit of her mother’s steely disdain. She had not been able to use prophecy to keep what she loved, and so instead would absolutely deny it. “Trees do not speak in Aremoria, and magic is only for backwater wizards sticking in the mud of Innis Lear. Get out of my city before it strips you to nothing, star priest.”
Era hesitated as if she hoped Hal might suddenly change. But Hal gestured for Petus to play his fiddle, and the young man lifted it to his chin.
The Learish girl pulled up the hood of her cloak, so all Hal could see was her plump frown. “I think you’ll understand before I do,” she said, then turned to go without gathering any of her discarded star tools.
A thin strain of music danced up from Petus’s fiddle, and Nova pressed a new cup into Hal’s hands.
Hal fell back onto her throne, slumped and weary, and drank. She ignored Ianta’s increasingly ribald attempts to tease, and Nova’s gentle hand at her knee, then her thigh, then stroking her jaw. She ignored the spreading merriment and the audience who’d crowned Docker winner by default, singing and spitting his curse-name in praise. She ignored all of it, staring at the three triplets of holy bones arrayed upon the limestone ground. They glinted red in the candlelight. Red as garnets. Red as ember-colored hair. Red as a kiss.
HOTSPUR
Burgun-Aremore border, midsummer
HOTSPUR TORE HER helmet free of her head despite sharp pain as strands of her fiery hair caught in the metal and ripped from her scalp. She threw it to the ground, shoulders heaving, breath wet with blood she’d swallowed after this bastard prince Douglass slammed his fist across her mouth.
She spat, then leveled her sword at his bare throat. “Yes, I am Hotspur, and yes, Douglass, a girl, and your pathetic inability to accept defeat is going to lose you your balls, or your life.”
“You’d know how to survive without balls!” he yelled, ridiculous and red in the face.
Hotspur laughed, as did the soldiers around them, including the two holding Douglass’s arms. She handed her sword to her aide Sennos.
“More than survive,” she said, waving a gauntleted hand. “Thrive, and crush the likes of you into th
e mud.”
The field was hers: an expanse of flattened grass sprawled with the dead and wounded, broken spears and spent arrows arrayed in thickets, fallen horses, and the glint of late-afternoon sun on steel plates and shimmering mail. She’d led her family’s forces and four hundred of the queen’s against this useless Burgun prince, who thought to take his father’s dying words as encouragement to rebel against Aremoria. Burgun had been annexed to Aremoria two generations ago through marriage, and their barons used the death of every patriarch as an excuse to make war and reputations. Douglass knew if he did not win—and he never could—he’d only be ransomed home.
Unlike Banna Mora.
Douglass glowered, but his arms relaxed. “We should fight, the two of us, even and clean, and see who claims victory.”
“How would that be better indication of superiority than this? I led the winning side, and I disarmed you, man. Be still and enjoy your captivity before I decide to forget your position and tie you up with the foot soldiers.” Hotspur turned away, stooping to grab her helmet. The plate across her breast cut into her shoulder, its buckle broken so it hung badly.
Sennos handed her sword back to her, the blade wiped clean. “We should take him up to the command tents?”
“Let him stew here for an hour.” Hotspur tossed her smile again to Douglass and sheathed her sword.
Her first aide continued, “We’ve made the hospital over that hill to the south, near the spring-fed creek.”
“I need water.”
Sennos called out to another soldier for a water bag. “Ashterus and Corio are fallen. Ash dead, Corio soon to be. Should head to him first.”
“Wormshit and baby-eaters,” Hotspur whispered. “Hospital?”
“No point, lady.”
Frustration choked her silent.
“First count shows us down by only twelve percent, but nearly half that won’t survive. We won, but they were deadly.”
Lady Hotspur Page 21