“Magic,” he said, softly obnoxious.
Cold dread tightened Connley’s throat. “Rowan.”
The Poison Prince stared out at the rippling ocean, and at the sky washed out behind the vibrant sun. Likely he saw far-flung destinies and strategy, too, and the very breath of Innis Lear. “By rejoining Aremoria and Innis Lear. That’s how I open the stars.”
“Oh,” Connley whispered, though it made no sense to him. But he finally realized what Rowan had brought him to this crenellation to understand. “Banna Mora’s quest is yours, too, given to you by the stars and roots of Innis Lear. You think it’s your destiny.”
Rowan’s gaze flicked to Connley for the briefest moment, eyes glinting with fear and friendship. “I think I won’t survive it. But it must be done. Something is wrong between Innis Lear and Aremoria, which is why we have half-made earth saints and the prophecies deteriorate. The island needs me to be its hands in this. I have become enough of Innis Lear to understand that much. There is that very old prophecy, too: The greatest king will reunite Aremoria and Innis Lear.”
“You don’t want to be the greatest king.”
“Banna Mora does. We are the same in that, brought together for destiny.”
The Witch of the White Forest closed his eyes, swayed nearer to his prince, and focused on the press of Rowan’s fingers at his hip and the thin warmth of that sun, the boldest star.
EIGHTY-SEVEN YEARS ago, the queen of Innis Lear stood behind her seated lover, one hand tilting his head to the side, the other delicately shaving his soft beard from his jaw. The razor glinted in the firelight as it scraped against his skin.
They’d crafted this tradition these past thirteen years: the first night this Aremore king spent with her on the island she would shave his beard away, in a ritual to remind them both about the roles they played and the masks they wore. Tonight was his second on Innis Lear this visit, but last night he’d been too upset to allow her near his throat with a blade. Only a few feet from where he sat upon a stool, in a basket woven of river rushes, slept a three-month-old baby, his second son: a secret she’d hidden from him until his arrival.
Anger at himself and at her had put a tremor in his voice and body: at himself for being away almost a full year, at her for not telling him she was pregnant again.
“How could you?” he’d whispered, standing alone last night as she nursed the child. He’d hovered, uncertain, and the queen had glanced up with her horn-black eyes.
“There was nothing for you to do but worry,” she’d replied.
“And if something had happened to you? Don’t I deserve to be prepared? To say goodbye or—or pray?”
The queen had smiled at the squeezing pink eyelids of their son—their last, she knew. His black hair was a wispy puff of curls, and she was glad finally one of her babies would have something nearer her hair than his. “You do not pray, my lion,” she’d said.
Her lover had groaned deep in his throat and folded his arms over his chest. “That is not the point. My own sister died of giving birth, and she was—”
“Stronger than me?” the queen challenged gently, unwilling to let the flare of her own anger transfer through her body into the baby.
“You know I don’t believe that. But you are small and older now, and Ban was nearly your death!”
The words fell like dropped knives between them, and for a moment there was silence in the tower bedroom but for the low whistling of wind at the shuttered window. Winter at Dondubhan was the only time the queen allowed those windows closed. She shifted her shoulder as her little son flailed at her breast with his awkward, skinny arm, and she said, “It is true Bannos and I had a rough beginning, but I knew that Connley would be healthy, and I would survive.”
“By the stars?” her lover demanded, voice quiet with anger he, too, would not express so the baby might feel it.
The queen had shaken her head, though, and sighed.
“Oh, Elia, not by a dream.”
She stroked Connley’s cheek with her brown forefinger: he no longer sucked, and the queen lifted him away from her breast, giving him to his father.
In the king’s large hands the child seemed even smaller, and she watched her lover’s bright blue eyes mellow away from anger. He efficiently swaddled his son while she tucked herself back into two layers of winter robes.
“It is such a Learish name,” the king murmured, studying Connley as he studied all things: carefully and completely. He patted the baby’s bottom, cradling him in an arm covered with a second warm blanket.
“That dukedom is no more, but the name should be honored. Besides, it was my turn,” the queen teased.
“Nor did I even know to be thinking of a name,” he replied with an edge of humor.
The queen leaned her cheek to his shoulder. Most of the rest of that night was spent watching their youngest sleep, holding him when he cried, and the king of Aremoria got to know the variations of his baby’s light brown skin, splotchy and soft, the muddy blue-brown of his eyes, and the delicate grip of tiny fingers.
During the next day a naming ceremony was held, for the queen had insisted upon waiting for her lover to arrive, offering a star prophecy by her own hand as mollification. The sun sparkled in the crystal winter sky and Dondubhan celebrated, with roasted sheep and stewed apples, the queen’s favorite ale and pastries from Aremoria. Long, streaming flags in rainbow colors gave life to the wind, and that same eager wind spread news of the healthy birth of Connley Lear to the cliffs and moors, the forests and mountains and meadows of Innis Lear. His name hung in the air, slipping through the rootwaters like a merry laugh.
Connley.
And so, tonight after festivities, after family and star prophecies and lullabies, when they finally were alone again, the queen went to the small chest of drawers beside her bed and removed a leaf-wrapped bar of olive oil soap brought all the way from Ispania. It was expensive and she saved it for her lover alone (though sometimes, when she missed him, she cupped it in her hands, just to breathe the exquisite smell and pretend her bed would be warm). The queen took it, and the curved razor, and brought them to the hearth where he drooped in a large chair by the fire, head lolled to the side so his gaze could easily fall upon the basket where Connley slept.
“Love,” she murmured, and he flicked his eyes to her, then a broad smile spread through his beard.
They arranged themselves as usual, the king on a stool, the queen standing behind with the soap, water, and blade beside her on the deep stone windowsill. The queen slid her fingers through his shorn, dark hair, enjoying the tickle of its shortness. At this length it did not show his age, unless the sun glinted just right to catch the pale gray hairs, but his beard was different. Though once richly brown, silver had begun to blossom brightly at his chin. The suntanned skin at his temples was sketched with wrinkles, drawn out from his serious eyes. He’d entered his fifth decade of life the year Bannos was born, and finally time was changing him: when they wandered the paths edging the Tarinnish with their children he kept up with them, chasing young Gaela with Bannos on his shoulders, but always after wished to sit down; he winced almost imperceptibly when he dismounted a horse at the end of a long day; and he was often reluctant to climb out of a warm bed in the morning, citing little aches. That, the king claimed, would not be so if he woke wrapped around her every morning; it was not age, but missing her, that triggered his malaise.
The queen stroked his cheek, bent to put her cheek against his, to relish the soft warmth of his beard, memories assailing her with vivid sweetness. He caught her hand. “I love you,” he said.
“I dream about you, too,” she replied, lifting the thread of last night’s conversation as if it had never ended. “And if you’d known, you’d have come without finishing your negotiations.”
“Not if it would have broken them.”
She paused, realizing what she’d done, and said, “I did not mean to say that you would choose me over the good of Aremoria.”
> “You made that choice for me years ago,” the king replied too softly.
The queen turned to the windowsill and with the razor shaved off slivers of soap into the clay water bowl. With a linen cloth she made lather. Impulsively, she lifted the heavy iron latch and shoved open the shutters to the night. The Tarinnish ruffled black and silver in the wind, its shore stretching east and north from the point of this tower; yellow firelight flickered from the town of Wellage that spilled away from Dondubhan’s gray-blue walls. The queen whispered, Hello, pretty night, and the wind replied, Hello, Queen.
The king’s hands suddenly gripped her hips and he pulled her slowly onto his lap. She cupped the bowl against her belly as he wrapped himself around her, arms strong and heavy over hers; he kissed her temple, brushed his lips against the thick twist of her copper-black curls, where they rolled behind her ears in an elaborate knot at her nape.
Wind pushed inside, making the tapestries shiver and dance, and the fire in the hearth leapt higher as if to hold heat around the basket where the tiny princeling slept.
The king hugged his queen and he said, “I dream, too, but I am awake for mine, seeking out possible futures for us and our family.”
With a little sigh, she leaned into his firm chest and allowed him to hold her. She closed her eyes. “Tell me.”
His breath was hot against her jaw. “When Gaela turns thirty, you will give her your crown, and I will give mine to Isarnos—by then he will have heirs of his own and Aremoria will be secure. We will go to Tenne-Tiras, just south of Lionis, for half of the year, and here, or the Summer Seat, for the rest. The two of us, or whatever friends we invite—Aefa would find us if we tried to deny her, I know—and our grandchildren or cousins, but sometimes only us. And we will do as we wish.”
“You’ll be so old,” the queen teased. “Will you be able to do anything at all?”
With a laugh, he jiggled his knees, shaking her. “Not yet seventy!”
“My father’s age.”
“Then perhaps when Gaela is twenty. You were able to hold the weight of it by then.”
“I don’t think you will be ready to retire in a mere thirteen years. Your library will barely be finished.”
The Aremore king growled in her ear, and she giggled.
“Let me up, lion, before this lather goes flat. Your beard is a nightmare.”
“I think you like it.” He squeezed her and nuzzled her neck.
But he released her, and she got to work. As she covered his beard with the soft soap, he told her again he’d like to take Gaela with him for a summer, now that their daughter was old enough to learn the sword. The queen lifted the razor and angled it so he could see the sharp blade catch the firelight. “Quiet now,” she said.
And so she shaved away the beard, humming under her breath. The rhythm of slicing, the scrape of steel to skin, lulled her into the peace of familiarity. Little Connley gasped and sniffled as he slept, and the queen knew he’d wake hungry soon. Perhaps she would take him to bed and put her lover behind her, cradling her baby to her breast while she herself was cradled.
Sister, whispered the wind.
The queen startled, glancing at darkness beyond her window.
That name … beloved name … continued the wind, with a strange and familiar intonation.
Stepping toward the window, the queen whispered, “Regan.”
“Elia,” her lover said, voice made deeper with kingly command, and the queen remembered she held in her hand a razor blade that curved in her fingers like a massive claw. She gasped and looked at him with wide black eyes.
Blood touched the hollow of his right cheek, just above the clear line of his jaw.
“Oh, Mars.” The queen dropped the razor. She’d cut him.
“Why did you say her name?” the king demanded quietly.
“I …” She shook her head. It was impossible. Her sister was dead for thirteen years. Both her sisters dead so long. But the queen would not conceal it from him. “I heard her voice on the wind. She called me sister and said … she heard his name.”
The Aremore king frowned mightily, made worse and ridiculous by his half-bearded state. “You are having waking dreams now.”
She denied it with a shake of her head.
“You are too young for your father’s madness.”
“It was her voice in the wind.”
Sister!
Wind gusted, and Connley wailed.
The king strode to the window and slammed the shutters into place.
THE QUEEN WOKE deep in the night, to the sound of her name. It flickered in the fire and drifted behind the slow, quiet pace of her lover’s breath.
Elia. Elia.
Elia.
Slipping away from his warm side, the queen gathered her robes and tied them about herself, then glanced at her sleeping baby, his little lips trembling in a dream.
Out the chambers she went, into the stairway that spiraled down and down, through the lower corridor past night guards, padding silently on bare feet despite the frigid winter that seeped throughout the fortress. She followed her name outside, to the small star chapel built against the thick outer wall, but instead of finding her way inside she ducked into the tight corner where its low roof met the fortress wall, and used the hidden door.
Wind hit her face the moment she emerged onto the rocky shore. Black water lapped at sharp stones, sucking gravel into the lake. Overhead the moon was just past full, clinging high in the east, and the glitter of stars pressed brightly. She read them in a sweeping glance: nothing obscuring the brilliant head of the Dragon and its long wing-spines; there the Thorn, barely showing this time of year; the Star of Hunters and the arcing Salmon. The constellations she expected, present and shouting their silver light.
Elia.
Sister.
She stared at the water: light, a reflection of the moon, a smile of stars. And the ghostly afterimage of a woman, like a slender tree growing up out of the Tarinnish as if the black water were fertile earth.
“Regan,” the queen said again, and then in the language of trees, Sister, why are you sad tonight?
Wind cut at her cheeks, fondling the trailing end of the scarf she’d wrapped around her hair for sleep. It tossed an old smell into her face: bergamot oil, the pure kind she’d not used in years, and then she smelled fire, too, and knew it was a memory from her sister’s funeral pyre: the queen had poured her hair oil into that fire, crying for her lost sisters, their mother, their father.
Elia.
She had to get to the center of the lake. They’d not had a funeral for Regan, without her body, without—
“Elia!”
Hands grasped at her and the queen shook herself, blinking, awake: there was no moon, instead the long tail of the Dragon and the roots of the Thorn, not its crown; the Salmon was a summer star, and—the queen rubbed her eyes even as the king lifted her out of the shallow water, pulling her onto the shore.
Her feet were ice, her throat burning from cold, and her hair unbound because she wore no scarf, not tonight—she’d fallen asleep melting and curled against him, full of his kisses and seed. “Morimaros,” she whispered.
“Worms and—and, fuck. I didn’t even know that door was there,” he said raggedly, and she realized he’d only pulled on trousers, his face pink on one side from sleeping. Little bruises from her mouth darkened his collar and chest. What a mussed pair of royalty they made.
With witnesses, now, too. Four retainers fully awake and armored stood at the narrow tunnel exit, the whites of their eyes shining in shock. And one of the queen’s serving girls—the newest, given the late-night position.
“Come inside, what happened?” the king asked.
She nodded but craned her neck backward even as she went with him, picking carefully on her bare feet.
The surface of the Tarinnish glowed with a small radiant reflection, a lovely, ordinary sight on most nights.
But there was no moon tonight to cast it.
CHARM
Lionis, early autumn
A WEEK BEFORE the autumnal day of balance, called Ah-In-Liss Fel in the tongue of Mothers, Echarmet of Kurake Queen arrived in Lionis.
Charm was eager to experience it in a cooler clime than the desert city in which he’d been born and lived most years of his life. The colors did not disappoint him, for as his barge sailed up the Whiteglass River, they passed hills of such vivid green he murmured a prayer. The blue sky reflected bright in the rushing river, and sunlight glared off gilded fields and the fire-orange and red leaves crowning the trees that skirted the banks to the south.
Moon And Shadow had painted pictures of such glory when she lived in the City of God’s Daughters—Queen Celeda now, he needed to remember her Aremore name. In Es Iniphet Es she had been called Moon And Shadow for the contrast between her white skin and the rich black waves of her hair. Charm was inordinately proud for having discovered the name himself, and more so that Elophet, Great Mother of God’s Third Philosophy, had agreed with her eleven-year-old first-daughter’s-first-son and adopted the title for their foreign guest.
Charm leaned over the edge of the barge; the brisk wind snapped at the end of his robe and even pushed the heavy lapis pendants that hung from his ears. He created for himself a verse of prayer to honor the beauty of Aremoria: So bold the colors they blur in the eyes, and become one Luminous Aspect.
Pleased, he turned to his mother’s-sister Elodisil, and recited the prayer for her.
Elodisil of Elophet Great Mother of God’s Third Philosophy smiled brightly. The sun glowed against her dark brown cheeks. “It is good this land appeals to you, first-nephew. If you would make it your home.”
Because she spoke in the Aremore tongue, Charm followed when he replied, “I would, Lady Aunt.”
“Only aunt,” she corrected. “Lady Elodisil is what the people here will call me, but you may say Aunt Elodisil. And you address Moon And Shadow …?”
“Your Majesty, or Celedrix, unless she gives me leave to say otherwise.”
Lady Hotspur Page 29