Lady Hotspur

by Tessa Gratton

  But any near enough to the Witch of the White Forest see the flicker of light in the depths of his eyes.

  Hotspur wants to lick his jawline. His mouth moves carefully, with confidence: her strange husband in the center of his power. Alive with prophecy and humor: the humor of belonging. She wants to love him, and love Hal, as if the friction of loving both can carve bigger spaces in her heart.

  Hal wants to kiss Hotspur, kiss away the lust she sees blatant on Hotspur’s face, and take it for herself. She might, too, before the sun rises, if it’s to be her last chance.

  IN DISTANT LIONIS, a capital that glows like the moon, but cut off from the slithering power of wormwork and ignorant of stars, Queen Celeda tries to smile despite the pain in her side. Her children, but one, surround her, playing strategy games and laughing, giving each other gifts handmade. Everything is warmth and brightness, a pocket of light against the deep black Longest Night.

  Ianta Oldcastle kneels heavily in a cave hundreds of feet directly below, whispering ancient ritual words—prayers, truly—that her mother taught her, and she in turn had learned from her own mother, who had it from hers. Ianta touches river water gathered into a stone bowl to her lips, to her forehead, and presses her palm over her heart.

  A wishful Nova Irris sits in Prince Hal’s thronelike chair on the balcony at the Quick Sunrise, forcing laughter and drinking too much. She knows in her very guts that Hal will never be hers, and never even pretend so again. Nova had liked the pretense, she used it and needed it still, for what will she be without it?

  SOLAS OF INNIS Lear’s lashes flutter as she gazes into the fire and she considers: it is so dark, so late, and now the island itself whispers yes to her, and welcome, and so she gives her Longest Night rod to her nephew Mared. She slips out of the great hall.

  That nephew cradles the rod of stars in his elbow, standing tall. He is willing to rule tonight, to remain awake until the dawn comes. He wonders where Rowan has vanished to, but his older brother has always left him behind, and this is the Longest Night, and so alone Mared will watch the fire flicker and fade, watch the ripple-stretch of lustrous red embers, as beautiful as the heart of Innis Lear.

  Reeling with laughter, Ter Melia stumbles as the gang of earth saints ricochets against the inner curtain wall again, spinning to aim at the chapel. She peels off, clutching her stomach where joy pains her so greatly. She is too old, she thinks, for this revel, and ought to hold vigil with the adults. But the freedom is invigorating, and here under the weighty skies of Innis Lear Ter Melia can make herself forget what has happened these past few years, and even what might happen next.

  High beside the north turret crowning the queen’s tower, the wizard stares out at the flat black Tarinnish. His hand presses to the moon-blue stones and he feels every rough shape against his skin (noticing the rough but not the fine has always been a fault of his).

  He wants to remain here, with Innis Lear. He touches his temple to the turret stones and sighs, amused with himself. So old, yet so much still a child.

  A cry of distress echoes from the yard below and jolts him straight, but it dissolves into howling laughter: that band of young men and women dancing a wild hunt tonight.

  The wizard remembers real earth saints dancing, the vicious spirals of root and blood-sap, shrieking laughter, razor teeth, lips like bark or curling red fungi, and eyes blacker than deep well water. Sugar on his tongue, draining down his throat until he choked. So what if he gave the saints their bargain? He was nobody, nameless, a memory in the wind and the dusty smell of raven feathers.

  Tonight, though, someone awaits him, a creature of flesh and human heart. She knows his name, though does him the courtesy of pretending to forget.

  He pushes away from the turret and descends.

  ECHARMET OF KURAKE Queen sweats a little, sitting beside the fire built before the well in the star cathedral. Kitty-Cat lounges across his lap, stomach to his knees, and her long brown arms trail against the rug, drawing invisible lines there, loops and letters. Kitty-Cat is drunk too easily for a girl of her status and strength. He rests a hand on the small of her back and tips his head against the wall, looking across at Vatta Bolinbroke with half-lowered lids. The second daughter of Celedrix smiles shyly at him, even as she argues with her mother about whether or not wine and cider should be mulled with the same spices. It is ridiculous, and the outcome hardly matters, but the two enjoy the sparring.

  To Charm’s eye, Celedrix’s cheeks are wan more than porcelain pale, her smile too slow to come.

  Perhaps she only is tired, but Charm is afraid. When she dies, there will be nothing but himself and Prince Hal and the throne.

  He needs his Father for years more, decades. He needs her to see her grandchildren lift sabers and recite the best Aremore learning poems. Earn their first godscarves.

  This heat in his guts feels like grief, but Celeda is alive and so why is he already grieving? Moon And Shadow is here, teasing her daughter, lifting that elegant black brow. How can he fear when she will be gone instead of appreciating this? Might it be her last Longest Night? What then?

  Charm swallows and pats his sister Tigir’s bottom. Kitty-Cat twists her neck to glare up at him and he laughs, shoulders shaking. He pinches her side. By her miniature shriek his laughter is emboldened. Yes, this is better. Make the moment better, if it is to be a memory; do not wallow.

  His laughter draws Celeda’s attention, and Vatta’s. That sister presses her lips into a smile, too, as Kitty-Cat rolls off Charm’s lap into an ungainly pile. But his gaze meets Celeda’s, and they share a snap of understanding, secret and intimate. She knows he thinks of savoring the moment.

  This is the gift she has given him, to know the truth. But not only for him, Charm realizes: for herself also, to have an accomplice in memory-keeping.

  Yes. Charm nods. He will do this for her (for all of them).

  A MAN WHO belongs there slips into the queen’s bedchamber at Dondubhan, knife in hand. He listens to the rhythm of blood pounding in his ears, counting his heartbeats, awaiting the hiss of wind and the flare of power. This is right. This is destiny.

  He cuts down, slashing the sleeping queen’s neck. Hot blood splashes his strong hands, his hairy wrists, and when her head lolls over he sees the understanding in those dark brown eyes: she was not surprised.

  VINDOMATA OF MERCIA tears into a lover again and again all the stretching hours of the Longest Night. If she does not, she will be plagued by the ghosts of her sons, murdered and haunting her, though it is their killer who should suffer.

  The duke of Mercia does not wish her lover to speak, but to expend the energy of his mouth distracting her, inducing sweat to bead on her skin and pleasure to thrive. Base desire coats her trauma like limewash to hide the joints of wood and bushels of thatch composing the walls of her heart.

  North, Caratica Persy, earl and wife and mother, sleeps. Her hip aches, and the torment translates into the skittish horse she rides in her dream, a horse she barely controls, as if she’s become a novice rider again, barely a squire. The horse bucks and bites, snorting white smoke.

  And then there is Douglass of Burgun, bold prince, stomping his feet against the wooden floor of the hall in his father’s castle. He cannot yet think of it as his, because since his father died, every chance he’s taken, risk made for gain, Douglass has lost. But that doesn’t stop him from planning, from reaching ahead. There will be war in the spring, and he will slaughter his way toward Celeda of Aremoria, the queen who refused to respect him as an honest hostage, and does not deserve her throne. He’ll rip her hair and make a fist around her throat. She’ll die, and even if he gains nothing else, it will be the name of this castle as his own.

  ALONE WITH THE stars, the Poison Prince of Innis Lear digs his hands into the wind.

  Months ago, far to the south at the Summer Seat, his wife nearly let him die, caught between hemlock and rootwaters. She saved him, kissed him to life again with the blessed waters on her tongue, but in
the numb moments, in the shadows that were neither life nor death, he saw something:

  A blaze of silver, streaks of starlight reaching toward each other across space, across the sea. It was a bridge of magic, a road of stars, and for a split second, Rowan Lear existed at both ends.

  The Dragon of the North had said as much to him once, and Rowan had thought then that it meant he would stand at both gates in different times. Open one, open another, and mark the thresholds with his name.

  But in the hemlock vision, there was no difference of time, for time spread out in spirals and reoccurring—ever-occurring—moments. There was no distance between now and then and to come. Rowan Lear at both ends, now, then, soon, always.

  Beside Rowan, the stones of the Three Sisters lean together at the crown of the moor, and beyond Dondubhan burns with torches and candles in every window. The fortress is a bonfire, the Tarinnish behind a watery mouth, and far north, north, north the dragon dives beneath the horizon again. An hour ago, on the Mountain of Teeth, that dragon was fully revealed.

  It is time.

  With wind knotted in his hands, Rowan steps hard onto the frozen moor. He snaps for fire and calls more wind. A wheel of orange flames bursts into life around him, from the coal and salt and hemlock seeds he traced into a circle against the earth. He pulls at the wind and lifts the fire up and up to waist height, his teeth bared with the effort.

  In his vision, he saw how to do it, and so he reaches. All day and night he’s consumed nothing but hemlock and rootwaters, in a cycle, clearing everything that was not pure from his body. His blood is scarlet and star-clear water, scattered with moon-white hemlock petals.

  His bones thrum with power, the hairs on his body rise, his skin crackles, his eyes widen as his sight blurs and the stars streak.

  The road, the broken, crumbling road.

  He sees it!

  Here is the path. He will die a hemlock death, a queen of Innis Lear, truly becoming a piece of it. If he lives, he will go to Aremoria and die one final time, to open the road and anchor the magic there.

  No other hemlock queen need die tonight.

  Only Rowan Lear.

  He can taste the lightning on his tongue, metallic and bloated. The shadows are silver, just at the tip of his grasp!

  His heart stops.

  INNIS LEAR LIKES the Longest Night.

  It likes the howling and prophecy, the thousands of bright eyes staring up and up, the knees to the earth and the flooding rootwaters. It likes its people on edge. It likes the tilting wheel of fate when everyone notices how sharp the edges can be.

  ROWAN OPENS HIS eyes, cold against the prickly moor grasses and frozen earth. The wind is quiet, but the earth turns under him. Still he can see the silver, but his pulse bangs dully in his skull.

  The silver is dawn breaking in the east.

  One for Innis Lear, whispers the wind, one for Aremoria.

  THERE IS A grotto on the northeast bank of the Tarinnish. Mossy boulders gather, making a mouth of stony lips for the natural well that draws rootwaters from the navel of the island. Thin, silver ash trees grow in a layered circle, and curling ferns and tall grasses bend nearer the well. Spindly weeds cluster, reaching for the heavens, always ready with winter-white petals. Hemlock. Starweed. The Queen-Maker.

  As if sleeping, a woman curls against the first mossy stone step. One hand stretches toward the rootwaters, the other cups itself against her heart. Dark blond hair, knotted with charms and snaking braids, sprawls around her splotched face. Her eyes are open, looking at magic, at star saints, at the last flare of her destiny.

  She is dead, poisoned by a weeping crown of flowers.

  When the sun lifts, the first tender rays brush against her tranquil lashes.

  PRINCE HAL

  Dondubhan, the Longest Night

  HAL PUT HER arm around Hotspur’s shoulders and the two women leaned closer for warmth. Their mead was long finished, and the flask of liquor drained. They spoke little, but shared glances and tiny smiles, drunk and sighing and relaxed.

  In the east the lowest stars blanched in the first gleam of silver-dawn. But at the summit of the queen’s tower at Dondubhan, it still was black and cold.

  The prince did not wish that eastern light to spread, for at the end of this Longest Night she worried Hotspur would slide back into her spiky shell. These hours had been bliss, the two of them together laughing, wandering the fiery yard and dark corridors of the fortress, Hotspur open to jokes and small touches, arguing for fun, singing even! If there were a way to end the turn of stars and keep the sun from ever rising again, Hal might have taken the risk.

  “All this prophecy,” Hotspur murmured.

  A cry rose from the yard far below them, then waned into a muffled flow of crowded laughing. The hunt still spun and danced, tripping now and smaller in size for how many of their number had passed out or paired off.

  “What about it?” Hal asked, stroking her hand down Hotspur’s shoulder. They sat tucked into the corner of the battlement, sheltered from the wind off the Tarinnish. Her bottom was cold where it sat against the stones, but the rest of her radiated warmth.

  “The dragon, the wolf, the lion, again and again. Like we don’t know we’re important.” Hotspur lolled her head against Hal’s shoulder, catching her gaze with languid eyes.

  Hal could not help herself: she brushed her lips against Hotspur’s forehead.

  Hotspur wrinkled her nose.

  “Connley and Era gave me a prophecy a month ago—the last dark moon, actually, right when I arrived.”

  “Really? What did it say? Did they give you hope for your mission here?”

  Despite the gentle teasing in Hotspur’s tone, she seemed genuinely interested.

  Hal hesitated, and Hotspur snapped her teeth playfully, as if she would bite Hal’s neck. It sent a hot shiver coursing down the prince’s spine. She shifted her hips, glad now for the cold stones under her. “They said we were changing the future—the three of us, coming together.”

  “Obviously. That’s what people do when they act at all.”

  “Well, and I wanted to know how to fix everything between our countries, and they said I could not. That it requires balance. One for Innis Lear, and one for Aremoria, but one what? Who knows.” Hal thought of what Connley had murmured, with a weird light in his eyes. Your instincts will keep you in pieces, but a sacrifice makes you whole. Then, Nothing will keep Isarna whole. She shook her head to banish his voice, then said, “I feel like Saint Elegar.”

  “Isn’t that the saint who was torn into half a dozen pieces?”

  Hal nodded.

  “Worms and baby-eaters, Hal, don’t feel like that!” Hotspur pushed away, so Hal had to look at her or obviously avoid it.

  She looked at her lap and forged on. “It’s time to bring the pieces together.”

  “Your pieces?”

  “Only you could do that, Hotspur,” Hal whispered. Her gaze lifted to Hotspur’s frowning eyes, then dropped to her equally frowning mouth. If Hal kissed that frown away, it would heal at least the greatest rift in her heart.

  Hotspur hummed a single, low note of warning.

  Hal smiled, not amused in the least, but at least recognizing herself. “I still have nightmares about that day—when Vindomata killed Rovassos.”

  “Worms.”

  “Yes, worms. Worms of blood and—I think about death all the time.”

  “Me, too.” When Hal glanced in surprise at her, Hotspur continued, “I must be comfortable with death, to charge into battle. To lead. And so I wonder about it, and what it might be like. Soft, I think.”

  “Soft? Even if you die violently? Which you court, Lady Hotspur, Wolf of Aremoria.”

  Hotspur tilted her face up to look at the glittering stars. “Maybe not soft, so much as comforting. Inevitable. Like the sunrise. Death melts pain and longing, hope … maybe it’s like love. Love like Connley spoke of it—to summon fire. Death is all around us, active like the wind. Whispering, sl
ipping into dreams. It waits for when we stop reaching out to people, or we’re so broken we can’t resist it any longer.”

  “You make it sound like we’re already dead, only still standing and speaking because of our relationships with others.”

  “That sounds right.”

  Hal laughed quietly. It was heartening to know Hotspur felt that way. That loving each other kept them alive. She said, “When I think of death, it is extremely practical. I step into the street where a horse is loose, and I imagine—like a sudden waking dream—the horse crashing into me, its hooves crack my leg and stomp on my ribs, and my blood splatters its belly. Or I lean against the stone rail on the marscote and it suddenly crumbles, and I fall. I feel the rush of air on my cheeks and my heart stops before I hit the courtyard, but I still hear the smack of my body, the screams of a gardener …”

  “Hal.” Hotspur’s voice was low with horror. “I thought it was only dreams.”

  “Sometimes it’s not my death. I’ve felt the splash of your hot blood—streaked on my mouth and neck so many times.” Hal squeezed her eyes shut and shuddered. She hated death, and killing; most of all she hated that killing was as inevitable as death itself. For a prince.

  Hotspur hugged Hal. The knight smelled like juniper and smoke. Hal pressed in, arms going around Hotspur’s waist and dragging her close. Stars and worms, she’d missed this: Hotspur’s sturdy body twisting around hers, holding her to protect her. It didn’t matter how much taller Hal was, or that she was equally strong; Hotspur could keep the worst enemy at bay with a glare, could hold off the most vicious of devils.

  “I love you,” Hal whispered, clinging.

  Another howl and scattered laughter rose from the yard. Hotspur pulled back, hands rubbing down Hal’s arms.

  Hal kissed her.

  Hands on Hotspur’s face, the prince kissed with every tangle of her heart. Her fingers splayed, and she slid them into Hotspur’s curls.

  Hotspur did not push away.

  Her hands cupped Hal’s elbows and it was the only encouragement Hal needed: she parted Hotspur’s lips with hers, tasting that hot, bright mouth for the first time in more than a year. Pushing onto her knees, Hal kept Hotspur’s head in her hands, tangling the red curls as she stooped over Hotspur like a hawk. She groaned into her lover’s mouth, and Hotspur grabbed at Hal’s hips, shoving coat and quilted vest back to fist her hands in the wool shirt. Hotspur opened up to Hal, and Hal reached behind Hotspur with one arm to support them both as they scraped along the rough wall to press against the flat stone floor.