Lady Hotspur

by Tessa Gratton

  This cliff is a raw wall of stone, bedrock shoved up out of the world by forces too awful for Lear to harness. But their leavings and echoes she can use, the angles of stone and fire, caught against the constant grating waves and singing moon.

  She will take it all away from him.

  “I did not lie,” he said softly, touching her teary cheek.

  “You did not speak true,” she replied, dull with shock. Behind him black trees of smoke rose, branching into the bright sky. Her temple, burning. “I believed you, what you wanted, from me and from my people and my power.”

  “Your power is too much, Lear, it shines too boldly in the hearts of these villagers and farmers, and they will always look to you as a sun, my crown nothing but a reflecting moon.”

  “I loved you. I was no threat to you.”

  His hand lifted away and he said, “You do not understand power, if you think so.”

  Lear will show that traitor king how well she understands power.

  With a guttural cry she throws her spirit down, reaching out with a hundred hands for the creases and nodes in the island’s body, its bones and blood: she slides through rock, dashes along trickling waters, teases the twisting roots. She listens as she spreads, to the pulsing strength of the island and its wordless longing. The island has no will, only a pure magic that matches the magic of her homeland across the channel. Linked, for this island is a drifting hand to the body of her home, connected by threads of fire, deep beneath the sea. But above, the paths of the stars arc from east to west, trailing magic from horizon to horizon. Those roads connect the lands, too. Those are the bonds she can snap, tear free, and take for herself.

  The wizard grasps the magic, the ache of the star roads, and flies along them back home, back to the rolling hills of Aremoria, the great forests of pillar-strong trees, valleys and living rivers. She listens, and laughs. Hot tears fall down her cheeks where her body sprawls against the island cliff top. The trees shiver and lean together, birds sing in dreadful expectation, and the winds laugh, echoing her laugh.

  Creatures peer at her around roots, opening eyes like cherry stones and eyes like seashells. What is she doing?

  She hears but only smiles angrily.

  Magic spreads everywhere, between both island and home, in the rocks, roots, and waters, in the air, in the words of the people as they kiss and yell and dream.

  Lear braids those roads of power together, tangling them into intricate, unbreakable knots. The trees ask her why, and the wind gusts with curiosity. The world trusts the wizard Lear, and she promises it will be over soon.

  She is no longer crying when she takes all that magic into her fists and tears.

  Aremoria screams: the wizard does, too.

  Her scream makes the island tremble.

  Her strength and the winding tensile power pull to the center: her center.

  It bursts her heart and shatters her bones. Lear is nothing but power, nothing but the magic. She keeps pulling, keeps dragging it here, toward the setting sun, into the bowl of the crescent moon, along the efforts of the tide: here to the heart of this island.

  A cradle of knotted magic, a navel of pain.

  Lear’s final breath is fire, and with it she severs the threads binding the star roads. They snap back at her, whipping raw sparks, and she opens her arms for them all.

  The magic sinks as she sinks, bones into rock, blood into rootwaters, spirit into wind. Here is the home of magic, infused into every pulse and groan and spring blossom.

  INNIS LEAR NAMES itself.

  AREMORIA CANNOT REMEMBER.

  It has no memories of its own. But the earth saints do: they remember the loss of the stars, the closed doorways, the fury of grief.

  For a thousand years they have schemed to take it back, especially the one with eyes of cherry stones. They play their tricks, send their shadow-man, lay points of hope in the fall of a leaf, in the death of a king, in the heart of a golden oak tree.

  HERE IS HOW a wizard is made:

  Ninety-four years ago a lost soldier, a ruinous young man, thrusts his iron sword into a golden Aremore oak, marrying the sword’s whispering power to that of the roots. For so long he battled this end, he pulled away from the promise in their words, but what is the point any longer? I accept your bargain, he says, falling to his knees.

  Twenty-two years ago a woman thinks of another tree, the yew in her castle courtyard said to be a goblin tree, despite the peaceful shushing of its leaves in the summer breeze. She likes the yew because she relates to it. Both are strong and elegant; both belong there in the yard, under the blazing sun; both are trapped and unable to move, but only to grow where they are planted, pressing against the slabs of limestone holding down their roots. Her gaze lingers on its furrowed gray bark, on the flutter of thin leaves, and she feels a longing, a desire, even. One night, she slips out of bed in only her robe and wraps her arms around the tree. Her bare feet scrape the thickest roots; her cheek leans against cool bark. She kisses the tree and murmurs that she would like a child stronger than herself, stronger than all of them, able to break free of the stones, of the entire courtyard and castle, to be whatever she can be, and burn down any barrier.

  Does the yew hum agreement? Does a warm hand find the small of her back? Caress her neck, and slide fingers along her hips? Does she meet an earth saint there, under the moonless sky, and do they dance and do they feast on flesh and tongues and tears?

  The woman opens her eyes at dawn in her bed beside her husband, wild with her dream and sorrowful, and when her child is born, she is named Isarna.

  WAKE UP

  Wake up

  Wake up!

  The trees sleep, dreamless, all these generations.

  They stretch in a creaking old yawn when a young wizard almost dies in their embrace, bleeding into the soil, and they remember for an instant.

  Or when a keen child touches a hand to them, whispering silly stories, they remember that once they shared entire conversations and held webs of truth between their roots.

  Wake up.

  A girl murmurs to the rose vines in a cathedral garden, hush now, not yet, not yet and the trees know enough to anticipate that what is not yet will be soon.

  Wake up.

  They hear the summoning now, they hear more and more, babble and promises from dreams or from hollow voices singing deep beneath their roots: Soon your eyes will open. Soon you will share secrets again.

  Soon.

  AN HOUR BEFORE sunrise on the Longest Night, the queen of Innis Lear asked the wizard, softly, “What is it like, when you aren’t here?” She skimmed her fingers along the hash-marks scarred into the skin over his heart. The scar spelled his name—the oldest and first given.

  He covered her hand with his, the touch of his calloused fingers light against her knuckles. Darkness surrounded them where they lay on a thin mat in a storage room in the northern turret of the queen’s tower, meant for folded tapestries and unused stools, but perfect for a wizard who preferred shadowed solitude and believed he deserved no more. He had claimed it for his own when he arrived at the fortress weeks ago. Beside the mattress a single flame fluttered at the tip of a narrow white candle stuck with its own wax to the slats of the wooden floor.

  It was no place for a queen.

  Despite her broad way of asking, the wizard understood her question. “My memories of the halls of earth saints are unfocused. A blur of sensations, smells, bright visions. They exist, they dance where there is no earth nor sky, but spaces between the earth, between the stuff that makes us solid. If they do not dance, they would drift into death or disperse, or become solid. The only way to survive there is to dance. Or hunt—fly through the shadows and from root-tip to root-tip, from past to past and future to future. Time is not grounded there, as it is here.”

  “But is it terrible? I would not like to think of you in a terrible place.”

  “It is … beyond such things. When I dance under the trees, Solas, I don’t remember te
rror or regret, I don’t know what made me, or even have a word for what I am. It’s only when they send me up that words become solid with meaning, memory, and potential.”

  “You won’t remember me.”

  “I won’t forget you, either. Someday, under the sky again, my tongue will form the shape of your name and bring with it all the meaning it holds.”

  The queen sighed softly and pressed her mouth to his chest, parting her lips to taste his skin, the delicate flavor of salt and earth, the tingle of airy magic. “I wish,” she said to his flesh, “you could take me when it is my time. That time may be within the hour.”

  He paused, hoping she was wrong, then said, “It is not for queens of Innis Lear to go to the earth saints.”

  “Only kings of Aremoria are so blessed?” A hint of anger put daggers between her words.

  “Innis Lear is too jealous of itself. The way it was made, the way that first wizard cleaved its spirit and heart away from Aremoria, makes the island desperate and selfish. You are part of it, and it will keep you for itself when you die—so long as you do not cling to life and names as Regan did, as she forced her sister to. The queens of Innis Lear become the island when you take up the hemlock crown, and its rootwaters are your blood. There is no room for earth saints in this place now, no space between roots and rootwater for them to make their castles.”

  “What do you mean, how it was made? She cleaved it from the mainland.”

  “The wizard did not tear the island’s mass, the rocks, from Aremoria: that is only the story. She came to the island and she broke the magic, the paths of magic linking shadow and shadow, root and root. She cleaved Innis Lear from Aremoria by taking that power and driving it into the island, through her own life and bones and blood. That is what she stole: she stripped magic from Aremoria and planted it on Innis Lear.”

  The queen sat up and leaned over him, both hands propped against his chest. Ghostly lights shone in the black of his eyes. “But you were a wizard in Aremoria.”

  “I was. Where wind blows, trees live, stars shine, and people spit, there will be threads of magic—sleepy magic, hard to awaken and mold—but it is nothing like the sentience of Innis Lear. The Aremore trees speak if you coax them to it, the wind can relay messages, birds are—well, birds. But Aremoria has no will of its own. The earth saints do as they can, take as they care to take, leave blessings and steal the occasional child. The land itself is only land. For now.”

  “For now.”

  The wizard put his hand on her cheek, digging fingers into her hair. He pulled at the soft strands, combing through the long brown tresses as if he might whisper to them as to wind. Her hair fell from his fingers in a fan, brushing his shoulder, pooling in swirls against his elbow and teasing his ribs. “I cannot say,” he murmured, “what will happen in the next months, but I think I have a part to play. Innis Lear is ready, now that its ghosts are laid to rest, ready for the star roads to open. But they must be opened from Aremoria, power dragged back to that land, and a new wizard anchored there.”

  “You mean take magic back from my island. I won’t let you do that, wizard.” Her hand slid up to his throat, but she did not press, only showed him that she could.

  In the shadows, his teeth flashed, but when he spoke it was with sorrow: “You would not be the first queen to think she should kill me and stop me.”

  “What stopped her? Love?”

  “Love does not stop people from killing.”

  Tears gummed her eyelashes when she blinked. “Tell me what stopped her.”

  “She was better than me.”

  “Am I?”

  The wizard touched her wrists. “Innis Lear is so strong, Solas. Its queens live mightily. I could not strip magic from Innis Lear if I had a hundred years and every earth saint at my back. Healing the wound between our lands will only give your island more power, like mirrors reflecting candlelight back and back and back again upon itself. And it is what the island wants, longs for. Open, it whispers. Innis Lear wants the star roads open again. Wants balance and earth saints of its own.”

  “You have had a hundred years and the earth saints at your back.”

  His smile was slight, and he said nothing.

  The queen kissed him and spread herself over him again, chest to chest, propped on her elbows with her hands in his thick hair. “Come, let me take you to my bed, the queen’s bed. We will be there when the sun rises complete, and see if I have lived through this Longest Night. If the prophecy for the hemlock queen to die falls true”—the queen smiled crookedly—“you will plant me beside my grandmothers.”

  “You aren’t going to die tonight,” he said.

  “Stay with me, then. On Innis Lear.”

  His eyes closed, and when she put her cheek against his, he whispered in the language of trees, I do not belong here.

  You do, Ban Errigal, and when you realize it, when you have suffered enough to forgive yourself, I will welcome you home.

  The wizard shook his head. “You’re mistaken, Solas. He died a hundred years ago.”

  “Just as Regan Lear did, and Elia the Dreamer thirty years after that,” the queen murmured. “Yet neither was allowed to rest until now. You’re more like them than not, part earth saint, restless with your past. When your wanderings are over, when your bargain is served and you are ready, you, too, will come home.”

  “You will be dead by then,” he said, aiming for hardness.

  But the queen of Innis Lear laughed sweetly and kissed the tip of his nose. “I am Innis Lear, you said yourself. So long as the island breathes, I will be here, and my bones will be the roots, my blood the waters.”

  Home, he whispered.

  PRINCE HAL

  Lionis, winter

  LIGHT SPEARED OVER the Lionis skyline as Hal entered the palace. She paused under the pink and silver clouds, wincing at the cold dawn. If she was to be a rising sun, she must surely be a winter one. Bright, but falsely warm.

  Only six days had passed since she’d murdered Owyn Glennadoer, and each of them she’d spent running.

  Hal still felt blood on her face, though she’d scrubbed and scratched it all away.

  At the city gate, she’d left Ter Melia and the three soldiers who’d accompanied Hal to and from Innis Lear (the rest of the party was either making their way slowly home, or Banna Mora had claimed them as hostages). Because Hal’s return was not expected for weeks yet, the prince thought to go quietly, in the hopes she could make it to her mother before rumors began, and with the queen invent together the story they would tell.

  Thus far, she’d not been recognized. But at Lionis Palace, she was the fallen Lion Prince and could not hide. Though her travel clothes were worn, her hair unkempt, cheeks chapped red, she remained herself. Surprised gossip would spread, but nothing worse than surprise, if Hal kept her expression clear and tears off her face.

  In truth she’d not cried at all. Nor had she slept beyond what absolute exhaustion forced upon her: dreamless it seemed, only to wake choking on a string of Glennadoer’s hot blood.

  Hal did not hesitate as she took the broad stairs off the People’s Courtyard up toward the level where she could cut across the audience gallery to her mother’s chambers. She ignored everyone—saluting guard, bowing maids, startled and diplomatically gaping nobility—until she arrived at the double doors where a page in Celedrix’s colors waited and a guard held out his gauntleted hand. “The queen is not to be disturbed,” he said apologetically.

  “Is she alone?”

  “So far as I know, Prince.”

  “Then move yourself, man,” Hal said calmly, with no hint of humor.

  He did.

  The front room was dim once the door closed behind her, though light filtered in from the queen’s bathing room as well as through the arch leading into her bedchamber.

  “Mother?” Hal called tentatively, a sudden apprehension tightening her already nervous stomach.

  No answer came, and she moved toward the bedcham
ber. Again she called for her mother.

  “Hal? What—?”

  Relief softened her knees and Hal took a fortifying breath before hurrying in. Morning light glazed the simple room, soft enough to mark no shadows over the floral tapestries, nor upon the thick rugs, nor darkening the perfect clouds painted on the vaulted ceiling. The bed dominated the side of the room opposite the daunting hearth. Curtains had been drawn around three sides of it so that Celeda could see the edge of the windows but not the door.

  “Hal?” her mother said again.

  Hal hurried around and knelt beside the open portion of the bed.

  Celeda reclined against striped silk pillows, hair loose, face unpainted, a quilt drawn to her waist and a heavy wool robe about her body. She blinked heavily, and her frown pulled worse lines around her lips, dragging at her eyes. Her lips were too dry. She looked as exhausted as Hal felt, and sick, even.

  “Mother, what’s wrong?” Heart pounding, Hal leaned her elbows on the mattress. “A winter cough? Fever? You’re so pale.” Hal reached thoughtlessly to put the back of her hand to Celeda’s cheek. It was cold.

  The queen stared at her daughter, lips apart, as if she did not quite believe Hal existed.

  “Mother,” Hal insisted.

  “I do not have a fever, nor winter sickness,” Celeda said. She took Hal’s hand as it dropped. “What are you doing here?”

  Hal studied her mother, afraid.

  Celeda said, “Hal,” and her voice was stronger, more commanding. The queen released Hal’s hand and sat up, with only a slight wince. “Tell me why you are home so early, and without notice or fanfare.”

  “Then you will tell me what is wrong with you.” Hal tried—and failed—to make her voice as strong as her mother’s.

  “I will, Hal, I promise.”

  Taking a deep breath, Hal nodded and sat back upon her heels. She thought to ask for wine, but on an empty stomach it would spell disaster. She did not need such things to fortify herself. She refused. “I killed Owyn Glennadoer on the morning after the Longest Night,” she said.