Lady Hotspur

by Tessa Gratton

  It made him wonder, too, what had been wrong with his own father, and even his distant mother. Had it been the uncertain magic of the Glennadoer curse that shattered the seed of his father’s love? Had Ryrie been too scattered to consider her first son as Rowan considered his first daughter?

  They were all broken on Innis Lear.

  The island had lost pieces of itself a thousand years ago.

  Oh, the island had gained much: a will of its own, a cohesive power, and a true name. But it had lost the liminal spaces, the shadow-magic. The roots of Innis Lear became so strong, so filled with stars and bloodlike rootwaters, they expanded through every space until the magic was all. Innis Lear had lost the rootworld. Lost those places for earth saints to dance and exist. They’d been driven out by willful magic, like worms fleeing flooded soil.

  A healthy field needed those worms.

  Hints appeared in ancient spells and the slithering whisper of the wind, as to which pieces might be regained, and clues laid down in ballads he’d grown up singing. The Dreamer had offered glimpses, too.

  For years Rowan had tried to understand the whole of the delicate narrative, but he was only a man, if a wizard. His mind was a singular spark, not like the omniscient gaze of the island or the calculating kaleidoscope of the stars. Not even like those lost earth saints who constructed their elaborate webs with a multifaceted hope.

  No, Rowan was not meant to understand, he was meant to act. The dragon had showed him, years ago:

  a line of starlight stretching like a road between Aremoria and Innis Lear. Rowan, somehow, at both ends

  That was his only part left to play.

  Cealla wiggled, and Rowan was glad to have pressed her against his bare chest, beneath shirt and tunic, both of them wrapped by the cloak. This was enough. She was enough.

  His daughter had taught him this: one act could alter all.

  One moment, and this tiny, perfect creature had been made between himself and Banna Mora. Even if he did nothing else to ever influence her, Cealla existed.

  One act could change the world forever. He did not have to manipulate a hundred possibilities, persuade or command or even understand. He only needed to choose.

  Rowan laughed a little, changing his song to a merry jig with silly rounding verses. A round was the way to weave disparate threads together again. A round, a round, around! It put a spring in his step, and before too long the prince arrived at his destination.

  The mouth of the secret spring where kings and queens were made.

  Grief dampened his smile as he stepped inside the grove.

  Shaded from the final rays of twilight and the first glow of a full moon lifting over the trees, the spring rippled with black water. Boulders surrounded it like thick earthen lips, and new sprouting starweed grew spindling fingers and ruffled leaves. Rowan held his daughter against him with one arm and removed his boots, then the cloak. He crouched and drew away his tunic and shirt, then set her down beside a cluster of hemlock to remove the rest of his clothing, until he and his little daughter were naked before Innis Lear.

  Cealla muttered, sucking her lips, and her eyes opened wide. She saw her father, who smiled and whispered, Welcome, little queen in the language of trees; she saw the blur of leaning trees and the distant pinprick of loving stars.

  For a moment, Rowan hesitated, caught in the memory of the Longest Night.

  After he’d held his mother’s bloody body, he’d chased the path of his traitor father to this very grove.

  He’d charged in, mail shirt ringing, and skidded to a stop at the sight of his half sister Catrin sprawled upon the earth, one hand trailing toward the spring, her fingers dipped beneath the clear waters. Dawn spread pink over everything in a bloody tinge, and Rowan had yelled for his retainers to search for Glennadoer (not knowing, not yet, his father already was dead, gutted by the sword of that Aremore prince!). Rowan himself had knelt at Catrin’s shoulder and rolled her against him. Her mouth had been pulled tight in a grimace of pain, blood and spit dried at the corner, and the pale skin of her face was bluish from suffocation.

  Starweed numbed a person first, put them into a stupor, and then when it had won control, sent muscles convulsing with the most wretched waves of pain until every part of the body loosened into death. Rowan had never fallen through to the tremors except once, and nightmares that he might had plagued him for three years after.

  My sister is not a queen, he’d whispered. The wind had answered,

  Not now, now not ever.

  Rowan Lear had stared down at his half sister’s body and thought about how much of his life he’d misinterpreted his father—his murderous, brutal father. Rowan had told himself that Glennadoer loved him, and when there was fury or hatred, it was only because Glennadoer knew no other way to teach or love or prepare a son for the throne.

  That had been wrong. Glennadoer never intended Rowan to wear the crown, no matter what any queen or any voice of Innis Lear wanted. His father had betrayed him long before he put a knife to Ryrie’s throat. And betrayed Catrin, too, and all his people. Glennadoer had wanted to rule over Innis Lear.

  And in the shadowed grove, surrounded by horror and the grieving retainers, Rowan had remembered the lesson of the Dreamer’s journal: You do not rule, you do not control, you become.

  And he had laughed, startling the retainers who murmured to their friends and wives later that the Poison Prince’s mind had already slipped away; thank the stars he’d married a queen. Kings of Innis Lear would always go mad.

  Rowan had laughed because his life already belonged to Innis Lear, and because in the end he was going to be something greater than Owyn Glennadoer could possibly have imagined.

  Now with his daughter in his arms, this future queen, Rowan knelt at the edge of the pool. Night wind chilled his shoulders, but he was not cold. Cealla warbled a thin song of distress, and Rowan sang back to her: she calmed. Her little fists waved awkwardly as he held her in his long, pale hands and lowered her gently into the rootwaters.

  My child, he whispered. Here is my daughter, who will be queen after Solas, after Banna Mora, long after me.

  The wind lifted tendrils of his hair, sliding around him and tickling the cheeks of little Cealla. Our queen, the island murmured.

  She screamed as he dunked her once and drew her free, water streaming off her wrinkled skin, her kicking legs and hairless scalp. Rowan smiled and brought her against his warm chest; she cried still but clung to him. Rootwater beaded on her face, dripping off her shoulders and tiny snail-shell ears. He kissed the droplets from her brow and paper-thin pink lips.

  Rowan sat back, dragging the cloak to them and wrapping them up together.

  “So you are anointed, little queen,” he said. “And I will tell you a story now, which someday the wind and roots will relay back to you, for I will be gone.” Rowan sighed, hugging his daughter. “Hundreds of years ago, the greatest families of Innis Lear sacrificed their children to the island. An offering to tie the folk to the land, the land to the folk. Our power cannot be got for nothing; we must give and the island must give. The starweed, the death of the queen to become the queen, has replaced those old sacrifices. It only requires one—one death. Your father, little queen, has died for Innis Lear with every moon of my life since I was nine, and the rootwaters have revived me. I have always been the sacrifice at one end of the star road, half alive and half dead, like the ghosts, the broken earth saints. Your father is an earth saint already! I have slowly prepared the way for the return of the rootworld, a little bit of death and life every month. To make our island whole, I will go to Aremoria and discover the other end of the road.

  “I will die there, too, by hemlock and Aremore rootwaters, and make a liminal space to open the star roads. I will be a line of starlight.

  “The people will tell you your father was arrogant, and I am. They will tell you I was beautiful and a friend to the stars and rootwaters. I am all that, too.” The prince laughed softly. “Sometimes it is
better never to know your father, I swear it. Though I would prefer to know you, as you grow tall and strong in power. Your girlish laughter and woman’s beauty. The command you will learn to imbue into your voice.”

  She scratched him with surprisingly sharp nails, and Rowan angled his head. “Have you marked a word upon your father’s flesh?” he asked, smiling. But it was too dark to see, and Rowan did not think he should summon stars into his hands. They would dazzle her, in this womb of island shadows. “A secret of your own, then, a message on my heart that I cannot read clearly—but surely will understand before the end.”

  The prince rocked his daughter, sitting there beside the stone mouth of Innis Lear, listening to the winds shudder and laugh, contemplating the destiny spread before him. Glory splattered his path, braided with power and necessity. A unification so long sought, a healing. But not for him, if he succeeded. There was a swelling of new emotion as Rowan thought of not being here, as he thought what this sacrifice would cost—not him (death was no cost, it was a transformation), but his wife, his daughter, his aunt and brothers and sisters, his people. The fury Banna Mora would experience, despite having been warned; the echo of his laughter an ache in Connley’s heart; Solas’s guilt that she’d not guessed or stepped along this path herself.

  He sang to Cealla Lear the oldest song he knew, about a wizard who cleaved an island.

  How selfish it was, Rowan thought, to grieve his own death.

  CONNLEY

  The White Forest, late spring

  DEEP IN THE heart of Innis Lear, the Witch of the White Forest was hiding.

  This was his favorite time of year at the cathedral, when sweet peas bloomed on the south wall and released their candied fragrance while glistening with morning dew. His bare feet picked through a blanket of cowslip, and sun-bright daffodils burst up where the shade of the trees did not quite reach. The songbirds made new nests in the nooks of the cathedral stones, flirting with one another and dancing with the wind. People came seeking blessings for their babes born over the winter or tinctures to chase away the last of a cough. They brought him ribbons to tie in the leaves or gifts for the birds, wine and cheese, or occasionally a chicken. The witch spent his time weeding and clearing roots of decaying detritus, repairing his door or the thatch of his little cottage. He repainted the cathedral moon-signs and shored up any crumbling of the well. Took stock of what tapestries had not survived the cold weather without mold, and which pillows were homes now for mice. A cathedral open to the elements rarely managed to stay in good repair for more than a few weeks.

  Connley worked as diligently as ever, smiling at his rare guests; he set seed and bread for the birds, murmuring welcome. He put himself through the paces, silent or whispering soft answers to the teasing wind.

  Through it all a melancholy clung to him.

  He told himself it was only that he’d never experienced springtime without Ashling. She was gone forever, bound, Rowan said, with her sisters’ bones, to settle Innis Lear and prepare it for what was to come. It was good for the sisters to be at peace, but unsurprising that he should miss her. For most of his life, she’d been the staple of his heart’s diet. But his melancholy was more than loneliness. He was used to being alone.

  Perhaps it was the nature of the wind since the Longest Night seeping into his bones. This was Innis Lear, and Innis Lear always had an opinion, but lately, the voice of the roots and wind drifted into unfinished lines of poetry or disconnected phrases. Or repeated again and again, One one one, one for Innis Lear, one for Aremoria. Or offered him plain news about the fox den around the bend of the nearby creek or an old buck who’d laid himself down to die. The only excitement came on the wings of a crow, word sent from Connley Castle by Grandmother Sin that one of his cousins would wed a young man from Taria.

  At night, when the stars glittered, the Witch of the White Forest found the Child Star and under her simple light cast holy bones. There fell the Star of Courage, touching the corner of the Tree of Ancestors. There appeared portents of conflict, of human choosing, and the ultimate spiral of destiny. And still the dragon, the lion, the wolf. (His wolf.)

  The worms and wind cooed and caressed the cards with agreement but no fresh clarity.

  What will happen? Connley asked.

  One for Innis Lear, one for Aremoria, the wind replied. Are you awake?

  Yes? No? Maybe Connley was always dreaming.

  It was raining the day Isarna Persy rode into the cathedral grove; a gentle, encompassing rain that missed no cracks and slowly soaked the earth and bowed the limbs of even the strongest trees with gentle persistence. Connley sat beneath an oiled canvas staked to the ground and stretched up against the cathedral. The canvas barely kept the rain off his head and the wool sweater he wore with the sleeves rolled up so he could weave undyed thread through circles of birch wood for moon charms.

  He heard her horse, and the trees giggled about the fire-wife, the wolf, and so Connley was prepared. Surprised, but prepared.

  Isarna rode with a hood pulled up over her curls. They’d grown long enough to braid out of her eyes, though barely, and she tilted her face to the sky as if the rain bothered her not at all. It landed upon her pink lips and splashed her freckles, darkening the leather and wool of her cloak.

  Connley hurried to meet her, taking her horse’s reins and helping her quickly unsaddle and rub him down, then loosed him in the wet field to eat as he liked of the young grasses and flowers. Isarna frowned a little, as if to complain, but shook her head and took Connley’s hand instead. He pulled her under the canvas shelter.

  “I have water, and some beer,” he said. “Are you cold?”

  “Warm enough.” Isarna pulled off her hood and untied the cloak. “Fire?”

  “We should go to the cabin.”

  “Wait. First—” Isarna stopped, and studied him, still frowning, as if he were a puzzle to solve.

  Connley waited, used to being confusing, used to speculation and uncertainty.

  His wife said, “Rowan is a bad teacher.”

  “What?” Connley tilted his head.

  “I miss you.”

  “Oh.”

  They stared in silence. Rain pattered against the canvas and played gentle music against the earth. A breeze blew, wordless but somehow warm and amused.

  Isarna took his face and kissed him. It was not urgent, nor quick, but a deliberate and tender exploration. She tasted a little bit sour, a little bit like cheese. But her tongue was sweet, tentative as Isarna was never tentative. Connley touched her cheeks, too, so that they cupped each other’s faces.

  It was only a kiss, and when Isarna leaned into him, angling for more, she stopped herself. “I miss you,” she said again, only a breath on his mouth.

  Connley opened his eyes: hers were so blue, bluer than the heart of fire.

  “Go with me to Aremoria,” Isarna said. “To Port Comlack now, and then we’ll sail for the March. I need you.”

  “Why? I’m no warrior.”

  “I …” Isarna glanced out of the shelter, into the bleary rain as if it were a field of some other place, a stage only she could see, and other men and women acted upon it. “There is magic involved in everything that is to come. I know I will return home different than I left. You are a true witch, you know magic.”

  “So does Rowan,” Connley argued, bitter for no reason he could name.

  “Why did you leave? Why come here?”

  “I like it here in the spring.”

  His wife scowled at him. It made Connley’s heart pump harder. She said, “You might have brought me with you.”

  “You’d have stayed with Mora.”

  Her scowl deepened. “You do know me, Conn. Do you like me, though? At all?”

  Cold suddenly, Connley nodded. “I do, of course I do.”

  “There’s no of course. I’m angry and dismissive, and …”

  “Do you like me?” he asked, incredulous. “There is no guarantee. I am mild and—and so mild.”
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  “You would not say that if you’d seen yourself make fire,” Isarna said, indeed angry and dismissive. “You would not say that if you’d seen the glow of magic in your eyes. You enchanted an earth saint, Conn, and the most arrogant prince I have ever known. I do like you. I—I need you. Because you are my … friend. Connley, I need you. Please don’t make me say it again.”

  For most of his life, he’d thought Rowan was his friend, and Era, though Era was also his cousin, and Rowan was also his prince. He’d thought of Innis Lear as his friend, the roots and birds and trees.

  Isarna continued, “I want you to be my teacher, yes, and a witch, yes. I want you to be mild and weird, to save kittens and put everyone off-kilter. You unsettle others because you are so settled yourself. All this”—she swept her arm to indicate the cathedral and perhaps the White Forest itself—“you love it, it’s part of who you are, and I understand that. My land, my Red Castle, that oak tree where we met, the earth that is Perseria, I love it. That’s what I want, what I want to be. A part of Aremoria, and you understand the connection, you understand that family and land aren’t different, they’re the same. I need that, and want it. Your honesty and friendship, and understanding. How else can I go back to Aremoria and do the hardest thing I’ve ever done? I need my friend and husband at my side. Our marriage is more than two people coming together, more than politics. It’s two pieces of earth becoming one. One from Aremoria, and one from Innis Lear.”

  She was panting a little by the end of it, and she held Connley’s hand—which he’d not noticed her take—so hard it would bruise, crushing his knucklebones.