Gaela shrugged and stepped away from him. She went to her desk, skimming her hand along the letters there; indeed one lay open and half written in his hand. “I am not everyone,” she said with pride, glancing up at him briefly.
“That is why I married you.” Astore stood with his hands at his hips, angry and admirably regal. His broad chest pulled at the wool tunic he wore and the gold-worked chains hooked from shoulder to shoulder. A large topaz hung from his left earlobe, glinting like the rings on his fingers and the hammered copper at his neck.
“Take a lover, Col. I’ll not stop you.”
“You are my wife. I want you. That is also why I married you. To make you mine, Geala Astore”
“I am not yours.” Gaela snorted a laugh. “Rather, you are my shield, as you said: your stars are necessary to make me queen. That is all.”
The duke came to her, grabbed her arm, and dragged her to him. “You are mine because you want that crown as much as I do. You came to me when your mother died so I would make you strong. Make you a warrior. And look at you.” He leaned in so his beard tickled her chin. “You are a warrior, and will be a ferocious queen. At my side.”
Gaela fisted her hands in his tunic and said through clenched teeth, “Yes, you will be at my side when I am queen; it is done. So why do you press this between us now, Col Astore?”
“We need an heir. There can be no more waiting. Seven years of marriage, and we have achieved our goal. The crown. Now we must keep it, and to keep it we need a child. Children. You cannot have convinced yourself otherwise, somehow.”
She thrust away from him and sat upon the edge of her desk. “Regan—”
Astore raised his hand between them, rigid and flat, pointing at her with all fingers. “Regan is not our ally in this,” he said firmly. “If she bears a healthy a child, and you have none, Connley will rally people against us, no matter how securely we get the crown now.”
“My sister is more my ally than any other.”
“I am your ally. She chose against you years ago when she married Connley!”
It was not in Gaela’s nature to argue on a person’s behalf if she believed that person’s motives to be clear. And so she stared at her husband, bland and cold, as she said, “You should have learned by now you cannot come between Regan and I.”
“She is your blindness.” Astore grabbed her knees and forced them apart, moving into the space. She pulled her lips back like a threatening wolf, but her husband transferred his hands to her thighs and pressed his fingers hard enough to bruise.
“Be careful, Col,” she warned.
“What will you do without an heir? Regan seems incapable of producing one. Even if she and you consolidate our rule, if we all manage it, what then? What of Innis Lear in twenty years, or thirty?” He continued to threaten with the weight of his hands on her thighs.
“We will bring Elia home,” she said through her teeth, not clawing at him or kicking him away; she’d not let him see how infuriating she found his behavior. How degrading.
“Elia!” he scoffed darkly. “Her children may well belong to Aremoria already! And why would you rather her children be your heirs than your own? Than mine?”
“My bloodline includes my sisters, Col. What difference in which of us continue it? In my grandmother’s empire it is always the empress’s niece who inherits after her. They make a stronger map of blood and alliance that way.” Gaela could feel her rage building, the spikes of it striking harder against her armor with every moment Astore touched her and every word he argued.
He said, “This is not the Third Kingdom, and I would have heirs, sons and daughters of my own line. You condemn not just Innis Lear with this folly, but my blood.”
“I do not care about your blood, you fool.”
“You had better start, or stars help me—”
“Stars!” she yelled, finally shoving him away and leaping to her feet. “The stars should have provided this future for you long ago, if they’re worth anything at all. I know my stars; they promised great posterity would spring from me, which is a great joke, for you could lie with me every day for eternity and never get me with child, and it has always been so, since before we married.”
He smiled meanly. “You cannot escape some of your stars, when at the same time you use others of them to gain a crown. I studied your birth chart; I looked at all the signs. You are fertile, Gaela, you are passionately so.”
She put her hand flat on his chest. “No. I changed it. I did this to myself. I make decisions and act upon them. I do not allow stars or prophecy to dictate my choices. They are a tool, nothing more.”
“Did what … to yourself?” Astore blinked.
“I am incapable of bearing a child, by choice and by necessity, Col. Brona Hartfare burned my womb out of me before you put your seed anywhere near it.”
Astore hit her.
The blow bent her around, and she caught herself with her hands against the corner of her desk.
“Lies!” he yelled.
Gaela’s skull rang, more with shock than any pain. She blinked. And then she turned, punching him in the gut. She followed with a slap across the side of his face.
Blood touched the tip of her tongue then, and she spat onto her floor. “Oh, Col,” she said dangerously, quietly.
He grabbed her by the throat.
So they stood. Gaela sneered, tilted her chin up, and welcomed his stare. “Do what you will,” she said through her teeth.
“Is it because of your mother?” Astore asked. A vein pulsed at the curve of his temple, hot pink where she’d hit him.
She wrapped her hands around his forearm. “It is because I will wear the crown, and I will get it like a king. Not as a mother and wife, but as the firstborn child, as the strongest. It is no fault of mine to be forced to perform this illusion of being your wife, to pretend to be what a woman of this island is supposed to be, in order to gain power among you and your peers.”
Astore dropped her suddenly, faltering back. He sank onto a short wooden chair with rounded arms. “Barren,” he said, with the ghost of a bitter smile. “What a schemer you are, Gaela Lear. You won this war before I even knew there was a battle to be had.”
She stalked toward him and leaned down, planting one hand on either arm of his chair. “And for it, you will be king, too. Be glad.”
“Never,” he muttered. “When we have the crown, when Connley is defeated, we will revisit this, wife.”
Gaela smiled and wondered if they both would survive so long.
THE FOX
BAN WAITED IN the hallway outside his father’s chambers, near a window and a low bench set into the smooth wooden wall. This was part of the new Keep, built of wood and plaster, with windows that opened to the southeast. Ban removed the letter from his coat. He’d written in as close to Rory’s sprawling hand as he could manage.
Leaning against the sill, Ban pressed his forehead into his arm and breathed unevenly on purpose, as if desperate to rein in a great hurt. Slip under the enemy’s defenses.
This plan would lead to getting the iron magic for Morimaros. It would prove to Elia exactly the fickle ease with which a father might overthrow a child’s love. It would undercut the stars King Lear adhered to so fanatically.
All Ban had to do was sink to the level they expected of a bastard. It shocked him with an unexpected thrill.
Base and vile, those were the words the king had used, the words Ban’s own father had never argued against. Well. They might have been meant to put him down, but Ban had learned of baseness and vile creatures when he hunted and tracked, when he cut his sword into the guts of another man, when he dug into the ground to bury a comrade or cover the shit of the army. He had seen how the earth accepted base and vile things and transformed them into stinking, beautiful life again. Flowers and fresh grasses. Colorful mushrooms and beds of moss. That was magic. Could the stars do such a thing? Never. Only the earth—the wild, mysterious, dark earth—knew such power.
Ban’s power.<
br />
He had spent the winter he was seventeen in the estate of his cousins Alsax in northeastern Aremoria, just near the borders of Burgun and Diota. That past summer he’d continued fighting alongside the foot soldiers in Morimaros’s army, all while quietly working directly for the king. He did all his soldier’s work and every low job the Alsaxes expected of him without complaint, then instead of joining his fellows for food or drink after a shift, would slip away to do Morimaros’s bidding. Often that meant infiltrating the lands of the opposition, whether that was Burgun border towns or the manor houses of rebellious Aremore nobles. He slept hungry with herds of sheep, in precarious nests beside red eagles, and in a womb of heartwood when he found a tree who trusted him entire. Always exhausted, always thirsty. When Ban was missing from the army for days at a time, La Far spoke with his Alsax commander and smoothed it over, though it took a long while to trickle down to the foot soldiers that he was more than just a slippery deserter.
But at the end of that summer’s campaign, the king had invited Ban to spend an entire two months in Lionis, working with Morimaros and La Far together on sword craft and riding and any martial skill Ban thought to ask after. It had been one of the best times of his life, for he’d been trusted and treated as though he deserved nothing less.
When he returned to the Alsax estate for the winter, it was with the king’s own letter in hand. By the king’s orders, he was not to be put with the foot soldiers again, but allowed to use the cold, muffled, snowed-in months for nothing but magical study, and given a room of his own to accommodate it.
Ban was determined to return to Morimaros as great a wizard as possible: his service to the king was the only thing forcing others to recognize his worth, and so he would shine no matter what else tarnished him.
Though some old books had been written on the subject of wizarding by observers of the art, there were no practitioners in Aremore, and Ban was left without access to a teacher. Instead, he chose to learn from the trees and beasts themselves, and studied mainly through experimentation. His small corner room on the top story of the pale limestone estate smelled constantly of pine and wax; musty bats and sweet winter berry poultices; the vibrant, spicy ink made from the heartblood of trees; and fire. He worked on a wolf-skin rug turned leather up to be drawn on with charcoal; there he etched out words in the language of trees and drew circles and root diagrams to guide him. Usually a half-empty plate of cheese and bread and cold, dry meat sat nearly forgotten beside him, and a bottle of wine he never bothered pouring into a cup. When working, he wore little besides heavy wool trousers dyed the brown of the winter forest, so he might easily paint charcoal runes across his chest, or cut the shape of his name against his collarbone.
Thus Rory found him when he shoved through the door joining their rooms, stumbling slightly from all the impassioned sex and the nearly empty bottle of wine he’d so recently partaken of. Flushed and unfocused, he blinked at his older bastard brother, surprised to find Ban even less clothed than himself and covered in streaks of ash writing in the language of trees. “Are you doing magic?” he cried.
Ban frowned from the center of the wolf-skin and settled his hands on his knees. The fingers of his right hand were blackened. In his left he held a trio of black raven feathers. He did not have the patience after midnight to walk his brother through his attempt to whisper a secret to a distant cluster of ravens with a thin rope of pine smoke.
“I am, yet it is late, and I should rest.” Ban eyed his little brother: the loose trousers and bare feet, the fur-lined robe and tousled hair, the long pink scratches distorting the flare of freckles down his neck. Ban pressed his mouth together. Rory had barely been here two weeks and already had a lover—or three.
“I want to know how to do magic,” Rory breathed, kneeling beside Ban.
This wizarding belonged to Ban, it was the only thing of his own, and he did not want to invite Rory to share it. Rory already had so many things that should have been his older brother’s. Ban said, “Listening to the wind demands quietude of the heart, peaceful breathing, and willingness to be still, brother. None of which are skills you cultivate.”
“Your heart is not quiet, either, brother.”
“I can see your flush right now.”
“You just disapprove of my nightly activities.” Rory’s smile was all teasing and smug delight.
“I do, but that makes my words no less true. You’ll never learn magic if you fix your attention and passion so firmly on a course of loud spirit.”
Rory nudged Ban with his elbow. “So that is why you eschew the naked entertainments? For your magic?”
“That, but for the more obvious reason, too.”
“What?” the earlson laughed.
“You could father a bastard,” Ban hissed.
“If he’s like my brother, Ban, it would be quite the thing! I welcome it.”
The bastard scowled, but his brother threw an arm about him, still laughing, and quite obviously meaning every word. “Never fear, Ban, no power in the heavens or the roots could get my lover with child by me.”
Ban began to sneer a reply, but caught the angle of his brother’s smile. “Is that a man in there?” he asked, hushed.
“Erus Or,” Rory confided. “He is strong.”
“You have to stop, you have to be careful.” Ban gripped his brother’s arms. “Didn’t you hear of the man Connley executed for the same?”
Rory shrugged him off. “I’ll be fine. This is Aremoria, not home. Besides, Connley killed that man because he was married to Connley’s cousin and betrayed her, not because he betrayed her with another man.”
Unsettled, Ban went to the window and gripped the cold stone sill. Even if he desired to, he could never take such risks in his position, despite Morimaros’s favor, despite his success in war. All Ban had was the thin iron rod of his reputation.
And there was his golden brother Rory, laughing with the carefree certainty of his own invincibility.
This plan of Ban’s now, three years later, would do all it needed to do: ruin Errigal and tear into the island’s foundations, work toward Morimaros’s goals and prove to Elia she’d done no wrong. But most of all, it would hurt Rory, stripping away his easy confidence. Ban was a wizard revealing the truth of the world to show Rory that people are terrible sometimes and unfair, that one does not always deserve what one receives, and that there are consequences to living carelessly.
That, Ban was willing teach his brother.
The snap of leather warned Ban that his father approached, clumping up the stairs as if already upset. That would work in Ban’s favor. He crumpled the letter in his hand and put both fists over his head, elbows jutting at the window casement.
“Ban!” Errigal snapped. “What is this?”
Ban straightened, his eyes down anxiously, and hurried to tuck the false letter away, in a pocket close to his heart.
The earl was alone, dressed in casual linen and wool, a sword belt strapping his tunic down, sheathing a plain soldier’s blade. Errigal put his fist against the pommel and glowered. “Why did you put that up so quickly, son?”
“It’s nothing,” Ban said, giving a tight shake of his head. His lip throbbed where he’d cut it wrestling Rory.
“Oh ho? Then why seek to hide it from me?” Errigal came forward, large hand outstretched. “If it is nothing, then nothing shall I see.”
Ban grimaced to hide the thrill of battle rising again in his veins. “It is only a note from my brother, and I’ve not finished reading it. What I’ve read so far makes me think it’s not fit for you to see.”
“Give it to me, boy, or I’ll take great offense.” Errigal thrust his hand out again.
“I think it would give offense either way.”
“Let me have it.”
With seeming reluctance, Ban withdrew the letter. Eyes cast down, he added, “I hope—I truly believe, Father—that Rory wrote this only to test my virtue. He hasn’t known me since he left our cousins, with me st
ill in Aremoria last year, and only hears what men in the king’s retinue say about me: that I am a bastard and therefore not trustworthy.”
Errigal made a growling noise of frustration and snatched the letter. He so violently unfolded it that the edge pulled and tore. Ban crossed his arms over his chest and knocked back against the wall, easily pretending anxiety. This was the moment this would tell him if Errigal was as terrible and easy to turn as Lear.
As his father’s mouth moved along with the words he read and his large eyes narrowed, as his lips paled under his beard, Ban suddenly realized there was a sick thread of disappointment wound through his spine. Some part of him had hoped Errigal was better. That the earl could not believe so easily his own son would betray him. It was that same cursed piece of Ban that had yet to stop yearning for approval from his father. Ban clenched his teeth.
“This reverence for age keeps the best of us out of power,” Errigal read in a broad, disbelieving voice. “We don’t receive our fortunes until we are too old to enjoy them. Because we wait for our fathers to—” The earl’s hand twitched. “We must speak of this together, for you would have half of his revenue forever, and live beloved of your brother.”
Silence fell, but for the cool wind bringing the far-distant clangs of smithies and a howl out of the great forest. Errigal slammed the side of his fist to the wooden wall. “Conspiracy,” he whispered, staring past Ban out the window. “Is this—Can this be my son Rory? Has he the heart to write this … I would not think so.”
Ban put his mouth into a careful frown, though he wanted to hit Errigal, to knock him down and step on his throat, to show him exactly how much this hurt.
Errigal glanced sharp and hot at Ban. “When did you get this? Who brought it?”
“I found it in my room.” Still he did not latch his gaze onto his father’s, knowing his fury would shine through.
“Is it his hand? Your brother’s hand?”
Ban shook his head. “Were the subject good, I would swear it’s Rory’s writing, but being what it is … I cannot say yes. It does not seem written in his words, even.”