“Ban,” Brona warned as she shoved her feet into slippers.
Kayo chewed his bread, then flattened his hands against the table and leaned in. “What promise are you keeping to Elia Lear, Fox?”
Ban reeled back. “You read my letter? You—I trusted you with it!”
But the Oak Earl did not look at all chagrined. He said, “The lady showed it to me, and the king of Aremoria, too.”
No longer hungry, Ban did his best to hide himself behind a veneer of invulnerability. He lifted one shoulder as he’d seen Lady Regan do. “I see. So the lady will marry Morimaros?”
“Who else should she marry, Ban? What else should she do?” Kayo casually ripped more bread, and behind him Brona knelt to take her pot off the fire, hands wrapped in leather mitts. She glanced at Ban curiously as she poured them all tinctures of honeyed water. The clay cups warmed fast, and Ban sat again, clutching his and inhaling the familiar, sweet steam. He shook his head, answering Kayo with silence. His mother sat beside him, near enough their arms brushed.
Brona put her hand on Ban’s knee. “She needs to find her place, too,” she said, like a portent.
He let his hand fall atop hers. All Ban’s thoughts and feelings were awhirl, and he wished it were possible to receive word back from Morimaros, instead of only sending it. The king was so far from Innis Lear, in body and spirit. Had he lost trust in his Fox? How had he taken the note for Elia? Ban studied his water: the flakes of whatever petals or dry leaves Brona had steeped that floated atop the surface, the shiny ripples, the wavering steam. He drank, and the heat diffused down and throughout his body, relaxing him.
“She was glad to have word from you,” Kayo said. “Elia was. Though she grew anxious about it, when she told Morimaros you’d promised to aid her cause.”
“And what cause is that?” Brona asked.
Ban lied, fiercely, “To bring her home.”
His mother’s dark eyes softened, and she squeezed his knee. “You love her.”
“I—” Ban looked away from her again. “We were friends when we were young.”
“And now it is more, because you are children no longer.”
“It is not more,” he insisted. “I don’t do that. I would not. I’m not like…”
“Like me?”
“I was going to say like my father,” he said. “But if you want, yes. You as well.” Ban turned his blame toward Kayo, too. Kayo, unmarried, rich, titled, and previously so favored of the king. Worse than Errigal, Ban suddenly thought, for Errigal at least was honest with his affairs. “You returned here so fast, Oak Earl.” He could not keep the accusation from his tone, and did not want to hear it might have been Brona drawing Kayo back. Did not want to think of Elia, drawn to Aremoria for anything but protection.
“There is much to do here,” Kayo answered. “I must to the king, though he banished me. I fear for him in his daughters’ hands, for Gaela and Regan hold him in no regard.”
“Does he deserve for them to?”
Kayo frowned. It aged him past his forty years. “He was your king, Ban Errigal, no matter that he stepped down from power.”
“He was only ever a terrible old man to me, and never had, or even tried to earn, my respect. And even if he had, it would be lost now after what he did to Elia—to his family. To this island.” Though Ban struggled to argue evenly, he knew his words shook with passion and rage.
Brona said, “And like what Errigal has done to his first son?”
Yes, Ban nodded. Yes. “Where is my brother?” he asked softly, for it was all he could do now.
“Rory?” Brona leaned away. “How should I know?”
Kayo said, “We’ve only heard the news, from hunters and traders. It was everywhere when I landed on the island three days ago.”
“What? No.” Ban glanced between the two, and saw the truth of their protestations. “I sent him here. I told Rory to come here when I ushered him out of the Keep—for his own safety, of course. I said he could hide with you, Mama, that he could be secure and wait for—for me to settle our father down. If such a man could be settled at all.”
She shook her head no. “I’ve not seen him, nor has anyone in Hartfare.”
Ban opened his mouth but said nothing. Did Rory truly not trust him, to hurry off on his own?
“I leave tomorrow for Astora,” Kayo said. “I need to assess the situation there—I’m worried Astore doesn’t have the resources to defeat Connley, even with Lear at his side. Because Connley has Errigal, and much of the island itself listens to his wife. But Connley cannot be king.” Kayo glanced at Brona, a telling, secret glance of shared knowledge, and Ban ignored it, before their intimacy infuriated him again. Kayo swung his gaze back to Ban. “Come with me. We will join with Lear and make our plans. There are others, too: Rosrua is unhappy with the events of the Zenith Court, and Bracoch. Glennadoer will side with Connley, because of his father’s line. But with Lear, Oak, Rosrua, Bracoch, and Ban the Fox of Errigal, we can be a strong alternative to Astore’s might and Gaela’s ruthlessness, and you must know we need to oppose Connley.”
Ban frowned. He did not know it was necessary to oppose Connley. Why would Connley be a worse king than Lear or Astore? Perhaps Innis Lear needed a dangerous, wary king for once, who did not blindly obey the stars. A king with a witch for a wife. Nearer to the earth saints than the cold stars. “Why do you speak of kings, when Gaela and Regan are queen?”
“Not yet, they aren’t. Not until Midwinter. Not until the ritual is complete. Until then everything is in transition. It is a twilight time. And they are merely heirs, married to these ambitious, antagonistic men, who will not sit by and let their wives rule without them.”
Though Ban was not ready to underestimate Regan, he nodded for Kayo. It was too perfect a position to waste: Regan trusted him with her most intimate secrets, and now here was Kay Oak confessing his own plans. Ban was being put in the center of it all. He asked, “You think Lear will accept your help? He was even more furious at you than at Elia.”
“This is where Kayo is supposed to be,” Brona said, in a voice Ban well remembered: her witch’s voice. The smooth, deep tone of invocation, when she said something she’d heard from the roots, from earth saints and holy bones.
Kayo sighed. “Ban, I love Lear as a brother, and long ago I chose this island for my home. I gave up everything else I might’ve been: my name, my family of Taria Queen, my skills as a trader, and the wide road. Everything, boy. For Innis Lear. For the king who is not a cruel or stupid man, but only a hurting, and lost one, who allowed himself be defeated by such things. And I am here for Elia.” Kayo glanced out the window at the bright day. “Lear is my king, still my sister’s husband. The father of my godchild and her sisters. For the good of Innis Lear and its people, this must be settled fast and well. We cannot have a two- or three-way war. That would open us up too much to Aremoria, and I’ve spoken recently with Morimaros and his council. He will surely take Innis Lear if we don’t get a hold of it before Midwinter.”
“Morimaros is a good king, a better commander,” Ban said. “I served in his army. If he chooses to invade our island, he will win it.”
Brona said gently, “You know what is right, son; you’ve always been rooted by it, here.”
“Have I? You said to me once, This is your fate—then so easily you sent me away. How can you know Errigal did not change the way I was grounded, or that Aremoria did not cure me from caring about this chunk of battered rock? I have made choices in a different language than that of Innis Lear, been saved and adored by strange trees whose words shift and laugh. What if I don’t choose Innis Lear now? It has never chosen me.”
He cut himself off, before he openly admitted his loyalties, before he gave too much away.
His mother studied him a long time; Ban focused on the rhythm of his breath and the crackle of the fire in the hearth.
Kayo said, “We’re not asking you to choose Innis Lear. We’re asking you to choose Elia.”
&
nbsp; “How?” he demanded, more urgently than he should have.
“To keep your promise and fight for her. If you will help bring her home the right way, you must be on my side in this, and on Lear’s, until Elia herself is ready.”
“Ready for what?” Ban asked.
It was Brona who said, calmly and simply, “To take the throne.”
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AGO, HARTFARE
FEW PEOPLE WOULD think to look for the queen of Innis Lear here inside this tiny cottage, tucked into the heart of the White Forest. Fewer still would expect her lounging in supreme contentment on a low, straw-filled mattress beside the hearth.
But Dalat was indeed at Hartfare, spending the week with her friend Brona, the witch of the White Forest. Both of them were heavily pregnant and ready to be finished with the experience.
Brona cupped her belly and crouched to relieve the pressure in the small of her back. She wore a long shift, sliced up the center to open in front so she could easily touch her naked skin, or press back with the heel of her hand when the baby elbowed her or stretched. Her ruffled skirt cinched the shift closed again under her belly, low around her hips, and covering her thighs, knees, and bottom. Still, it was nothing modest by anyone’s standards. A heavy wool cloak weighed on Brona’s shoulders, keeping in what warmth she could; this was early spring, and even the fire was not enough to heat bare skin. Cold, damp air slicked beneath the door of the cottage and at the open windows.
But the witch refused to bundle up and so lose the ability to splay her hands around her son whenever she liked.
The queen groaned, shifting onto her side where she lay on Brona’s bed. “Help me get my feet up, shk lab-i,” Dalat said, beckoning to her second daughter.
Regan Lear, six years old and quietly precocious, moved immediately to lift her mother’s feet.
That simple gesture caused a flutter in Brona’s heart. She could not wait to hold her son, to feel his touch outside her womb.
Dalat, because she was a good friend, saw Brona’s hunger. “Soon,” the queen said softly. “You’ll have him. We both will have them.”
It was Brona’s first child—and her only, she knew, through careful wormwork—but this would be Dalat’s third. Brona had not asked if the feelings changed: the anticipation, the pain, the longing, the exhaustion. Dalat’s face was older now than it had been when Gaela was born nearly eight years ago. The queen was thinner beneath her cheeks, despite health and happiness, but her skin still shone, her smile was vivid, and the merriment that lived in her deep brown eyes promised adventure, as much as it always did. When Brona spent time with Dalat, the witch felt as though she’d experienced so much more than even her own wild life on this angry island could provide: long sea-voyages, storms and illness, foreign ports and magnificent palaces built of shining white stone, points of lapis blue set into necklaces and coronas of gold, vast prairies of rolling, shifting sand, and poetry that dropped from the tongues of men and women like diamonds.
“Is the baby hurting you, Mother?” Regan Lear interrupted Brona’s musing, sitting down on the mattress beside her mother’s head to put a cool brown hand on the queen’s black braids.
“Ah, only a slight bit,” Dalat admitted.
“But I didn’t.”
The queen smiled and poked a finger against Regan’s ribs. The girl bent away, pressing her mouth closed against laughing too brightly. Dalat’s second daughter wore a more formal dress than even her mother, long and dyed bold purple. Brona knew—because she had repeatedly cast spreads of holy bones on behalf of each princess of Innis Lear—that this one carved her place already, as a partner and prop, mother or lover, perhaps even a witch herself. A consort, but never a true queen.
That destiny belonged to the unborn princess, or perhaps that first daughter, the ferocious warrior who even now cut across the lane outside Brona’s cottage, wooden sword in hand, meeting the boisterous Earl Errigal stroke for stroke.
Brona groaned as she settled onto the floor, her knees bent and splayed to the side, soles of her feet together. The princess eyed her suspiciously, judging the witch’s improper attire, but Brona wrinkled her nose and smiled; Regan mimicked the exact same position with the limber ease of childhood.
“Are we casting bones now?” Dalat’s daughter asked, leaning toward Brona eagerly, yet managing to keep her voice smooth.
“As the princess commands,” Brona replied, holding out her hand.
Regan hopped up to fetch Brona’s bag of bones, reverently offering them to the witch before resuming her seated position.
“Would you like a reading for yourself?” Brona asked.
The princess’s brow wrinkled as she thought. She glanced at her mother and Dalat lifted her eyebrows and nodded, giving Regan what permission she liked. But the princess, all of six years old, touched her flat little stomach and said, “For the babies.”
Brona painstakingly shifted her own seat until she leaned the small of her back against the mattress, where Dalat could put a hand between her shoulder blades, connecting the friends in spirit. Then the witch removed her cards and bones from the leather pouch. She set the bone, crystal, and antler holy bones along her thighs and began to shuffle the cards. Closing her eyes, Brona thanked the stars and worms of her heart for a friend like this queen, vivacious and cunning and gentle, who loved her enough to tuck herself away from the king and his kingdom—all the business Dalat herself saw to on behalf of her absent-minded husband—in order to comfort Brona through her first pregnancy. The witch sighed deeply as she shuffled, casting her thoughts too inside her, toward her little son. Brona listened to the threads of light and earthly shadows weaving around him, those that stretched toward Dalat behind, weaving about the queen’s third daughter.
The witch of the White Forest held her eyes shut as she spread the cards in a spiral. “Choose a bone,” she instructed the queen and the princess. Both did, the former taking the crystal saint of stars, the later picking up a pale bone carved like a leaf: the Worm of Birds. Brona tossed the remaining seven bones across the spiral of cards. “Now,” she said, “please put your bones down where you will. Dalat, yours will be for your daughter, and Regan, if you will bless my son with your casting.”
Regan’s eyes lit up with pride and she bent over the spread in contemplation. The queen put her saint of stars bone against the card for the Bird of Dreams. The princess glanced up at her mother, then Regan reached out, nearly setting the chosen worm bone against the Tree of Thorns card—but a hesitation shifted her hand eastward, and she placed it instead against the linked corners of two others; Tree of Ancestors and Bird of Rivers. “Is that all right?” the princess whispered.
“Of course,” Brona whispered back. “You have rootwater in your heart. You know where these bones belong.”
The princess nodded slowly.
The witch slid her gaze over and around the cards. “What do you see, little witch?”
“I don’t know.”
“Look, and feel, and listen, and there will be something.”
Regan glanced to her mother.
Dalat encouraged, “Go on.”
“Here,” said the witch, pointing to the Bird of Dreams card. Silver lines of moonlight wove throughout the feathers of an elegant songbird, and its shadow was a raven of stars and blood. “What does this card your mother chose tell you about your baby sister, with words or in feelings.”
The young princess pursed her lips.
“Do not think too long,” Brona counseled.
Regan closed her eyes and breathed slowly, lips parted as if to taste the fire-warmed air. “I can’t trust her,” she whispered.
“What!” Dalat frowned.
“She’s not real!” Regan glanced at her mother in a panic. “I’m sorry, that’s…”
“Of course she is real.”
The witch hummed, studying the delicate crystal saint of stars where it lay against the card, connecting the wings of the moonlight songbird and its bloody raven shadow. “Sh
e is only a future now,” Brona said. “Nothing but a promise, growing and wanting. But that future she is will be made by our pasts, entwined together—our pasts and our loves and troubles. She is a dream.”
Seeming relieved by the longer, magical explanation, Regan looked to her mother again, for forgiveness.
“I am willing to love a dream,” the queen said.
Regan hugged herself. “I don’t know how.”
Dalat flipped her hands, calling Regan onto the mattress with her. The princess climbed carefully against her mother, and Dalat wrapped her arm around Regan as her middle daughter curled around the bulge of the queen’s belly. “Imagine her, Regan, my pretty shk lab-i. Imagine what she might be.”
As mother and daughter dreamed together, Brona Hartfare glanced again at the spiral of cards and scattered holy bones. Her gaze drifted, bland and unfocused, as she waited for the symbols and names to paint her a story, for the voice of prophecy to whisper.
Suddenly, the witch stopped breathing: neither queen nor princess noticed, for the witch had simply fallen silent, unmoving, and alone. Because in honor of Brona’s son, Regan Lear had put the Worm of Birds bone between the cards of the Tree of Ancestors and the Bird of Rivers.
For months, Brona’s son’s name had echoed her dreams, been whispered in long, ragged songs by the wind and roots of Innis Lear. His heart, blood, and magic would resonate, would echo up and up, outward and even deep into the bedrock of Innis Lear until every inch and crevice of the island knew his name. Knew him, and loved him.
But with the Worm of Birds there, his future of power and love instead became his doom.
Brona flicked her eyes to little Regan Lear, so innocently snuggled against her mother, whispering in babyish confidence.
Such a young girl could not know what she’d done, what she’d revealed like a curse.