And so of course, it did not last: there came the memory of the hardened face of his father at dawn, and the sneering, proud king, and the realization that she would let him go, that he would be forever alone.
Putting his forehead to the wall, Ban tried to empty his mind again. The cold of the stone seeped into his skin.
He must tell Gaela and Regan he’d killed King Lear.
It was a weight Ban could not quite shrug off. Not for loyalty or sympathy for the loss of a father, nor for regrets—this was by no means the first man the Fox had led to his death. No, he was glad the old man was gone, but Ban had not guessed that this utter, devastating silence would ever be the consequence.
Innis Lear itself grieved the terrible old man, despite his rejection of rootwater and magic, his injury to the land itself. The island wept and wailed, but still it did not speak.
The king’s death should have been a triumph, a gleeful, malicious satisfaction sweet on Ban’s tongue. Instead, his stomach knotted anxiously.
Finally, there came the knock to summon him. Ban leapt at the door, composing himself once more as he was led through the narrow castle corridors. Despite broad windows, Gaela’s room was suffocating and closed up, brightened only by candles and firelight. The dark reds and blues and purples reminded Ban of nothing so much as the innards of a dying man, sprawled across a bloody battlefield. Perhaps that was exactly by design.
“Ban the Fox,” Gaela Lear said by way of greeting, and he liked that she used the name he’d earned, not his father’s bequest.
Ban had not been this near to the eldest daughter of Lear in years.
“Queen,” he said softly, giving her back the title that she, too, had earned.
Both Gaela and Regan sat already in tall-backed chairs, wine in a jug and plenty of steaming meat on their plates. It smelled delicious. Gaela gestured with greasy fingers for him to sit, to pour himself wine. She swallowed her bite. “We did not wait, so please do not worry about any formality now.”
Ban glanced to Regan, who’d bathed, and wore a dark dress of Gaela’s, tied tight enough to pucker at the eyelets, and bound with a wide pink belt in order to fit her slighter frame. The lady’s hair was braided simply in a loose crown, her face drawn still in grief. But her eyes were bright again. She nodded once to Ban, holding his gaze longer than was necessary; Gaela noticed this with narrowed eyes.
He could do nothing about that, and so sat, helping himself to the duck. Ban fed his suddenly voracious appetite while the fire crackled and wind blew hollow and high against narrow windows. Regan picked slowly at her plate, but Gaela finished and leaned back, and Ban knew it was a signal he should stop, too. He wiped his hands and drank deep of the dark wine. For courage.
The lady of Astore studied him, lounging back in her chair. Her dress was cut low and dyed so deep a purple it would be easy to imagine it only an extension of her skin. Some thick twists of hair, free of the white ribbons Gaela wore for mourning, had nestled against her neck and collar. “Well, Ban. You are the Earl Errigal now, besides a wizard, a soldier, and a spy. And my sister claims you’re hers.”
It was quite the opening gambit. Ban said, “Your sister Regan has won loyalty from me, and from the trees and roots, who are my friends. Her husband won me, too, by his own mettle and honor. Though I never thought they were at cross-purpose to you and your aims.”
Regan smiled, the ghost of last week’s sharpness in the delicate corners. “Never you and yours, Gaela. But your husband’s, maybe.”
Gaela held her gaze on Ban, never blinking. She was a ferocious dragon, born of these cold north mountains; he only a southern fox.
Showing his teeth, too, Ban said, “You were surely at cross-purpose with Astore, to kill him in the way you did.”
Ban was dazzled by the fierceness of Gaela’s regard, her grimace nearer a grin. “He betrayed me, and thought to rise higher.”
Regan said, “As did the former Errigal. And our uncle offered Ban the same, once.”
“Did he?” Gaela said silkily.
A flutter in Ban’s stomach caused him to regret the greasy duck he’d eaten, and the wine went sour on the back of his tongue. He forced a nod. “I told the Oak Earl no. And I said the same to your sister Elia, herself, when she told me she would find—recover—and save your father, bring him out from the wilderness where he was cast.”
At this, both sisters leaned forward. “What is this?” Regan asked.
The Fox held his hand still on the cup of wine. “The night of the storm, when I led my father to his death, and Connley met his own, I came across Elia Lear lodged in Hartfare.”
“Elia is on Innis Lear.” Gaela stood, towering over the table.
I’m going to save you, too.
Ban forced himself to speak. He would see out the plan, commit to this destruction. “She came to save your father, from you both, no matter the cost.”
“Does she have Aremoria behind her?” Gaela leaned toward him, hands on the table.
“Not yet,” Ban answered, heart pounding. “But she will summon him, if she needs to. Consider making him the king of Innis Lear.”
“Over my dead body,” snarled Gaela.
Regan closed her eyes. “What a fool our baby sister is, to set her sights so low.”
“Aremoria will see the loss of your husbands as opportunity,” Ban said, though it was only partially true.
A soft cry of distress escaped Regan’s lips. Gaela gripped her shoulder. “We will find vengeance for Connley’s death, sister,” Gaela promised. “Take Errigal, and this entire island, for our own, in your husband’s memory and for our glory. Elia will be sorry to come home for this challenge. She should have done as we said, and we would have made her choices easy.”
Regan clutched Gaela’s hand. The two shared a long, hot stare.
Ban lowered his gaze to the remains of duck and violent streaks of berry preserves.
“You look poorly, Ban,” Regan said.
“I am reluctant to go against your youngest sister. To see her harmed, more than she might otherwise be. We were friends, once.”
“But?” Gaela prompted, sensing his hesitation.
“I must—we must.” Ban let all the years of loathing coat his voice. “Elia would forgive Lear everything.”
Gaela downed her wine, licked a drop of it from the corner of her mouth. She came to him and grasped the shoulder of his tunic, dragging Ban to his feet. Regan joined them, taking his hand in her cold fingers.
Both his and Gaela’s hands were rough and dry, muscled and scarred by swordwork. Regan’s were smooth and elegant, with nails ragged from their travels, still honed enough to bite. Ban thought of Elia’s soft brown skin, how it would blister if she went to war.
“You hate our father as much as we do,” Gaela said. “I remember you, as a boy. He called you her dog. As if dogs are not loyal, not true.”
“And you made yourself a fox,” Regan continued.
Gaela said, “I made myself, too, Fox.”
“He was sent away, Gaela, for the same reasons our mother was murdered. As heartlessly, as carelessly, as if so easily discarded.”
If he did not confess to his part in Lear’s death, it would never be known. The king died of age, of a lack of breath. It was none of Ban’s doing. Yet he also greatly wanted the credit, to be included in the heat of their regard. And they needed to know it was done, that their way was clear. That Elia’s hopes were already in ruins. “I have had my revenge,” Ban said huskily.
Regan’s nails bit into his hand. “Ambitious fox,” she whispered, eyes stuck on his face, as if she would drown without him.
Before he could explain, Gaela said, “Do you swear to my cause, Ban the Fox, that which is my sister Regan’s cause, as well?”
“I swear,” he said, both believing it in that moment, and knowing it would not matter.
Neither woman knew how fickle Ban’s oaths were.
Regan said, “You should marry me.”
T
he air went still and heat spiked all through Ban, then Gaela snapped, “What?”
Regan detached herself from her sister and faced Ban. Though her hair was unadorned, and there’d been no trace of paint on her lips for days, that wintry beauty remained. “You are Errigal now, by our word. Become Connley, too,” she said, cool and gracious. “Ban the Fox, general of Innis Lear’s armies, all of them, beneath Gaela Astore of Lear. United by marriage and the roots of the island. Three impossibly strong lines of power between us. Our blood and our roots are suited.”
Ban could hardly breathe. Elia had refused to run with him, to leave the island, to choose him for nothing but love itself. And here her sister would choose him so boldly, proposing that their partnership would make the island stronger, that his presence would make her stronger.
Gaela studied her favored sister with narrow eyes. “You would have no mourning time. It might be seen as desperate.”
“It is desperate,” Regan answered, her gaze all for Ban. “But I will not let our father win now, even under Elia’s aegis. I will do anything to end their bid, to end them. Connley is dead, but we will be queen, Gaela. He died for it, and there will be nothing can stop me now.”
She drifted nearer to him. “Don’t you desire me, Ban Errigal?” Regan whispered.
He parted his lips to answer—something, Ban did not know what—and then Regan kissed him.
Ban gasped against her mouth. He lifted his hands and found her elbows, then her ribs, as Regan seduced him with this slow, sensuous kiss. Cool shade and a slender, crystal waterfall; she was a refuge from bruising sunlight and battering wind, from the hungry salt sea and cruel constellations. It stirred him, but not like Elia. He thought of her, and it hurt to do so, more even than he had expected.
Gaela’s deep laugh echoed, in the room and in Ban’s gut.
Regan ended her kiss with a delicate lick, a taste of his teeth. Her hands lit upon his jaw, but her eyes remained dull and quiet. Ban could see her disaffection, despite the prowess of her kiss. She cared not for him, not nearly as she had for Connley.
“Connley would have approved,” Regan said with a hush, as if she heard Ban’s thoughts. She let her fingers stroke him as she lowered her hands. “I would marry you, Ban, and we would be well matched, though you are young, and in love with Elia.”
Ban felt frantic, all at once: the terrified, cornered rabbit, not the fox.
“When it is all over, perhaps,” Regan continued, glancing at her sister, not for permission but only agreement.
Gaela snorted. “Win this battle for us, Fox, and perhaps you’ll be a duke for it, and shortly after a king.”
“I will win it. For myself, and for you. But I will never be a king, nor even—a duke.” Ban backed away from both, clutching his trembling hands at his sides as he bowed.
He remembered the messy passion with which Elia had kissed him. Insisting, making a home for him inside of her. Then the equally impassioned certainty with which she’d chosen against him, afterward.
Gaela returned to the table and poured them all more wine.
Ban took his cup from her hand. He drank it fast, and though Gaela smirked at him and made to speak, he was quicker.
“King Lear is dead.”
“What?” growled Gaela. “What did you say?”
“The—your father. Your father is dead.”
Regan grasped his jaw. “How do you know this? When?”
“I killed him,” Ban said hoarsely, pulling free of the two women to stand as tall as he could, apart so that he might have a chance if they leapt to kill him. “The night Connley died. You raged and wept so thoroughly. I had Lear’s breath in my hand, and I took it from him forever.”
Gaela was shaking her head. “Magic? Is this only magic? You did not cut out his heart, or see him go cold?”
“No.”
“How can you be sure, then? Are you as mad as he is? Shall I throw you in the bottom of my tower for this treason?”
Ban looked at Regan. “I hated him. But he was safe, and living, my spell waiting for your deployment. Then you reminded me. This was all the fault of our fathers: they have always been the cause of our misery. So they are dead now, mine and yours, both. We are free of them! We are beholden only to ourselves, no cursed stars.”
Regan stared at him, breath shallow, the gleam of awe sparking deep in her eyes.
“Ban Errigal, are you certain?” Gaela demanded. Her dinner knife was clutched in her fist. “My father is dead? You killed him, truly? You robbed me, so easily, of my vengeance?”
“Listen to the island,” Ban replied, trembling but sure. “Listen to this angry wind that has blown four long days and nights—since he died—and hear that it says nothing. If you can. Or ask your sister, and she will confirm. The island is silent even as it screams. There must be a king of Innis Lear. It longs for a head beneath a crown. It must have a ruler. Without a king, Innis Lear will die, or wilt, or—or the rootwaters will go dry, and the island will crumble into the sea if one of you does not take the crown now. Much faster than it has been doing, even under the fatal stewardship of that old, wretched fool.”
Gaela’s lips parted eagerly.
“The rootwaters,” Regan murmured, drifting toward the window. “They’ll accept me.”
“You?” Gaela stalked after her, took her arm harshly, and spun her sister around. “Me. I will be king.”
“Connley is dead,” Regan insisted, as if it meant anything. Would prove something.
“No, you are Connley! And I am Astore. We are Innis Lear, sister, as has always been our intention. No stars. We will make our own meaning. Let us go now to the throne room and declare it so!” Gaela laughed.
Ban shook his head, knowing in his gut what he said was true: “The rootwaters must accept you. The island. Not the people. Whatever ritual is done on the Longest Night, that is what you must do to win the crown. Then the people will follow, only after that. Even Elia will agree to support your claim, if the island accepts you.”
Regan nodded slowly. “Yes. Yes, Gaela. Let us go together. Now. To the rootwaters of the Tarinnish. By morning we will be the queens of Innis Lear and nothing will stop us.” She picked up her cup and drank all its wine, lifting her chin to reveal her tender, vulnerable throat. When she finished, the redness clung to her lips like blood.
Gaela lifted her cup in salute, and smiled.
Ban the Fox did not smile, because outside the wind blew voicelessly still.
ELIA
THROUGH THE COLD night came a summons:
Elia of Lear.
Elia.
She’d been dreaming of something, but it was gone now, leaving only flowery vestiges in her memory.
Elia sat up in the small bed, awake.
Silence—but for the wordless wind and the crackle of straw as her own body settled.
Elia.
It was the trees.
Leaping to her feet, Elia grabbed her boots and shoved them on. Fumbling for her overdress, she was glad it laced up the sides instead of the back; Aefa stayed every night with her parents, and couldn’t have helped tie anything tonight. The days had grown colder, so Elia grabbed the wool blanket from the bed and wrapped it over her shoulders before stepping outside.
Hartfare slept.
Overhead stars turned, winking and shimmering as if they crawled and moved of their own accord. Elia saw too many patterns, too many possibilities, the constellations weaving in and out of each other, rivers of stars and potential. She blinked.
The sky stilled.
Elia drew a deep breath of cold air. She listened, hoping to hear the call of Innis Lear again.
Hello, she whispered.
Wind blew in reply, flicking small, cold fingers against her messy crown of braids, teasing her nape until she drew the blanket tighter around herself.
Elia, said a few trees—those at the southwest of the village.
That was the way she walked.
For three days she’d lived in H
artfare, enduring as the island mourned. In all that time, the wind had not stopped howling and keening in sorrow, though Elia had cried herself out the first night. They’d brought her father here, to Brona’s cottage, and washed him, put him in a simple gray shift. Elia had dotted his birth stars down his forehead with the white of star priests. She cast a final chart for him, too, based on the stars showing at the moment of his death: he should be interred when the Autumn Throne crested, a week before the Longest Night, the stars said. Nearly three months from now. And so with Brona and Kayo, Lear’s youngest daughter had bound her father’s body in cloth and settled him into a box built of oak, lined with flint and chips of blue granite. The once-king rested now back in the meadow where he’d died, guarded by a trio of his retainers until Elia was ready to have him sent north to Dondubhan.
Brona advised that Elia must consolidate her strength here in the south, and Kayo agreed, once he was able to speak again, after two feverish days when Brona fussed and worried the infection would take his other eye. The worst had passed, and he would see again, if dimly and incomplete. Aefa argued still that Elia ought to take residence at the Summer Seat, because it made a powerful statement. Elia had listened to them, but wished she was able to hear the trees’ opinion.
Elia had promised to choose by the time the Star of First Birds awoke at dusk, inside the heart of the Throne. That would be within two nights. Then Kayo could send messengers to the Earls Bracoch and Rosrua, to the Earl Glennadoer, and to the retainers at the Summer Seat, that Elia was on Innis Lear. That the king had died.
She was fairly certain she would go first to Errigal Keep as she’d promised Ban, in hope that he too would keep his promise and bring Elia’s sisters to her there.
They needed to speak together, even more now with their father dead. And Elia did believe Kayo when he insisted she should not go to Gaela, for it would appear that Elia was the supplicant, that she agreed to her eldest sister’s ruinous claim to the crown. No, Elia must have her sisters come to her, it was the only way to establish any power in their dangerous triangle. Or hope to sway Regan on behalf of these most beloved wells and roots.