The roses hiss and shake themselves hard enough that petals drop free, falling like tears. They’ve learned to express themselves in human ways, after so many generations beloved of Innis Lear’s queens.
Thank you, he whispers. Shall I tell you a secret? We’d been sparring, and I asked the wind to dance with me. I used magic; I cheated. The wind puffed in his eyes and distracted him so I pushed past his buckler. He was furious, said I was lazy and a trickster. There should be no room for magic between men and their swords. I said he uses his advantages, oughtn’t I use mine? The prince makes a fist again, then presses his other hand tighter to where his upper arm is bruised. I didn’t expect him to hit me.
Wind gusts through the garden, shaking the cherry trees and bending the juniper: sharp, consoling scents lift toward him, and it is a juniper who says, Now, but the prince does not understand why.
The roses do.
I’ll be as tall as him someday, but not as big, the prince says. If I don’t use magic, I’ll never win, and if I don’t win, he won’t love me. Even when I wear the crown someday, he won’t.
WE LOVE YOU, the entire garden cries.
The prince smiles, and some tension falls away. He touches the sickle curve of a thorn. Pressing, he gasps, but shows the roses the bright dot of scarlet that blossoms at the pad of his index finger. I can give my blood, too. It’s all a sacrifice that binds everyone on Innis Lear.
Prince, says the wind, and Rowan, and from the depths of the black Tarinnish a lighter voice resonates through the murmuring, whispering roots: Now, she says.
The prince stands, confused. “Now?”
Roses sigh and curl, vines pull away from the corner of their wall, roots lifting to draw out of the crumbling, rich soil: the roots cradle a thing in spindly, twisted fingers like the hands of an ancient earth saint.
Crouching, the prince reaches out and accepts the bundle. Wrapped in leather and rotten wool, but untouched by worm or beetle or mold, is a book.
Delighted, for Rowan Lear has always loved books, he curls his feet beneath him and opens it on his lap.
Lined with rows and paragraphs of delicate handwriting, the book is filled with the hash-marked language of trees. The words describe glimpses of strange skies and daily experiences, like a diary, but no—this is magic, this is dreaming substance, not waking life. The boy flips through, reading pieces of different entries:
I sit with my father upon stone chairs placed in a meadow as though the meadow were a great hall: he is young, or at least younger than I last knew him. We are of an age, I realize, and he laughs a booming, merry laugh I have never heard before. His long face is hardly wrinkled, and all that thick hair is dark as oak gall. “You, girl, are going to be a mess of a mother,” he says, and I am offended, though it is what I believe in my most frightened moments. When I wake I understand, and I cry softly alone, while the sun rises. Why was it not my mother instead, come to tell me I am pregnant?
The sky is pristine blue and cloudless, but rain falls against my skin and my feet do not touch the ground.
In an ocean I lay, deep in the blackest part, where there is no difference between the night sky, moonless, and the water. I am cradled by the peaceful flow of impossible black water, drifting as though the water were wind. A slow-moving current of wind, inexorable, unstoppable, too like thick blood to understand the intention.
My sister whispers my name again and again. I cannot find her, though I wander for months and years, and maybe that was her desire all along, that I
In the middle of the day, the sun becomes the moon, a half-moon, and around it the Dragon of the North stretches and pulls, so far out of place. The horizon is the color of bloody sunset, and as the red-red streaks reach toward the dragon, its eye becomes Calpurlugh and all the stars roar like a lion, and I know Aremoria has declared war against Diota once again.
Ban walks the cliffside to the south of the Summer Seat. He looks toward the center of the island, and at his side is a great, ranging lion. It is young, hungry, but leans its shoulder into his thigh with affection. Sometimes he pauses to scratch its ear, other times he shoves it away, frowning.
Grandson—
The prince of Innis Lear drops the book.
Blood from his finger smears against the corner of that page.
Grandmother, he whispers in the language of trees. The wind blows back, encouraging and pleasant. The roses remember her soft smile and meandering moods—she did not die here in the rose garden, though they beseeched her to. This book was the next best thing, a piece of her, a flower of her mind built of spiraling petal-dreams, gifted to the roses to embrace, to keep, to hold until the time a new dreamer was born.
Rowan lifts the book again, and it falls to the same page:
Grandson—this is what I need to tell you: there comes a time when the stars will offer no solace, and you must open them. I cannot be certain what this means, but it is the thing I must say to you. That, and: Innis Lear must always have a queen. Not a woman, but a queen—a lover for the island, a consort. Listen to Innis Lear, love the stars, and partner with the rootwaters. This is how to be a queen of Innis Lear. You do not rule, you do not control, you become.
What does this mean? Rowan asks the wind.
It’s all a sacrifice that binds everyone on Innis Lear, the roses reply, feeding his words back to him as a riddle.
I understand, he says, though he does not yet, not quite. Understanding will take years and dreams, rootwaters and confessions and finally understanding that he is on his own with this. Even his mother allies herself more strongly with her sister than with her son. When Rowan tells her, a few months later, that her husband broke his ribs, she shrugs tenderly and says, “If your mother must convince your father that you are strong, how will you ever become so?” It isn’t what Rowan wants from Ryrie, but rare it is for the children of queens to get what they want.
It does not occur to him to tell Solas, or perhaps it is the book, and the Dreamer’s words for her grandson that sway him: This is how to be a queen of Innis Lear. You do not rule, you do not control, you become. From this, he decides the queen’s only ally must be the island, too, and if he tells Solas everything, she will see him not as family, but as a rival. Rowan is too concerned with survival to risk it.
Thus is made a choice that, though never spoken aloud, never expressed, shifts the very stars in the sky. For if Rowan Lear had told his aunt Solas the truth about Owyn Glennadoer then, everything would be different now.
BANNA MORA
Northern Innis Lear, the Longest Night
THEY CLIMBED THE Mountain of Teeth on the shortest day of the year, only the two of them: Banna Mora Errigal and Rowan Lear.
As she struggled up the rocky path, clutching the straps of the pack tied to her shoulders and back, she told herself the entire excursion was a test: there was no dragon, only a constellation, and it would tell her nothing.
Mora paused to unlatch her sack of water and drink. Her throat ached at the nearly frozen liquid and the harsh splash it made inside her empty belly, cooling her with tiny knives. She tossed it to Rowan. He’d worked too hard, hiking behind her, to do more than hum breathlessly. Together they gazed out at the valley of Glennadoer behind them. They’d made it halfway up the mountain path and the harsh gray-gold island displayed itself.
The Mountain of Teeth was a half mile high at its summit, the tallest mountain on the island, and the northernmost of the Jawbone range. At sunset it was said to glow dull pink, as though blood had been spilt down its sharp flanks. It was surrounded by rough moors and murky bogs for miles, and in the northwest a town had settled beside a crystal stream to care for local herders and visiting pilgrims. Their horses waited back at the pilgrim’s inn, as this path was intended only for walking, for carrying what a person could under their own strength.
The trail sliced back and forth up the rocky face, over slopes of nothing but chunks of quartzite and around knifelike protrusions. Rowan and Mora would make it to t
he summit in a few more hours of hard climbing, where they would greet the Dragon of the North.
It was a ritual itself, Rowan had said: fasting and physical exhaustion would leave mind and heart open to the dragon and its gifts.
“Do you expect a star saint to descend and whisper wisdom into my ears?” Mora had demanded at the base of the path, where a sign read GATE TO HEAVEN in the hash-mark language of trees.
Rowan shrugged. “I experienced great clarity when I met the dragon.”
“What sort of clarity?” she asked, blocking their path up. She would not take a step until he answered.
Moving close as if he might kiss her again—he had not, nor had she him, since their first night in Glennadoer—Rowan said very softly, “The sort of clarity that tells you who you are meant to be, with such a pristine righteous voice that if you close your eyes seven years later, you’ll always hear it again.”
“You hear it now?” she murmured, awed despite herself.
With a smile, Rowan closed his eyes. “Now I do.”
“You are extremely obnoxious.”
“And you’re still repressed,” he answered, pushing her aside with a hand on her arm. And Rowan walked past her up the mountain. Her choice was to either remain alone, or follow.
Hours later, barely able to speak for the weariness in her body, Mora was ready for any kind of clarity.
They reached the pinnacle of the path just as the sun was setting. A strip of blue cloth flapped in the freezing north wind, tied to a pole twice as tall as Mora. Wrapped around the pole were threaded human teeth.
Nothing grew here but scrub grass, and deceitfully smooth falls of scree slid down on both sides of the summit like trailing gray skirts. Wind shoved at Mora, and she crouched beside a sharp gray-pink rock. Here the path spread only as wide as her outstretched arms. Rowan dropped his pack and sighed loud and welcoming, hands splayed, eyes shut, mouth open. Hello, heavens, he said in the language of trees.
Mora recalled his claim the words meant something closer to, I ask you to welcome me, and that felt massively more appropriate here at the top of the world. “I ask you to welcome me,” she said in Aremore.
Rowan smiled and knelt beside her, untying from his pack a bundle of sticks with which to make a fire after they greeted the dragon. They would spend the night here, leaning together on this peak. Mora drank water again, and then withdrew the wine pouch that had bounced against her hip beside the water.
It was unseasonably warm, but still she wore mittens and a heavy leather-and-wool coat, and a scarf wound about her head and neck. The scarf Mora shoved now into the bag in place of the box of dry meat and cheese with which they would break their fast when the time came. Tied below the bag was a thin mat of rushes and a blanket; Rowan carried a quilt tucked under his pack and a bearskin over his shoulders to spread against the rocky ground.
The sky was clear, the wind brisk. Nothing would settle tonight, and the stars would shine like crystals.
Once everything was laid out for camp, Mora sat facing the setting sun. It blazed and bled over the moors, glinting off bog-land and the curve of the Unnamed River that poured out of the Jawbone range north to the tip of the island. The sky transformed from blue to violet, with hot yellow highlighting the western peaks.
“May I?” Rowan asked, fingering the ends of the curls at her left ear. In his other hand he held a charm made of silver and a shard of black rock that glinted like the waters of the Tarinnish. She nodded, and he took pieces of her curls to braid with the charm. It hung heavily at her temple, as cold as ice. His knuckles skimmed her cheek, and Mora caught her breath.
“Do you have one for your hair, too?” she asked.
Tender surprise parted his lips, and he nodded. From his bag he dug out a second charm, silver, too, but with a rough pinkish-red stone. An uncut garnet.
Mora touched her chest over the Blood and the Sea, then crawled behind him to unbind locks of his long hair. It was so soft and smooth, as fine and straight as—she did not know. The strands slid through her fingers and she braided it loosely, having to twist the braid again around the charm until it was a feral knot. She brushed her knuckles against his cheek when she finished. The fading sunlight found the arch of his cheekbone, the fine stubble along the line of his jaw, and highlighted his bottom lip.
Her pulse was too fast, her hands unsteady.
Sitting away, Mora folded those hands in her lap and turned her gaze to the north. “The dragon will be there?”
“Yes,” he answered after a brief pause, voice rough. “Just over the horizon, and the entire length of it will only be visible for an hour at the top of this Longest Night. It is so great a beast that every other night some piece of it remains under the mountains: a claw, its tail, the end of its nose …”
“I hope no clouds blow in.”
A small hum was his only answer. It turned into a melody, gentle and merry. A round. Mora murmured the words in a singsong voice, not quite joining him. When it came around and around, the sun was gone, and only purple-silver twilight surrounded them.
Full darkness dropped slowly, and Rowan asked her to point out the first star she noticed. It was the Star of Third Birds, and then just after came a star Rowan named Dalubh. “The Star of Third Birds flies very near to the Tree of the Worm this time of year, though in its branches, not its roots. That star, Dalubh, is the head of the worm. And so your year will be filled with mysteries, and your challenges are invisible to you, where perhaps weakness, or enemies, or old choices have been rotting away at your foundations.”
Mora wrinkled her mouth in distaste. “If you eat something, you’ll prophesize better.”
Rowan laughed, and the noise rang out into the open night. “Maybe not. Prophecies have grown difficult this year.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Too many possible futures, perhaps? Confusion of intention, or the stars and the island itself are at odds? I cannot say, but maybe tonight will tell us. The only consistency has been the appearance of some part of the Dragon of the North, the Lion of War, and the Wolf Star. These stars are surrounded by wild fortunes, dooms, lighthearted weather predictions, all manner of prophecy.” Rowan paused, studying her as though looking at something else. “The first prophecy I ever cast that involved all three—dragon, lion, and wolf—was for the Aremore queen.”
“I was there. I heard it.”
His eyes suddenly sparkled.
To put him off, she said, “What else should we do to wait?”
“Pray, I would say to one who did such things—but you may brood instead.”
Mora shoved him over, and he laughed as he fell, catching himself with his palm. The laugh turned to a sharp hiss. Rowan turned his hand over to reveal the dark glint of blood scored along the heel of his thumb. She did not feel the slightest bit of guilt, and did not help him tend to it.
To her surprise, he touched the blood and drew it into a spiral that filled his white palm. Then carefully he lifted that hand and pressed the palm to his cheek, leaving a shadowy imprint of a blood spiral there.
“Rowan, last summer, just after Celeda’s rebellion, I saw a vision of Morimaros the Great.”
“You had a vision?” The prince narrowed his eyes.
She ignored his tone. “Hal saw him, and Lady Hotspur, too. Dragon, lion, wolf. Like it bound us together even outside of your prophecy.”
“You are the dragon of my prophecy,” he said, not a question.
“Maybe.” Mora scowled.
“What do you think your vision meant?”
“I have no idea. I only thought to tell you because you care about such things. We thought perhaps he was an earth saint.” She mentioned nothing of the comfort she’d gained from the dead king’s glance.
Rowan said seriously, “We must not trust earth saints. They want something from you, if you saw one.”
Year-old threads of suspicion curdled in Mora’s chest, and she nodded. “You are certain they exist.”
&nb
sp; “I am.” Rowan lifted one shoulder. “They are not malicious, usually. They are neutral, or at worst they draw toward chaos. They are spirits with their own agenda, but that does not make it a bad agenda, or inherently harmful.”
“Maybe they do want what is best for Aremoria?”
“Maybe. And maybe it was the spirit of Morimaros,” Rowan added, as if he’d read her heart. “Maybe when he died, they took him into the rootworld and made him one of them. Surely he was as worthy of being a saint as any who have walked Aremore soil.”
“Certainly Morimaros would want only what is best for his homeland.”
“Even so.”
A heavy crescent moon rose as more stars emerged. Mora’s neck ached and she lay back on the bearskin to watch the sky. Wind scraped curls across her mouth and brought tears to her eyes.
But the sky was too brilliant to shy away from. Stars upon stars, glimmering immaculate and clear. She breathed softly, and when Rowan leaned into her, she did not mind. Their shoulders pressed together, and Mora’s stomach growled. The mountain seemed to turn and tilt beneath them, and the massive bowl of the sky glittered down at her with so many stars.
She drifted, then dozed, and her head lolled toward Rowan’s.
He sang a song about the stars becoming butterflies, floating down around them and falling like gentle snow. Mora could taste cold flakes on her lips.
“The head is revealed,” Rowan said, pulling her to sit up with him. He pointed out the eye, the nose line, the fourteen teeth of the dragon’s maw. It slowly crept up the northeastern portion of the sky, higher and higher. There its sinuous neck, there the first joint of wing, there the front paws reaching toward the Child Star. Mora stared so long and hard the dragon came alive, a silver worm of shimmering light, grinning at her, flicking its wings dramatically so that all the stars rippled away, far across the entire sky.
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