“Nothing major, though I’ll have a fine scar here.” She touched her shoulder, where beneath cloak and mail and linen the stitches Vindomata had sewn ached with gentle fire.
“My daughter the warrior,” he said with pride, finally, and disbelief, still. And then as always, Hotspur wanted to suggest he might not’ve been surprised, marrying into a line of warrior women, if he’d ever chosen to look past his own expectations.
But she said nothing to her father, instead waving a hand at the man behind her, who slouched on his horse like a massive child.
“Here,” she said, “is Douglass, the prince of Burgun, and my hostage.”
Lord Perseria hummed and eyed the prince, seeming impressed, but Caratica frowned and said, “Yours?”
“Mine,” Hotspur confirmed, meeting her mother’s eye with a silent warning.
“Let us go inside, then, and see to our guest,” Caratica said. “But first, a toast.”
Wine and small cups were brought out, given to all who were more than soldiers or servants, including the recalcitrant Douglass.
“To Hotspur,” the Earl Perseria said, lifting her cup high.
“Hotspur!” called those gathered, and Hotspur herself breathed deeply of the sound: she had done well, exceedingly so, and deserved every moment such as this.
Caratica told Hotspur to clean up and then attend upon her for an hour before supper would be laid for welcome, victory, and Douglass of Burgun.
“I’ll show him to his rooms,” Hotspur volunteered, kissing her mother’s cheek again. Then she beckoned her hostage to her side. “Come, man, this way.”
He bowed grudgingly at the earl, then stomped to Hotspur; she led him a half pace ahead, though it allowed him to hulk over her. She kept her shoulders rigid and a hand on her sword. Burgun would do nothing to risk himself, not in the Persy ancestral home.
They walked through the thirteen-foot-long tunnel that burrowed through the keep’s main wall, beneath murder holes and two iron gates, then entered the conduit court. Built of stone walls and stone floor, from here one could go directly to any part of the keep. Dark archways on the ground level led to kitchen and larder, then to the tower stairs—either down into the armory and below even that into the bedrock prison, or up to the secretarial offices and staff living quarters. A wide stone staircase on the western wall led to a balustrade circling the entire court with arches leading into master chambers, great hall, study, and library.
Hotspur jogged halfway up the stone staircase before she realized Douglass had paused in the courtyard, staring up at the fifty-foot yew tree growing from the center. She hardly noticed it anymore, as it hadn’t changed in all her twenty years of life.
Gray bark, ridged deeply, curved in a slow spiral up and up and up toward the high gray branches. Narrow, bright green leaves draped over the courtyard, shading all of it. At the base, heavy stones had been placed in a circle like a well. They were uneven now, as the tree had pressed up against them as it grew.
“Is this an altar?” Douglass asked.
Hotspur twisted up her face. “It’s a tree.”
The Burgun prince slid her an uncharacteristically wry look. “Was it an altar, then?”
“What do I know of ancient superstition? Is that a thing you know well in Burgun?” It was on her tongue to say something terrible about burying bones in the roots of trees like this, the way heathens did, and earth saints. Beneath her hand, her sword whispered uneasily.
Douglass shrugged. “It seems unlikely to have been anything else, but I suppose it’s possible a Persy ancestor was just stupid enough to try to grow a tree in stone.”
“It worked,” she snarled.
Douglass laughed and took the steps two at a time to reach her in seconds. “Or you built the castle around the tree.”
Other retainers and servants were filtering in behind them with stools and discarded cups from the greeting party, so Hotspur did what none expected of her: she swallowed her retort and grabbed his sleeve, dragging him with her the rest of the way to his rooms.
“Here, Douglass. I’ll send someone to fetch you for dinner, and send a bath. You stink.”
“I know I don’t, Lady Persy, but I’ll take your snarling as a compliment.”
She shoved him into the room and dragged closed the heavy door. As she hurried around the balustrade toward her room, she snagged a man and asked the order be passed that Douglass was to be assigned a footman for his stay, and treated like an honored guest despite being housed over the armory. Then she slammed into her room, where one of her mother’s girls waited to help her into the bath. Once dry and dressed again, Hotspur snatched a handful of dried peach slices and ate them as she went to her mother.
Caratica waited alone in the study just off the greeting hall. The earl stood at one tall glass window, leaning on her good leg. Her red-gray braid was unpinned, hanging like a rope down her spine. “Hotspur,” she said lightly.
“Mother.” Hotspur sank onto a cushioned stool beside the shelves of books and scrolls that lined the entirety of the south wall. She finished the last strip of peach. “I have little to say that can’t be shared with all. The battle was straightforward, though …” Hotspur grimaced. “Vindomata will tell you I drove off the queen’s representative. He was disgusting and terrible, and you’d have hated him, too. All disrespect for my men, my soldiers who’d just died, Mother! It was appalling. Abominable.”
“I’m sure it was, Hotspur. That is not why I wanted to speak with you alone and immediately.”
Hotspur sat straight up from her slouch. Caratica’s tone was too light to be relaxing. “What is wrong?”
The earl reached, without shifting her legs or weight, for two folded letters on the windowsill. “I have received an interesting letter from Banna Mora.”
“Mora?” Hotspur cried.
“Yes. As have you.” Caratica offered the top letter to Hotspur, who leapt up and took it, tearing past the wax seal to unfold it.
Dear Isarna, Lady Hotspur,
Long has it been since last we spoke, and as many things have happened to me in the interim, I imagine your portion has been just as complicated and strange.
First I shall say: I miss you.
Second: I find myself in good spirit here with my family and among the ancient roots of my people on Innis Lear. Within the week I will be married, to Rowan Lear.
This is my third attempt to write you. I cushioned my words in the previous versions, sidestepping the truth and dimming the harsh light by tugging clouds across the face of the sun. I should have remembered you would have no interest in pretty words if they were lies. I have remembered myself, too, and who I am, fundamentally. And so, I say this plainly: I am the true heir to the throne of Aremoria.
You know this, and Celeda knows it, too, or else why keep me away?
I aim to take the crown to reunite Innis Lear and Aremoria, as they were always intended to be. Morimaros himself wrote it: the greatest king will unite the two lands. I want your aid. Perseria has long been the shield and sword of Aremoria, and at best, I ask you to be my sword and my shield. At least, I ask you to remove your shield from across their bodies. Allow me my path.
If you read still, Hotspur, I take it only as evidence you have not immediately burned my letter in horror, hatred, or disgust.
If you read still, consider this, too: I have a brother named Connley, your age and strong of heart. He is of my blood, half Aremore and half Learish, both royal lines, and besides that he is a wizard. I have begun to know him these last months, and believe him to be everything that is good in the heart of this island. Marry him, and solidify our friendship. Marry him, and find happiness I know you have not yet found. The end you seek can be for both Innis Lear and Aremoria.
I await your response eagerly,
Banna Mora of Aremoria and Innis Lear
Hotspur read the entire missive, then read it again. Marriage, and—and open rebellion. And that last line, the end you seek, Hotspur under
stood too well. Mora wished for the same thing Hal had last year: to use the prophecy and win a crown.
“Hotspur?” her mother said carefully.
Hotspur’s mouth was dry. She swallowed and asked, “What does she say to you, Mother?”
“She proposes your marriage to her brother, though I suspect she is more bold in her words to you, or else you have jumped to a political conclusion faster than I expected.”
It was said so calmly Hotspur knew Caratica was clamping down on her emotions. Hotspur handed her letter to her mother and watched as she read the first few lines, then had to stop looking. Hotspur turned to the wall and gripped the dark shelf, wishing she could imprint her nails into the smooth, grainy wood.
Her skin flushed, but her stomach felt like a chunk of ice. Mora was bent on retaking her crown. Offering Hotspur alliance. But against Celeda, the queen Hotspur had fought alongside, to put her on the throne of Aremoria.
Oh, wormshit, but Celedrix should never have forced Banna Mora away from Lionis.
There would be war, soon, no matter what the Persys did.
Hotspur’s stomach twisted.
What would Hal say to this?
What was best for Aremoria? For Hotspur’s family and the people of Perseria?
“Oh,” Caratica said, a single syllable pulled from her guts, dark and immediate and definitive.
Hotspur caught her mother’s eyes. She shook her head, panicked.
The earl sat abruptly on the windowsill. She flattened her hands on her knees. “Hotspur. Isarna. Tell me everything that happened on the Burgun border, now, and everything about the queen’s man, and everything you can think of that Vindomata has said to you in the past two months. We must send for my sister, and see.”
“See?” Hotspur whispered, her fingers trembling. “There is nothing to see.”
“How we will respond, Hotspur. Do we ignore it, do we bring it all to Celeda? There is no turning back from this letter, my daughter.”
“Mora must know that, too. She sent it—knowing. She’s not afraid at all,” Hotspur said, disliking the breathy quality of her voice.
“Why should she be? What should she fear?” Caratica touched her forehead, pressing a spot of white into the skin, banishing all blood.
Hotspur opened her mouth with the immediate answer, but stopped herself from admitting the instinct to her mother.
Me, she thought. Banna Mora should be afraid of me.
PRINCE HAL
Lionis, late summer
THE PRINCE BEGAN her quest at the zenith service in the Cathedral of Lionis, kneeling before the well on a cushion reserved for the queen’s family.
Hal loved the cathedral, and because of her childhood studies could see signs of its ancient design: two halls crossed in the middle where the well drove into the earth, and though they’d been covered now with a ceiling of arching wooden beams, once the cathedral had been open to the sky. Once, rain fell through, making gentle music in copper pots at the end of each stone pew; now used for perfumed oils and dried flower petals. Once, sunlight glazed living vines that crawled along the inner corners and marked the passage of seasons and daytime by the moon-marks etched into the walls. Now the moon-marks remained, but the living vines were replaced by painted murals of the Aremore royal family tree, tracing the queen’s lineage—and Hal’s—back through eleven generations, culminating in the glorious oak tree tapestry hanging against the back wall, so that the tree seemed to grow out from the well itself, if a person looked from the proper angle. That tree was the Queen’s Tree, and it chronicled her life, her immediate family, her friends and allies. Citizens could pin blessings to it, for Aremoria or their queen, or prayers and hopes, or even sometimes petitions, on certain days of the year. When Celeda died, she would be wrapped in it and her body laid before the well here.
Despite everything, they’d done the same for Rovassos, and then burned him in his tapestry.
Hal could not imagine what her own tapestry would look like, if she survived to rule.
She stared at the well. It channeled through the black earth and bedrock of Aremoria to its damp rootwaters. She saw herself pitch forward, toppling over the edge and falling down and down into the navel. Her shoulder hit the wall, and her hip, and her body stuck in the narrow shaft, not touching the water, too deep to be seen. Her neck twisted harshly so that she could not cry out. She suffocated before she starved.
Hal trembled with the effort it took not to let herself fall.
A cool finger skimmed Hal’s bowed neck, and the archpriest Ylantra murmured, “Lion Prince.”
Biting her lip against the title, Hal glanced up. The older woman’s dark hair fell free about her white face, and fine wrinkles graced her Vitili-round brown eyes.
“You’re troubled,” the priest said to the prince.
“I’m looking for someone,” Hal said softly.
“All here are you and I, Prince.”
“Her name is Era, and she is from Innis Lear. A priest. Have you seen her? She’s visiting.”
“Era Errigal?”
Hal nodded, recalling the girl’s red freckles and eerily intent young gaze.
“I have met her, yes, but not since she came here two years ago, very young, to study the old royal birth charts of Aremoria. It was a project on her mentor’s behalf.”
“Did she strike you as … gifted?”
Ylantra’s lips curved down. “She whispered with the trees, and the roses in the garden. I heard nothing reply to her, though I have studied their language. It was strange, what she said to them.”
An eagerness gripped Hal, as if perhaps she might learn something to discredit the young star priest. “What?”
“She said, Hush now, not yet, not yet.”
“Not yet, what?”
Ylantra shrugged. Five small white dots curved down her temple in the shape of the Dog’s Tail constellation. Celeda’s birth star. “I do not know, Lion Prince,” she said.
Hal hunched over, elbows on knees, and cradled her face in her hands. It felt like someone offered her a favorite treat, then as she moved to accept, withdrew it just beyond reach. If only she could find the proper footing, the right moment in time, where all would come together in a gracious epiphany.
The prince always had yearned for epiphany.
“Do the trees ever speak to you?” Hal asked, voice muffled. She turned her head in her hands to look at the archpriest.
“Why should they? I serve the queen your mother, and the people of Aremoria. Not the stars or trees. Except inasmuch as the trees are the people of Aremoria. Perhaps if the trees ever do speak to me, or the people, or even the queen, I will translate for you. That is what I am, here in this cathedral. A counselor, guide, a conduit.”
It was an academic, practiced answer. As were most religious answers in Lionis.
Hal asked, “Do you think it is possible for a queen to relinquish the need for translation? Can I speak myself for the people? Or do I pretend, as my mother does, to know what is best for the people without being one of them? Do I play the role until the role becomes real?”
“I cannot tell you how to be a queen, Prince Hal.”
Hal laughed, but miserably. “I wish the stars could tell me what to do, as they do the queens of Innis Lear. I need to find Era.”
“If she is here, she has not come to the cathedral for shelter. Perhaps one of the smaller chapels.”
“My thanks, lady of stars,” Hal murmured, standing.
The archpriest stood, too. “My prince, I cannot tell you how to be queen, but I can tell you that what always has served me best is my faith. In myself, and my friends. In my heart. You must have friends, and a heart.”
“I don’t know,” Hal said, hoarse from tears crawling in her throat, “if queens are allowed a heart. My mother has none.”
“She did have, though, and perhaps still does, even if you cannot see it.”
Hal left the cathedral, all the while thinking both her mother and Ylantra we
re old women, a generation who knew themselves and embraced their mistakes, for what other choice did they have?
And she knew her mother was heartless. Any mother with a heart would not say such things as Celeda said to Hal.
Outside, she nearly ran into her sister.
“Ugh, Hal, you’re blind with some passion,” Vatta said, shoving Hal away. She wore a calf-length coral gown layered with a thick leather belt and gauntlets and a small sword. Chain mail wrapped her neck like an armor necklace and clung to her bound-up braids in a way that would be a bitch to untangle. But the illusion was delicate majesty and unexpected strength. Vatta looked more a prince than her older sister.
“What are you doing here?” Hal asked, blinking. Beside Vatta was their bastard baby sister Tigir. Nearly eleven and gangly like an adolescent hound, brown from her father Hal had never met, Tigir dressed entirely like a boy—just like Hal. Hal sneered at her on principle.
“Hey, Slag Prince,” Tigir called, looping her long arm around Hal’s neck and dragging her sideways.
Hal punched her in the ribs, hard enough to sting but not wound, and flipped around to free herself.
Tigir coughed and winced dramatically.
“Stop,” Vatta said. “We heard you were in the palace a few mornings ago, and thought to join you this evening, to see what all the fuss is.”
“The fuss about me, or with whom I spend my time?”
“All of it,” Tigir said, lacking the modesty that would lead her to dissemble.
Children ran in a line across the cathedral yard after a dog with a ball in its mouth. At the edge of the courtyard a man had spread icons across a cloth, now yelling to the passersby they’d been blessed by the queen. Hal sighed. Affection kept her from sending either sibling away, though she forced herself to remind them, “Our mother will not be happy if she hears you go with me.”
“Unhappy at you,” Vatta said. “It will not come down on us.”
“What!” Hal put a hand to her heart, pretending horror. “You would throw me to the furious storm, knowingly?” She closed her eyes, pretending to faint against the wall of the cathedral.
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