Instead of flaring up, instead of slapping him or yelling as she was wont to do, Mora’s expression cooled. “Yes,” she said. “I am your hemlock queen, and you should listen to my words and do as I say.”
“I listen,” he murmured, instantly tender.
She gritted her teeth. “Yet you accept your death.”
“Not freely, not for nothing. My death is a price to pay for my cause, and my cause is yours: Aremoria and Innis Lear reunited.”
“Explain.”
Rowan closed his eyes, and saw it again: the Dragon of the North in all its granite, starlit beauty. Its hollow-mountain voice:
a line of starlight stretching like a road between Aremoria and Innis Lear. Rowan, somehow, at both ends
He said to his wife, “When I was a boy, I found Elia the Dreamer’s journal of dreams, and she knew I would. She wrote to me, and said first that I should learn to become Innis Lear, not to rule it. And so I began the hemlock ritual when I was only nine years old. She also told me of a vision she had of me, dead in Aremoria at the crown of an ancient church—it is Lear’s church, the wizard Lear who cleaved our island from Aremoria a thousand years ago.”
Mora hissed in displeasure, but Rowan held up his hand.
“When I was older, and the Ashling spirit tried to kill me, I investigated her. I wanted to know the source of her power, and why she was obsessed with Connley. I wanted to protect him, Mora, and myself and all the island if need be. I studied, I discussed her with the roots and stars, I gathered everything possible, and I came to understand what I said earlier: she is a broken earth saint. Not quite alive nor either dead, not like them, not like the winds of Innis Lear, either.”
“What does that have to do with your death?”
Rowan smiled. “She is as she is because there is something fundamentally flawed within Innis Lear. With the island’s magic. She is not the only broken earth saint to wander our island. They are awful, lonely beings, inherently disruptive and destructive. They cannot exist apart, nor can they be truly part of Innis Lear. I believe this flaw was born when the first wizard Lear cleaved us from Aremoria. She cleaved magic as well. That is what the Dragon of the North showed me when I met it the first time.”
His wife sat abruptly. Her jaw clenched, and she glared up at him. Rowan knelt to continue, “The dragon showed me a path of pure magic, a star road. Lear broke it when she broke Innis Lear from Aremoria. She shattered this living connection of magic, and neither our island nor Aremoria can be complete without the other. By anchoring herself to our island, she became its magical heart, its will, and ripped magic from Aremoria. That is the reason Innis Lear is so wildly alive, so strong in power. It has a heart of its own, and more magic than its due. At the same time, the Aremore earth saints were trapped alone in their under-root chapels and the trees were isolated, the core of their magic torn away. Both sides long for what was lost. A heart for Aremoria, and the health of earth saints on Innis Lear. We have an anchor here, but to open the star road again, someone will have to be anchored to Aremoria the same way.”
“You. You think your destiny is to die on Aremoria to bring its magic back.”
“To resolve the broken magics of Innis Lear. There is imbalance. Our island has managed and maintained with only its rootwaters and its queens, but these broken earth saints—like this Ashling who obsesses so over your brother—upend all that. And there are forces pushing from Aremoria now. I felt them when I was in the March, and you have witnessed them attempting to force action with small appearances. The earth saints seem to have no more power than simple manifestation. They fade without the star roads open. And Innis Lear needs the same, to balance itself.”
“Star roads! Hearts anchoring the magic of an entire land? You are so arrogant, to think you can match what that wizard Lear did a thousand years ago. Powerful enough to cleave apart Aremoria and Innis Lear, and you—you think you can undo that greatest magic?”
Rowan’s pride pounded in his chest with every beat of his heart. He did believe it. “I am not alone, Mora. I am working for Innis Lear. And the island wishes for this outcome, or I would not be reborn from the hemlock again and again.”
“That is madness, Rowan! To poison yourself and say surviving means you act as an agent of Innis Lear itself.” Mora’s voice was low, desperate with what Rowan chose to interpret as belief.
He smiled. “You survived it, too, Banna Mora. You wear a hemlock crown as surely as I do. When the stars began to babble, two years ago, I made a great star prophecy, and do you know what the stars and the winds both told me? Go to the March. That is where the temple is, where I will die opening the star road again. I did not find the temple then, but I did find you, my love.”
Mora said nothing, though her hand trembled against her knee.
“Do you see what it all means?” Rowan pressed, wanting to grab that hand, use desire to make her see. “You were meant to be my partner in this. Innis Lear wants you here, with me, and together we will make Aremoria a part of Innis Lear again.”
“Fated to be yours,” Mora murmured.
“And Innis Lear’s, and the queen of a new Aremoria.” He reached and placed his finger against the garnet in the Blood and the Sea.
Wordlessly, Mora slid off their bed to straddle his lap. Rowan wrapped his arms around her hips, cradling her with her belly pressed against his. He held her gaze, as she calmed her breathing, as she studied him. It was a general’s mask she wore, a queen of the battlefield, strategizing, rethinking, turning everything she thought she’d known into new shapes until she forced them into one she admired.
“Very well, husband,” she finally whispered. “Hemlock lover. I will serve Innis Lear in this mission, with you at my side.”
Rowan kissed her, as if he kissed fate itself.
PRINCE HAL
Southern Innis Lear, late autumn
HAL BOLINBROKE’S FIRST few hours on Innis Lear passed in a haze of wonder, despite the dire reasons for coming. Her entire life she’d wished to visit this dangerous, wild island, and here she finally was. She intended to enjoy it as long as she could. When she met Hotspur again, and Banna Mora, any pretense of holiday would swiftly end.
They’d sailed around the south cape to arrive at Port Comlack. Cliffs cut up from the sea, glaring and sand-pale, and a biting wind flushed off the island, blasting at Hal’s already chapped cheeks, fighting the sail of her barge. The sailors lowered it and maintained course with a heavy, rhythmic rowing song. Hal couldn’t even hear the splash and dip of the oars over the spitting wind.
It tasted of rain and earth, not fish, not salt: this was no ocean wind, but a true wind of Innis Lear—the sort that talked, that beckoned and begged and denied.
At her side, the wizard closed his eyes.
Hal tossed an arm around his narrow shoulders. “We’ve arrived!” she said in Learish.
“So we have,” he replied in the same.
They’d cast off from Aremoria hours before dawn, and for the hours they’d sailed Hal had pestered the wizard to speak with her in Learish, to better practice her pronunciation. The wizard had sighed with exasperation. “Best ask some other, when we arrive, Prince Hal. My accent is a hundred years old.”
Hal nearly dove off the barge in heady glee that he admitted such, and her wild grin was matched, inasmuch as he was capable of matching such high emotion, by the deepening of the crows-feet wrinkles at the wizard’s mud-green eyes. As if he hid a smile.
It took the rest of the afternoon to unload the barge of Hal’s royal accoutrement and the gifts she’d brought on her own and her mother’s behalf for the nobility of Innis Lear. They were met by Rory Errigal, the son of the acting duke of Errigal, who was near forty, tall and broadly muscled, with those blasted red freckles Hal had recognized on the young, round face of Era Errigal those months ago in her Uncourt. Rory welcomed Hal with all the proper words, and Hal enthusiastically clasped his arm, eager to hear about Errigal and this area around Port Comlack.
/> Her visit had been highly negotiated and the details arranged prior, so Hal knew she’d not be sleeping under any of Queen Solas’s residences until meeting with the queen herself a few days from now in Astora City, the seat of the Taria dukes. Rory Errigal would escort her party along the Innis Road through the queen’s land, skirting the Earl Rosrua’s territory until they leaned north into Bracoch lands. At that point the Earl Bracoch would join them to lead them into Taria. Most nights Hal and her party would pitch a camp, staking some slight sovereign claim to the circle of their fires. When finally they were welcomed by Solas herself, they’d become a part of the queen’s household for the journey farther north to Dondubhan for the winter holidays.
Hal didn’t mind traveling rough; it reminded her of the weeks spent campaigning with Banna Mora and the rest of the Lady Knights. Sleeping under the stars; building fires; the hard earth at her back; the sounds of her fellows laughing and snoring; all of it filled her with a sense of ease.
Having Lady Ter Melia with her helped.
Hal hadn’t had much contact with the former Lady Knight in the past year, as Ter Melia had left Hal’s service when Hotspur had still been in Lionis, recruited by Commander Abovax to the queen’s personal guard. But Hal welcomed her on this mission anyway, with a trust born of nostalgia and hope.
The first few hours on the island, Hal studied the wizard carefully, expecting what, she wasn’t quite sure. (For him to age backward, perhaps, becoming a young man her age; for flowers to blossom in his footsteps; for the flecks of color in his eyes to change into stars; for the wind to gust and transform him into a dozen ragged black crows.) All the wizard did, however, was wander away from the party unloading at the docks, head tilted, while fingers of wind pulled at his mussed black hair rather like a friend. Hal chased after, inviting him and Ter Melia to join her along the path she’d noticed up the bluffs to the west. The three trudged up the gravelly path between long fronds of brown and golden grass that all bent the same way: toward the sea. In Hal’s experience, wind blew harshest from the ocean, battering sand and grasses in all directions.
It was an exhilarating walk, if freezing. Winter settled early on Innis Lear, and though it was several weeks still until the Longest Night, ice already kissed the wind and dawns were frost-heavy.
Ter Melia posed at the pinnacle of a bluff and stared out over the wavelets pouring toward the island. “Innis Lear feels as they said it would.”
“Alive? Wild?”
“Dangerous.”
Hal laughed, for she agreed. The rocks below shimmered in the mist off crashing waves and Hal leaned farther out, aware of how easy it would be to tip over. Would it be like flying, for those short breaths before her body broke upon the threshold of sea and shore? A pull from below her heart whispered Try it, and Hal shifted her weight away from the edge, not trusting herself, afraid of the reckless impulse.
Vertigo caught her in its spinning grip, and she seized Ter Melia’s wrist.
“Careful,” Ter Melia cautioned.
Hal glanced over her shoulder at the wizard. His back was to them as he stared out over the golden fields pocked by rough stones and tangles of gray-green bushes. She moved toward him and followed his gaze. Far, far in the distance, beyond a dip in the moor, smoke rose and then a hazy outline of hills tall enough that perhaps they were mountains.
“That,” the wizard said, “is the way to Scagtiernamm.”
“Thorn trees? Is that what it means?”
“Refuge. The Refuge of Thorns.”
“You know it,” Hal said, walking nearer to him.
The wizard smiled humorlessly.
Wind hissed through the grasses, curling around his ankles. The wizard touched one of the charms braided into his thick hair, dangling there at his collar.
“Is the wind talking?” Hal asked.
He nodded. “It remembers my name.”
Every part of Hal ached with the desperate wish to ask for that name, to beg if necessary. The wizard put his hand on Hal’s shoulder and patted her, like to calm an enthusiastic dog. But Hal took no offense; she was overly eager.
“Is this where you come from?” she asked with a semblance of calm. A compromise.
She didn’t truly expect the wizard to answer, but he said, “I was born on Innis Lear, though made in Aremoria.”
“You remember now?”
“Yes. Almost everything.”
“Maybe I was supposed to bring you home. Maybe it’s why they gave you to me.”
The wizard looked sharply at her.
Hal grinned. “I was at the Witch Elm for a reason, wizard. I asked the earth saints for help, for a bargain, and you’re what they sent.”
For a moment the wizard didn’t seem to react at all, staring through her. Then he said, “Lion Prince,” as if it meant everything.
“What do they want from me?”
“I only know my riddle.” He shook his head in apology.
Ter Melia called to Hal to show her the moon, delicate and white in the still-blue sky. It would be full in a few days.
In the morning, the wizard had vanished. Though Hal wished otherwise, she did not hold her party back, knowing he either would rejoin them or not. There was no danger he could find himself in that Hal could protect him from, of that she was certain.
On account of the wagons of supplies and gifts, they rode slowly: Hal, Ter Melia, and Rory Errigal with his grandmother Sin’s retainers, and Hal’s Aremore soldiers in their brilliant orange. Hal made easy conversation with Rory, asking after a girl of his family named Era. Rory grimaced and said Era was impossible to track, since she’d been granted her priesthood at too young an age.
She was his daughter. He spoke of her with the loving exasperation Hal expected from the good parents of wild children. Though riding at Rory’s side, Hal kept Era’s confidence and did not relate to her father that they’d met in a cave below the palace at Lionis.
Midafternoon, the wizard reappeared, riding a horse they hadn’t brought from Aremoria. Besides the horse he had nothing but what he wore, and a cloth bag tied to the saddle large enough to hold a child, which clacked as the horse moved as if filled with seashells. His left eyebrow was split and bruised as if he’d been punched.
Hal welcomed the wizard back expansively, hoping for an explanation that was not forthcoming.
It was a glorious day, despite the cold, and the intense colors of Innis Lear cut at Hal’s eyes: iron-black, gold, the darkest nighttime green, and drops of bloodred when they passed hawthorn trees sporting their berries. The south of the island was all dramatic moors, windy and treeless. Occasional creaks broke across the grassland like glittering seams. Hal’s giddiness had her smiling at everything, and it drove Ter Melia from her side to range ahead of the party with Rory Errigal.
But the wizard understood. “I love it here, too,” he said in his quiet way.
“Did you know Morimaros the Great traveled Innis Lear in disguise once? As a common soldier. How I long to remove this tabard and torc, and replace it all with a humble retainer’s uniform or the cloak of a hunter. Wander Innis Lear however I like!”
The wizard nodded, eyes on the wispy clouds.
Hal said, “Do you know the story? When Morimaros the Great came here to win the crown for Elia Lear?”
“I do not think that is exactly what happened,” the wizard murmured.
“Did you know him?”
“He came here because he was betrayed, and in that betrayal, hurt Elia. He came because he owed her his support, his strength, but not to win anything for her. With her, maybe. She was already a queen.”
“Who betrayed him?” Hal asked very quietly, almost too soft to hear beneath the wind and horses.
The wizard gazed out across the moors. “I was young and angry. I … loved him. But I thought that nobody would ever choose me over everything else, and that meant I didn’t deserve to be chosen at all. They both knew you can’t choose one person over the world—especially if you’re
a king or queen.”
A pang of heartache turned Hal’s face away. “Maybe a queen can choose both, though. One person and the world.”
The wizard laughed once, a sound of tragedy and affection. “Has that been your experience, Your Highness?”
She grunted her displeasure at the question.
Gently, the wizard said, “My king was a lion, too.”
Hal caught her breath, undeserving, she felt, of the comparison. The wizard had said he felt the same a hundred years ago. Undeserving. She realized she held the reins too tightly, and relaxed her fists.
“Can you tell me how it all fell apart?”
Startled, for the wizard rarely asked questions, she looked at him again. “All what?”
“What they built. Morimaros and Elia.”
“Did it, though? Look how strong Innis Lear is, and Aremoria has only become grander since then. Morimaros built the Royal Libraries and established trade through Vitilius, and the Third Kingdom.”
“Are we not here to prevent war between Lear and Aremoria?”
Hal grimaced. “Oh, that.”
“Last I visited Aremoria,” the wizard said delicately, “there were no questions of inheritance plaguing either country.”
“Um. Morimaros didn’t have children. I mean, he did, but they were here, and heirs to Innis Lear. Three of them: Gaela, Bannos, and Connley. Gaela inherited the Learish crown, Connley went to the Third Kingdom and his line has remained there, and Bannos’s son married into the Errigal line here. Gaela ruled, and her daughter Astora after her, and Astora’s daughter is the current queen, Solas of Innis Lear. So there is little question about inheritance on Innis Lear, though Solas, like Morimaros, has no children of her own. Her sister, Ryrie, bore Solas’s heir: Rowan Lear, though they say on Innis Lear a king will go mad.”
The wizard laughed softly and said, “So they will. And I had heard, long ago, that Elia’s children would all be bastards.”
Lady Hotspur Page 44
