Lady Hotspur

by Tessa Gratton

  How was she to make it another month here? Another month at least! She’d come to Innis Lear thinking her friends would at least hear her out, but why should they, if every other person—and the cursed stars!—urged them to rebellion? Why should they listen when Hal was nothing but a hollow story, empty inside?

  “The next dark moon is on the Longest Night itself,” came a gentle voice.

  The wizard. Hal looked and there he was, walking slowly from the direction of the queen’s tower. “Oh,” Hal said ingeniously.

  He joined her at the rampart, gazing over the black waters. “The last was yesterday. In a few hours now a dragon’s tail moon will rise. The slenderest cut of moonlight, so delicate it seems it would fall from the sky if not hooked in it with two sharp points. That moon is my birth star.”

  That last was said tinged with bitterness as delicate as the moon the wizard described.

  “I haven’t seen you for two days,” Hal said casually, wanting to cheer him up. She leaned her hip onto the wall. “Where have you been?”

  The wizard leaned in, lowered his chin, and with an air of confession said, “Everywhere.”

  Hal laughed. It lightened her heart, and she allowed her laughter to trim itself down into a pleased smile. He began to say more, but his attention flickered past her, toward the king’s tower, and he fell silent.

  Turning, Hal saw Connley Errigal there, hesitating at the high gray turret.

  “Well, come on.” She beckoned. “Did you bring any of that wine?”

  “Er, no,” he said. “I didn’t want you to leave so disconcerted.”

  It was an exceedingly kind description of her state when she’d fled their prophecies.

  The wizard said, “I have not spoken with you, Connley Errigal.”

  “Nor I you … wizard. Do you have a name?”

  Hal held her breath, in case … but no, the wizard shook his head.

  “Not on Innis Lear,” Hal said for him. And the wizard slid her a wry look. She shrugged.

  “If I asked you in Aremoria?” Connley pressed, with a curious tilt to his brow.

  Hal could not believe how clear the starlight was. She could see the nuances of Connley’s expression, she could see the seams between these huge gray stones that built this fortress wall, she could even see the pattern of the braids in the wizard’s hair.

  The wizard said, “The wind remembers my oldest name, but if neither Innis Lear nor its queen will reveal it, neither should I.”

  Connley nodded as if that were a normal thing to say (perhaps it was on Innis Lear). “Do you know anything of earth saints?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you … when they want something, what do they do?”

  The wizard murmured, “Play a trick. Or two or three. Or send me.”

  “What did they send you to do?”

  Hal went absolutely rigid, but the wizard did not give Connley his lion’s heart riddle. He said, “They have no power on this island. Not anymore.”

  “Did you plant her?”

  The wizard frowned, but Hal remembered the thing Era had said, The saints must be planted.

  “Not yet,” the wizard whispered.

  Connley turned away, gripping the nearest crenellation.

  “The bones,” Hal said. “Oh, worms.”

  “I want her to be at rest,” Connley said.

  The firmness of his words settled Hal’s nerves for some reason. He was so strange, but so centered, too. He’d be good for Hotspur, Hal thought tragically. This small, comely, cool-tempered witch.

  Hal looked out over the Tarinnish again, putting her elbows on the wall. Cold wind grazed her cheeks and hardening fingers. Connley leaned to her right, the wizard to her left. They both were shorter than her. Both slight, but coiled somehow, as if all excess had been stripped away. Was that what Innis Lear did to a person? What would Hal be stripped to?

  “On a moonless night,” Connley murmured, “it’s said if you see a reflection on the water, Elia the Dreamer is near.”

  A tremor chased down the wizard’s arm; Hal felt it against her own. He said, “Have you seen her? Heard her?”

  “Yes. She’s a ghost, too. Maybe like my—like the other one.”

  Hal said nothing, only bit her bottom lip and stared out at the sharp black waves of the Tarinnish, reflecting nothing but a spill of constellations.

  The navel of Lear remained dark to her, though she did not stop looking for moonlight shimmers, or perhaps she’d fallen into a waking sleep, numb and rigid against the rampart. The wizard touched her elbow, then her cheek with the back of his knuckle.

  “She is not here tonight,” the wizard whispered.

  THE SKY WAS nothing but stars, and the wizard had drifted into the queen’s rose garden to be maudlin.

  It would be some hours before the sleek sickle moon rose. He was alone with his rippling thoughts, without any moonlight to distract him with the dreams and slipping will of the earth saints. The wizard did not fully understand why the saints preferred moonlight to starlight, but perhaps the moon itself was a chunk of earth, a balance for their power against the flickering stars.

  Without it, they hunkered in their shadows and under-root halls.

  The garden ground crunched lightly with frost as he walked. Pebbled paths curled between small ornamental trees—bare now for the winter, but for the evergreen junipers. A small lawn opened up against the northern wall, and there clinging to the blue-gray stones of Dondubhan grew rose vines. In this darkness the roses were slithering shadows.

  Once there’d been a bench here, tucked beneath a trellis, but he’d never used it; he and—they—had preferred to set themselves against the ground, even on a night like this, deep in wintertime.

  It was awful to be at Dondubhan again.

  Everything was the same, only peopled differently. He remembered too much.

  The wizard reached out and pressed his finger to a thorn. It bit his skin, piercing easily through. He welcomed the hot flourish of pain, stinging then gone. Hello, he whispered in the language of trees.

  A few tight buds nodded. Hello, the wind said. And, Hellooooooo in a long, snaking hiss. The wizard smiled at the humor. He put the bead of blood to his mouth, smearing his bottom lip.

  Memories crowded his mind, some his own, others images and words slipping through the starry breeze: girls giggling together, a young man cradling a book in his lap, a wailing king, a kiss.

  Ban, she said.

  The wizard jerked, spun around. The voice had not come from the wind. Not the roses nor the gnarled, barren cherry trees.

  Hello, said the wind again.

  He must have imagined it.

  Memories. This place.

  The wizard crouched.

  He touched his lip and put the blood, like a kiss, against the ground. It was hard and cold, and the garden smelled of nothing but dirt, with a slight tinge of pine and crushed juniper berries. Sharp, bitter.

  As the wizard settled in to listen, sounds from beyond the wall reached him: the shush of the Tarinnish lapping at the shore. Better to keep his mind gently dark, the calm of a pristine black shadow. No glimmer of stars like hope, no jarring moonlight memories. No names.

  Ban.

  He stopped breathing. He pressed his eyes closed.

  Ban. Ban. Listen.

  Ban.

  Help me.

  The wizard’s face crumpled and he covered it with his hands, fingers digging into his scalp. The same thing the other had begged. Help me.

  On a moonless night, that young witch had said, if you see a reflection on the water, they say Elia the Dreamer is there.

  (The Witch of the White Forest, they called that boy, and the wizard had opinions.)

  Between one heartbeat and the next, the wizard stepped into the darkest shadow between two juniper trees and stepped out onto the shore of the Tarinnish.

  Alone on this rocky strip of land, a narrow curve between the thick base of Dondubhan’s curtain wall and the reaching l
ake, he stared out. There, far over the slick black waters, was a pale glow. It shimmered and flicked, rather like the reflection of a full moon on choppy waves.

  But there was no moon in the sky.

  “Elia,” he said quietly.

  He’d heard stories of how she died so many times, from so many people: the queen of Innis Lear fell into her father’s madness and drowned herself; she was ill and felt this a softer way to go; she wanted to breathe the rootwaters; she was lured there, murdered; a star had drawn her out, a prophecy, and as her crown had been won by stars, she decided it ought to be lost thus, too.

  And the worst story, told in the shaking words of a dying king, Her sister did it, called her name again and again until she couldn’t resist. I wasn’t there, I ought to have been there, how could I not have been there?

  The wizard knew the truth now, by the bound bones tucked in a rough bag beneath the mattress where he slept, of what her sister had become.

  It had been madness, and she had been lured, and it had been her sister: all three. He suspected there’d been a prophecy cast, too.

  The silver light wavered, and he heard his name again.

  Help me. Ban.

  There were more bones for him to collect.

  (I wasn’t there, I ought to have been there.)

  He stripped off his quilted coat, and then on second thought the rest of his clothing, too.

  (How could I not have been there?)

  To the sound of his name (oh, that name, she’d taken it away, and the shape of it on her lips had haunted him for a hundred years), like a summons, a poem, but mostly like gentle, weary sobs, the wizard cut magic into his skin with a sharp rock. Then he drew a deep breath and ran out over the surface of the Tarinnish.

  His bare feet splashed lightly; his breath filled his lungs and the wind pushed at his back, lifted him as he raced. Toward the dance of light pinpointed atop the black lake.

  Before him the light rose: a narrow column of purest silver and white, edges shimmering. He saw her. A hand reaching. A gasp. Parted lips.

  The wizard streaked across the Tarinnish, and when he reached her, she vanished.

  With time only to gasp a huge breath, he plunged feet-first into the icy black water.

  Down and down as numbing darkness pressed in, so cold it was blue-black fire. Down until his toes found the bottom, slick and silty, and he crouched, bending with the water, its weight helping him. He sifted his hands through muddy bracken, lungs hot, ears tingling.

  He dug, he crawled across the bottom of the lake, glad only she’d not drowned at the center, where the island claimed its lake opened for miles below, a channel to the heart of the world. Her bones might’ve sunk forever.

  The wizard found a rib first, and a knobby vertebra. Then a sharp, flat shoulder blade.

  And her skull.

  That he clutched to his chest.

  With the rib and scapula in hand, he shoved off the lake floor and kicked up. And up.

  And up.

  He burst out of the waves with a gasping, wet cry.

  For long moments the wizard only breathed. He turned to float on his back and whispered a request that the wind lend aid. It blew, staggering his exposed flesh with frozen goosebumps. The skull against his belly felt warm, as did the tears that leaked down his temples to join the million droplet tears of the Tarinnish.

  A man would have died of the cold and the dark waves. But the wizard lived, inasmuch as living described his existence, and when he was near enough to shore he walked up the rocky beach to the land. He dragged on his clothes one-handed, unable to let go of the skull. It gleamed beneath his fingers.

  Impossible not to imagine the flesh that once had ridden this bone, the teeth (some of which were missing), the smile, the tightly curled black lashes.

  The eyes.

  The wizard turned those dark sockets against his chest (not as dark as they’d been when she lived, when her eyes were horn-black, black as the very lake behind him, black as ravens and moonless nights).

  With a tightening of his lips and little sigh, he went to the wall of the Dondubhan fortress and stepped into a shadow.

  When the wizard stepped out of that shadow into the garden, the queen of Innis Lear stood beside the roses. Her lips parted in quiet surprise (not at his presence, but at the suddenness of it). She held out a blanket. She herself was bundled in cloak and wool and blanket of her own.

  “I saw you race over the surface of the water,” she murmured. “I saw the light.”

  He did not ask how she knew, then, to come here instead of the shore. When she offered him the blanket, he gave over the skull in return. The queen held it delicately, lovingly, tilting it to catch the new moonlight.

  (That scalpel moon had just risen.)

  HOTSPUR

  Dondubhan, early winter

  SNOW FELL IN the second week of Prince Hal’s attendance at Dondubhan, piling in the yards, filling in the crenellations, lifting the tops of turrets a foot beyond their means. Icy wind gusted the snow into uneven drifts, shoved higher against west-facing walls. For miles all visible landscape glittered like the surface of the moon. Except the unfreezing Tarinnish, black as ever and rippling under the onslaught of winter. Sheets of gray-white clouds engulfed the sky, even once the storm was past, putting earth and heaven on the same level, one lost in the other.

  The great hall burned with torches, packed with the majority of Dondubhan’s residents. Though some made warm homes in the kitchen, and others in the barracks, for anyone not a servant or retainer, the great hall was the best place to gather.

  Hotspur had known the bad weather was coming (everyone had), but not realized it would result in sharing space. She’d been having trouble enough pretending all was as it should be, with Hal everywhere she turned, but now she could not avoid the prince.

  During the storm itself, Hotspur huddled in her room with her husband under wolfskin and wool, feeding their small fire and twisting her tongue around the language of trees. Connley was not restless, only Hotspur, for Connley had spent his recent winters hibernating in the White Forest with only a pair of deer and six crows for company. “What kind of company are deer?” Hotspur had demanded; Connley answered that they were warm company, and the crows plentiful entertainment. He did admit, though, that by the end of winter his tiny cottage had stunk so badly he’d set fire to the thatched roof and rebuilt everything after the spring. She stared at him, trying to imagine her tender Connley burning anything down. As she goggled, his mouth slowly crept into a smile and she realized he was teasing her, so she jumped him, throwing him hard onto his back—though it was cushioned by the thick mattress and blankets, so he was fine—and Connley laughed so hard tears leaked from the corners of his eyes.

  She kissed him, because she liked him, and because she was his wife, and sex should strengthen their ties. Connley allowed it, allowed her wandering hands against his ribs and hips, and even stirred slightly toward desire, but Hotspur sensed his willingness stemmed from service, not want. She stopped and sat back on her heels.

  “It would be better if there were desire between us,” she said.

  “What would be better?”

  Hotspur frowned. “Our marriage.”

  “Then why did you stop kissing me?”

  Exasperated, Hotspur pursed her lips and said nothing.

  “If it’s what you want, take it,” he said.

  “I don’t want to take anything from you. I want you to give it to me. I want …” She shivered and shut her eyes, thinking of Hal two afternoons ago, laughing at the high table so brightly it was like nothing bad had ever happened in the entire world.

  Connley touched her lips. “Consider it a gift, then, Isarna.”

  Hotspur jerked away. “Maybe later. Maybe … someday. We’ll … be more natural about it.”

  When the snow finally stopped and wind gusted haphazardly rather than with constant scrutiny, there came a scratching on the shutter latched tight over their narrow to
wer window. Help, she thought she heard in the noise—not wind, but something else. She dragged open the wooden shutter: a crow blasted inside, slapping her face with its damp black feathers, and another, and another followed, croaking and slipping on the suddenly snow-splattered table and chairs. They woke Connley from dreams, and he spent several naked minutes calming them with careful, urgent songs in the language of trees. Settled finally, Connley curled beside the hearth with the three bedraggled young crows snuggled against him: two in his lap, one at his shoulder, tucked half under his curls. He slept, too, and Hotspur’s complicated heart did not know what to do with the uncertain swelling there.

  They brought the crows with them to the great hall when the snow had stopped and the gray glow through shutter cracks indicated that somewhere the sun had risen. All three birds fit into a wide basket warmed by a blanket Connley had held to the embers in the hearth. They ruffled feathers and cocked their heads at Hotspur, little brown eyes gleaming. She said, are you hungry? what happened to you? and they squawked, flapping their wings recklessly. Connley talked nonsense to them, which calmed them immediately. Connley said crows were even less inclined to linear thoughts than most birds, so they responded better to messy, simple songs.

  Vae Lear leapt up from her seat at the end of the high table when they appeared, cooing and taking the basket from Connley. No others seemed to make a fuss about it, shrugging Connley’s strangeness away as usual, sharing amused glances, or ignoring it for more important things. Solas Lear did call out, “Do not let them take the best pieces of meat, Vae.”

  Though the great hall already was packed to the corners, it was Hal to whom Hotspur immediately, unthinkingly looked. She lifted her brows at the prince, to share the joke of how all these islanders kept crows as pets. Hal smiled, and smiled broader when Hotspur did not glance off straightaway. It was the bolder smile that brought Hotspur back to herself: Hal was too beautiful, too purely herself, and Hotspur scowled, stomping after Connley.