Straight through the queen’s tower Era barged, past startled folk, and into Banna Mora’s room. She did not pause there, either, but headed for the outer door that led to the rose garden.
Just as she emerged, the sun vanished completely and a wind sighed, shaking the cherry trees so petals fell like snow. Warm perfume lit the air, and Era went to the thicket of roses. Her hands trembled and she whispered, I’m here, thank you. Now, please.
Thorns pierced her palms as she pulled vines apart, hunting through the coils. She pushed aside nodding blossoms, their velvety kisses urgent.
here, the roses whispered. saint. poison saint.
Now, Era said again. “Rowan,” she said aloud.
There, a starlight strand of hair, twisted about a thick branch of roses.
Era dug through stinging bites, lips parted so she breathed the flavor of rose wind, tasting their welcome.
She revealed a hand first, too cold and veined with vivid silver-gold blood.
“Rowan,” she repeated.
His fingers bent like brittle sticks.
The rose vines shivered, and Era laughed, a breathy, choking laugh.
Innis Lear always brought him back.
A woman crouched beside Era to help, and a young retainer—they were the baby princess’s keepers. They must’ve seen Era blow past them and followed her.
When the roses let go their teeth from the shifting, silver-shadow planes of Rowan’s face, his lashes fluttered and he looked up with eyes made of starlight.
EVERY YEAR THE prince of Aremoria visits Tenne-Tiras on the last full moon before Halfsies Day, to sit beneath the creaking branches of the witch elm.
The first year, she’s vexed Lady Hotspur did not join her, the knight having flitted off again, this time to the Diotan border. The prince drinks sack for old time’s sake, spits into the well, and generally curses in extravagant detail every annoying thing anyone has done the year long. She’s unsure if her nameless wizard can hear her, or any earth saints, or if it’s only the heart of Aremoria listening. The prince says, “I needed you, wizard, to stick around and show Hotspur how to be. She’s my own royal wizard, but spends most of her time burning through the countryside.”
(It’s necessary, though, since a suddenly living, willful world with magic at its disposal can create quite a bit of havoc.)
The second year, the prince drags her lover to the witch elm, and they have a good fuck against the well, knocking at the crumbling rim, and the prince tells Hotspur about her first time—both her first time having sex and her first time meeting a wizard. They certainly make the bells hanging from the tree ring.
The third year, it is the queen of Aremoria who visits, alone again. She does not curse or complain, but curls against the roots with her bag of sweet wine and weeps. The witch elm shivers, and the queen knows the land weeps with her, sad and lost and relieved to finally let it out. She sighs at dawn and promises again to always return here, to always listen to Aremoria. As she walks away from the witch elm’s grove, she feels a hand against her cheek, though nobody is there.
The queen is not alone on the fourth year—oh, she arrives alone, for Lady Hotspur won’t be separated from her son, recently adopted when a Persy cousin died giving birth. “He is my heir now, and I’ll not have him removed from Perseria until he can speak the language of trees with a proper Aremore accent. Neither will I leave him,” the galvanized mother insisted.
And so the queen attends her lonely ritual. She hardly minds; her wolf will probably be taking in war orphans next.
But around midnight the creaking of the elm’s branches shifts lower into a sort of groan, and the tinkle of little silver bells intensifies. The queen climbs to her feet and warily backs away, staring with bleary, sack-turned eyes.
Shadows bend, and moonlight streaming through the lattice of black branches solidifies into long silver hair. Like a sleek cloak, the star-bright hair forms against head and shoulders, falling down a pale chest. The thing is taller than the queen, and she recognizes the arrogant cut of his jaw. When he opens his eyes, they are almost too much to look into: clear as starlight.
“How did you—” She gapes at him, though the shape of her mouth curves almost immediately into a proper grin.
He says something in the hissing language of trees, and the queen curses violently, having dropped her practice of it mere weeks after beginning. She has people for that, only those people aren’t here to translate.
“Say it again?” she asks.
Stepping nearer, the earth saint repeats his words to her much, much slower—the condescending baby-eater—but the queen can repeat it now. She whispers it to herself.
When he blinks, hiding the shine of his eyes, his form seems almost human. The queen says, “Do you see Banna Mora? Are you—alive? Tell Banna Mora she should send Mared and Vae here for the winter. Especially Mared. My sister needs to get married.”
The earth saint reaches out, speaking that hissing tree tongue, and touches the queen’s chest with a winter-cold finger.
The queen shrugs, uncomprehending. She can tell Mora herself if this creature won’t play messenger.
He vanishes one strand of light at a time, and the queen doesn’t mind admitting how beautiful it is.
At home, she whispers the tree tongue phrase to her wizard, and Hotspur says, “It means because the star roads are open. What happened?”
“I saw the Poison Prince at Tenne-Tiras.” She can’t bring herself to use the name he’s been given. Saint Rowan.
Hotspur’s eyes widen in shock—then they’re both opining over whether Mora knows, or if she’s furious or happy, or, most important, why she didn’t send a letter to her best friends that her husband was still alive.
Mostly.
The fifth year, the queen herself cannot reach the witch elm of Tenne-Tiras because she’s days away from giving birth. It enrages her when she realizes, and she swears to the wind and the chatty roses in the sun garden that she’ll visit the elm as soon as she can ride a horse again. She wants to name her daughter after her first wizard, but literally everyone in her life says no.
(Banna Mora of Innis Lear writes, Do you want them to think you’re naming your child after me?)
Before the queen has the opportunity to visit Tenne-Tiras, she wakes one night to her daughter’s gentle cooing and nearly has a heart attack at finding that very nameless wizard standing at the child’s bassinet. Careful not to wake her husband, she gets out of bed. (The queen and her king do not share a bed, though after Vedicca was born he asked to be allowed with them at night, at least as long as the baby sleeps in her mother’s room, too.) “What are you doing here?” the queen whispers.
The wizard removes his finger from Vedicca’s chubby brown cheek and flicks his muddy gaze at the queen. “I came to meet this new piece of my lion’s heart. You have nothing to fear from me.”
The queen stares at him, weighing the choice to believe him or not. “There is no new riddle bringing you here?”
“There will be no new riddles.” The wizard smiles. “I am free. While I helped to do what they wanted done, I never truly answered their riddle, and so I cannot be drawn back to the rootworld unless I choose to go. They don’t mind—they love a technicality.”
Thrilled, discomfited, she hugs him. He smells like churned earth and wet stone. He puts his arms around her and returns the embrace. Before he goes, she digs into a wide trunk and pulls out a tiny white seashell she picked up at the edge of the Whiteglass River, a hundred feet below the palace, in the mouth of her old rioting cave. It’s the size of her fingernail, and when she passes it to him, he smiles again and slips it into a pocket of his tattered coat.
“I had heard there was a new witch in the White Forest,” the queen whispers.
“Come visit me there,” he whispers back, touching a finger over her heart.
Both the sixth and seventh years, Lady Hotspur travels at the queen’s side to Tenne-Tiras, and they make love at the roots of th
e witch elm. Their affair is neither a secret nor a celebration, and so long as the queen demands the respect of her people, so long as her king is satisfied, who is to care or stop them? It causes no more strife than any other affair, and certainly no wars of succession, and the tangle of relationships and layers of love both bind and expand many Aremore hearts. A small change but an important one.
When the queen and her wolf are together, both burn brighter, and Aremoria likes incandescence.
On the fourteenth year, the queen takes her nine-year-old daughter to Tenne-Tiras with her. It belongs to the heir to the Blood and the Sea, after all. The girl is old enough not to be in much danger from earth saints, and young enough to believe everything in the story the queen plans to tell.
These royal women arrive at the keep with proper fanfare, but alone they make their way to the witch elm. “This is mine?” the prince murmurs as she wanders to the well. The dark stones seem cobbled together with nothing but the will of the land, and vivid green moss spills down one side, a glinting black icing in the moonlight.
“You belong to it, more like,” the queen says. “Aremoria is its own self now, you know, and the land might say These queens are mine as much as we can say it is ours.”
The prince turns round, dark eyes to her mother. “Because Aremoria is alive?” asks Vedicca. “And you made a bargain with the earth saints.”
“Because while your father is my king, the most powerful man in the land, Aremoria is our true consort.”
The girl looks skeptical.
“Come here,” the queen says, holding her hand out. Her daughter takes it, and together they kneel at the witch tree. The queen spreads her fingers against the furrowed bark and says, “Hello old bitch,” fondly recalling her very first visit. Vedicca makes a strangled sound and puts her hand atop her mother’s. It is a pleasing sight in the dim silver nighttime: gray bark, white hand, brown hand, with the bold red garnet of the Blood and the Sea crowned by a dozen tiny moons.
They sit together, shoulder to shoulder, against the elm. The queen allows her daughter some sips of sack, then says, “I’ve never told you this story whole before, though you must know pieces of it, from your aunts and father, our wizard and whatever gossip you’ve caught hold of. It’s a story about three women who loved one another, the story of how Innis Lear made its first earth saint in a thousand years, and how Aremoria got its heart.
“It begins,” says the queen, her voice falling into that peculiar cadence of storytellers, “with rebellion …”
Even the wind itself is listening. Especially the wind.
And twenty years after the Battle of Liresfane, there are three women—two of them queens—at the Witch Elm of Tenne-Tiras: one for Aremoria and one for Innis Lear.
BANNA MORA HAS never been here before.
She goes to the well and spits into it. Then she perches upon the rim, making the well into a midnight throne.
Hal pours Terestria’s tears out against the elm tree’s roots, touches her palm to the trunk, and then asks Mora if she can do any magic and if she might light a few of these candles stuck with their own wax to the boles and branches.
Mora says no. She’s never bothered with magic.
Even the wind falls silent in shock, until Hal laughs. Never bothered with magic.
The laughter is catching, and soon both queens shake with it. Lady Hotspur rolls her eyes and claps her hands: fire bursts against every wick, and soon the grove is warmer.
Hal joins Mora at the well, then Hotspur does, and the three sit pressed together, passing the flask among them.
“Every year?” Mora asks, head tipped up to look through the reaching branches and shivering summer leaves to the glory of stars.
“Usually just before Halfsies Day, but you’ll be back on your island by then. I wanted you here.”
“Twenty years is so long.”
Hotspur says, “When I wake up some mornings, with wind brushing the tip of my nose, I think no time has passed at all. Then I look at my children, and they are too grown.”
Mora raises the flask. “To Aremoria and Innis Lear, to friends and queens.” She drinks, then shares.
Hal hesitates with the flask nearly to her lips. “Not to Rowan, too?”
“That prick,” Mora says, voice full of affection.
“Do you ever think,” Hal says, sips, and continues, “that you are the one of us more like Morimaros now, because your daughter was fathered by an actual earth saint?”
Mora grunts. “Turns out earth saints are a bit too dead to father living children.”
Hal laughs again, but Mora catches her eye, and a hardness in her gaze makes the queen’s laughter fade.
“I lost two, not even big enough to name when they died inside me,” Mora says. “Didn’t tell anyone but Solas. Rowan said once that he … has them, but he says a lot of things that I’m sure aren’t quite true. The Poison Prince is a secret keeper, according to the songs and prayers.”
“Saints,” Hal whispers, a hand drifting to her own belly. Her daughters are fourteen and eleven now, both healthy and whole, and she does not want to imagine what it must feel like to—
But Banna Mora laughs sharply. “Saints, indeed.”
Hotspur says, “If an earth saint cannot father a child, at least I know my father was my father.”
Mora pats her friend’s hand. “Rowan was the first person to tell me never to trust what an earth saint says, so you mustn’t take his word for anything.”
“Did you ever consider remarrying?”
“I’m still married, even if I only see him on moonlit nights and in a twilight summer sky.”
“Married to Innis Lear itself, what a tradition,” Hal says.
Mora slides her another look, one that gleams in this moonlight. “Do you ever consider remarrying, Hotspur?”
The Wolf of Aremoria—more a wizard now than a soldier—says, “And juggle three husbands?” as she eyes Hal.
The queen of Aremoria laughs. “You’re good with your hands.”
The queen of Innis Lear sobers, and says, “I discovered that Solas married in secret, thirteen years ago, but no husband appeared at the Summer Seat until the night she died.”
“Did Cealla make it home in time?” Hal asks gently. The heir to the hemlock crown had fostered for two years in Aremoria, until this spring when a message came via crow and roses both that Solas was dying.
“We all were with her on the last night,” Mora whispers.
Hal takes Mora’s hand, and Hotspur puts her arms around both of them.
“Your daughter, speaking of,” Hotspur says, “asked my daughter about joining the Lady Knights.”
Banna Mora snorts. “She asked me, too. I told her to start her own damn knighthood on Innis Lear.”
“Good idea,” Hal says. “I’ll send my daughters to her, and they can all train together, learn to be friends and fall in love.”
Slowly, the dragon nods. “Yes. Our daughters should be friends and in love, living wild together on Innis Lear.”
“And when they come to Aremoria, it will be a homecoming,” says the lion.
“Wherever they go together, they’ll be home,” adds the wolf.
Home, whispers the wind in the language of trees.
DEEP IN THE heart of Aremoria, there is light.
Acknowledgments
I started drafting Lady Hotspur in earnest a month before my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer; she died while I was still revising. So to say there are more people than I can count who helped me with this book is not an exaggeration. From friends with open-door and endless-wine policies, to that one guy at the hospital so excited to meet a published author he distracted me for over an hour on one of the last days, I’m indebted to too many.
Thanks to everyone at Tor for your part in making this book real, especially the production team, led by Lauren Hougen, for rolling with the punches when I moved whole chapters around during copyedits (again), and Irene Gallo and the ar
t department for creating the perfect package. Thanks to Melanie Sanders, copy editor extraordinaire, for digging deep enough to make a seventeen-page style sheet and following through on all my mistakes. I can’t believe I had Ban’s scars on the wrong side of his body. Thank you to my publicist, Saraciea Fennell, and Sarah Pannenberg at Macmillan Audio, and the entire library marketing department. I have yet to walk into a library and not find my books there.
Endless thanks to my editor, Miriam Weinberg, for just, as Hal would say, Seeing me. You get this book, helped me see it more clearly than I ever could have on my own. Thank you.
I’d like to thank everyone at Harper Voyager, too, for the incredible UK versions of The Queens of Innis Lear and Lady Hotspur, especially Natasha Bardon, Vicky Leech, Jack Rennison, Jamie Frost, and Sarah Shea.
Thanks to my agent, Laura Rennert. These past couple of years have been rough for us both, but you’ve been a rock throughout, despite how often I’ve told you, Actually, no, the book isn’t finished yet.
What can I say to thank my friends across the country who’ve taken care of me, ranted with me, and just patted my shoulder while I was sad. I’ve saved so many of your notes of love and sworn vengeance upon my enemies—both of which I appreciate deeply. Thank you harpies, friends, and back-channel bitches for being brilliant, wild, and passionate. You know who you are, and you all have permanent invites to my court of riot. Especially Kaz Mahoney and Bethany Hagen for sharing their tragic dead-mom wisdom; Zoraida Cordova for always making my heart lighter; Justina Ireland for being a lifeline and friend in the Abyss.
Thank you Dad, Sean, Maureen, Travis, Carly, Melinda, and all your babies. I wouldn’t have made it through any of this if we weren’t family.
Natalie—what would I do without you? I’m pretty sure you’re the star under which I was born.
Mom. Thank you for making me who I am. This book will never be truly finished, because you can never read it.
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