by Rebecca Ross
And yet . . . I could not envision Isolde becoming a queen whose magic went corrupt, a queen who could not control her gifts and power.
“Brienna?”
I glanced up at Jourdain, unaware of how long I had been sitting at the table, reminiscing. All three men were gazing at me, waiting.
“Do you have any thoughts about Isolde’s magic?” my father asked.
I considered sharing that conversation with the queen, but I decided that I would hold her fears privately.
“Isolde’s magic favors healing,” I said. “I don’t think we need to be afraid of it. History has shown us that the Kavanaghs’ magic only went astray in battle.”
“Yet how vast is the Kavanagh House now?” my brother asked. “How many Kavanaghs are left, and will they all be of the same mind-set as Isolde and her father?”
“Gilroy Lannon was bent upon destroying them, more than any other House,” Jourdain said. “He killed a ‘Kavanagh a day’ at the beginning of his reign, accusing them of false crimes, making a sport of it.” He paused, grieved. “I would not be surprised if only a small remnant of the Kavanaghs remained.”
The four of us fell silent, and I watched the candlelight trickle over the falcon mosaic, catching the glimmer of the stones.
“Do you think Lannon kept record of their names?” Cartier asked. “They should be read as grievances at the trial. The realm needs to know how many lives he has stolen.”
“I do not know,” Jourdain responded. “There were always scribes in the throne room, but who knows if Lannon allowed them to record truth.”
More silence, as if we could no longer find words to speak. I stared at my list, knowing we had not truly created any solid plans this night, and yet it seemed as if we had at least opened a door.
“I say we meet privately with Isolde when we return to Lyonesse for the trial,” my father finally said, breaking the quiet. “We can speak to her more about the magic, and how she would prefer her grievances to be read.”
“I agree,” Cartier said.
Luc and I nodded our consent.
“I think that is all for tonight,” Jourdain said, rising. Cartier, Luc, and I mirrored him, until the four of us stood in a circle, our faces cast half in firelight, half in shadows. “I shall send a letter to Isolde, to let her know our thoughts for the trial so she can begin gathering grievances in Lyonesse. I’ll also send missives to the other Houses, to prepare their grievances. The only thing I ask of the three of you now is to remain aware, vigilant. We have planned a rebellion before; we should know what to look for, should supporters of Lannon dare to impede our plans to crown Isolde.”
“Do you think we will face opposition?” Luc asked with an anxious fidget of his hands.
“Yes.”
My heart plummeted at Jourdain’s response; I had believed that every Maevan would be thrilled to see the Lannons overturned. But the truth was, there were most likely groups of people who would scheme to disrupt our progress. People with darkened hearts who had loved and served Gilroy Lannon.
“We are one step from returning the queen to the throne,” my father continued. “Our greatest opposition will no doubt come in the next few weeks.”
“I believe so as well,” Cartier said, his hand drifting close to mine. We did not touch, but I felt his warmth. “Isolde’s coronation is going to be one of the greatest days this land has ever seen. But wearing the crown is not going to protect her.”
Jourdain looked to me, and I knew he was imagining me in her place, not as a queen, but as a woman with a target upon her.
Crowning Isolde Kavanagh as the rightful queen was not the end of our rising. It was merely the beginning.
TWO
A TRAIL OF BLOOD
Lord Morgane’s Territory, Castle Brígh
Cartier
There was a time in my life when I believed I would never return to Maevana. I did not remember the castle I had been born in; I did not remember the lay of the land that had been in my family for generations; I did not remember the people who had sworn fealty to me as my mother held me to her heart. What I did remember was a kingdom of passion and grace and beauty, a kingdom that I later learned was not mine although I yearned for it to be, a kingdom that had held and guarded me for twenty-five years.
Valenia was mine by choice.
But Maevana . . . she was mine by birthright.
I had grown up believing myself to be Theo D’Aramitz; I had later defiantly become Cartier Évariste, and both were names to hide beneath, a shield for a man who did not know where he was supposed to live or who he was supposed to be.
I thought of such things as I departed Jourdain’s castle well past midnight.
“You should stay the night, Morgane,” Jourdain had said to me, after our planning meeting had come to an end. He followed me down the stairs, concerned. “Why ride out so late?”
What he meant to say was, Why ride back to sleep alone in a crumbling castle?
And I did not have the courage to tell him that I needed to be on my own lands that night; I needed to sleep where my father and my mother and my sister had once dreamt. I needed to walk the castle I had inherited, dilapidated or not, before my people began to return.
I stopped in the foyer, reaching for my passion cloak, my travel satchel, my sword. Brienna was there, waiting on the threshold, the doors open to the night. I think she knew what I needed, because she looked to Jourdain and murmured, “It’ll be all right, Father.”
And Jourdain, thankfully, left it at that, clapping me on the arm in a wordless farewell.
It had already been a strange night, I thought, moving to where Brienna waited. I had not expected to hear Jourdain speak his regrets, to witness the first step of healing for the MacQuinns. I felt like an imposter; I felt burdened each time I anticipated my own homecoming and reunion.
But then Brienna smiled up at me, the night breeze playing with her hair.
How did you and I reach this point? I wanted to ask, but held the words captive in my mouth as she caressed my face.
“I shall see you soon,” I whispered, not daring to kiss her here, in her father’s house, where Jourdain was most likely observing us.
She only nodded, her hand falling away from me.
I departed, fetching my horse from the stables, the sky crowded with stars.
My lands lay to the west of Jourdain’s, our castles only several miles apart, which equated to roughly an hour’s ride. On the way to Castle Fionn that evening, Brienna and I had found a deer trail connecting the two territories, and we had chosen to take that instead of the road, winding through a forest and over a rill, eventually meandering into the fields.
It was the longer route, beset by thorns and branches, but I chose again to take it that night.
I rode the trail as if I had done so countless times, following moonlight and wind and darkness.
I had already been to my lands once, earlier that day.
I had come alone and taken my time walking through the corridors and the rooms, uprooting weeds and streaking through dust and cutting down gossamer, hoping I could remember something fair about this castle. I had been one year old when my father had fled with me, but I hoped that a fragment of my family, a seed of my memory, had lingered in this place, proving that I deserved to be here, even after twenty-five years of solitude. And when I could remember nothing—I was a stranger within these walls—I had conceded to sit on the dirty floor of my parents’ chamber, eaten by grief until I had heard Brienna arrive.
Despite all of that, the castle still took me by surprise.
Once, Castle Brígh had been a beautiful estate. My father had described it to me in perfect detail years ago, when he had finally told me the truth of who I was. But what he had depicted to me did not correspond with how it looked now.
I eased my horse to a trot as we approached, my eyes smarting from the cold as I struggled to see it in full by moonlight.
It was a crumbling sprawl of gray stone
s; the foothills of the mountains rose steadily behind it, draping shadows on the uppermost floors and turrets. A few slopes of the roof gaped with holes, but the walls were thankfully intact. Most of the windows were shattered, and vines had nearly overtaken the front of the exterior. The courtyard was thick with weeds and saplings. I had never seen a place more forlorn in my life.
I dismounted, standing in waist-high grass, continuing to stare at the castle, feeling as if the castle was leering back at me.
What was I to do with such a broken place? How was I to rebuild it?
I untacked my horse, leaving him hobbled beneath an oak, and began the trek to the courtyard, stopping in the wild heart of it. I stood on vines and thorns and weeds and broken cobbles. All of it mine, the bad as well as the good.
I found that I was not the least bit sleepy although I was bone weary and it had to be drawing nigh to two in the morning. I began to do the first thing that came to mind: pull up the weeds. I worked compulsively until I warmed myself, sweating against autumn’s frost, eventually getting on my hands and knees.
That was when I saw it.
My fingers yanked up a tangle of goldenrod, exposing a long cobble with a carving in the stone. I brushed away the lingering roots until I could clearly see the words, gleaming in the starlight.
Declan.
I shifted back to my heels, but my gaze was hooked to that name.
Gilroy Lannon’s son. The prince.
He had been here that night, then. The night of the first failed rising, when my mother was slain in battle, when my sister was murdered.
He had been here.
And he had carved his name into the stones of my home, the foundation of my family, as if by doing so, he would always have dominion over me.
I crawled away with a shudder and sat down in a heap, the sword sheathed at my side clattering alongside me, my hands covered in dirt.
Declan Lannon was in chains, held prisoner in the royal dungeons, and he would face trial in eleven days. He would get what he deserved.
Yet there was no comfort in it. My mother and my sister were still dead. My castle was in ruins. My people scattered. Even my father was gone; he had never had the chance to return to his homeland, dying years ago in Valenia.
I was utterly alone.
A sudden sound broke my chain of thoughts. A tumbling of stones from within the castle. My eyes went to the broken windows at once, searching.
Quietly, I rose, drawing my sword. I waded through the weeds to the front doors, which hung broken on their hinges. It rose the hair on my arms to push those oaken doors open further, my fingers tracing their carvings. I peered into the shadows of the foyer. The stones of the floor were cracked and filthy, but by the moonlight that poured in through the shattered windows, I saw the imprint of small, bare feet in the dirt.
The footprints wound into the great hall. I had to strain my eyes in the dim light to follow them back to the kitchen, weaving my way around the abandoned trestle tables, the cold hearth, the walls stripped bare of their heraldic banners and tapestries. Of course, the footprints went to the buttery, to every cupboard in an obvious search for food. Here there were empty casks of ale that still sighed with malt, old herbs hanging in dried batches from the rafters, a family of goblets encrusted with dust-coated jewels, a few broken bottles of wine that left glittering constellations of glass on the floor. A smudge of blood, as if those bare feet had accidentally stepped on a piece of glass.
I knelt, touching the blood. It was fresh.
The trail of blood took me out the back door of the kitchens, into a narrow corridor that emptied into the rear foyer, where the servants’ staircase wound in a tight spiral to the second floor. I stepped through a hoard of cobwebs, stifling a shudder when I finally reached the second-floor landing.
Moonlight poured in patches through this hallway, illuminating piles of leaves that had blown in from the broken windows. I continued following the blood, my boots crunching the leaves and finding every loose stone in the floor. I was too exhausted to be stealthy. The owner of the footprints undoubtedly knew I was coming.
They led me right to my parents’ chamber. The very place I had stood with Brienna hours ago, when I had given her her passion cloak.
I sighed, finding the door handles. Nudging them open, I peered into the dim light of the chamber. I could still see where Brienna and I had wiped the dust from the floors, to admire the colorful tiles. This room had felt dead until she had stepped within it, as if she belonged here more than I did.
I entered and was promptly assaulted with a handful of pebbles.
I whirled, glaring across the chamber to see a flash of pale limbs and a mop of unkempt hair disappear behind a sagging wardrobe.
“I am not going to hurt you,” I called out. “Come. I saw your foot is bleeding. I can help you.”
I took a few steps closer but then paused, waiting for the stranger to reappear. When they didn’t, I sighed and took another step.
“I am Cartier Évariste.” And I winced, to realize my Valenian alias had come out so naturally.
Still no response.
I edged closer, nearly to the shadow behind the wardrobe. . . .
“Who are you? Hello?”
I finally reached the back of the furniture. And I was greeted by more pebbles. The grit went into my eyes, but not before my hand took hold of a skinny arm. There was resistance, an angry grunt, and I hurried to wipe the dust from my eyes to behold a scrawny boy, no more than ten years old, with a splash of freckles on his cheeks and red hair dangling in his eyes.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, trying to subdue my irritation.
The boy spat in my face.
I had to find the last dregs of my patience to wipe the spittle away. I then looked at the boy again.
“Are you alone? Where are your parents?”
The boy prepared to spit again, but I pulled him from the back of the wardrobe, guiding the lad to sit on the saggy bed. His clothes were in tatters, his feet bare, one still bleeding. He couldn’t hide the agony on his face when he walked on it.
“Did you hurt yourself today?” I asked, kneeling to gently lift his foot.
The child hissed but eventually let me examine his wound. The glass was still in his foot, weeping a steady trickle of blood.
“Your foot needs stitches,” I said. I released his ankle and continued to kneel before him, looking into a pair of worried eyes. “Hmm. I think your mother or father will be missing you. Why don’t you tell me where they are? I can take you to them.”
The boy glanced away, crossing his lanky arms.
It was as I suspected. An orphan, squatting in the ruins of Brígh.
“Well, lucky for you, I know how to stitch wounds.” I stood and slipped my travel satchel from my shoulder. I found my flint and sparked some of the old candles to life in the chamber, then withdrew a woolen blanket and my medical pouch, which I never traveled without. “Why don’t you lie down here and let me tend to that foot?”
The boy was stubborn, but the pain must have worn him down. He settled back on the wool blanket, his eyes going wide when he saw my metal forceps.
I found my small vial of stunning herbs and dumped the remainder into my flask of water.
“Here. Take a drink. It’ll help with the pain.”
The boy carefully accepted the mixture, sniffing it as if I had sprinkled in poison. Finally, he relented and drank, and I waited patiently for the herbs to begin to work their numbing effect.
“Do you have a name?” I asked, propping up the wounded foot.
He was silent for a beat, and then whispered, “Tomas.”
“That’s a good, strong name.” I began to carefully extract the glass. Tomas winced, but I continued to talk, to distract him from the pain. “When I was a lad, I always wanted to be named after my father. But instead of Kane, I was named Aodhan. An old family name, I suppose.”
“I thought you said your name was . . . C-Cartier.” To
mas struggled to pronounce the Valenian name, and I finally pulled out the last of the glass.
“So I did. I have two names.”
“Why would a man”—Tomas winced again as I began to clean the wound—“need two names?”
“Sometimes it is necessary, to stay alive,” I replied, and this answer seemed to appease him, for the boy was quiet as I began to stitch him back together.
When I finished, I gently bound Tomas’s foot and found him an apple in my satchel. While he ate, I walked about the chamber, looking for any other scrap of blanket that I might sleep with, for the night’s chilled air was flowing into the room through the broken windows.
I passed my parents’ bookshelves, which still held a vast number of leather-bound volumes. I paused, remembering my father’s love of books. Most of them were moldy now, their covers stiff and rippled from the elements. But one slender book caught my interest. It was drab in comparison to the others, whose covers were exquisitely illuminated, and there was a page sticking out at the top. I had learned that the most unassuming of books typically held the greatest of knowledge, so I slipped it beneath my jerkin before Tomas could see me.
No other blanket could be scrounged up, so I eventually conceded to sit against the wall by one of the candles.
Tomas rolled around in the wool blanket, until he looked more like a caterpillar than a boy, and then sleepily blinked at me.
“Are you going to sleep against the wall?”
“Yes.”
“Do you need the blanket?”
“No.”
Tomas yawned, scratched his nose. “Are you the lord of this castle?”
I was surprised by how I wanted to lie. My voice sounded odd as I replied, “Yes. I am.”
“Are you going to punish me, for hiding here?”
I did not know how to respond to that, my mind hung upon the fact that the boy thought I would punish him for doing all that he could to survive.
“I know I was wrong to throw pebbles in your face, milord,” Tomas rambled on, his brow wrinkled in fear. “But please . . . please don’t hurt me too badly. I can work for you. I promise I can. I can be your runner, or your cup bearer, or your groom, if you like.”
