“Be well, Ban,” Elia said. He nodded, then picked up his sword belt and left.
She had watched him go when they were children, crying, shoulders shaking with young agony at the injustice. He had watched her go last month at the standing stones: him blazing like a torch trapped in its sconce, her heart-frozen, numb.
Here was the third departure, and Elia was neither shuddering with agony nor stuck in place. She was ready.
And Elia was glad for last night’s storm, glad for all its raw power that had thrust her together with Ban. She’d streaked across the sky last night, a star falling through the blackness, and landed where he’d been born, landed in the roots of Innis Lear, in this thicket of thorns and wild shadows. No matter what came next, threads of starlight had planted here, and Elia understood them.
At the edge of the woods a handful of moon moths floated, pale spirits darting in the flickering shadows, just where Elia could not quite see. In the gentle rush of a stream, Elia heard the hopeless echo of her starless sister’s name, but the forest would say no more.
THE FOX
THE RAVEN STRETCHEDblack wings wide, an arc of darkness against the bright green morning. It then leapt off a pile of stones and flapped past the forest canopy, into the keen blue sky. One cry for the wizard, and it vanished east, toward Aremoria and its king.
Ban sat hard onto the ruins he’d stumbled over, the leavings of some long-dead lord. Moss edged the crumbling stone foundation, and small ferns and patches of rose brambles grew in the cracks. He lowered his head into his hands. His skin felt raw, scrubbed over with shards of glass. That was the last missive Ban the Fox would ever send to Morimaros of Aremoria. He was not formed for order and service, for the soaring spires of clean, careful Lionis. Ban was wild, and this furious island owned his heart.
But he was sorry to hurt Mars. And selfishly glad not to be forced to witness the moment the king understood this betrayal.
Ban scraped his hands down his thighs. Ruins were what this island needed more of: places for the trees to swallow up towers and ramparts, for the navel wells to flood and nobody to count the stars for a hundred years. Raze Lear’s castles to the earth, let them be reclaimed, and seed over the royal roads. Show the people of cold prophecy to fear this land they’d so quickly forsaken, the roots that had deserved to be better loved. Shove those standing stones into the ocean.
That was what Ban would do, if he were a wizard powerful enough.
Regan might let him.
Though Gaela might prefer to murder him instead.
He shuddered with the thrill of the idea.
Five years ago, when Ban nearly died in Aremoria, those compassionate trees had saved him, knitting him together and reminding him what power was. Ban had thought his mission must be to grow his reputation; he would become great, and then come home. To prove his worth, to show Lear andhis father, and all of them, that Ban was more than any prophecy. To make them see him: he was a bastard, but by the worms of the earth and the cursed stars in the sky, he would be a powerful one.
Now Ban understood proving himself to those men meant accepting the very foundations of their star-addled beliefs, using the language they understood, taking up the very weapons that had been used against him.
But such things did not spur heat in his veins or give breath to his spirit.
He would go to Gaela Astore, as Elia had asked. He’d go, but he would show Gaela how to burn the island to the ground. Give the warrior what she needed most from him: his wild, natural power. And Regan trusted him; she needed him, she would agree. He would help them begin a new empire in a world not tainted by their fathers. He would say,Yes, you should listen to Elia though she requests the impossible, and then hold her there between you as we destroy everything your father wrought. I have done this, twice over, for my own father is dead. And I have abandoned the only king who ever cherished me.
If Ban could do it, they could, too. Now he was free. Free to be the island’s champion—to bring magic and rebirth back to starved land. But his first mission was to seek vengeance for the ruination Lear himself had wrought.
The forest had agreed, and in proof had delivered Ban’s lost sword, forged of whispering Errigal steel. A gift to aid his intentions. The trees and the wind had sung to him, leading him to the muddy hill where the sword waited, stabbed into the earth, glistening pure and clean in dappled sunlight.
Ban touched the hilt again now, and the sword sighed hungrily.
Something else sighed, too.
Not a tree, but—
Ban softened his breathing to silence and crept across a loamy sprawl of dead winter leaves, toward the sound.
Another sigh.
And another.
It was rhythmic. Someone—something—was asleep and snoring. An earth saint, Ban thought giddily, or perhaps even an old stone giant or forest dragon.
Ban’s heart thrummed in his chest. He would not even risk a whispered inquiry to the trees. They’d brought him here; they knew of whatever awaited him and had not revealed it until now, like a game for them to play. Ban reached a soft, small meadow. The last of the rain was evident in the muddy grass, and in the heavy flow of the creek bending around the edge.
An old man huddled, sleeping against the mossy face of a granite boulder along the creek. He wore a tattered robe, and his hair was tangled and damp. His long face drooped in heavy sleep.
The earth tilted beneath Ban’s feet. Blood rushed in his ears and he stood, stunned.
