Elia wanted to scream that shedid not know.
She lifted her wine and used the goblet to cover the deep, shaking breath she took, full of the tart smell of grapes.
This was worse, more uncertain, than she’d ever seen her father. Perhaps if she’d not decided to continue her studies this spring at the north star tower, and instead had remained at his side after the winter at Dondubhan, he would not be so troubled. Perhaps if her sisters bothered to care, they could help. Or at least listen to her!
Dalat, my dear.
Had Lear expected his wife tonight, not his youngest daughter? Was he completely mad?
She should ask the stars, or even—perhaps—slip out to the Rose Courtyard again, and try to touch a smear of rootwater from the well to her lips. Would the wind have any answers?
The Earl Errigal slammed his fist on the table just below Elia, jolting her out of her traitorous thoughts. Errigal was arguing ferociously with the lady Bracoch, and then Elia’s eyes found the person she’d missed in her earlier agitation.
Older, stronger, different, but that bright gaze held the same intense promise. It washim.
Ban.
Ban Errigal.
An answer from the island to her unasked questions.
He was dressed like a soldier, in worn leather and breeches and boots, quilted blue gambeson, a sword hanging in a tired sheath. Taller than her, she was certain, despite his seat on the low bench. He never had been tall, before. His black hair, once long enough to braid thickly back, was short, slicked with water that dripped onto his collar. His tan skin was roughened by sun, and stars knew what else, from five years away in a foreign war, his brow pinched and his countenance stormy.
How could his return not have been in her star-patterns? They must have been screaming it, surely—or had it been there, hiding behind some other prophecy? Twined through the roots of the Tree of Birds? Had she missed it because all her focus had been on Lear and the impending choices about her family’s future? Had she refused to see?
Over the years she’d forcibly rejected even Ban’s name from her thoughts. Easy to imagine she’d missed some sign of his homecoming.
What else had she missed?
Elia was staring, and she realized with an embarrassed shock that he wasvery attractive. Not like his brother, Rory, who took after their blocky, striking father, but like his mother. There was a feral glint to his eyes, like fine steel or a cat in the nighttime. She wanted to know everything behind that look, everything about where he’d been, what he’d done. His adventures, or his crimes. Either way, she wanted to know him as he was now.
Ban Errigal noticed her looking, and he smiled.
Light flickered in Elia’s heart, and she wondered if he still talked to trees.
Her breath rushed out, nearly forming whispered words that only he would understand, of all the folk in this hot, bright hall.
But she did not know him, not anymore. They were grown and distant as stars from wells. And Elia had her place under her father’s rule; she understood her role, and how to play it. So she averted her gaze and sipped her wine, reveling silently in the feel of sunshine inside her for the first time in a long while:
Ban was home.
THE FOX
AT THE HIGHESTrampart of the Summer Seat, a wizard listened to the wind. He sighed whispered words of his own, in the language of trees, but the salt wind did not reply.
He ought to have remembered the cadence here, the slight trick of air against air, of hissing wind through stone, skittering through leaves, but it was difficult to concentrate.
All he could think wasElia.
ELEVEN YEARS AGO, INNIS LEAR
THE QUEEN WASdead.
And dead a whole year tonight.
Kayo had not slept in three days, determined to arrive at the memorial ground for the anniversary. He’d traveled nearly four months from the craggy, stubbled mountains beyond the far eastern steppe, over rushing rivers to the flat desert and inland sea of the Third Kingdom, past lush forests and billowing farmland, through the bright expanse of Aremoria, across the salty channel, and finally returned to this island Lear. The coat on his back, the worn leather shoes, the headscarf and tunic, woolen pants, wide sack of food, his knife, and the rolled blanket were all he had come with, but for a small clay jar of oil. This last he would burn for the granddaughter of the empress.
Dalat.
