Sweat broke along Gaela’s hairline, and she said, “I need Regan. Come with me now, and do it at Dondubhan, so I may be sick where she is.”
“And nearer to your mother,” Brona murmured.
“No, this is nothing to do with her. She would not…” Gaela stopped. She touched her fists to the damp earth of the garden.
“She wanted you, Gaela. Your father was afraid of the prophecy, but Dalatwanted her girls, no matter what. Motherhood was a gift to her, not a curse.” Brona touched her tan hands to the backs of Gaela’s. She was so much paler than Gaela, though not so pale as Gaela’s father or her future husband.
This is the only match that matters,Dalat had said.
Perhaps her mother had the luxury to think so because she’d grown up in the Third Kingdom where everyone was rich and dark and proud. Where Dalat and her daughters would have belonged. But Gaela knew that to most people on Innis Lear it mattered more what she didnotlook like than what she did. She didnotlook like her father; she didnotlook like a king.
Gaela would not give up her mother’s skin for anything, but she could make herself into a king for Innis Lear.
It had been nearly five years since Dalat’s death, and Gaela alone of all the daughters felt it hard and sharp still, for she alone had grown up with a mother, been sixteen when she died—as the star prophecy had promised. The grief filled her with rage sometimes, and she embraced it as a hot, scouring ocean wind, keeping her clear and focused on what she wanted: the throne.
Gaela opened her mouth to say so to Brona, for Brona had known Dalat longer even than Gaela herself had. They’d been friends, dear friends, and if anyone missed Dalat as fiercely as Gaela, it would be the witch.
“How can you bear to be parted from your son?” Gaela asked instead. “How can you allow yourselves to be separated?”
“My son?” Brona’s face was near enough to Gaela’s, as the two women knelt there, that Gaela could count the hair-thin lines of smiling and sorrow and age skirting Brona’s eyes. Gaela nodded, and Brona squeezed her fists. “I would prefer he be here still, with me. But mothers must let go, someday. He carries pieces of me inside him, and words I’ve given him. He will make or break himself, as all children must. Your mother would say the same.”
Gaela lurched to her feet. “I must make or break myself.”
More slowly, Brona stood. She stepped back from Gaela, enough to take her in with one sweep of her gaze. “Yes,” she said, “Make or break yourself, Gaela Lear, and take this island with you.”
“I will break myself in order to make myself,” Gaela whispered, shivering suddenly with pain and promise.
And perhaps then this island, too.
THE FOX
THOUGH HE COULDnever think of it as home, Ban found he rather admired the oddly shaped Keep of the Earls Errigal.
The Keep had been destroyed in his grandfather’s grandfather’s time, when the island of Lear had been a chaotic cluster of tiny kingdoms. The then-king of Connley had sacked Errigal Keep, knocking two of the black stone walls down with the unmatched strength of his war machines, gutting and burning the inside and executing the inhabitants in waves until Errigal surrendered. King Connley brought every little territory to its knees in this way, and made the island into his own; he renamed himself Lear—after the wizard who had cleaved the island from Aremoria—and turned the former kingdoms into dukedoms. The new line of Lear forced Errigal to swear allegiance and promise never to rebuild the Keep into the great stone fortress it had been.
But Ban’s grandfather’s grandfather had been a clever man, and he found a flaw in the wording of the vow. Instead of erecting a new manse on the opposite mountain as was expected, he rebuilt the once-foreboding Errigal Keep—but not with stone. The angry gray ruins still reached out of the mountainside, rough and cracked like a shattered shield, but within those arms now rose a new castle of pale wood and lime mortar. There were wings built half of that ancient old granite, half of thick trees polished and striped with grayish plaster. Random wooden towers peeked over the ruins to peer in every direction, and one great tower rose spindly and strange from the center, with only room enough for three men to stand lookout. Errigal Keep gave the impression of a proud old carcass, dead and laid to rest here on the barren mountain, with only wintery blue banners for memorial.
Ban was caught between grudging admiration and irrational anger at the efficiency with which his father ran the Keep. Errigal’s retainers were sharp and well-behaved, especially compared to King Lear’s more ragged menwhom Ban had observed at the Summer Seat. They patrolled the mountain and the Keep walls, and they held to their rotations with a moonlike timeliness. Errigal himself was free to hunt or play cards or seduce women or sit on his ass with a tankard of wine if he wished. In the evenings, soldiers and their wives gathered with Errigal in the long dining hall for hot food and plenty of beer and fire. They told stories—the same stories they’d told when Ban was a boy—or sang or gossiped or heard what news from Lear or the mainland countries Errigal had gotten during the day.
Earl Errigal was quite liked and respected here despite, or maybe because of, his bullish, loud strength.
But he was doing something wrong, for the navel well in the rear garden of the Keep had gone dry. Though capped off years ago as the king had instructed, several of the residents had secretly continued to use it for holy rootwater. Folk in Errigal understood the language of trees, and even if they strove to obey their earl as he sternly maintained the king’s decree, they could not let go the faith of their mothers or the old Connley lords.
Yesterday, one such woman had found Ban in the navel garden, contemplating the plain wooden cap over the well, and admitted to him mournfully that it had been dry two years. No rootwater, even at the spring bloom. Those who wanted rootwater had to venture into the White Forest for a natural spring, or do without.Most have turned to the star chapels,she whispered.
Exactly as the king had intended.
Ban scowled, remembering, and climbed atop a wide boulder that jutted out the side of the Keep mountain. He looked out on the rest of the valley.
The town of Errigal’s Steps scattered down the slope below the Keep, full of wattle-and chalk-daub houses, a star chapel, bakeries and cobblers and tailors and butchers and, importantly, more weapon smithies per muddy road than any other town in all of Innis Lear. Even Aremoria bought swords from Errigal, worked with the iron magic unique to this valley.
To the south of Steps was a long peat marsh where the iron ore came from, kept narrow by the short, jagged hills of the region. From the Keep lookout tower it was possible to see the ocean on a clear day, or to trace the winding Innis Road that crossed the marsh and headed from that eastern coast all the way west to the Summer Seat.
From here Ban should’ve been able to look north and see the edge of the White Forest of Lear, full of giant oaks and white-limbed witch trees, heavy ferns and flat daggers of slate cutting up from the earth, creeks where drowned spirits played and meadows where flowers unfurled to the moon.When last he’d stood on this very boulder, as a fourteen-year-old boy, the canopy had waved farewell. But now, though he was taller and stronger, the forest seemed farther away.
Errigal would not have cut the trees back, nor would the trees have allowed it if he’d tried, nor the witch who lived in the forest’s heart. The forest had withdrawn on its own. The trees had leaned away from the island’s edges, pulling tightly together as if for safety. For comfort? Ban did not know, because he had not yet forced himself to approach the White Forest to ask. He needed to. He needed to hear the whisper of those trees. To drip his blood onto their roots again. To visit his mother.
“It’s time,” called Curan, Errigal’s wide-shouldered iron wizard.
