“You haven’t decided yet?” Genuine surprise lifted his sister’s voice.
Mars ran his hands over his skull, scrubbing at the thick hair. It needed a new shave.
“Tell me what troubles you most, big brother.” Ianta poured a little more wine into Mars’s cup.
“If I want Innis Lear more than anything, I should go and take it now, when they’re divided. That will be best for Aremoria, with the least risk to us.”
“But there’s something you want more?”
“Aremoria should be—it is—my only concern.”
“YouareAremoria.”
“Father told me how this would be. That being king separates me from all else. That my love—my attention—belongs to my people first, and to myself, rarely.”
“Even the sun is affected by the clouds, by rain and the moon.”
“But are the sun and moon lovers?” he said, amused at the turn of the conversation, but also inexplicably hurt by it.
Ianta laughed. “I suppose you’d have to ask the sun and the moon.”
Glancing up at the sky, scalded silver and nearly impossible to behold by the brilliant sun, Mars nodded.
His sister said, “You could be lover to Elia Lear.”
“She is her own sun, no moon for mine.”
Ianta clapped her hands as though she’d caught him in a trap. “Her own sun! Mars, are you in love with her?”
Fiercely uncomfortable, he sat up. “If I take Innis Lear now, she’ll hate me.”
“Aremoria will be stronger if you have a queen,” Ianta murmured, wheedling. “Haven’t you thought of that? Maybe stronger with a queen than with a conquered Innis Lear.”
“I have an heir.”
“Isarnos ismyheir, too, you know, and I might want to protect him from your throne.”
“Or give him to Vindomatos’s daughter?”
Ianta shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind retiring to that north duchy. And strengthening our ties along Burgun’s border. Aremoria wants for you to have your own queen and your own heir.”
“If Elia marries me, I could maybe have Innis Lear, too, in the end,” Mars said.
“And if you go for her island first, she might never willingly marry you.”
“Willingly!” Aghast, Mars stared at his sister. “I do not want a queen unwilling, Ianta, and I’m… offended.”
“Then put the navy to nest for the winter,” she pressed.
This was no counseling, not Ianta’s usual give-and-take questioning, meant to help Mars decide what his choices would be. She argued vehemently for some agenda. Mars said slowly, “By the spring, when we can sail again, her sisters might have consolidated power. It will be harder to invade. More resources spent. More of my men will die.”
“Or they’ll kill each other, those elder sisters, and Elia will hand the island over to you. There are several ways this can go.”
Mars drank his wine, brooding into the cup. Word had come from Ban the Fox, sealed on the wing of a raven, that his mission proceeded slowly but surely. Rory Errigal was unseated, and Ban positioned like creeping poison near his father’s heart. Near enough to cause whatever ailments he wished, to stir trouble ahead and sow discontent further. That seemed more like fast work than a slow infiltration to Mars, but given the resentment that always lived in Ban, perhaps disrupting the earldom was a thing he was only glad to have reason to do, and so had already known exactly which thread to pull. And if it went faster, then the king’s spy could return home sooner.
He missed Ban, the quiet surety of his dark presence, like a shadow always reminding Mars tobethe sun. They had not been friends, exactly, but as close to it as a king and a bastard wizard could be.
I keep my promises,his Fox had written to Elia Lear.
