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“Yes, Grandmother,” Mora said.
Sin released her, though it was not quite a dismissal. The old woman nodded at an empty stool. Rowan offered her wine.
It was time for a strategic withdrawal: retreat to consider her position and balance advantages versus disadvantages. Yes. And to calm her racing heart. With a careful smile, Mora admitted her head was aching and perhaps she should lie down.
The narrow look Sin Errigal gave her suggested that her grandmother saw through the lie but chose to allow it.
MORA SPENT THE afternoon fretting, a state of mind she despised. But her usual methods of dealing with such feelings involved swords and war games, which she was still not fit for. So Mora requested parchment and charcoal sticks, and pushed together the three tables in her chambers: the largest meant for taking meals, the elaborately carved side table from the hearth room, and the table that held the ewer of lavender water beside her bed. Though not all the same height, she managed to raise the side table with a folded tunic and one of the romance books.
With that suitable surface, Mora spread out the pale leather, held down the rolling edges with a clay cup and the fire poker. Thus she was able to spend hours sketching out alternate battle plans by which she might have held the March against Glennadoer and his wizard son. It seemed impossible; a refreshing, frustrating challenge.
By the time the sun set, her cheeks were smeared with char and one of the sticks was worn to a nub. The leather was covered in directional arrows and rubbed-out cavalry charges. She couldn’t have won, with circumstances as they’d been. Exhausted and aching, especially in her back and shoulders from hunching over the awkward tables, Mora ate cold meat and apples, then collapsed into bed.
She woke more ready to sit with her grandmother, though once again faced uncertainty. What should she ask first? After the family and her brother, after Sin’s own health—surely she no longer performed the ducal duties, and had passed the chain to one of the sons of her first marriage. A Rory, no doubt, as that had ever been the tradition in the family.
In truth, Mora longed to ask Sin Errigal about one man: Morimaros the Great.
Just thinking of it raised her temperature. Sin had known him, had been married and a mother when he died fifty years ago. They must have met at Dondubhan for the Longest Night, or at the spring naming festival. Sin Errigal would have insight into the prophecy from the tournament, and an opinion about Morimaros’s ghost, surely. As Trin wound her hair into a loose—very loose—infinity knot at her nape, Mora felt a sick satisfaction that Hal was not here to speak with Sin about their shared idol.
Mora asked for lip and eye paint, and Trin hid her surprise and pleasure most neatly. The dress was the same red wool she’d worn yesterday, but the one Mora felt the most confident and handsome in. Gold went in her ears and at her wrists. She briefly considered the Blood and the Sea, but no, that must remain her secret. Mora flattened her hand over it, to feel the hard ring press against her breastbone.
Then she swept out of her chambers, led by a small servant girl to the grand room Sin had claimed.
Shown in as expected, Mora moved through the doorway between the antechamber and the bedchamber with her face a mask of calm and her best royal bearing.
The huge bed had been shoved against the window to clear the floor, and rugs rolled away to bare the smooth black stones. Sin Errigal crouched alongside Rowan Lear, both of them leaning over a spread of sky charts and spiraling star cards like two old crows arguing over a shining ribbon. It seemed neither had changed or slept since yesterday, though surely that wasn’t the case: Sin’s head was bare, and the hints of white curls Mora had noticed yesterday were all the hair she had. Freckles and age spots decorated her brown scalp, and Mora realized lines had been drawn between several of them at her crown as if to mark out a constellation.
Rowan didn’t even notice Mora’s entrance, bent as he was and pointing at a gilded card with a silver worm curling between the branches of a black-and-red tree. “This, though, Grandmother,” he said urgently. His white-gold hair was loose like a cape around his back and shoulders.
“Good morning, Granddaughter,” Sin said, leaning back. Her legs were folded tightly beneath her.
The prince stood in a single, smooth motion. “Banna Mora.”
Mora let herself be shocked by his undressed state, and showed it in her expression: he was barefoot, in trousers and a vest hanging open over his hard, pale chest. Like the constellations marked on Sin’s scalp, Rowan had dots of white paint scattered below his collarbone and down his abdomen. The Salmon constellation dove toward his left hipbone, its nose obscured by the edge of his vest. At his temple, knots had been tied into his hair as if by agitated fingers.
For a moment, neither said a word. Mora breathed through parted lips, staring at him with growing excitement. The moment she noticed, she snapped her mouth shut and shuttered her gaze, replacing any interest or eager surprise with haughty expectation. “You are informal, Rowan Lear,” she said.
“You are repressed, Banna Mora Errigal,” he replied in the same cool tone.
A bolt of outrage held her silent.
Sin grunted and said, “Fool boy, leave us alone.”
Disappointment tinged the smile Rowan gave Mora before he bent to kiss the crown of Sin’s head. “I’ll send you some food, shk maomi.”
“Something hot and soft for my old teeth, and think about what I said.” Sin wagged her first two fingers at him. “The Tree of Ancestors and the Bird of Sacrifice.”
“And you don’t discount the earth saints,” Rowan said over his shoulder to the old duke. He bowed elegantly to Mora and slipped past.
Then she was alone with her grandmother, still crouched on the floor like a tiny bird born of tree roots, surrounded by prophecy and stars.
Mora clenched her teeth and stared. Sin patiently returned the look, blinking sometimes, and tilted her head in contemplation. Finally, Mora sighed, toed off her slippers, and sank to the floor beside her grandmother. The red skirt pooled around her, nudging aside several boldly painted holy cards. Mora folded her hands in her lap and looked expectantly at Sin. “I am glad to have a day with you.” She hesitated, thinking of the endearment Rowan had used. It sounded like the Mother-tongue of the Third Kingdom.
“We were talking about you,” Sin said mischievously.
Mora refused to inquire. She glanced at the spread of cards and messy sky charts, but neither did she wish to ask after holy bones. “What is shk maomi?”
Sin scowled. “It is ‘small mother,’ very informal. You were right about Rowan.”
“Do you speak their language?”
“Some. My father was a son of a second-line family.”
Second-line family was a rough translation of the Third Kingdom way to denote relationship to the empress, Mora knew, and Sin’s second husband—Mora’s grandfather—was the Learish-born son of a Taria Queen daughter-line, a woman who’d married Elia the Dreamer’s first son, Bannos—Mora’s namesake.
It was an ideal opening to inquire about that same Bannos’s father: Morimaros the Great.
Yet Mora found she could not—not with the holy cards staring up at her, bright and colorful in their magical lies. She’d fostered in Aremoria young enough to have lost any faith in the cards or star prophecies. In Aremoria the king was all the religion the people needed. Or ought to need.
Hard to imagine Celeda Bolinbroke anyone’s god.
That’s the problem with a coup, isn’t it? Mora thought viciously. If one murders the consecrated king, one’s own rule can never quite be so hallowed.
“Such anger,” Sin murmured. “Give me your hand.”
Unthinking, Mora obeyed. Her grandmother spread Mora’s left hand open, palm up, and traced a tickling circle, then small hash-marks along her thumb. Mora felt a tremble through her bones and fought to keep from curling her fingers into a fist. It was anger, Sin was precisely correct.
Mora deepened her breath. The Blood and the Sea was a weight around her neck.
“Fire,” Sin said. “You must go north for the Longest Night, Banna Mora.”
“Northern Innis Lear? Glennadoer land.”
Her grandmother nodded, lips pursed, bony old hands cupping Mora’s.
“Why?” The Longest Night was more than six months away.
The old duke said, eyes bright, “There is a dragon in the north. And it is waiting for you.”
PRINCE HAL
Lionis, summer
IN HER ELEMENT, and motivated by passion, Hal Bolinbroke was a glory to behold.
At the center of a crowd, playing her audience like the strings of a harp, the prince made herself into a rare beast indeed: everybody’s friend.
Don’t you hope the prince wins her wager with Lord Aesmaros, a courtier might say, and his companion agree, though neither recalled exactly what the wager was about. It did not matter, for they wanted Hal to win it. And they wanted to be heard to say so.
Did you hear how the Wolf of Aremoria raged on behalf of Banna Mora in the corridor outside Celedrix’s study, and how the prince appeared to tame her with little but a smile and a touch?
I did—except I heard it was no touch, it was a kiss to envy.
When Lady Hotspur appeared at a welcome dinner for the new ambassador from the Third Kingdom wearing a thin silver bracelet with an amethyst exactly the color of the Bolinbroke arms, everyone knew from whom the gift had come.
Rumors drifted up from the city that Prince Hal dropped by a different tavern most nights, drawing a crowd and spreading liberal benevolence in the shape of copper and beer. Some older, more traditional members of the esteemed Aremore nobility disapproved, naturally, but not Hal’s peers, not those sons and daughters of Lionis who benefited from her generosity—both by following her to some such tavern evenings, and by joining her at invitation-only affairs in the palace. Themes for such parties abounded—legends of Aremore past, earth saints, Third Kingdom splendor, Learish goblins—and the cost of admission was naught but a bottle of liquor, a rare book, or an even rarer metaphysical theory. Philosophies were shared, history argued, and Hal herself often read from the diaries of Morimaros the Great, unless a professional poet attended, in which case they had recitations and songs and new compositions in honor of, usually, Lady Hotspur of Perseria, who blushed and fumed and glared affection at the prince.
Some accused Hal of adopting the habits of the Merry King himself, but she would answer such critiques, Ah, you see, I make no promises and bestow no favors. This is not the work of politics, this is the work of cultivating the minds and imaginations of Aremoria. For the future benefit of our people. My friends shall take our arguments and learning to politics, perhaps, or to the country or the royal libraries, better and stronger for having laughed, recited, debated vehemently.
So long as the queen herself did not disapprove, what could anyone do?
Those who attended the private parties and tavern hauntings swore to mothers and fathers, to anyone who asked, that it was only drinking and education, with perhaps the occasional celebratory kiss—nothing untoward. Nothing like the Merry King’s rumored debauchery. Ianta Oldcastle did not attend the palace soirees, though occasionally she was spotted in the prince’s company when Hal ventured into a tavern near the river.
And indeed, at the height of summer, when the queen opened the People’s Courtyard for a festival, the prince’s flock took themselves to the streets and amidst the palace celebration, cheerfully arguing, sharing their songs and high spirits—their liquor, too. They proved to many that the nature of their revelry was righteous, if rambunctious.
It was a magnificent summer—except for the absence of Banna Mora, who remained hostage to Innis Lear.
They had no direct word from her, only a statement from Queen Solas that Banna Mora was her guest, and of course negotiations could be engaged with if the new queen of Aremoria disliked the situation. It was very delicately worded—Hal saw the letter herself—and even she was forced to admit Solas did not want war. Though what she wanted, other than to cause trouble, remained unclear.
“Mora must return home!” Hotspur had yelled at Hal, in the broad back room of the Two-Headed Cat, surrounded by multiple third sons of earls and the daughters of rich merchants. And Lady Ter Melia and Nova Irris watched closely, the latter of whom lately had been raised from former squire in a former band of Lady Knights to sergeant in the palace garrison under Hotspur’s command.
Hal shrugged. “If Mora wanted to return, don’t you think she could see it done?”
“Not if she’s a prisoner!”
“She is a guest—we have to take Solas Lear’s word on that at least.” Hal put her hands on Hotspur’s waist, sliding close enough to murmur in her ear. “And we have to do this carefully.”
“Do what carefully?” Hotspur hissed back in Hal’s.
“Support Mora, without giving in to any demands from Innis Lear.”
“It’s disloyal. If it were you I’d be on that island already, crushing anyone in my path to get to you.”
Hal kissed Hotspur’s open mouth. She wanted to rage for Mora, too, but first she needed to do as her mother had commanded and create a foundation of trust and loyalty here in Aremoria. To the Lion Prince. Hal’s lips slowed; she pressed her forehead to Hotspur’s. “I know you would, I want to do the same, I only …” She could not lie to Hotspur. “I have to be strong here before I can be strong there. Strong enough to reinstate the Lady Knights and petition Mora to come home that way. An honor for both sides. Help me.”
Hotspur nodded, knocking their skulls gently—for Hotspur, gently. It still bruised a tiny bit.
“Talk about her,” Hal said, “but don’t yell about her. Don’t seem angry. Remind people why we trust and love Mora, and why she belongs with us.”
“I’m not good at such things as you are, Hal.”
“You lead your soldiers. It’s the same.”
“I command my soldiers. It’s not the same.” Hotspur pursed her lips and shoved Hal playfully away.
Princess Vatta asked, a few nights later, what it was like to be in love.
Hal’s younger sister was seventeen and beautiful, with smooth black hair and an oval face that was a perfectly cool tan, with pink bow lips and dark eyes tilting up at the outer edges; her dark Ispanian looks came via the old First Kingdom on their grandfather’s side.
The sisters were in the Princes’ Gallery after a small formal banquet recognizing the christening of two new ships in the Aremore navy, the first commissioned by Celedrix since coming into power. Hal had taken the Princes’ Gallery over, very rightly, as her own sort of audience chamber, attached as it was to, but also behind, the queen’s throne room. She’d defeated the palace steward in an epic war over the fate of Banna Mora’s portrait, arguing that every prince whose portrait was displayed had eventually no longer been a prince, just as Mora no longer was a prince; what did it matter that most transformed because they became the king, whereas Mora’s transformation had been a bit more brutal? It was a two-week war: Hal only won by presenting herself for her own portrait with no jokes nor distraction, and allowing that Mora’s be moved to one of the less brightly lit walls.
Hal did not know her little sister Vatta well, for while Hal had been made a ward of the king and lived in Lionis during their mother’s exile, Vatta had lived with their father in Bolinbroke for the first four years, and after his death been sent to Ispania to live with distant girl-cousins in the isolated, if gorgeous, Sivaro Mountains. The cousins were rather devoted to an old monotheistic religion that branched off First Kingdom teachings, and their mentorship suffused Vatta’s character with gravitas, despite her youth and relative lack of faith. Her attitude was properly Aremore: Vatta liked, she said, the philosophy of the religion, for it respected women’s inherent power, but she was disinterested in the superstitions about behavior and dress and life after death.
When Vatta asked about being in love, Prince Hal smiled her best stalling smile, aware she was surrounded by other eager listeners, and Hotspur, too, tucked in the far corner, stuck in passionate conversation with one of the sons of Iork.
“What is it like being in love?” Hal leaned toward her sister, a hand propped on her knee—she still wore predominately a noble knight’s clothes of trousers, shirt, and long fitted vest in expensive, boldly dyed material with embroidery to show off the effort. Most royal gowns were too heavy and layered in the skirts for combat, though Hal was working on designing something in between—when she leaned over, so did four of the seven young people gathered around, including Vatta. “It is like always knowing who you are,” Hal said. “If you become uncertain of a thing, you can remember that in your heart, you are known by the woman you love, who loves you in return. There is always warmth to turn to, if you are sad or afraid. Always a hand that will reach back to you. It is like having your own, personal queen.” Hal made her smile less charming, more dreamy, which was not even a lie. “A queen who will be at your side, looking out for you, and your family, and your people.”
Vatta narrowed her eyes, amused. But she smiled back and said, “How wonderful.”
“It is.”
“I would like to be in love.”
A young man practically batted his eyes at Vatta as he said, “So would I!”
Hal laughed. “It will happen when it does—of all the stories I know, love’s narrative is the most unpredictable, for I would not have expected to find it in a gruff, stubborn warrior like Lady Hotspur.”
As if she heard her name, though it was impossible across the loud, echoing gallery, Hotspur glanced at Hal. Her freckled cheeks were flushed and the swell of her breasts quick with excited breath—Hotspur had on a dress with a tight bodice, for she liked such restrictions, Hal had discovered. They weighed on her like armor and were therefore of more comfort, she insisted, than any lightweight tunic or man’s jacket such as Hal wore. To show her appreciation for Hotspur’s skirts, Hal had pulled Hotspur into a narrow stairway that served for staff access between grand halls and galleries and libraries. Hal knelt and ducked under Hotspur’s gown, kissing and clawing up past her stockings to the hard expanse of bare thigh. She’d hooked the thigh over her shoulder and made love to Hotspur’s hot, delicious well.
Just the thought of that stolen moment made Hal lick her lips and recall the feel of Hotspur’s trembling, bucking ass, taut in her hands.
Laughter brought the prince back to herself: Vatta’s laughter, and that of the rest of the young people.
They laughed at Hal, who must have missed something while staring at Hotspur.
Vatta said, “I do believe you’re madly in love, at least, sister.”
Hal embraced the teasing, allowing it to bolster her story.
“It will make it harder,” Vatta continued, “when you marry Charm of Kurake Queen.”
“Perhaps, little sister,” Hal said, “when he meets you, he will fall madly in love with you, and you with him, and then you both will know what it is like. Aremoria will gain the alliance, and I will keep a queen for my own heart.”
Too perfect a story, perhaps, but Hal liked the balance of it.
AN ASSASSIN TRIED to murder the queen the morning of the first zenith after midsummer, and nearly succeeded, except Abovax saw the glint of steel at the last moment and cried out, giving Celeda enough warning to dodge and take the man out herself with a grappling move she’d learned from a general in the Third Kingdom. (The general with whom, it turned out, she had a third daughter, a brown nine-year-old bastard named Tigirsenna who’d been sent for and would arrive in Aremoria soon.)
The only silver lining to the attempt on Celedrix’s life, aside from her survival, was that it could not be blamed on Banna Mora. Hal answered the danger by making a speech before the court in the full regalia of a knight: she shone in mail and her Aremore-orange tabard, and over her head a personal banner hung, which was the usual lion-and-bluebell arms of Bolinbroke, but on a field of that same blunt orange, outlined in purple.
“If you would murder our queen,” she declared, “best do the same to me, for as I live I will take up my mother’s ring and use every mode and method of our beloved country’s strength to hunt you down and remove your head.”
Hotspur stood at her left shoulder, just as proud, but grim and ferocious.
That week a blessing appeared, scrawled with orange paint across the external wall of the Lionis Cathedral:
May the Lion Prince protect us.
“Fuck me,” Hal muttered as she stared at it. Hotspur clapped her hand onto Hal’s shoulder, laughing.
It was working. That was a good thing.
“I’m the prince of Lionis, not the Lion Prince,” Hal insisted that night, exceedingly drunk in the Quick Sunrise, Ianta Oldcastle’s favorite haunt. It was the least fine of the taverns in which the prince drank, for the Sunrise existed too near the river to be approved of by nobility.
“Subtle distinction,” Ianta drawled.
“It’s not subtle.” Hal stumbled on the word three times before managing to hit the right sounds without slurring.
Ianta snorted and waved for Nova to pour more sack. “Where is Hotspur?”
“She doesn’t—she doesn’t like it when I’m in this mood.”
“What mood?”
Hal shook her head, then flattened her hands on the table to steady herself. “Drunk, Ianta. Obviously!”
“Is that a mood, or a state?”
“Or an act?” Nova murmured. Her blond hair curled shaggy around her face, and she presented herself most often as a boy, except when flirting with Hal.
Hal stomped her boot on the balcony floor, doing her best to rattle the table. “It is all those things, drunkenness. An act to create a state, because of a mood.”
“Fascinating.” Ianta knocked her knuckles against Hal’s forehead like one might greet a door.
“Just like death,” Hal said, shoving at Ianta’s hand. “An act, a state, a mood! Death never stands still, it can be made, it can be caused, it can be enacted, and therefore is an act. One can be alive or dead, and if dead one is in the state of being so. And as for a mood—oh, alas.” Hal put her face in her own hands.
Nova folded her arms. “I don’t see how it can be a mood. How can you feel dead, for if you know what death feels like, you must have been in the state of death, from which one does not recover.”
“It is a mood,” Hal said, muffled by flesh. “My mood has been death for fully a year.”
The prince knew she was ridiculous but could not push through weary, cottony drunkenness to care. Alcohol could poison a person. Likely not a pleasant way to go, despite how pleasant drinking could be. This floor might give out and all of them crash down through shards of floorboard, crushing those below, every one of them dead of puncturing beams, head wounds, slow bleeds.
The sky could fall.
Hal laughed at herself.
Hotspur was unsympathetic to Hal’s raging hangover the next day.
Tigirsenna of Celeda Queen arrived alongside the first harvest, when Aremoria remained hot as hearth fires in the afternoon, but the nights cooled with rapid promise, and soon the tips of maple and oak leaves dipped themselves in gold and scarlet. The girl was nearly ten, nearly as tall as Hal, and filled with nearly more energy than any five young men. Her eyes were a shade lighter than the warm brown of her skin, her thick black hair roped tightly and set with lapis beads, and she bounced on her toes constantly while demanding answers of her older sisters in accented but fluent Aremore. Hal liked her, and liked how she distracted the palace from Hal for a bit. Royal bastards were good for that. The queen engaged in her own gossip campaign to remind Lionis that in the Third Kingdom, the get of a queen was legitimate the moment the queen declared it so, and what Aremore would wish to be less civilized than the Mother of All Mothers? Hal approved of that, too, and added her own agreeable opinions whenever possible.