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I dismounted, standing in waist-high grass, continuing to stare at the castle, feeling as if the castle was leering back at me.
What was I to do with such a broken place? How was I to rebuild it?
I untacked my horse, leaving him hobbled beneath an oak, and began the trek to the courtyard, stopping in the wild heart of it. I stood on vines and thorns and weeds and broken cobbles. All of it mine, the bad as well as the good.
I found that I was not the least bit sleepy although I was bone weary and it had to be drawing nigh to two in the morning. I began to do the first thing that came to mind: pull up the weeds. I worked compulsively until I warmed myself, sweating against autumn’s frost, eventually getting on my hands and knees.
That was when I saw it.
My fingers yanked up a tangle of goldenrod, exposing a long cobble with a carving in the stone. I brushed away the lingering roots until I could clearly see the words, gleaming in the starlight.
Declan.
I shifted back to my heels, but my gaze was hooked to that name.
Gilroy Lannon’s son. The prince.
He had been here that night, then. The night of the first failed rising, when my mother was slain in battle, when my sister was murdered.
He had been here.
And he had carved his name into the stones of my home, the foundation of my family, as if by doing so, he would always have dominion over me.
I crawled away with a shudder and sat down in a heap, the sword sheathed at my side clattering alongside me, my hands covered in dirt.
Declan Lannon was in chains, held prisoner in the royal dungeons, and he would face trial in eleven days. He would get what he deserved.
Yet there was no comfort in it. My mother and my sister were still dead. My castle was in ruins. My people scattered. Even my father was gone; he had never had the chance to return to his homeland, dying years ago in Valenia.
I was utterly alone.
A sudden sound broke my chain of thoughts. A tumbling of stones from within the castle. My eyes went to the broken windows at once, searching.
Quietly, I rose, drawing my sword. I waded through the weeds to the front doors, which hung broken on their hinges. It rose the hair on my arms to push those oaken doors open further, my fingers tracing their carvings. I peered into the shadows of the foyer. The stones of the floor were cracked and filthy, but by the moonlight that poured in through the shattered windows, I saw the imprint of small, bare feet in the dirt.
The footprints wound into the great hall. I had to strain my eyes in the dim light to follow them back to the kitchen, weaving my way around the abandoned trestle tables, the cold hearth, the walls stripped bare of their heraldic banners and tapestries. Of course, the footprints went to the buttery, to every cupboard in an obvious search for food. Here there were empty casks of ale that still sighed with malt, old herbs hanging in dried batches from the rafters, a family of goblets encrusted with dust-coated jewels, a few broken bottles of wine that left glittering constellations of glass on the floor. A smudge of blood, as if those bare feet had accidentally stepped on a piece of glass.
I knelt, touching the blood. It was fresh.
The trail of blood took me out the back door of the kitchens, into a narrow corridor that emptied into the rear foyer, where the servants’ staircase wound in a tight spiral to the second floor. I stepped through a hoard of cobwebs, stifling a shudder when I finally reached the second-floor landing.
Moonlight poured in patches through this hallway, illuminating piles of leaves that had blown in from the broken windows. I continued following the blood, my boots crunching the leaves and finding every loose stone in the floor. I was too exhausted to be stealthy. The owner of the footprints undoubtedly knew I was coming.
They led me right to my parents’ chamber. The very place I had stood with Brienna hours ago, when I had given her her passion cloak.
I sighed, finding the door handles. Nudging them open, I peered into the dim light of the chamber. I could still see where Brienna and I had wiped the dust from the floors, to admire the colorful tiles. This room had felt dead until she had stepped within it, as if she belonged here more than I did.
I entered and was promptly assaulted with a handful of pebbles.
I whirled, glaring across the chamber to see a flash of pale limbs and a mop of unkempt hair disappear behind a sagging wardrobe.
“I am not going to hurt you,” I called out. “Come. I saw your foot is bleeding. I can help you.”
I took a few steps closer but then paused, waiting for the stranger to reappear. When they didn’t, I sighed and took another step.
“I am Cartier Évariste.” And I winced, to realize my Valenian alias had come out so naturally.
Still no response.
I edged closer, nearly to the shadow behind the wardrobe …
“Who are you? Hello?”
I finally reached the back of the furniture. And I was greeted by more pebbles. The grit went into my eyes, but not before my hand took hold of a skinny arm. There was resistance, an angry grunt, and I hurried to wipe the dust from my eyes to behold a scrawny boy, no more than ten years old, with a splash of freckles on his cheeks and red hair dangling in his eyes.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, trying to subdue my irritation.
The boy spat in my face.
I had to find the last dregs of my patience to wipe the spittle away. I then looked at the boy again.
“Are you alone? Where are your parents?”
The boy prepared to spit again, but I pulled him from the back of the wardrobe, guiding the lad to sit on the saggy bed. His clothes were in tatters, his feet bare, one still bleeding. He couldn’t hide the agony on his face when he walked on it.
“Did you hurt yourself today?” I asked, kneeling to gently lift his foot.
The child hissed but eventually let me examine his wound. The glass was still in his foot, weeping a steady trickle of blood.
“Your foot needs stitches,” I said. I released his ankle and continued to kneel before him, looking into a pair of worried eyes. “Hmm. I think your mother or father will be missing you. Why don’t you tell me where they are? I can take you to them.”
The boy glanced away, crossing his lanky arms.
It was as I suspected. An orphan, squatting in the ruins of Brígh.
“Well, lucky for you, I know how to stitch wounds.” I stood and slipped my travel satchel from my shoulder. I found my flint and sparked some of the old candles to life in the chamber, then withdrew a woolen blanket and my medical pouch, which I never traveled without. “Why don’t you lie down here and let me tend to that foot?”
The boy was stubborn, but the pain must have worn him down. He settled back on the wool blanket, his eyes going wide when he saw my metal forceps.
I found my small vial of stunning herbs and dumped the remainder into my flask of water.
“Here. Take a drink. It’ll help with the pain.”
The boy carefully accepted the mixture, sniffing it as if I had sprinkled in poison. Finally, he relented and drank, and I waited patiently for the herbs to begin to work their numbing effect.
“Do you have a name?” I asked, propping up the wounded foot.
He was silent for a beat, and then whispered, “Tomas.”
“That’s a good, strong name.” I began to carefully extract the glass. Tomas winced, but I continued to talk, to distract him from the pain. “When I was a lad, I always wanted to be named after my father. But instead of Kane, I was named Aodhan. An old family name, I suppose.”
“I thought you said your name was … C-Cartier.” Tomas struggled to pronounce the Valenian name, and I finally pulled out the last of the glass.
“So I did. I have two names.”
“Why would a man”—Tomas winced again as I began to clean the wound—“need two names?”
“Sometimes it is necessary, to stay alive,” I replied, and this answer seemed to appease him, for the boy was quiet as I began to stitch him back together.
When I finished, I gently bound Tomas’s foot and found him an apple in my satchel. While he ate, I walked about the chamber, looking for any other scrap of blanket that I might sleep with, for the night’s chilled air was flowing into the room through the broken windows.
I passed my parents’ bookshelves, which still held a vast number of leather-bound volumes. I paused, remembering my father’s love of books. Most of them were moldy now, their covers stiff and rippled from the elements. But one slender book caught my interest. It was drab in comparison to the others, whose covers were exquisitely illuminated, and there was a page sticking out at the top. I had learned that the most unassuming of books typically held the greatest of knowledge, so I slipped it beneath my jerkin before Tomas could see me.
No other blanket could be scrounged up, so I eventually conceded to sit against the wall by one of the candles.
Tomas rolled around in the wool blanket, until he looked more like a caterpillar than a boy, and then sleepily blinked at me.
“Are you going to sleep against the wall?”
“Yes.”
“Do you need the blanket?”
“No.”
Tomas yawned, scratched his nose. “Are you the lord of this castle?”
I was surprised by how I wanted to lie. My voice sounded odd as I replied, “Yes. I am.”
“Are you going to punish me, for hiding here?”
I did not know how to respond to that, my mind hung upon the fact that the boy thought I would punish him for doing all that he could to survive.
“I know I was wrong to throw pebbles in your face, milord,” Tomas rambled on, his brow wrinkled in fear. “But please … please don’t hurt me too badly. I can work for you. I promise I can. I can be your runner, or your cup bearer, or your groom, if you like.”
I didn’t want him to serve me. I wanted answers from him. I wanted to demand, Who are you? Who are your parents? Where do you come from? And yet I had no right to ask such of him. These were answers that would be won by trust and friendship.
“I’m sure I can find a task for you. And as long as you are on my lands, I will protect you, Tomas.”
Tomas murmured a sigh of gratitude and closed his eyes. Not a minute passed before he was snoring.
I waited a few moments before withdrawing the book from my jerkin. I gently leafed through the pages, tickled that I had randomly chosen a book of poetry. I wondered if this had been my mother’s, if she had held this book and read by the window years ago, when a page fluttered loose from the leafs. It was folded, but there was a shadow of handwriting within it.
I took the parchment, let it unfold in my palm, delicate as wings.
January 12, 1541
Kane,
I know we both thought this would be for the best, but my family cannot be trusted. While you were gone, Oona came to visit us. I think she has grown suspicious of me, of what I have been teaching Declan in his lessons. And then I saw Declan yanking Ashling around by her hair in the courtyard. You should have seen his face as she cried, as if he enjoyed the sound of her pain. I am afraid of what I see in him; I think that I have failed him in some way, and he no longer listens to me. How ardently I wish it were different! And perhaps it would be, if he could live with us instead of being with his parents in Lyonesse. Oona, of course, was not even surprised by his behavior. She watched her son yank our daughter around, refusing to stop him, and said, “He’s only a lad of eleven. He’ll grow out of such things, I assure you.”
I can no longer go through with this—I will not use our daughter as a pawn—and I know you would be in agreement with me. I plan to ride to Lyonesse and break Ashling’s betrothal to Declan at dawn, for it is I who must do this, and not you. I’ll take Seamus with me.
Yours,
Líle
I had to read it twice before I felt the bite of the words. Kane, my father. Líle, my mother. And Ashling, my sister, betrothed to Declan Lannon. She had only been five then, as this letter was written mere months from the day she was killed. What had my parents been thinking?
I knew the Lannons and the Morganes were rivals.
But I never imagined my parents had been at the origin of it.
My family cannot be trusted, my mother had written.
My family.
I held the letter to the candlelight.
What had she been teaching Declan? What had she seen in him?
My father had never revealed that my mother had come from the Lannon House. I had never learned her lineage. She was beautiful, he had said. She was lovely; she was good; her laughter had filled the rooms with light. The Morgane people had loved her. He had loved her.
I refolded her letter, hiding it in my pocket, but her words lingered, echoed through me.
My mother had been a Lannon. And I could not stop the thought from rising …
I am half Lannon.
Lord MacQuinn’s Territory, Castle Fionn
Brienna
I woke to the sound of banging below in the hall. I lurched out of bed, momentarily dazed. I didn’t know where I was—Magnalia? Jourdain’s town house? It was the windows, of all things, that reminded me; they were mullioned and narrow, and beyond them was the fog Maevana was notorious for.
I fumbled for the clothes I had worn yesterday and brushed my hair with my fingers on the way down the stairs, servants noticeably quieting as they passed me, their eyes wide as they took me in. I must look wretched, I thought, until I heard their whispers follow me.
“Brendan Allenach’s daughter.”
Those words sunk into my heart like a blade.
Brendan Allenach would have killed me on the battlefield had Jourdain not stopped him. I could still hear Allenach’s voice—I will take back the life I gave her—as if he was walking in my footsteps, haunting me.
I hurried along, following the noise, realizing the clamor was inspired by Luc’s music. My brother was standing on a table playing his violin, rousing hearty claps and cup banging from the MacQuinns.
I watched for a moment before sitting alone at the empty lord’s table to eat a bowl of porridge. I could see the love and admiration in the MacQuinns’ faces as they looked upon Luc, cheering him onward even as he knocked over a pint of ale. My brother’s music spread over them like a healing balm.
Beyond the revelry, on the other side of the hall, I noticed Jourdain standing with his chamberlain, a grouchy old man named Thorn, no doubt discussing the plans for the upcoming day. And I began to think about what my own plans should be now, in this strange time of in-betweens—in between resuming normal life and the trial, in between an empty throne and Isolde’s coronation, and perhaps more than anything, my place in between arden and mistress. I had been a student for the past seven years; now it was time for me to decide what to do with my passion.
I felt a wave of homesickness for Valenia.
I thought about the possibility of a passion House in Maevana. There were none here that I knew of, as impassionment was a Valenian sentiment. Most Maevans were familiar with the idea; however, I worried their attitudes toward it fell as cynical or skeptical, and I honestly could not fault them for it. Fathers and mothers had been more concerned about keeping their daughters and sons alive and protected. No one had time to spend years of their life studying music, or art, or even the depth of knowledge.
But all of that would soon change beneath a queen like Isolde. She had a vast appreciation of the study. I knew she desired to reform and enlighten Maevana, to see her people flourish.
And I had my own desires to sow here, one in particular being to start a House of Knowledge and maybe, hopefully, convince my best friend Merei to join me, uniting her passion of music with mine. I could see us filling these castle chambers with music and books, just as we had done at Magnalia as ardens.
I pushed my porridge bowl aside and rose from the table, walking back to my room, still struck with homesickness.
I had chosen an eastern chamber in the castle, and the morning light was just beginning to break through the fog, warming my windows with rosy hues. I walked to my desk, staring down at my writing utensils, which Jourdain had ensured I had an ample supply of.
Write to me whenever you miss me, Merei had said to me days ago, just before she departed Maevana to return to Valenia, to rejoin her patron and her musical consort.
Then I shall write to you every hour of every day, I had replied, and yes, I had been a touch dramatic to make her laugh, because we both had tears in our eyes.
I decided to take Merei’s advice.
I sat at my desk and began to write to her. I was halfway through the letter when Jourdain knocked on my door.
“Who are you writing to?” he asked after I had invited him in.
“Merei. Did you need something?”
“Yes. Walk with me?” And he offered me his arm.
I set my quill down and let him guide me downstairs and out into the courtyard. Castle Fionn was built of white stone in the heart of a meadow, with the mountains looming to the north. The morning light glistened on the castle walls as if they were built of bone, nearly iridescent in the melting frost, and I took a moment to look over my shoulder to admire it before Jourdain led me along one of the meadow paths.
My wolfhound, Nessie, found us not long after that, trotting ahead with her tongue lolling to the side. The fog was finally receding, and I could see the men working in an adjacent field; the wind carried snatches of their hums and the whisk of their sickles as the grain fell.
“I trust my people have been welcoming to you,” Jourdain said after a while, as if he had been waiting until we were liberated from the castle before he voiced such a thing.
I smiled and said, “Of course, Father.” I remembered the whispers that had chased me to the hall, about whose daughter I truly was. And yet I could not bear to tell Jourdain.
“Good,” he replied. We walked farther in silence, until we reached a river beneath the trees. This seemed to be our talking ground. The day before, he had found me here among the moss and currents, revealing that he had secretly married his wife in this lush place, long ago.
“Have you had any more memory shifts, Brienna?” he asked.
I should have expected this question, yet I still felt surprised by it.
“No, I have not,” I responded, looking to the river. I thought about the six memories I had inherited from Tristan Allenach.
The first had been brought on by an old book of Cartier’s, which happened to have belonged to Tristan over a century ago. I had read the same passage as Tristan had, which had created a bond between us that not even time could break.
I had been so bewildered by the experience, I had not fully understood what was happening to me, and as a result, I told no one about it.
But it had happened again when Merei had played a Maevan-inspired song, the ancient sounds of her music vaguely linking me to Tristan as he had been searching for a place to hide the stone.
His six memories had come to me so randomly, it had taken me a while to finally theorize how and why this was happening to me. Ancestral memory was not too rare of a phenomenon; Cartier himself had once told me about it, this idea that all of us hold memories from our ancestors but only a select few of us actually experience them manifesting. So once I had acknowledged that I was one of those few people to have the manifestations, I began to understand them better.
There had to be a bond made between me and Tristan through one of the senses. I had to see or feel, hear or taste or smell something he had once experienced.
The bond was the doorway between us. The how of it all.
As far as the why … I came to surmise that all the memories he had passed down to me were centered on the Stone of Eventide, or else I would have most likely inherited more memories from him. Tristan had been the one to steal the stone, to hide it, to begin the decline of the Maevan queens, to be the author of magic’s dormancy. And so I was the one destined to find and reclaim the stone, to give it back to the Kavanaghs, to let magic flourish again.
“Do you think you will inherit any more memories from him?” Jourdain asked.
“No,” I replied after a moment, looking up from the water to meet his concerned gaze. “All of his memories pertained to the Stone of Eventide. Which has been found and given back to the queen.”
But Jourdain did not appear convinced, and to be honest, neither was I.
“Well, let us hope that the memories have come to an end,” Jourdain said, clearing his throat. His hand went to his pocket, which I thought was a nervous habit for him until he withdrew a sheathed dirk. “I want you to wear this again,” he said, holding the blade out to me.
I recognized it. This was the same small dagger he had given me before I crossed the channel to set our revolution into action.
“You think it necessary?” I asked, accepting it, my thumb touching the buckle that would hold it fast to my thigh.
He sighed. “It would ease my mind if you wore it, Brienna.”
I watched him frown—he suddenly appeared so much older in this light. There were more threads of gray in his russet hair and deeper lines in his brow, and suddenly I was the one to feel worried about losing him when I had just gained him as a father.
“Of course, Father,” I said, tucking the dirk away into my pocket.
I thought that was all he needed to say to me, and we would begin to walk back to the castle. But Jourdain continued to stand before me, the sunlight dappling his shoulders, and I sensed the words were caught in his throat.
I braced myself. “Is there something else?”
“Yes. The grievances.” He paused and took a breath. “I was informed this morning that a large portion of the MacQuinns, mainly those younger than twenty-five, are illiterate.”
“Illiterate?” I echoed, stunned.
Jourdain was quiet, but his eyes remained on mine. And then I realized the cause of it.
“Oh. Brendan Allenach forbid them education?”
He nodded. “It would be of great help to me if you could begin to gather grievances for the trial. I worry that we will run out of time to appropriately collect and sort them. I have asked Luc to approach the men, and I thought perhaps you could scribe for the women. I understand if it is too much to ask of you, and I—”
“It is not too much to ask,” I gently interrupted him, sensing his apprehension.
“I made an announcement at breakfast this morning, for my people to begin to think about if they had any grievances, if they wanted them to be made known at the trial. I believe some will remain quiet, but I know others will wish to have them recorded.”
I reached out to take his hand. “Whatever I can do to help you, Father.”
He raised our hands to kiss the backs of my knuckles, and I was touched by the simple act of affection, something that we had not quite reached yet as father and daughter.
“Thank you,” he rasped, tucking my fingers in the crook of his elbow.
We walked side by side back along the path, the castle coming into view. I was comfortable with the silence between us—neither of us were known as avid conversationalists—but Jourdain suddenly pointed to a large building on the eastern edge of the demesne, and I squinted against the sun to see it.