The Queens of Innis Lear by Tessa Gratton
Only now, it felt oddly hollow.
Dreams plagued him that the earth crumbled beneath his feet, as did this constant feeling that he was not where he was supposed to be. Go home, that voice told him, but folk he trusted most had asked him to stay away. His brother, Elia herself, the impossibly practical Aefa, Kay Oak, and even the good king Morimaros, when he had managed to find time to sit with Rory. They all had implored Rory to be patient, to wait until the time was right.
The insistence that he remain tucked away in Aremoria felt less like concern, and more as though Rory were being dismissed.
He continued to smile, to flirt and charm, to listen and converse sincerely, yet through it all the urge to be elsewhere distracted him like a constant itch, even ruining such a brilliant festival day as this.
Behind him a bird squawked, and he whirled sharply around, nearly spilling the too-full cup of cider in his hand. A boy stood there, and behind him a tall man holding a pole with a perch at its top. Tethered there was a parrot, head cocked and tail flared. Rory did not think the parrot appreciated all this spectacle. But he smiled at the boy. It was Isarnos, son of Twice-Princess Ianta, and heir to the throne of Aremoria.
“You’re Ban the Fox’s brother, aren’t you?”
Rory managed to withhold the cringe. He turned it into a brighter smile instead. “Ban the Fox is my brother,” he said, and winked.
Isarnos eyed him suspiciously, as if he did not understand the distinction.
Truly, there only was one in Rory’s mind—or, he suspected, in that of any person from Innis Lear. But he’d become rather tired of the implication that Ban was better, more known here in Aremoria, even though it was absolutely true. Rory had fostered here for three years and had been perfectly adept at war, but he was always meant to return home to Errigal and be the earl. While Ban had been banished here and by hardship and magic earned a wild yet strong reputation even these civilized Aremore folk admired—if with a tinge of fear. Rory did not like being overshadowed by his brother’s taller reputation, did not like being defined by Ban’s achievements. He was used to being his father’s son, the future Earl Errigal, as was natural and expected, and that was the definition of title, place, and self he understood.
This constant suggestion that he was second to Ban aggravated Rory and chafed at his pride now, as it never had before.
“I wish I had a brother,” Isarnos continued.
“As you should!” Rory exclaimed, crouching to put his face slightly lower than the prince’s. “Brothers are grand—when I was your age, my brother and I used to charge about ruins and play we were valiant warriors, or sometimes earth saints ridding the world of the massive old worms.”
“Dragons!” Isarnos said. “Did you have dogs?”
“We did, sometimes.”
“Can you do magic?”
Rory winced, letting it be exaggerated. “No, alas, I cannot do any magic, though Ban promised once to teach me some. Did he ever teach you?”
“I was too little, my mother said. But he showed me fire in his hand, and he could talk to my birds and the barracks kittens.”
“That seems a very valuable skill. He ought to have taught you.”
Isarnos pursed his lips and nodded hard. “How come your brother went back to Innis Lear? Why isn’t he here with you?”
“He…” Rory paused. The exultant noise of the crowd washed over them, and the parrot flapped its emerald wings. “He’s taking care of our father, and … and there are many things at home to be looked after. He’s very good at looking after them.”
“Wizards have to be. And brothers, too, I suppose.”
Rory agreed, though it sank in, all of it—the itch to go home, his vanity and resentment—and he understood for perhaps the first time that Ban had every reason to never want Rory to reappear.
“I hope,” he said slowly, “you’ll get a good wizard of your own, when you’re king. And that you’ll count me a friend on Innis Lear.”
The prince lifted his chin and stared at Rory with eyes a shade lighter than the king’s. “But you’re here. Will you go back to Ban and trade him to us again?”
Rory laughed—it was rather like a trade. “I might!”
And then he stopped cold. Though he was loath to admit to blame, he knew it had been his long-ago confession to his father about Ban and Elia’s love that had banished his brother here. Rory had been at fault for pushing his brother out of Innis Lear, though it hadn’t been his intention. Ban did not know—at least Rory did not think so.
“Trust me, Rory,” Ban said. “Go.”
“Some villain has done me wrong,” Rory murmured back.
No, Rory refused the weave of that thought. His own banishment could not—could not—be Ban’s fault.
But the courtyard reeled around him, and Rory felt the dizzying sensation from his dreams that somewhere he could not yet see, the city had begun to crumble.
“I have to—go, Your Highness,” he said to Isarnos, and the prince’s face fell, but he nodded.
Rory pushed into the crowd. There the royal guard lined the courtyard and watched from balconies for any danger; there the king’s dais; there a tight circle of musicians with lyres and fiddles; there—there his own mother, a glittering, ginger bird in a huddle of Alsax and Rennai cousins. She saw him, too, and smiled politely: they had little enough to say to each other. Lady Dirbha Errigal had carved a place here in Aremoria, cut her Learish bonds.
He had asked, when she’d happened upon Rory last week at the Alsax townhouse, “Why, Mother, did you never come home?”
She had eyed him imperiously, shocked at his presumption. “And what?”
“Be—well, take your…” Rory had stumbled, for he’d not truly known the shape of his question.
Dirbha took pity on her son and said, “Your father breaks the rules. Why do you think you are here? He chose his bastard over his true-gotten son.”
Rory had shaken his head. “That is not what happened! And I will go home, to be the earl, eventually. When everything is restored.”
“Your father does not restore unless it suits him. He and I were bound together by the laws of Innis Lear, beneath the stars. That is how it should be, and yet, your father loved … her…”
“I loved you,” Rory said.
Dirbha touched his hand. “It was not a lack of love that kept me away. I thought you knew. The thing that tore my title, my self-respect, my home from me was the bastard. That child was proof that my place on Innis Lear was nothing compared to your father’s. Proof flaunted and then manifest. How could I trust your father’s word, or his faith, or that anything he said mattered, if he would thrust before me evidence of how he only did what served his selfish desires? What is star prophecy if he manipulated it to his benefit? What is marriage but a battlefield if he strategized how to win? Marriage—love!—is no war. There should be no enemies, but only friends. Yet he made an enemy of my heart with that singular weapon.”
“Ban,” Rory had whispered.
His mother’s entire body shuddered. The silence following had been a pretty one, tempered by music from delicate wind chimes ringing dimly through the window glass.
“I will not live in a place where I am so constrained, but the men around me are not,” she’d said softly. “That woman—the witch—she lived her own life, but there were consequences for her, too. I hate her, I cannot help it, but she wasn’t the one who broke his own laws. That was only your father, and all the others who looked away, who laughed or accepted his behavior.”
“That still is not Ban’s fault,” Rory had whispered.
“No, it is not, but he remains the constant reminder of it.”
Ban, Ban, Ban, it was all Ban: Rory hardly knew his own name when people looked at him and always saw the other. Oh, it’s the Fox’s brother—What handsome men they have on Innis Lear—Have you heard, he was banished by his own father! Those people are strange! Superstition and star prophecy ruining lives—and their princess gone
Rory’s mother had spoken again, looking firmly into her son’s eyes. “I can live with it all here in Aremoria, with the order and constraints that I could not bear under the colder, sharper sky of Innis Lear.”
She’d asked Rory if he would stay, or if the claws of the island had hooked in his heart. Will it ruin you? his mother’s voice asked in his crumbling dreams.
Innis Lear was his place. Rory was the heir to the earldom; he belonged there and wanted it. Elia had gone home because Innis Lear was hers. She’d been cast out by her father but not let it define her. What was Rory doing but playing a sorry victim? Even Ban had never let his bastardy or dragon’s tail moon define him.
All his life, Rory had been promised his name.
But maybe he needed to go home and live up to it.
THE FOX
WHITE-AND-GRAY BANNERS HUNG from the ramparts of Dondubhan Castle, crowning it with grief. The fabric snapped in the constant, furious wind. As they rode closer, Ban thought it impossible Astore should know Connley had died, and so decided they must be mourning flags in honor of another. Perhaps the soldiers recently killed in the fighting along the ducal border, or some minor retainer gone on in age. It mattered not to Ban.
Ahead of him, Regan Lear swayed with the rhythm of her horse’s gait. Her back still held straight, never showing the weariness with which they all melted, having ridden hard the last three days from the eastern shores of Innis Lear here to the base of the Jawbone Mountains at the high north. A silent, rough progress they’d made, with Regan hardly eating, eyes sunken to purplish bruises, a permanent tightness to her mouth. Osli had braided Regan’s hair into loops after the lady had torn out her first, more intricate style. But now the simple plaits hung bedraggled, and the hem of that once-fine gown was filthy, her embroidered slippers torn. Only her posture proclaimed Regan a queen. Ban and Osli fared not much better, for food had been scarce, as Regan hardly allowed them to pause to hunt while the sun shone.
The woeful party arrived, finally, having angled first to Astora, only to be told by retainers from Carrisk at the road’s bend that Gaela had already led two raids, pushing at the Connley border, and now gathered her forces back at Dondubhan, another half a day north.
Ban should have been chilled to realize the trees had not whispered to him about the raids, nor gossiped about what death put mourning banners atop these ramparts. Except that the trees no longer spoke to him.
The wind blew constantly, voicelessly. It had never stopped since Ban cracked open the walnut shell, unleashing his furious magic.
Ban listened intently, but heard nothing in the sharp breeze: no angry snarls from the small hawthorns or cherries they passed, nor the shiver of voices in the long grasses of the moor. No calling birds or chattering crickets.
Nothing.
The voice of the island was simply gone.
He alone seemed to notice. Regan listened only to the dull silence of her own grief, and Osli focused on the processes of travel. If any town folk or farmers were afraid of or upset by the new silence, or by this constant, whining wind, they did not come looking to the roads for help or answers. Was it possible the island shunned only him? Ban the Fox, who had killed the king?
No, it could not be true. He had set this island free.
At dawn, Ban had murmured Good morning and received no response. He’d put his cheek to twisting gray roots and asked, Are you listening? He had called out to the rustle of branches that hid small animals, next to a formation of swans nestled at the frosty edges of a pond. None acknowledged him.
As they rode around the Star Field, Ban stared at the piles of island stones, at the altars covered in pale candles, at the trio of gray-robed priests casting a star reading in the center, bent and huddled and still as hoary statues. Could they feel the change in the wind, sense the dangerous silence? Soon he would have to tell them—someone—that the king, too, was dead.
Then Dondubhan Castle appeared.
Ban had not quite remembered the brutal grandeur of this fortress, nor the huge, rippling black waters of the Tarinnish. As a boy he’d been overwhelmed by its size, the number of families it could contain, and the power embodied in every large chunk of blue-gray stone. But Elia had lived here, and so Ban had loved it.
At the open gate they were challenged, until Osli called out their names and Regan lifted her face in a portrait of disdain. The beardless, clear-eyed soldier who spoke wore white on his sleeve, and said, “The lady will have to be informed of your arrival. None are allowed inside but her retainers, not since Astore’s death.”
Stunned, Ban glanced at Regan, who shuddered and clutched her reins tight enough the leather cut into her palms. Osli began to ask what had happened, but the lady Regan cut her off, caring nothing for another dead man.
“Stand aside,” Regan ordered, suddenly livid and alive, and then pushed her horse on through the long, dark tunnel arch. Ban hurried after on his own steed; the stone floor off the tunnel gave way to a packed-earth yard. Regan dismounted, tossing the reins to a soldier dashing up. “Take me to my sister. See these two loyal retainers fed and sheltered, then in an hour bring the Fox to us.”
Ban slid off his horse. “My lady,” he said, hoping to halt her. He’d rather go into this fortress at her side. But Regan pierced him with a look. She shook her head, and in the language of trees said, I need my sister only.
Bowing, Ban let himself begin to feel the hours of exhaustion, and cold, and hunger. It was a relief, too, to hear the language of trees after four days of silence, even from another human.
As Regan was led quickly away, Osli turned to him and said, “I must make my report to the commander and discover what happened. You’ll do all right on your own?”
A tinge of humor was buried under her words, and so Ban summoned up a small smile. The retainer recognized that Ban had always been on his own, and would continue to survive it well. They’d discovered a tense camaraderie on the journey: nearly the same age, both outsiders on their chosen paths, dedicated to these royal sisters. Osli was as devoted to Gaela and therefore the lady Regan as Ban had once been to Morimaros, for Gaela, too, had given Osli the opportunity to make herself in her own image. Ban hoped, for her sake, that Osli never turned so capable of betrayal as he himself.
She offered her hand, and Ban clasped it.
A young man in Astore pink, but without the trappings of a retainer, fetched Ban and brought him into Dondubhan Castle.
Though the outer wall and barbican was a looming fortress of thick rock peppered with narrow-eyed arrow slits, inside, the castle keep itself spread much more elegantly, with dark wood and pale limestone arches and massive towers of blue-gray stone. It had glass windows as tall as Ban himself, and central trees planted in the interior that lifted high to give shade to the courtyards. Blue banners clung to the walls, most striped now with undyed wool for mourning. Ban was dumped in a lower-level room, one that he suspected by the stark furnishings was often reserved for star priests. Before the servant left, Ban caught his arm. “What happened to the Lord Astore?”
The young man grimaced. “Killed, by our lady,” he said, before leaving swiftly.
Ban shook off his disconcertment and did his best, in the narrow quarters, to rinse his body and scrub dirt from his scalp. He had no razor, but thanks to Ban’s maternal bloodline his beard never grew in thick, covering his jaw only softly with black hair, not too patchy, nor too unkempt. Keeping his mind as empty as possible, he warmed himself dry by the fire before reluctantly putting his dirty clothes back on. As he waited for his summons, Ban removed the little braids still stuck in his hair. He ran his fingers through for want of a comb, and bound it all back in a single short tail. Chunks and wisps fell around his face.
Ban paced,
Ban turned to the window and leaned out. The sky was a cold blue, clouds moving faster than they ought. This room overlooked the choppy Tarinnish, not the inner courtyards and garden lanes, and Ban was glad, since the dark and tumultuous waters did reflect his spirit.
He wasn’t sure he could bear seeing the gardens and verdant nooks, the havens of his fearsome youth. Once in a garden here, Elia had whispered to him that she dreamed of him, that she saw him next to her always. And once they had kissed in the rose garden, near enough to prick their sleeves on the thorns where he had first laid eyes on her, near enough that the early buds had exploded into full blossom. Once, he’d put his head in her lap and let himself doze there; her fingers played against his bottom lip and tangled in his hair. Once Ban had been hopeful, and impossibly happy. Once, he’d not remembered to guard his heart.