The Queens of Innis Lear

  In the bright afternoon, against birds calling high and pretty from the edges of the forest, with the sounds of Hartfare warm and welcoming all around, Gaela’s voice was hard. Harsh, and determined as fire.

  Brona said, “This is not what makes a woman, or the lack of which that makes a man.”

  “Do not be pedantic or poetical with me, Brona. Do not philosophize or moralize. Only tell me if you can.”

  “I can.”

  Gaela said, “And you will?”

  “You might die of it.”

  “I am prepared to die in battle.”

  Brona’s expression darkened. “Good, for that is what this shall be. A battle inside you, and all you will have is the strength of your heart. Your determination.”

  “I can conquer my body,” Gaela whispered.

  “Hm.” Brona frowned, nodding at the same time, studying the warrior in a thoughtful yet daunting manner. It relieved Gaela to be reminded that Brona was an authority in her chosen work, and yet it still brought a swift pinch of annoyance that anyone could still elicit such timidity in her at all. “You will need some weeks to recover, perhaps. Are you ready now, or shall I come to you?”

  Gaela’s instinct was to insist on an immediate surgery. She was ready, had been ready; she needed this as she’d needed almost nothing in her life. But then she thought of Regan’s fury if Gaela were to go into this alone, were to leave without a word. Regan did not get to make this decision for Gaela, or even with her, but that did not mean she would not be there to squeeze their fingers together, to clench her jaw in shared pain, to hold Gaela through the worst of it.

  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 Dalat wanted 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 did not look like than what she did. She did not look like her father; she did not look 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 COULD never 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 men whom 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 A
remoria 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.

  First, Ban would do this magic.

  He hopped off the boulder and made his way down the slope toward the bloomeries. Five brick chimneys squatted on a flat ridge, each spewing short, white-orange flames and billows of smoke. They burned iron ore down to its purer parts to be worked into swords in the town. Two apprentices tended each chimney, most of them men younger than Ban, though one of the two women was older, having come late to her calling. For nearly nine hours today Curan had overseen his students take turns with their round bellows, heating the chimneys and coaxing the fire with urgent spells. They’d begun well before dawn, shoveling in oak charcoal and heavy chunks of iron ore, and Ban now studied their results, listening to the crackling, furious dialect the fire spoke.

  As a boy, he’d known Errigal was the home of the greatest swords. For generations a wizard here had passed on his understanding of how earth, tree, and fire came together to make the strongest iron, the purest to be found. And the smiths worked charms and promises into the finished blades, so Errigal swords never shattered or chipped. They made spearheads and daggers, too, faster and less protected, but it was the swords that were desired by kings the world over.

  So desired, it seemed, the stars themselves had revealed to Lear he need not forbid this sort of earth magic.

  Curan had been the first person the Fox approached upon returning here, to learn what he could of fire and iron, and whether they could be harnessed outside this isolated valley. In a place like Aremoria, even. Morimaros wore a blade of Errigal steel that had been his father’s and grandfather’s. The king paid a steep price for every piece of it he wanted for Aremoria. This intelligence was not the only item on Ban’s list, but it was a good place to begin: learning to make for himself a quiet magical sword, deadly and strong.

  “Here, boy,” Curan said, grasping Ban’s elbow. “Smear the mud on your forearms, chest, shoulders, and face. It will keep the heat away while you reach in and pull out the bloom.”

  A wide bucket of gray mud waited, and two of the apprentices had already begun slathering it on. Ban tugged his shirt off and obeyed, welcoming the cool, heavy feel of it through his fingers. For good measure, he slid it through his hair, too, slicking it back. He and the apprentices became animate clay men, eyes glinting, and teeth, too, when they laughed at each other.

  He drew a spiral over his heart and said, My heart is the root of the island, in the language of trees. Curan nodded approval; it had not been one of his instructions.

  “You all remember the charm?” the wizard asked. “You may need it more than once, for the iron these days is sleepy. For every six blades we used to forge successful, we get only one good, living bloom now.” His gnarled blond hair was braided back in three ropes, tied together with pieces of iron coins and silk. A leather apron protected his chest, painted and sewn with marked spells for steadiness and even heat. The apprentices and Ban nodded, ready.

  Together they went to the first chimney, where the ore Ban had harvested himself cooked. With a long-handled hammer, one apprentice knocked the thin layer of clay away from the door at the base. Heat flared out, licking with fire, followed by a thin stream of melted slag, red-hot. Ban lifted tongs and positioned himself to reach in with them, blinking at the heat drying his eyeballs and cracking the mud on his skin.

  “They will be hard, the chunks of iron, but the surface gives, like a sea sponge or loam beneath your feet,” Curan said.

  Breathe in the fire, out a long hissing spell: words in a hard, symmetrical pattern the iron enjoyed. Ban crouched and angled the tongs into the furnace mouth. Fishing through the roast, his nose filled with hot burn and smoke, Ban whispered the spell again. He closed his eyes, listening to the fire. It spat merrily at him, happy to be so furiously hot: Dancing from heaven, hot as stars, it sang.

  He whispered the secret name of iron, and finally his tongs clasped onto something that felt right. He pulled. The iron dragged at the guts of the chimney. Ban coaxed it, sweat on his lips and trailing down his neck and sticking at the corners of his eyes. The bloom of iron worked free, born from the desperate heat, and Ban smiled.

  Backing away with that glowing hunk clasped in the tongs—white-hot, orange, and dark, shadowed black—he turned to the stone altar slab on the ground. He set the bloom down, but did not release it from the tongs.

  Curan tapped it with a short hammer, gently. Iron, he said in the language of trees, then shaped the words for fire and earth. Flecks of orange-black fell away.

  “Good,” he said.

  Ban fixed his stance, holding the tongs with both hands and his shoulders back, and he began the slag charm. As he spoke it, Curan and the apprentices hammered the bloom of iron, working the slag away, the impurities, in a heart rhythm, a rhythm the wind picked up and Ban felt in the soles of his feet. He’d not touched anything like this since he was a child, working magic with his mother, or dancing with Elia. Alone as a wizard in Aremoria, he had not been offered such a chance, either.

  The iron formed under their hammers into a long, soft rectangle, shining like a sun.

  I burn! the iron cried in triumph.

  Ban laughed at its joy, feeling an echo of it rumble through his arms.

  Curan gave him an understanding smile, though one of the apprentices’ brows creased, as if he did not hear. “It speaks easily with you, Ban Errigal, and very clear,” the wizard said.

  “It called to me from the marsh, when we were harvesting,” Ban said. “I asked the roots for my own material—the quietest, strongest ore. To become a sword for a Fox.”

  “The island listened.” Curan clapped his hand on Ban’s bare, muddy shoulder. The iron wizard frowned a moment but said no more, going to oversee his students remove blooms from the remaining chimneys.

  “I hear that bright magic!” called a distant voice in a happy yell.

  Ban turned south, toward the path from the Innis Road.

  A soldier approached on a fine-shouldered chestnut mare, in the dark blue coat of Lear’s retainers, but unbuttoned over a dirty white shirt. His sword belt slung over the saddle and tapped his horse’s shoulder with every trot. The soldier unbuckled the chin strap of his leather helm and tossed it to the rocky earth, swinging off the saddle before even pulling his horse to a stop.

  Vibrant hair flared off his skull, half stuck down with sweat. “Stars and granite!” cried Rory Errigal—the brother barely behind Ban in age, but always ahead in legitimacy. Rory raised his arms wide as if he could make love to the whole valley. “What a fine place this is, and finer still to be home at last!”

  The heir to the earldom was buoyant and as b
ulky as his father, with a thatch of red hair and matching red freckles thick over the rough white skin of Errigal, the same color as the coarse sand of the beaches. His thin beard and eyelashes were fine yellow like early morning sunlight, brighter still when he smiled.

  And Rory Errigal smiled always.

  Even at his grim bastard brother.

  Ban fought against the tug of a smile on his own face, wondering how long it would be before Rory saw and recognized him. They’d served together in Aremoria for two years, until Rory’d been called home last year to serve in the king’s retainers. They had not seen each other since.

  “Curan!” called Rory. “Hello!”

  The wizard nodded at the two young men and one woman currently working another bloom free of another fire, then turned to face the young lord, wiping his hands on his leather apron. “My lord Rory, welcome home.”

  “I wasn’t quite sure what the trees were saying as I rode in, but I see now they were welcoming new iron.” Rory strode over, having dropped the reins so his horse heaved a sigh and meandered slowly after him, casting several long looks toward the Keep and her eventual stable.

  “You’re out of practice listening,” Curan said.

  “So it happens with the king’s retainers.” Rory shrugged as it if they were not discussing forbidden magic. Always so certain he is untouchable, Ban thought, amazed.

  Rory said, “This is your crop of apprentices? Is Allan still here? I heard he married and left our valley.”

  “Allan is—”

  “Saints’ teeth!”

  All the wind seemed to quiet, even, and the hissing of fires and clang of hammers, at the shock in Rory Errigal’s voice. His powerfully blue eyes widened. “Ban?”

  Ban reluctantly passed his tongs to another student and wiped his hand over his cracking, muddy hair. “Hello, brother.”

  Before aught else but a merry cry, Rory threw himself forward, flinging his considerable muscle mass against Ban. Ban stumbled; Rory caught him with an elbow around the neck, and like that the two brothers hit the ground in a full wrestle.