The Queens of Innis Lear

The Fool was an imbecile, bringing pink flowers and bright yellow butterfly wings to little Regan, teasing her and trying to tease Gaela, too. She remembered it still, always with a scowl. Are there green undertones in your mother, do you think? Let’s compare … Dalat smiled and tilted her head to allow the young man to brush a leaf to her cheek until Regan declared a babyish yay or nay. Gaela had been more determined, more precise. She had gathered walnut bark and a deep purple flower, smooth black river rocks, gleaming acorns, a shining crow feather, and a feather mottled rich brown from an eagle’s wing. The last her mother had accepted like riches, and woven the quill into the tight knot of braids at the base of her neck. Like my grandmother’s imperial crest, Dalat smilingly declared. It stood out like a horn, or a slender, delicate wing all its own. It’s still not right, Gaela had said angrily. The Fool sang, Poetry is about perception, little princess, not accuracy. It is about what it means to compare the Queen’s dark and curving mouth to a powerful eagle’s wing. Then her mother took Gaela’s hand, spread it out against her own, and said, This is the only match that matters.

But Dalat was dead, the Fool attached like a wart to the king, and Gaela had no use for poems. Poems did not create power, and Gaela intended to be king when her terrible father died, or sooner. Nothing would stop her.

The urgency of the soldiers now thrummed in Gaela’s bones, lending satisfaction to her resolve. She wished she could march with her army to the Summer Seat, drag her father to his knees, and take the crown. How her satisfaction would grow at the sight of him bowed before her, trembling and afraid. Did my mother die on her knees? Gaela would ask. Did you touch poison to her lips with a kiss, or put it in her nightly mug of warm honeyed milk? Did you ever trust me as she trusted you? Of course, he never trusted anyone or anything except the vicious stars. And so Gaela would thrust her sword into his neck, and watch as he gasped and gargled, as he sank into an undignified pool of blood at her feet.

But no matter how she longed to take the crown in such a way, it was not the most direct, most efficient, or even most secure path. No, the people of Lear took their king-making seriously, claiming them fast and hewing hard to the anointment and the secret, specific traditions of the island’s roots. Gaela would have to bide her time, wait for the king to name her his heir, and then give the island her blood and spit on the longest night of the year. As was right.

To do it by any other method would invite Connley to challenge her—curse him, his ancestors, and his perfect stars, and curse Regan for marrying into that line and giving the dog a stronger claim. Though Gaela wanted war, wanted a chance to release all the fury and aggression inside her heart more than most anything, she did not want a war with her sister on the opposite side.

So here Gaela Lear stood, amidst her personal army, performing for the folk on Connley’s border, sending a brutal message without quite making a firm challenge.

The soldiers had formed up for the melee. With a ferocious smile, Gaela abandoned her perch and ran to join them. Her movement served as signal, and the two sides slammed together, all yelling and chaos, with some few laughing as Gaela laughed. She drew her sword and aimed for the nearest soldier; he had plenty of time to block with his buckler and sword, but the force of her charge shoved him back. She bared her teeth and twisted, shoving at him with all her might. He spun, and Gaela dove farther into the battle.

A flash of light to her left had Gaela turning hard, lifting her own buckler as she dodged under the attack and slammed the edge into her attacker’s face. It caught his helmet with a clang, and he stumbled back, falling hard. Gaela swung around, just in time to see the next attack.

She lost herself in the frenzy of danger, in the cuts and blocks, in the fight to prove herself. She kept on as the battle raged, her teeth clenched, alert, pounding again and again toward the center of the horde. Pain jolted through Gaela’s body with most blocks; she cried out; she screamed. She reveled. This was the nearest she’d come to war, to the desperation and danger: some men would die in this game, and some would be injured too badly to fight again for a long while. Their swords should be blunted, or wrapped. This should be less deadly, but Gaela did not care. She would survive, and she would win, today and tomorrow. It was not reckless. It was vital. Her husband could never understand how this brought her to life as nothing else did, how she needed the immediacy of this danger. This—this—brought her to the edge of her strength, made her feel the mettle she possessed in the very core of her bones. When she fought, Gaela knew she did not need any root blessing or star prophecy.

She was born to be king.

Suddenly, Gaela found herself in a break of soldiers, facing one man. This soldier was huge, blond-bearded with pocked scars on his young pink cheeks, and clearly he had built his uniform from castoffs that did not quite fit. His sword and buckler were borrowed from the Astore armory, and they were stamped as such. But he did not take his eyes from hers, even when she lifted her chin so the sun caught the red blood at the corner of her mouth. She smiled, and it smeared her teeth.

He planted his feet in a very strong defensive pose.

Gaela dropped her buckler and attacked.

Her two-handed grip gave her strength and leverage, which mattered as his size negated any reach advantage she’d have gained by fighting with her shield.

Blood roared in her ears, and she shouldered in past his block, nearly bashing his cheek with her pommel before he twisted and shoved her back hard enough she stumbled. With a spin from the inertia, she drove hard again, hacking at his sword, each clang of metal filling her heart with joy. He was good, using his weight, but still slower than she was. Soon they were the only fighters, all others watching the show.

It was brief but glorious, and Gaela risked a low cut up under his reach, so enthralled she was with the rhythm of their game. He blocked it, chopping with his buckler so the reinforced edge caught her upper arm, numbing the entire limb. She cried out, shocked, and dropped her sword from that hand. It swung off-balance in her other and the man pressed his advantage as she valiantly blocked again, again, and then with his boot he stomped on her thigh.

Gaela went down.

The soldier dropped everything to catch her arm, lifting her to her feet again in a smooth gesture.

He did not hold on when she was steady, and the entire movement appeared so natural, so easy, the gathered soldiers cheered.

Gaela liked a soldier who would win and still save her face. The fingers of her shield arm tingled as blood rushed back into them. Gaela sheathed her sword and rubbed her hands together, smiling for her opponent and all the soldiers. “Well fought, man. Give me your name, that I might invoke it when I speak with my husband.”

“Dig,” the large young man replied.

She lifted her thin eyebrows. “No other?”

“None, lady.”

“Then, Dig of Astora, welcome to my army.”

Just then, a horn sounded from the ridge to the west. Gaela clasped Dig’s wrist, then released him and strode heavily toward the camp. Her body ached with weariness, but she was glad of it.

Osli jogged up, chainmail ringing with the movement. The captain pushed her hair out of her face, dragging it through sweat, and said, “Lady, should I order the end of the games today, or do you want them to run the tower drill again?”

“Drill once more, then have the beer shared out here on the field before everyone returns to camp.” The princess smiled at her young captain, a girl of only nineteen with nearly as much ambition as Gaela herself. “Then you should join me for whatever news comes with this horn, and we’ll share wine while we plan tomorrow’s games. Bring that Dig soldier, and choose two more exemplary men to reward.”

Osli nodded sharply and darted off as Gaela climbed the steeper section of the hill, reaching the long flat plain on the crest where her army had set up camp. Most tents were simple single-pole shelters or lean-tos, ringed wide about fire pits. The supply wagons made a crescent at the south end, and smoke rose there as folk cooked a hearty meal. Fifty men and women and ten wagons to keep her three hundred soldiers tended and fed for this weeklong campaign. She’d ordered them to act as though the supply from Astora City had been cut off, as it might be in real war.

Her eye caught the trio of horses stamping near her tent, a much larger canvas shelter with seven poles and crowned by the Astore banner. One of the horses was her own, its head lowered and rear hoof up in relaxation, but the other two were still dressed and saddled, eagerly drinking from the trough set before them. They were Astore’s horse and one of his stewards’.

Gaela looked all around, and spied him there, a good distance from her, atop a promontory where he’d have a good view of the valley below. Likely he’d witnessed only the final moments of the melee, and now was eying her towers and bastilla.

She made for her tent to divest herself of mail and gauntlets with one of the apprentices, denying her husband the pleasure. A boy in a pink tabard waited at the entrance, and she dragged him in so he could undo the buckles under her left arm that held her small chest plate over the mail.

It was not quick work, and Astore slapped open the tent just as the heavy mail shirt finally slipped off her head and into the waiting arms of the apprentice boy.

“Get out,” Astore said fondly, filling the front of the tent. Fifteen years older than his wife, he was blond and wore it long, in a plain, straight tail. Though he was certainly not ugly, Gaela found it difficult to judge his attractiveness, as she found such things difficult with all people. He was fit and strong, a good war leader, which had brought him to her notice in the first place. He wore a trim blond beard, his light brown eyes were edged in wrinkles, and his skin was as white as hers was black. Save the pink patches from staying too long on the sunny castle ramparts with his retainers.

Gaela stripped the linen hood off her hair as he stared at her. She then went to pour them wine from the low table beside her bed. He always was struck by Gaela when she was disheveled from battle, wearing men’s trousers and a soldier’s quilted gambeson, with only a smear of dark paint around her eyes. It amused her that he strove to hide the visibility of his sexual interest as best he was able, lest it cause her to turn cold. Gaela could always see it. She knew the signs, and she pushed at them when she was feeling mean. Their marriage bed was a contentious one.

“Wife,” he said, accepting the clay cup of wine. She saw a letter with the swan of Lear waiting unopened in his other hand, and she sipped her wine in silence. Her heart still thrummed with the energy and joy of battle.

Astore moved around her to sit in the only chair, a heavy armchair rather like a throne that Gaela brought with her always. He watched her carefully as he drank nearly all his wine. She did not move, waiting. Finally, Astore said, “You’re reckless, setting your men against each other with sharp blades.”

“Those who are harmed in such games are hardly worthy of riding at my side, nor would I be worthy of the crown, to die so easily.”

His grim smile twisted. “I need you alive.”

Gaela sniffed, imagining the release she’d feel if she punched him until that smile broke. But she still needed him, too. The Star of the Consort dominated her birth chart, and to those men of Innis Lear she needed on her council and in her pocket, that meant coming to the throne with a husband. Though Gaela longed for war, she was enough of a strategist to know it was better that the island fight outward, not among themselves. For now, she used Astore, though her sister Regan would always be her true consort. “What does Lear want?”

“He wrote to both of us; to me he still refuses to allow reconstruction on the coastal road.”

“It isn’t in the stars?” she guessed, restraining the roll of her eyes.

“But it is—I commissioned a chart by my own priests. He twists his reasoning around and dismisses what seems to be obvious necessity. Possibly Connley has been whispering in his ear.”

“He hates Connley more than you, usually.” She sank onto the thick arm of the chair and leaned across Astore’s chest for the unopened letter.

Placing his arm just below her elbow in case she needed steadying, but not quite touching her, Astore did not disagree. “I might write to your little sister and ask her for a prophecy regarding the coastal road. Lear has never yet argued with one of hers.”

Gaela drank the rest of her wine and set the cup on the rug before cracking the dark blue wax of Lear’s seal.

Eldest,

Come to the Summer Seat for a Zenith Court, this third noontime after the Throne rises clear, when the moon is full. As the stars describe now, I shall set all my daughters in their places.

Your father and king,

Lear

Grimacing, Gaela dropped the message into Astore’s lap. She touched the tip of her tongue to her front teeth, running it hard against their edges. Then she bit down, stoking the anger that always accompanied her father’s name. Now it partnered with a thrill that hummed under her skin. She knew her place already: beneath the crown of Lear. But did this mean he would finally agree? Finally begin the process of her ascension?

“Is he ready to take off the crown? And will he see finally fit to hand it to you, as is right?” Astore’s hand found her knee, and Gaela stared down at it, hard and unflinching, but her husband only tightened his grip. The three silver rings on his first three fingers flashed: yellow topaz and pink sapphires set bold and bare. They matched Gaela’s thumb ring.

She methodically pried his hand off her knee and met his intense gaze. “I will be the next queen of Innis Lear, husband. Never mistake that.”

“I never have,” he replied. He lifted his hand to grasp her jaw, and Gaela fell still as glass. His fingers pressed hard, daring her to pull away. Instead she pushed nearer, daring him in return to try for a kiss.

Tension strained between them. Astore’s breath flew harsher; he wanted her, violently, and for a moment she saw in his eyes the depth of his fury, a rage usually concealed by a benevolent veneer, that his wife constantly and consistently denied his desire. Gaela did not care that he hated her as often as he loved her, but she did care that his priorities always aligned with her own.

Gaela put her hand on Astore’s throat and squeezed until he released her. She kissed him hard, then, sliding her knee onto his lap until it forced his thighs apart. Scraping her teeth on his bottom lip, she pulled back, not bothering to hide that the only desire she felt now was to wash off the taint of his longing.

“My queen,” the duke of Astore said.

Gaela Lear smiled at his surrender.

THE FOX

BAN THE FOX arrived at the Summer Seat of Innis Lear for the first time in six years just as he’d left it. Alone.

The sea crashed far below at the base of the cliffs, rough and growling with a hunger Ban had always understood. From this vantage, facing the castle from the sloping village road, he couldn’t see the white-capped waves, just the distant stretch of sky-kissed green water toward the western horizon. The Summer Seat perched on a promontory nearly cut off from the rest of Innis Lear, its own island of black stone and clinging weeds connected only by a narrow bridge of land, one that seemed too delicate to take a man safely across. Ban recalled racing over it as a boy, unconcerned with the nauseating death drop to either side, trusting his own steps and the precariously hammered wooden rail. Here, at the landside, a post stone had been dug into the field and in the language of trees it read: The stars watch your steps.

Ban’s mouth curled into a bitter smile. He placed his first step firmly on the bridge, boots crushing some early seeds and late summer flower petals blown here by the vibrant wind. He crossed, his gloved hand sliding along the oiled-smooth rail.

The wind’s whisperings were rough and harsh, difficult for Ban to tease into words. He needed more practice with the dialect, a turn of the moon to bury himself in the moors and remind himself how the trees spoke here, but he’d only arrived back on Innis Lear two days ago. Ban had made his way to Errigal Keep to find his father gone, summoned here to the Summer Seat, and his brother, Rory, away, settled with the king’s retainers at Dondubhan. After food and a bath, he’d had a horse saddled from his father’s stable. To arrive in time for the Zenith Court, Ban hadn’t had the luxury to ride slowly and reacquaint himself with the stones and roots of Innis Lear, nor they with his blood. The horse was now stabled behind him in Sunton, for horses were not allowed to make the passage on this ancient bridge to the Summer Seat.

At the far end, two soldiers waited with unsharpened halberds. They could use the long axes to nudge any newcomer off the bridge if they chose. When Ban was within five paces, one of them pushed his helmet up off his forehead enough to reveal dark eyes and a straight nose. “Your name, stranger?”

Ban gripped the rail and resisted the urge to settle his right fist on the pommel of the sword sheathed at his belt. “Ban Errigal,” he returned, hating that his access would be determined by his family name, not his deeds.

The soldiers waved him through, stepping back from the brick landing that spread welcomingly off the bridge.

A blast of wind shoved Ban forward, and he nearly stumbled. Using the motion to turn, he asked the guard, “Do you know where I might find the Earl Errigal?”

“In the guest tower.”

Ban nodded his thanks, glancing at the scathing sun. He did not relish this meeting with his father. Errigal traveled to Aremoria every late spring to visit the Alsax cousins and to be Lear’s ambassador. He’d always lavished praise on Ban in front of others, awkwardly labeling his son a bastard at the same time.

Perhaps Ban could eschew the proper order of greeting, and ask instead where the ladies Lear would be this time of day. Six years ago he’d have found Elia with the goats. But it was impossible to imagine she hadn’t shifted her routine since childhood. He had changed; so must she have. Grown tall and bright as a daffodil, or worn and weathered like standing stones.

Ban squashed the thought of her hair and eyes, of her hands covered in green beetles. He suspected most of his memories were sweetened by time and brightened with longing, not accurate to what their relationship had truly been. She, the daughter of the king, and he, the bastard son of an earl, could not have been so close as he remembered. Probably the struggle and weariness of being fostered to a foreign army, the homesickness, the dread, the years of uncertainty, had built her into a shining memory no real girl could live up to. Especially one raised by a man like Lear. In his earliest years at war, Ban had thought of Elia to get himself through fear, but it had been a weakness, like the straw doll a baby clings to against nightmares.

Surely she would disdain him now because of the stars at his birth, just as the king had. If she remembered him at all. One more thing to lay at the feet of Lear.

Ban settled his hand on the pommel of his sword. He’d earned himself his own singular epithet. He was here at the Summer Seat not as a cast-off bastard, but as a man in his own right.

Turning a slow circle, Ban made himself change his eyes, to observe the Seat as the Fox.

Men, women, soldiers, and ladies swarmed in what he guessed was an unusual amount of activity. The castle itself was a fortress of rough black stones quarried centuries ago, when the bridge was less crumbled, less tenuous. It rose in a barbican here, spreading into the first wall, then an inner second wall taller than this first, with three central towers, one built against the inner keep. The king’s family and his retainers could fit inside for weeks, as well as his servants and the animals necessary to live: goats, pigs, poultry. Barracks, laundry, cliff-hanging privies, the yard, the armory, and the towers: Ban remembered it all from childhood. But it was ugly, old and black and asymmetrical. Built over generations instead of with a singular purpose in mind.

The Fox was impressed with how naturally fortified the promontory was, how difficult it would be to attack. But as he studied his environs, the Fox knew it would be easy to starve out. Surround it landside with an enemy camp, and seaside with boats, and it could be held under siege indefinitely with no more than, say, fifty men.

If one could locate the ancient channel through which spring water flowed onto the promontory, the siege would be mercifully brief. Were he the king of this castle, he’d order a fort built landside, to protect the approach, and use the promontory as a final stand only once all other hope had been lost.

Unless, perhaps, there were caves or unseen ways from the cliffs below where food could be brought in—and there must be. But an enemy could poison the water in the channel, instead of stopping it up. The besieged could not drink seawater. Was there a well inside? Not that Ban could recall from his youth, and it was surely less likely now. This place was a siege death trap, though winning such a battle would be symbolic only: if the Seat were under siege, the rest of the kingdom should already have fallen, and so what would the Seat be against all that?

Ban felt a twisted thrill at the idea of the king of Innis Lear having to make such choices. Better yet if his course here led directly to it.

He went along the main path through the open iron gates and into the inner yard where soldiers clustered and the squawking of chickens warred with hearty conversation, with the cries of gulls hunting for dropped food, the crackle of the yard-hearth where a slew of bakers and maids prepared a feast for the evening. Ban’s stomach reacted to the rich smell, but he didn’t stop. He strode quickly toward the inner keep, one hand on the pommel of his sword to balance it against his hip. Ban wondered if he could greet his father (he was fairly certain he remembered which was the guest tower) and then find a place to wash, in order to present himself in a fitter state than this: hair tangled from wind, horse-smelling jacket, worn britches, and muddy boots. He’d dumped his mail and armor in Errigal to make a faster showing astride the horse.

A familiar orange flag caught his attention: the royal insignia of Aremoria.

There was a good king. The sort of soldier who took his turn watching for signal lights all night long, digging his own privy pits and rotting his toes off. Who had suffered alongside his men and took his turn in the slops and at the dangerous front. Morimaros of Aremoria did not make choices based on nothing but prophecy.

Across the yard a maroon pennant flapped: the flag of the kingdom of Burgun. Ullo the Pretty. Also come to court Elia Lear, despite, or maybe because of, being trounced in battle.

Ban wondered what she thought of the two kings.

Beyond the second wall, the smell of people, sweat, and animals was crushing. The lower walls had no slits or windows, nothing to move air, and Ban longed to climb onto the parapets, or into the upper rooms built with cross-breezes in mind, because this was where court spent the months warm enough for it. From the parapets he’d be able to see the island’s trees, at least, if not hear them: the moss and skinny vines growing on this rock had not the will for speaking. Ban made for a stairway cut along the outside of the first, only to freeze at the base when his father appeared in the dark archway above.