Connley joined them. He kissed Ban’s cheeks, first one, then the other, and then his mouth. There was more heat than had been in his wife’s touch. “Hail, Errigal,” the duke murmured against Ban’s lips.
Ban could not help the shiver that tore down his spine.
“Finish your drink, Ban, and tell us what the Fox of Aremoria would do next,” Regan said.
The letter from Elia Lear to her sister remained inside Ban’s coat, discarded across the arm of a chair.
SIX YEARS AGO, INNIS LEAR
“YOU CAN’T HIDE from me, Ban Errigal!”
The princess sang out her call, smiling all the while as she picked her way across the mossy meadow. She avoided crushing any of the tiny white sparflowers, but kicked at every dandelion gone to seed. Her trusted boots remained by the creek where she’d been dipping her toes, waiting for her sister Regan to finish collecting caterpillar husks and wildflowers. The water had been cool, the silt soft underneath her feet, and Elia wished to throw off her light summer layers and revel like a river spirit.
But the hanging branches of a willow had brushed her shoulders and said, Ban is near.
Not having seen her friend in several months, Elia splashed to shore and asked the trees for direction.
This was the edge of the White Forest nearest the Summer Seat, on land her uncle the Oak Earl tended. Wind-stripped moors and hard grazing land, except for under the trees, where it became a bright place with quiet meadows full of young deer and hanging sunlight, creeks spilling from fresh springs, and very few spirits. It was easy for Elia to listen to a whisper here and there, to trace a straight path toward Ban. Her breath came light and full, as she tasted the height of summer on her tongue, happy for quite a long stretch, and happier still to know who it was she chased.
When she came to the line of slate and limestone rocks turned upside down, the worms and sleeping beetles exposed, Elia said his name aloud, twice—once in the people’s tongue and once in the language of trees. No answer came back to her. But she saw the imprint of a narrow boot, thin-soled and supple enough to show where the ball of his foot hit and the toe brushed after. She traced the curve of it, and went the way it pointed, humming to herself a song with nonsense words like her father’s Fool would sing, but changed them to flower-names and root words, in a long cheerful pattern that all the birds appreciated. A half-dozen bluebirds and sparrows hopped from their nests to flit along behind her.
The meadow of sparflowers and white-puffed dandelions glowed with traces of sunlight and floating seeds, yet all was still. Someone had told these grasses and trees to be quiet.
Elia smiled. She was just fourteen and none on the island were better than she at listening, for none but she both understood and rarely demanded a response. That was Ban’s role: he asked, he spoke, he commanded. His mother, the gorgeous witch Brona, meddled and manipulated, twisting vines and flowers to her will with teasing and fair exchange. Regan had just begun to pull at roots, to weave them into hopes and messages, pouring her blood into the barren space left behind.
So Elia listened now, from the center of the meadow, her little brown hands caressing the grasses gone to seed, and the tufted dandelion heads, the kiss-soft petals of delicate white flowers. Her hair moved and shifted as she cocked her head, a mass of free copper-brown-black curls. She wore a gown her sister had once owned, and so it was three intricate and expensive layers, but all of them some kind of yellow, and Elia was everything summer-warm in the world.
One of the trees at the north side of the meadow shivered. It was so slight, so quiet a sound, Elia knew anyone else would not find him.
She leapt up, dashed to the alder, and put her hands on the grayish trunk, rubbing her fingers along the tiny horizontal markings on the bark, so like the written language of trees. Down the middle a fold pressed together, nearly four feet tall. Open up, she whispered, and the bark shivered, giggling at her wishes. Elia kissed it, and again. Open up, please! Though there was no true word for please in the language of trees.
Elia!
It wasn’t the tree complaining, but Ban.
She laughed. “Come out! I’ve not seen you in so long. Are you taller?”
The tree shivered again, and the fold opened like arms, revealing a triangle of a hollow between two wide roots, and there she spied him half crouched in the darkness.
He grimaced at her, wiping mud from his cheeks. But she leaned in too fast, and fell against him with a little laugh. They crushed together in the musty hollow, laughter echoing up to the tree’s heart. All the branches shook as they tickled the tree from the inside. Elia held tight around Ban’s neck, and he lifted her to her toes and dragged them both out.
They collapsed into the meadow, knocking elbows and knees, quite breathless. Ban smiled because sunlight found Elia’s horn-black eyes, making them shine, and she smiled because she had her hands on his tawny cheeks. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” he said back, rather gruff for a boy.
Elia sat. Petals and dandelion seeds fell out of her hair. “Why didn’t you come see me? How long have you been near?”
Ban absently caught the leavings as they drifted from her hair. His own was long and rough, knotted in places from old braids he never untied, greasy as young men without parents are so skilled at maintaining. His fingers were already talented, though, and they danced as he wove petals and seeds into a wide ring with a strand of wind.
“Ban,” she said softly, touching the corner of his mouth
