Elia opened the door of Brona’s cottage for Ban’s departure.
Though Elia only had wrapped herself in a blanket over the long shift she’d gone to bed in, Ban wore a clean shirt borrowed from Kay Oak’s traveling bags, and a coat of his mother’s that fit his shoulders. They’d done what they could with his hair, braiding pieces of it back from his face. Still he seemed wild, though that might have been his expression or those hollow cheeks. He paused, framed in the door. His eyes rested on hers, heavy with the weight of all that had passed between them.
But Elia felt grounded for the first time in years. She could see the paths they’d followed, and why, the choices they’d been forced to make for themselves and never for each other. Before she let him go, she needed only one more answer.
Elia folded her hands before her: not in pain, not holding some great, gnawing wound inside, merely regal and sure like the queen she was supposed to be.
She asked, “What do you want, now that this storm has passed?”
“I am the storm,” Ban murmured. He leaned closer to her, until his forehead brushed hers and his words tickled along her cheekbone to her ear. “I want this island to crumble, and see what rises. Discover who can transform all the shattered power into something strong. Will it be you?”
“Stars and worms, Ban Errigal,” she whispered, shivering.
“I had to come home because this is what I was meant to do. To pull Innis Lear apart. To show your father and my father and everyone who believes as they do how fragile everything truly is, and how wrong they have been.”
“Am I wrong, too?”
Ban pressed her against the doorframe. Body to body. “What do you want, Elia Lear?” he asked, then kissed her tenderly.
She welcomed the kiss, relishing its warmth and simplicity, when nothing about this was simple. His lips, her tongue, their teeth and hearts.
Elia leaned back and said, “I want to save everyone.”
“So we are opposed,” he whispered, muddy green eyes too near her own.
“No.” She touched his lips with her fingers, nudging him away. “I’m going to save you, too.”
It was clear from the bleakness in his face that Ban did not believe her. Well, she would make him believe, just as she would make her sisters. “Go to Gaela and bring her to me at Errigal Keep. I will get my father and go to Regan. We will wait there, and when you and my eldest sister arrive, you’ll see what I can do.”
“I’ll go to Gaela.” Ban’s lips barely moved under her fingers.
“Good.” She began to kiss him again, but Aefa suddenly appeared.
“Elia,” said a wide-eyed Aefa, approaching through the squelching mud with another woman behind her. “You—um.”
“I must go,” Ban murmured.
“Be well, Ban,” Elia said. He nodded, then picked up his sword belt and left.
She had watched him go when they were children, crying, shoulders shaking with young agony at the injustice. He had watched her go last month at the standing stones: him blazing like a torch trapped in its sconce, her heart-frozen, numb.
Here was the third departure, and Elia was neither shuddering with agony nor stuck in place. She was ready.
And Elia was glad for last night’s storm, glad for all its raw power that had thrust her together with Ban. She’d streaked across the sky last night, a star falling through the blackness, and landed where he’d been born, landed in the roots of Innis Lear, in this thicket of thorns and wild shadows. No matter what came next, threads of starlight had planted here, and Elia understood them.
At the edge of the woods a handful of moon moths floated, pale spirits darting in the flickering shadows, just where Elia could not quite see. In the gentle rush of a stream, Elia heard the hopeless echo of her starless sister’s name, but the forest would say no more.
THE FOX
THE RAVEN STRETCHED black wings wide, an arc of darkness against the bright green morning. It then leapt off a pile of stones and flapped past the forest canopy, into the keen blue sky. One cry for the wizard, and it vanished east, toward Aremoria and its king.
Ban sat hard onto the ruins he’d stumbled over, the leavings of some long-dead lord. Moss edged the crumbling stone foundation, and small ferns and patches of rose brambles grew in the cracks. He lowered his head into his hands. His skin felt raw, scrubbed over with shards of glass. That was the last missive Ban the Fox would ever send to Morimaros of Aremoria. He was not formed for order and service, for the soaring spires of clean, careful Lionis. Ban was wild, and this furious island owned his heart.
But he was sorry to hurt Mars. And selfishly glad not to be forced to witness the moment the king understood this betrayal.
Ban scraped his hands down his thighs. Ruins were what this island needed more of: places for the trees to swallow up towers and ramparts, for the navel wells to flood and nobody to count the stars for a hundred years. Raze Lear’s castles to the earth, let them be reclaimed, and seed over the royal roads. Show the people of cold prophecy to fear this land they’d so quickly forsaken, the roots that had deserved to be better loved. Shove those standing stones into the ocean.
That was what Ban would do, if he were a wizard powerful enough.
Regan might let him.
Though Gaela might prefer to murder him instead.
He shuddered with the thrill of the idea.
Five years ago, when Ban nearly died in Aremoria, those compassionate trees had saved him, knitting him together and reminding him what power was. Ban had thought his mission must be to grow his reputation; he would become great, and then come home. To prove his worth, to show Lear and his father, and
