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 again, suddenly, will she return? She was too wild to be our queen—the folk of Innis Lear are better spies and wizards than kings and queens! The Fox’s brother! Oh! This one could never hide—such hair! Will he, too, earn the confidence of our Mars?
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
