“What did you expect?” Novanos asked in undertone.
Staring at the pale bubbles circling the top of the dark beer, Mars shook his head once. The beer smelled like new bread. He glanced at Elia, still holding her arm around Rory Errigal. Mars hadn’t spent much time with the young man, both lacking the occasion and disliking to be reminded of Ban. But he’d been told Rory was a flirt and quite good with his sword and shield. Two different girls in Mars’s castle had fallen to his charms, and possibly one of Novanos’s best soldiers. Ban had told Mars once that Rory took after Errigal, and it was easy to see. He touched Elia readily, and Mars forced himself to be glad the two friends had each other right now: he remembered too keenly the feeling of a father’s sudden death.
He wondered how Ban had orchestrated it. And if the Fox had anything to do with the death of Lear. Mars would place a heavy wager upon it. But he needed more information before he could unravel this web.
Novanos tried the beer and grimaced. Mars smiled a little at the man’s refined palate.
“You should at least attempt to relax,” Novanos said. “Use this as the only freedom you’re like to get the rest of your life. Enjoy the break from responsibility.”
“I’m going outside,” Mars said.
When his captain grunted in displeasure, Mars sourly added, “To enjoy my freedom.”
Controlling himself carefully, Mars left the inn. He stood in the street, squinting up at the bleary sun and feeling like a spoiled child. The king of a beautiful, strong country, sulking as if he’d been sent away by his mother.
He’d wanted Elia to smile. To see him and be pleased, even if she strove to hide it. He’d wanted her to need him, despite those last words she’d said to him in Lionis, and despite that he’d lied by omission for nearly their entire relationship.
But her father was dead, so she couldn’t. Even besides that, she had so many things to think about; Mars knew very well the sort of pressure she was under now, no matter what her intentions for Innis Lear. He understood better than any, yet here he was wishing her to be as foolish as he had been, to drop her responsibilities, and not prioritize her grief or her friend’s grief and the loss of a strong earl, but Mars’s miraculous arrival. It was childish of him, and beneath them both. She would never appreciate it.
Laughing bitterly at himself, Mars turned to go back inside and be patient. He would be here for her, however she would use him: that was his goal.
A dark-haired woman stood in his way.
Mars froze.
“Go with me,” she said in a voice as regal as a queen’s—if queens ruled shadows and dreams.
“Where is Elia?”
“You are not yet granted an audience with our lady, but go with me up the cliff. There is a path offering very dramatic views.”
“Very well,” Mars said, low and strangely unnerved. Heat prickled up from beneath his skin; the sky of Innis Lear was cold.
The woman nodded and led the way, her skirts swinging freely around her worn boots. She was not dressed as a noblewoman: the green of her cinched tunic was faded, though her skirts were layered and ruffled, like a distant cousin of Ispanian fashion. She wore no jewels but a few links of copper tied to her belt, and silk ribbons held back the wind-snarled mass of her hair. A plain black jacket, also faded, fit loosely and clearly had not been made for her, but for a larger man. Despite the mismatched clothing and untended hair, she was gorgeous. Her warm tan skin showed some lines of age and laughter around her welcoming lips. Mars was not so used to being attracted to people as soon as he met them, but there was a familiar wariness in her brown eyes when she glanced back to make certain he followed.
He did, a few paces behind, so as to keep from crowding her. She took quick, short strides through town, up the steep, snaking streets, and out of the cove. Some wooden stairs stained white by salt cut up off the main road, and she took them over and around jutting limestone capped with scraggly gray-green ocean grass. Wind blasted, shoving at Mars, but the woman seemed not to be affected; rather, the wind parted for her.
Mars concentrated on placing his boots carefully on the twenty or so stairs until they reached a plateau and a very narrow path, worn to limestone gravel against the grass and thin dirt. The woman climbed easily, mounting the bluff with a deep enough breath he could see her shoulders lift and fall. She waited, looking back, and when Mars joined her she began to walk again, meandering idly with her gaze directed out at the glittering sea.
Pale ribbons danced in the wind, loosening from her hair. It smelled of salt here, nothing more, because the wind scoured this place clean of all else.
After a quarter of a mile edging the cliff, the woman stopped and turned entirely to face the sea. “Can you feel the island’s fury, Morimaros of Aremoria?”
He frowned and folded his hands together behind his back. This promontory of cliff reached farther out than the rest of the south coast, thrusting them high enough over the ocean that the crash of waves on the white rocks below was only a dull rush of sound. The wind battered at his back, as if to throw him over. “I feel the wind.”
“Do you think it wants you here?”
To say what he truly thought—that it mattered not to him what the wind wanted—would cast this woman, and all of Innis Lear, against him. Mars only said,
