Ban was caught between grudging admiration and irrational anger at the efficiency with which his father ran the Keep. Errigal’s retainers were sharp and well-behaved, especially compared to King Lear’s more ragged men whom Ban had observed at the Summer Seat. They patrolled the mountain and the Keep walls, and they held to their rotations with a moonlike timeliness. Errigal himself was free to hunt or play cards or seduce women or sit on his ass with a tankard of wine if he wished. In the evenings, soldiers and their wives gathered with Errigal in the long dining hall for hot food and plenty of beer and fire. They told stories—the same stories they’d told when Ban was a boy—or sang or gossiped or heard what news from Lear or the mainland countries Errigal had gotten during the day.
Earl Errigal was quite liked and respected here despite, or maybe because of, his bullish, loud strength.
But he was doing something wrong, for the navel well in the rear garden of the Keep had gone dry. Though capped off years ago as the king had instructed, several of the residents had secretly continued to use it for holy rootwater. Folk in Errigal understood the language of trees, and even if they strove to obey their earl as he sternly maintained the king’s decree, they could not let go the faith of their mothers or the old Connley lords.
Yesterday, one such woman had found Ban in the navel garden, contemplating the plain wooden cap over the well, and admitted to him mournfully that it had been dry two years. No rootwater, even at the spring bloom. Those who wanted rootwater had to venture into the White Forest for a natural spring, or do without. Most have turned to the star chapels, she whispered.
Exactly as the king had intended.
Ban scowled, remembering, and climbed atop a wide boulder that jutted out the side of the Keep mountain. He looked out on the rest of the valley.
The town of Errigal’s Steps scattered down the slope below the Keep, full of wattle-and chalk-daub houses, a star chapel, bakeries and cobblers and tailors and butchers and, importantly, more weapon smithies per muddy road than any other town in all of Innis Lear. Even Aremoria bought swords from Errigal, worked with the iron magic unique to this valley.
To the south of Steps was a long peat marsh where the iron ore came from, kept narrow by the short, jagged hills of the region. From the Keep lookout tower it was possible to see the ocean on a clear day, or to trace the winding Innis Road that crossed the marsh and headed from that eastern coast all the way west to the Summer Seat.
From here Ban should’ve been able to look north and see the edge of the White Forest of Lear, full of giant oaks and white-limbed witch trees, heavy ferns and flat daggers of slate cutting up from the earth, creeks where drowned spirits played and meadows where flowers unfurled to the moon. When last he’d stood on this very boulder, as a fourteen-year-old boy, the canopy had waved farewell. But now, though he was taller and stronger, the forest seemed farther away.
Errigal would not have cut the trees back, nor would the trees have allowed it if he’d tried, nor the witch who lived in the forest’s heart. The forest had withdrawn on its own. The trees had leaned away from the island’s edges, pulling tightly together as if for safety. For comfort? Ban did not know, because he had not yet forced himself to approach the White Forest to ask. He needed to. He needed to hear the whisper of those trees. To drip his blood onto their roots again. To visit his mother.
“It’s time,” called Curan, Errigal’s wide-shouldered iron wizard.
First, Ban would do this magic.
He hopped off the boulder and made his way down the slope toward the bloomeries. Five brick chimneys squatted on a flat ridge, each spewing short, white-orange flames and billows of smoke. They burned iron ore down to its purer parts to be worked into swords in the town. Two apprentices tended each chimney, most of them men younger than Ban, though one of the two women was older, having come late to her calling. For nearly nine hours today Curan had overseen his students take turns with their round bellows, heating the chimneys and coaxing the fire with urgent spells. They’d begun well before dawn, shoveling in oak charcoal and heavy chunks of iron ore, and Ban now studied their results, listening to the crackling, furious dialect the fire spoke.
As a boy, he’d known Errigal was the home of the greatest swords. For generations a wizard here had passed on his understanding of how earth, tree, and fire came together to make the strongest iron, the purest to be found. And the smiths worked charms and promises into the finished blades, so Errigal swords never shattered or chipped. They made spearheads and daggers, too, faster and less protected, but it was the swords that were desired by kings the world over.
So desired, it seemed, the stars themselves had revealed to Lear he need not forbid this sort of earth magic.
Curan had been the
