He nodded, clutching her hands. He needed it. He needed her. “Yes,” he said, voice hoarse.
GAELA
IN THE LONG history of their contentious relationship, there was but one thing the king of Innis Lear and his eldest daughter, Gaela, had repeatedly managed to perform together magnanimously: a deer hunt.
Today was a glorious occasion for it, dawning bright and cool, with slipping hints of autumn in the taste of the wind. Gaela arranged it all, including an afternoon field lunch, and lent her father a brace of hounds as his own remained at Dondubhan. She rallied her captain and best scouts to her side, as well as a handful of her newest recruits, including that mountain Dig when she learned he could understand the whispered language of trees. It was a good tool for a successful hunt. Possibly the only thing the language was good for besides getting beneath her father’s skin. The large youth shifted uncomfortably on his horse: he’d need to acquire the right seat if he was to join Gaela on the battlefield.
Lear lounged on his tall charger as they headed out, fully at ease despite the length of his limbs. His hair flared in wild chestnut and silver strands, flapping across his mouth when he talked to his own captains, men in the dark blue tabards of the king’s retainers. They were a stark disruption of formal Astore pink and the muted green-and-gray leather of Gaela’s scouts.
At first, riding with little intention, the party made its way over meadows laced with late-summer flowers and grass heavy and darkened by seed. Clouds played a game with the sunlight, rushing to cover the sun’s face and reveal it again, cooling the air then making it burst with warmth. The shifting light kept Gaela alert, happy, and it distracted the hounds, who liked the rush of wind and flickering sun more than the promise of the chase.
Gaela’s scouts listened to the trees when Lear had his face turned away, and took off in search of deer.
The king called for a pouch of wine that he shared around with his men, and declaimed the start of a poem from the ancient days of Innis Lear, about war bands and star prophecies and honor. It was one Gaela enjoyed, as it lacked simpering platitudes or the usual meandering narrative that too often caught itself up in repetition and meaningless action. She did not join the retainers, though, who recited the refrain along with her father, or take a turn with a verse. A small smile played on her mouth as she scanned the blue-and-emerald horizon, these edges of her island, and allowed herself to settle into the moment, into the knowledge that it was hers.
And so Gaela was the first to note the scouts had circled back to signal they’d found a deer path. She lifted her hand to interrupt Lear’s verses. But while Gaela’s own men and her captain Osli fell quiet, Lear himself shook his head and finished his lines. He raised them louder, along with the voices of his retainers, until the last couplet became a shout. It was followed with applause and great cheering until their horses stomped in displeasure.
The scouts held up their second flag, along the western edge of the tiny woods, signaling the charge had to be now or never.
Freeing her bow from over her shoulder, she nudged her horse on.
Wind blew at her face and she crouched in the saddle, urging the horse faster and faster. Behind her thundered her hunting party. Gaela no longer cared whether they caught their prey; this flight mattered more, the connection and movement of her body and her horse and the earth below, hard-hitting and wild.
She pulled up at the edge of the woods, where her scout Agar bowed in his saddle, and the trees clicked and whispered. Agar said, “It’s a young buck; we should pause and look elsewhere.”
Gaela frowned and barely skimmed a glance up at the layers of greenery and edging yellow leaves.
“What’s this?” called Lear from behind. “Why end the charge?’
“A young buck, Father,” Gaela said. “We will turn back.”
“But the morning stars were full of firsts, and this is our first deer sighted, so it must be our first kill.” Lear threw out his arm, pointing the way into the forest.
Agar said, “It’s too young, my lady.”
“We look elsewhere, Father,” Gaela said. “To maintain the health of the forest.”
“Bah!” Lear laughed through a scowl, as if he himself could not locate the most pressing emotion. “Bartol! Clarify the star sign for me. Was that not the Star of Sixes and the Eye of the Arrow Saint this morning, hanging on to brightness as we must now hang on to our prey?”
A pale-bearded retainer with burn scars and the white dots of a priest bowed in his saddle, just behind Lear. “Yes, my king.”
Lear glanced triumphantly at Gaela. “We go!”
“Father,” she growled, holding her horse still with one hand, placing the other with hard-fought calm upon her wool-clad thigh, “a too-young buck has not bred, and will not even have prize antlers for you, this time of year. Go for another; I will not bless this charge.”
“I bless it myself,” Lear reminded her, raising his hand to turn his men onward, waving them into the forest.
Gaela argued no further, but she lifted her chin and flattened her hand toward her own people. In all the years she’d learned the hunt at her father’s knee, he had taught her to care for the forest’s needs. To never play such an ignorant, reckless gambit with a herd, only for the pleasure of the moment. The stars, he’d said then, approved of a careful hunt, blessed the relationship between hunter and prey. The stars, the stars, the blasted stars.
“Lady?” Osli murmured, hardly moving her lips.
The prince turned dark eyes on her captain, then shook her head. “I return to Astora. Have the picnic if you like, but tend my father, and hope that young stag
