She put her hand flat on his chest. “No. I changed it. I did this to myself. I make decisions and act upon them. I do not allow stars or prophecy to dictate my choices. They are a tool, nothing more.”
“Did what … to yourself?” Astore blinked.
“I am incapable of bearing a child, by choice and by necessity, Col. Brona Hartfare burned my womb out of me before you put your seed anywhere near it.”
Astore hit her.
The blow bent her around, and she caught herself with her hands against the corner of her desk.
“Lies!” he yelled.
Gaela’s skull rang, more with shock than any pain. She blinked. And then she turned, punching him in the gut. She followed with a slap across the side of his face.
Blood touched the tip of her tongue then, and she spat onto her floor. “Oh, Col,” she said dangerously, quietly.
He grabbed her by the throat.
So they stood. Gaela sneered, tilted her chin up, and welcomed his stare. “Do what you will,” she said through her teeth.
“Is it because of your mother?” Astore asked. A vein pulsed at the curve of his temple, hot pink where she’d hit him.
She wrapped her hands around his forearm. “It is because I will wear the crown, and I will get it like a king. Not as a mother and wife, but as the firstborn child, as the strongest. It is no fault of mine to be forced to perform this illusion of being your wife, to pretend to be what a woman of this island is supposed to be, in order to gain power among you and your peers.”
Astore dropped her suddenly, faltering back. He sank onto a short wooden chair with rounded arms. “Barren,” he said, with the ghost of a bitter smile. “What a schemer you are, Gaela Lear. You won this war before I even knew there was a battle to be had.”
She stalked toward him and leaned down, planting one hand on either arm of his chair. “And for it, you will be king, too. Be glad.”
“Never,” he muttered. “When we have the crown, when Connley is defeated, we will revisit this, wife.”
Gaela smiled and wondered if they both would survive so long.
THE FOX
BAN WAITED IN the hallway outside his father’s chambers, near a window and a low bench set into the smooth wooden wall. This was part of the new Keep, built of wood and plaster, with windows that opened to the southeast. Ban removed the letter from his coat. He’d written in as close to Rory’s sprawling hand as he could manage.
Leaning against the sill, Ban pressed his forehead into his arm and breathed unevenly on purpose, as if desperate to rein in a great hurt. Slip under the enemy’s defenses.
This plan would lead to getting the iron magic for Morimaros. It would prove to Elia exactly the fickle ease with which a father might overthrow a child’s love. It would undercut the stars King Lear adhered to so fanatically.
All Ban had to do was sink to the level they expected of a bastard. It shocked him with an unexpected thrill.
Base and vile, those were the words the king had used, the words Ban’s own father had never argued against. Well. They might have been meant to put him down, but Ban had learned of baseness and vile creatures when he hunted and tracked, when he cut his sword into the guts of another man, when he dug into the ground to bury a comrade or cover the shit of the army. He had seen how the earth accepted base and vile things and transformed them into stinking, beautiful life again. Flowers and fresh grasses. Colorful mushrooms and beds of moss. That was magic. Could the stars do such a thing? Never. Only the earth—the wild, mysterious, dark earth—knew such power.
Ban’s power.
He had spent the winter he was seventeen in the estate of his cousins Alsax in northeastern Aremoria, just near the borders of Burgun and Diota. That past summer he’d continued fighting alongside the foot soldiers in Morimaros’s army, all while quietly working directly for the king. He did all his soldier’s work and every low job the Alsaxes expected of him without complaint, then instead of joining his fellows for food or drink after a shift, would slip away to do Morimaros’s bidding. Often that meant infiltrating the lands of the opposition, whether that was Burgun border towns or the manor houses of rebellious Aremore nobles. He slept hungry with herds of sheep, in precarious nests beside red eagles, and in a womb of heartwood when he found a tree who trusted him entire. Always exhausted, always thirsty. When Ban was missing from the army for days at a time, La Far spoke with his Alsax commander and smoothed it over, though it took a long while to trickle down to the foot soldiers that he was more than just a slippery deserter.
But at the end of that summer’s campaign, the king had invited Ban to spend an entire two months in Lionis, working with Morimaros and La Far together on sword craft and riding and any martial skill Ban thought to ask after. It had been one of the best times of his life, for he’d been trusted and treated as though he deserved nothing less.
When he returned to the Alsax estate for the winter, it was with the king’s own letter in hand. By the king’s orders, he was not to be put with the foot soldiers again, but allowed to use the cold, muffled, snowed-in months for nothing but magical study, and given a room of his own to accommodate it.
Ban was determined to return to Morimaros as great a wizard as possible: his service to the king was the only thing forcing others to recognize his worth, and so he would
