want to be the greatest king.”
“Banna Mora does. We are the same in that, brought together for destiny.”
The Witch of the White Forest closed his eyes, swayed nearer to his prince, and focused on the press of Rowan’s fingers at his hip and the thin warmth of that sun, the boldest star.
EIGHTY-SEVEN YEARS ago, the queen of Innis Lear stood behind her seated lover, one hand tilting his head to the side, the other delicately shaving his soft beard from his jaw. The razor glinted in the firelight as it scraped against his skin.
They’d crafted this tradition these past thirteen years: the first night this Aremore king spent with her on the island she would shave his beard away, in a ritual to remind them both about the roles they played and the masks they wore. Tonight was his second on Innis Lear this visit, but last night he’d been too upset to allow her near his throat with a blade. Only a few feet from where he sat upon a stool, in a basket woven of river rushes, slept a three-month-old baby, his second son: a secret she’d hidden from him until his arrival.
Anger at himself and at her had put a tremor in his voice and body: at himself for being away almost a full year, at her for not telling him she was pregnant again.
“How could you?” he’d whispered, standing alone last night as she nursed the child. He’d hovered, uncertain, and the queen had glanced up with her horn-black eyes.
“There was nothing for you to do but worry,” she’d replied.
“And if something had happened to you? Don’t I deserve to be prepared? To say goodbye or—or pray?”
The queen had smiled at the squeezing pink eyelids of their son—their last, she knew. His black hair was a wispy puff of curls, and she was glad finally one of her babies would have something nearer her hair than his. “You do not pray, my lion,” she’d said.
Her lover had groaned deep in his throat and folded his arms over his chest. “That is not the point. My own sister died of giving birth, and she was—”
“Stronger than me?” the queen challenged gently, unwilling to let the flare of her own anger transfer through her body into the baby.
“You know I don’t believe that. But you are small and older now, and Ban was nearly your death!”
The words fell like dropped knives between them, and for a moment there was silence in the tower bedroom but for the low whistling of wind at the shuttered window. Winter at Dondubhan was the only time the queen allowed those windows closed. She shifted her shoulder as her little son flailed at her breast with his awkward, skinny arm, and she said, “It is true Bannos and I had a rough beginning, but I knew that Connley would be healthy, and I would survive.”
“By the stars?” her lover demanded, voice quiet with anger he, too, would not express so the baby might feel it.
The queen had shaken her head, though, and sighed.
“Oh, Elia, not by a dream.”
She stroked Connley’s cheek with her brown forefinger: he no longer sucked, and the queen lifted him away from her breast, giving him to his father.
In the king’s large hands the child seemed even smaller, and she watched her lover’s bright blue eyes mellow away from anger. He efficiently swaddled his son while she tucked herself back into two layers of winter robes.
“It is such a Learish name,” the king murmured, studying Connley as he studied all things: carefully and completely. He patted the baby’s bottom, cradling him in an arm covered with a second warm blanket.
“That dukedom is no more, but the name should be honored. Besides, it was my turn,” the queen teased.
“Nor did I even know to be thinking of a name,” he replied with an edge of humor.
The queen leaned her cheek to his shoulder. Most of the rest of that night was spent watching their youngest sleep, holding him when he cried, and the king of Aremoria got to know the variations of his baby’s light brown skin, splotchy and soft, the muddy blue-brown of his eyes, and the delicate grip of tiny fingers.
During the next day a naming ceremony was held, for the queen had insisted upon waiting for her lover to arrive, offering a star prophecy by her own hand as mollification. The sun sparkled in the crystal winter sky and Dondubhan celebrated, with roasted sheep and stewed apples,