Heat grew up Hotspur’s neck, flushing her cheeks, and her palms felt clammy. “I beg mercy,” she said, falling back, turning, moving quickly down the vaulted corridor.
“Hotspur,” called Vindomata. “Come back. Attend us.”
She could not.
Two and a half years ago, she’d been ordered to join her mother and aunt in rebellion. Just as Hal had been commanded by her own mother. It had been swift and decisive, and Hotspur never questioned the point or purpose. She’d not needed to. But she was a grown woman and could no longer unthinkingly obey.
To rebel again, Hotspur had to choose it with open eyes.
Her split skirts dragged at her knees and shins as she moved. She lifted them with ring-adorned fingers, grasped the pommel of her sword, and ran. Disrupted, messy curls streamed behind her. Hotspur Persy became a streak of green and red dashing through Lionis Palace to the outer bailey.
None stopped her as she passed through the gaping main gate, beneath the sharp-toothed portcullis, and burst into the city like ballista fire.
Hotspur slowed, veered west off the wide Royal Avenue, and caught her breath in the lee of a white-stone building. The sword whispered in the base of her skull.
It was festival time, and the air of Lionis lifted sharp with celebration.
The Shadow-Half Festival was called thus for the simple reason that it fell exactly between the Longest Night in winter and summer solstice, and Aremoria never had managed to extract itself entire from the wheel of the year. Elsewhere, such as on Innis Lear, this harvest time lent itself to darkness and feasts of death, to placating the spirits of the earth and readying oneself for the harsh winter. But in Aremoria, where the monarch was the sun, where star prophecies were written for babes as naming gifts then forgotten by adults, the Halfsies Day—a diminutive term coined no doubt by some drunken students—signified a chance to be someone other than who one was every other day of the year.
Rich folk tattered their skirts and put grease in their hair; the poor took circlets of ribbon or rags or autumn flowers and wore them like crowns. In the streets, those with such self-crafted crowns were bowed to and given grandiose titles, all merry, and those neither rich nor poor might wear masks of half white, half black or ears made of paper to seem like a wolf’s or elephant’s. Children gave their parents chores and parents cried and harassed their children. Women who never left home without dresses and coiffed hair put on trousers and their brothers’ shirts. Men seen every day in masculine uniform painted red on their lips and eyelids.
Aremoria faced the winter with laughter.
It was said by some in the villages, by older men and women who remembered their own grandmothers’ tales, that once on this day people had traded futures—my star for yours, this holy bone for another—and it was a time to reshape your destiny, to beg the saints of earth and heavenly bodies for new paths, new opportunities. Before Morimaros the First was king and molded the national faith closer to his own, made stars into witnesses not actors, and put earth saints to bed like slippery children.
Hal had adored Halfsies Day. She’d told Hotspur of plotting her costumes for weeks, seeking out the most elaborate, meekest of ideas for herself, then herself and Mora, and eventually all the Lady Knights: lambs with fluffs of unspun wool glued to their shirts; babies in huge wrapped diapers over their clothes, feeding each other sacks of milk. They’d put on mud and rags to blend in to the forests, with staffs of oak and necklaces of bones and feathers—they’d hissed and whispered at each other like tree-tongue wizards.
And last year, when Hotspur was still in Lionis, still burning with Hal, she’d showed up at Hal’s room wearing a Bolinbroke tabard with boot-black streaked in her hair, carrying a wooden sword and swaggering. Hal found red lip paint and dotted a hundred freckles across her own cheeks, and put on the green of Perseria, then went about yelling at everyone, demanding the dogs behave with more honor, challenging horses to duels. Oh, how they had laughed that day, and how they had spent the evening and night: blissful, languorous, inside each other.
This afternoon, in the crisp autumn wind, Hotspur heard the sound of Hal’s laughter, felt the echo of a kiss at her nape.
If Vindomata and Caratica succeeded in putting Hotspur in opposition to