“You were more interested in me before you knew my name.”
“What?” She made a sour face. “I’m very interested in you. I just asked you a question, didn’t I? Why you’re already here?”
“I meant,” he said, struggling to keep looking at her instead of staring into the fire, “that you were close to me, touching me, and now you are all the way over there.”
She glared, her lips turning white at the edges. “I was thinking of something casual, a—a fling. But things can never be casual between us.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re to be married—we must find a way to be allies, or better, friends, I hope!”
Connley’s stomach turned over and he struggled to remain calm. “To be any of those things, we’ll need to communicate better,” he said. And when she said nothing, he continued, “Why were you thinking of a casual affair with a stranger you met in the forest, especially when you’re promised elsewhere? Is that … what you do?”
Hotspur sat swiftly. She did not look at him. “No,” she said firmly.
“I don’t, either,” he said, then instinctively offered some little surrender by confessing even more. “I’ve never been with a woman.”
She groaned. For a moment, it curdled Connley’s blood, and he thought he should get up and go home—all the way to the White Forest. Dig himself a hole beside the navel well, and remain with Lady Ashling forever.
But then Hotspur said, so softly he almost missed it, “I’ve only been with women. One woman.”
The relief cooled him slowly. “Oh.”
They sat in silence for a long while, the entire time the sun finished setting, and long, dark shadows stretched away from their fire. The grandmother oak creaked as she settled in to the night. Connley closed his eyes and listened to the humming of crickets and frogs, the waking owl nearby—he wanted to reach out to it, whisper images to it. Beneath his shirt his feathers tickled his belly. The wind murmured of a family of foxes hunting a new burrow, for their last had been felled in a recent storm, and the wind whispered of deer hunkered down and sleeping rabbits, the pack of wolves several miles away still sated by yesterday’s kill. Nesting squirrels and songbirds tucked into forked branches and ferrets in hollow boles. The wind called this oak grove a nest, his nest.
“So you’re going to marry me?” Connley asked through the darkness.
“Yes,” she answered right away.
He stared up, desperate for stars, but the oak leaves shifted gray and black overhead, layers and layers of scales entirely hiding the luscious night sky.
“Are you going to marry me?” Hotspur asked.
“Yes,” Connley whispered, because there was no other choice to make: not for himself, his island, his wind, or his heart. He thought of Banna Mora’s stubborn face as she insisted he would like Hotspur; he thought of Rowan’s haunted eyes, suddenly focused with passion; he thought of Ashling’s longing voice, My son, my son. And he thought of the harsh roots of Innis Lear, the precious rootwaters that tasted like freedom and tears both, washing him clean of any trespass, any regret.
PRINCE HAL
Lionis, autumn
SOLDIERS CAME TO the Uncourt, wearing the colors of the queen.
“Prince Calepia, your mother requests your presence,” the captain said, his command echoing off milky stalactites.
Hal sat up from her recline on the makeshift throne, slamming her feet to the ground. This sanctuary was supposed to be safe from her mother, from responsibilities: here she was the Prince of Riot, her people were people of the gutter, low and merry folk who cared more about feeding their families than politics.
She tried not to think about how feeding their families was politics; knowing that truth was a curse of her education and the shackles of a title she did not want.
Plastering on a grin, Hal swept to her feet and spread her arms, calling, “Good folk of riot—even the queen herself occasionally needs a slice of mayhem, and luckily, she birthed such a one. Nova, do take the throne.”
Her lover bowed, slinking into the wide chair to take up a pose like a stooping hawk. “My word is your word tonight,” she purred.
“As is right in the Uncourt—the unnatural becomes nature’s course.”
Nova narrowed her eyes, parsing the flavor of insult, but snapped her teeth at Hal.
Lady Ianta was not yet awake, and thus yet unaware the Uncourt had even gathered.
The prince went with her mother’s soldiers.
TO HAL’S SURPRISE, she was led to her mother’s private suite. The soldiers kept at her heels, and