person? What would Hal be stripped to?
“On a moonless night,” Connley murmured, “it’s said if you see a reflection on the water, Elia the Dreamer is near.”
A tremor chased down the wizard’s arm; Hal felt it against her own. He said, “Have you seen her? Heard her?”
“Yes. She’s a ghost, too. Maybe like my—like the other one.”
Hal said nothing, only bit her bottom lip and stared out at the sharp black waves of the Tarinnish, reflecting nothing but a spill of constellations.
The navel of Lear remained dark to her, though she did not stop looking for moonlight shimmers, or perhaps she’d fallen into a waking sleep, numb and rigid against the rampart. The wizard touched her elbow, then her cheek with the back of his knuckle.
“She is not here tonight,” the wizard whispered.
THE SKY WAS nothing but stars, and the wizard had drifted into the queen’s rose garden to be maudlin.
It would be some hours before the sleek sickle moon rose. He was alone with his rippling thoughts, without any moonlight to distract him with the dreams and slipping will of the earth saints. The wizard did not fully understand why the saints preferred moonlight to starlight, but perhaps the moon itself was a chunk of earth, a balance for their power against the flickering stars.
Without it, they hunkered in their shadows and under-root halls.
The garden ground crunched lightly with frost as he walked. Pebbled paths curled between small ornamental trees—bare now for the winter, but for the evergreen junipers. A small lawn opened up against the northern wall, and there clinging to the blue-gray stones of Dondubhan grew rose vines. In this darkness the roses were slithering shadows.
Once there’d been a bench here, tucked beneath a trellis, but he’d never used it; he and—they—had preferred to set themselves against the ground, even on a night like this, deep in wintertime.
It was awful to be at Dondubhan again.
Everything was the same, only peopled differently. He remembered too much.
The wizard reached out and pressed his finger to a thorn. It bit his skin, piercing easily through. He welcomed the hot flourish of pain, stinging then gone. Hello, he whispered in the language of trees.
A few tight buds nodded. Hello, the wind said. And, Hellooooooo in a long, snaking hiss. The wizard smiled at the humor. He put the bead of blood to his mouth, smearing his bottom lip.
Memories crowded his mind, some his own, others images and words slipping through the starry breeze: girls giggling together, a young man cradling a book in his lap, a wailing king, a kiss.
Ban, she said.
The wizard jerked, spun around. The voice had not come from the wind. Not the roses nor the gnarled, barren cherry trees.
Hello, said the wind again.
He must have imagined it.
Memories. This place.
The wizard crouched.
He touched his lip and put the blood, like a kiss, against the ground. It was hard and cold, and the garden smelled of nothing but dirt, with a slight tinge of pine and crushed juniper berries. Sharp, bitter.
As the wizard settled in to listen, sounds from beyond the wall reached him: the shush of the Tarinnish lapping at the shore. Better to keep his mind gently dark, the calm of a pristine black shadow. No glimmer of stars like hope, no jarring moonlight memories. No names.
Ban.
He stopped breathing. He pressed his eyes closed.
Ban. Ban. Listen.
Ban.
Help me.
The wizard’s face crumpled and he covered it with his hands, fingers digging into his scalp. The same thing the other had begged. Help me.
On a moonless night, that young witch had said, if you see a reflection on the water, they say Elia the Dreamer is there.
(The Witch of the White Forest, they called that boy, and the wizard had opinions.)
Between one heartbeat and the next, the wizard stepped into the darkest shadow between two juniper trees and stepped out onto the shore of the Tarinnish.
Alone on this rocky strip of land, a narrow curve between the thick base of Dondubhan’s curtain wall and the reaching lake, he stared out. There, far over the slick black waters, was a pale glow. It shimmered and flicked, rather like the reflection of a full moon on choppy waves.
But there was no moon in the sky.
“Elia,” he said quietly.
He’d heard stories of how she died so many times, from so many people: the queen of Innis Lear fell into her father’s madness and drowned herself; she was ill and felt this a softer way to go; she wanted to breathe the rootwaters; she