energy of his mouth distracting her, inducing sweat to bead on her skin and pleasure to thrive. Base desire coats her trauma like limewash to hide the joints of wood and bushels of thatch composing the walls of her heart.
North, Caratica Persy, earl and wife and mother, sleeps. Her hip aches, and the torment translates into the skittish horse she rides in her dream, a horse she barely controls, as if she’s become a novice rider again, barely a squire. The horse bucks and bites, snorting white smoke.
And then there is Douglass of Burgun, bold prince, stomping his feet against the wooden floor of the hall in his father’s castle. He cannot yet think of it as his, because since his father died, every chance he’s taken, risk made for gain, Douglass has lost. But that doesn’t stop him from planning, from reaching ahead. There will be war in the spring, and he will slaughter his way toward Celeda of Aremoria, the queen who refused to respect him as an honest hostage, and does not deserve her throne. He’ll rip her hair and make a fist around her throat. She’ll die, and even if he gains nothing else, it will be the name of this castle as his own.
ALONE WITH THE stars, the Poison Prince of Innis Lear digs his hands into the wind.
Months ago, far to the south at the Summer Seat, his wife nearly let him die, caught between hemlock and rootwaters. She saved him, kissed him to life again with the blessed waters on her tongue, but in the numb moments, in the shadows that were neither life nor death, he saw something:
A blaze of silver, streaks of starlight reaching toward each other across space, across the sea. It was a bridge of magic, a road of stars, and for a split second, Rowan Lear existed at both ends.
The Dragon of the North had said as much to him once, and Rowan had thought then that it meant he would stand at both gates in different times. Open one, open another, and mark the thresholds with his name.
But in the hemlock vision, there was no difference of time, for time spread out in spirals and reoccurring—ever-occurring—moments. There was no distance between now and then and to come. Rowan Lear at both ends, now, then, soon, always.
Beside Rowan, the stones of the Three Sisters lean together at the crown of the moor, and beyond Dondubhan burns with torches and candles in every window. The fortress is a bonfire, the Tarinnish behind a watery mouth, and far north, north, north the dragon dives beneath the horizon again. An hour ago, on the Mountain of Teeth, that dragon was fully revealed.
It is time.
With wind knotted in his hands, Rowan steps hard onto the frozen moor. He snaps for fire and calls more wind. A wheel of orange flames bursts into life around him, from the coal and salt and hemlock seeds he traced into a circle against the earth. He pulls at the wind and lifts the fire up and up to waist height, his teeth bared with the effort.
In his vision, he saw how to do it, and so he reaches. All day and night he’s consumed nothing but hemlock and rootwaters, in a cycle, clearing everything that was not pure from his body. His blood is scarlet and star-clear water, scattered with moon-white hemlock petals.
His bones thrum with power, the hairs on his body rise, his skin crackles, his eyes widen as his sight blurs and the stars streak.
The road, the broken, crumbling road.
He sees it!
Here is the path. He will die a hemlock death, a queen of Innis Lear, truly becoming a piece of it. If he lives, he will go to Aremoria and die one final time, to open the road and anchor the magic there.
No other hemlock queen need die tonight.
Only Rowan Lear.
He can taste the lightning on his tongue, metallic and bloated. The shadows are silver, just at the tip of his grasp!
His heart stops.
INNIS LEAR LIKES the Longest Night.
It likes the howling and prophecy, the thousands of bright eyes staring up and up, the knees to the earth and the flooding rootwaters. It likes its people on edge. It likes the tilting wheel of fate when everyone notices how sharp the edges can be.
ROWAN OPENS HIS eyes, cold against the prickly moor grasses and frozen earth. The wind is quiet, but the earth turns under him. Still he can see the silver, but