sorrowful, and when her child is born, she is named Isarna.
WAKE UP
Wake up
Wake up!
The trees sleep, dreamless, all these generations.
They stretch in a creaking old yawn when a young wizard almost dies in their embrace, bleeding into the soil, and they remember for an instant.
Or when a keen child touches a hand to them, whispering silly stories, they remember that once they shared entire conversations and held webs of truth between their roots.
Wake up.
A girl murmurs to the rose vines in a cathedral garden, hush now, not yet, not yet and the trees know enough to anticipate that what is not yet will be soon.
Wake up.
They hear the summoning now, they hear more and more, babble and promises from dreams or from hollow voices singing deep beneath their roots: Soon your eyes will open. Soon you will share secrets again.
Soon.
AN HOUR BEFORE sunrise on the Longest Night, the queen of Innis Lear asked the wizard, softly, “What is it like, when you aren’t here?” She skimmed her fingers along the hash-marks scarred into the skin over his heart. The scar spelled his name—the oldest and first given.
He covered her hand with his, the touch of his calloused fingers light against her knuckles. Darkness surrounded them where they lay on a thin mat in a storage room in the northern turret of the queen’s tower, meant for folded tapestries and unused stools, but perfect for a wizard who preferred shadowed solitude and believed he deserved no more. He had claimed it for his own when he arrived at the fortress weeks ago. Beside the mattress a single flame fluttered at the tip of a narrow white candle stuck with its own wax to the slats of the wooden floor.
It was no place for a queen.
Despite her broad way of asking, the wizard understood her question. “My memories of the halls of earth saints are unfocused. A blur of sensations, smells, bright visions. They exist, they dance where there is no earth nor sky, but spaces between the earth, between the stuff that makes us solid. If they do not dance, they would drift into death or disperse, or become solid. The only way to survive there is to dance. Or hunt—fly through the shadows and from root-tip to root-tip, from past to past and future to future. Time is not grounded there, as it is here.”
“But is it terrible? I would not like to think of you in a terrible place.”
“It is … beyond such things. When I dance under the trees, Solas, I don’t remember terror or regret, I don’t know what made me, or even have a word for what I am. It’s only when they send me up that words become solid with meaning, memory, and potential.”
“You won’t remember me.”
“I won’t forget you, either. Someday, under the sky again, my tongue will form the shape of your name and bring with it all the meaning it holds.”
The queen sighed softly and pressed her mouth to his chest, parting her lips to taste his skin, the delicate flavor of salt and earth, the tingle of airy magic. “I wish,” she said to his flesh, “you could take me when it is my time. That time may be within the hour.”
He paused, hoping she was wrong, then said, “It is not for queens of Innis Lear to go to the earth saints.”
“Only kings of Aremoria are so blessed?” A hint of anger put daggers between her words.
“Innis Lear is too jealous of itself. The way it was made, the way that first wizard cleaved its spirit and heart away from Aremoria, makes the island desperate and selfish. You are part of it, and it will keep you for itself when you die—so long as you do not cling to life and names as Regan did, as she forced her sister to. The queens of Innis Lear become the island when you take up the hemlock crown, and its rootwaters are your blood. There is no room for earth saints in this place now, no space between roots and rootwater for them to make their castles.”
“What do you mean, how it was made? She cleaved it from the mainland.”
“The wizard did not tear the island’s mass, the rocks, from Aremoria: that is only the story. She came to the island and she broke the magic, the paths of magic linking shadow and shadow, root and root. She cleaved Innis Lear from Aremoria by taking that power and driving it into the