bright silver, white and pink and yellow, pinpricks of illusory color, a rainbow shattered and tossed into billions of points. There the half-moon, a chunk of magic that hung, only the saints knew how, so near one could count its gray freckles and pockmarked shadows. Hotspur took a deep breath, her body filling up with a sensation she hardly knew how to name: awe, peace, longing. Love, maybe.
And then Hal kissed her a second time.
ROWAN
Innis Lear, early autumn
ROWAN LEAR WAS more attuned to the whims and will of his island than any who had ever lived, and thus he alone recognized the ghost for exactly what it was.
He’d been aware of her for years—first as a goblin story told to frighten children into behaving (If you don’t come inside this instant, the Ashling Lady will steal you away and hide you beneath the roots until you are dead!) and later as an unsettling voice in the wind, not quite in rhythm with the rest of the island.
She was a discordant wail, a note of Innis Lear’s melody gone sharp.
Unlike most parental threats, and unlike the slippery, disinterested spirits that flitted and ducked between shadows in the White Forest, the Ashling ghost did sometimes murder children. First she seduced them, lulling them into a fantasy of comfort and friendship, then she grew jealous of their other loves, and finally she drew the child into the darkness of night with longing words and dancing lights. Until the child tripped over a cliff or became caught in the river and drowned.
Over the years parents began weaving garlands of thin ash branches to hook over their babies’ rockers, to show the Ashling Lady their children already loved her. Perhaps it kept some safe, perhaps not. Rowan was inclined to believe that performing love never satisfied anybody, but a ghost was nobody, and magic liked a sympathetic display.
Because the island did not worry overmuch about the Ashling ghost, Rowan did not, either—until he was eighteen and she tried to kill him.
Rowan had been the heir to the hemlock crown from the moment he was born to the queen’s sister—the queen herself choosing to remain childless. He’d spoken the language of trees before he said his first words of Learish, a thing his father, Earl Glennadoer, resented strongly enough to forbid Rowan the whispering tree tongue whenever he lived in the north with the earl’s people. (And Rowan was doubly forbidden from revealing this stricture to his mother or aunt.) The Glennadoers had been cursed for generations never to birth strong magic in their line, and the arrival of Rowan ought to have been viewed as an end to such malediction. Except that Rowan was a boy, and for a hundred years only queens had taken up the hemlock crown, since the last king’s broken mind had nearly broken the island, too.
It put young Rowan in a strange position: the hopes of the entire Learish people rested on his not falling to madness. He fought the pressure by giving himself entirely to Innis Lear, stealing secretly away to eat hemlock under the stars. He survived only by the grace of the rootwaters, and the winds named him their Poison Prince for his devotion. Though the islanders did not know why he’d earned the appellation, they liked their prince’s dangerous nickname. Rowan became the island’s vessel: he bled for the rootwaters, he breathed for the wind, he understood the calculations of star prophecy, and he worked every spare moment to be exactly as the island wished.
This meant that—as well as being Solas’s heir—Rowan ended up serving as translator, priest, judge, farmer, or shepherd if someone required it of him. He also strove to meet his father’s pitiless expectations, becoming, too, a warrior. Though not so bearish and brutal as a Glennadoer should be, Rowan had mastered sword, bow, and some tricks of battle magic by the time he was an adult.
But dedication to being the best king Innis Lear had ever seen left little space for friendships.
If asked, Rowan might have said he was content with the companionship he had, counting on the roses in the queen’s garden at Dondubhan, a small book written by Elia the Dreamer, the island itself—and Connley Errigal.
It was for Connley that the Ashling ghost tried to kill the Poison Prince of Innis Lear.
The two young men were friends firstly because they both were wizards; the sort who balanced each other perfectly. While Rowan acted always with purpose, moving in tandem with