the Blood and the Sea, but no, that must remain her secret. Mora flattened her hand over it, to feel the hard ring press against her breastbone.
Then she swept out of her chambers, led by a small servant girl to the grand room Sin had claimed.
Shown in as expected, Mora moved through the doorway between the antechamber and the bedchamber with her face a mask of calm and her best royal bearing.
The huge bed had been shoved against the window to clear the floor, and rugs rolled away to bare the smooth black stones. Sin Errigal crouched alongside Rowan Lear, both of them leaning over a spread of sky charts and spiraling star cards like two old crows arguing over a shining ribbon. It seemed neither had changed or slept since yesterday, though surely that wasn’t the case: Sin’s head was bare, and the hints of white curls Mora had noticed yesterday were all the hair she had. Freckles and age spots decorated her brown scalp, and Mora realized lines had been drawn between several of them at her crown as if to mark out a constellation.
Rowan didn’t even notice Mora’s entrance, bent as he was and pointing at a gilded card with a silver worm curling between the branches of a black-and-red tree. “This, though, Grandmother,” he said urgently. His white-gold hair was loose like a cape around his back and shoulders.
“Good morning, Granddaughter,” Sin said, leaning back. Her legs were folded tightly beneath her.
The prince stood in a single, smooth motion. “Banna Mora.”
Mora let herself be shocked by his undressed state, and showed it in her expression: he was barefoot, in trousers and a vest hanging open over his hard, pale chest. Like the constellations marked on Sin’s scalp, Rowan had dots of white paint scattered below his collarbone and down his abdomen. The Salmon constellation dove toward his left hipbone, its nose obscured by the edge of his vest. At his temple, knots had been tied into his hair as if by agitated fingers.
For a moment, neither said a word. Mora breathed through parted lips, staring at him with growing excitement. The moment she noticed, she snapped her mouth shut and shuttered her gaze, replacing any interest or eager surprise with haughty expectation. “You are informal, Rowan Lear,” she said.
“You are repressed, Banna Mora Errigal,” he replied in the same cool tone.
A bolt of outrage held her silent.
Sin grunted and said, “Fool boy, leave us alone.”
Disappointment tinged the smile Rowan gave Mora before he bent to kiss the crown of Sin’s head. “I’ll send you some food, shk maomi.”
“Something hot and soft for my old teeth, and think about what I said.” Sin wagged her first two fingers at him. “The Tree of Ancestors and the Bird of Sacrifice.”
“And you don’t discount the earth saints,” Rowan said over his shoulder to the old duke. He bowed elegantly to Mora and slipped past.
Then she was alone with her grandmother, still crouched on the floor like a tiny bird born of tree roots, surrounded by prophecy and stars.
Mora clenched her teeth and stared. Sin patiently returned the look, blinking sometimes, and tilted her head in contemplation. Finally, Mora sighed, toed off her slippers, and sank to the floor beside her grandmother. The red skirt pooled around her, nudging aside several boldly painted holy cards. Mora folded her hands in her lap and looked expectantly at Sin. “I am glad to have a day with you.” She hesitated, thinking of the endearment Rowan had used. It sounded like the Mother-tongue of the Third Kingdom.
“We were talking about you,” Sin said mischievously.
Mora refused to inquire. She glanced at the spread of cards and messy sky charts, but neither did she wish to ask after holy bones. “What is shk maomi?”
Sin scowled. “It is ‘small mother,’ very informal. You were right about Rowan.”
“Do you speak their language?”
“Some. My father was a son of a second-line family.”
Second-line family was a rough translation of the Third Kingdom way to denote relationship to the empress, Mora knew, and Sin’s second husband—Mora’s grandfather—was the Learish-born son of a Taria Queen daughter-line, a woman who’d married Elia the Dreamer’s first son, Bannos—Mora’s namesake.
It was an ideal opening to inquire about that same Bannos’s father: Morimaros the Great.
Yet Mora found she could not—not with the holy cards staring up at her, bright and colorful in their magical lies. She’d fostered in Aremoria young enough to have lost any faith in the cards or star prophecies. In Aremoria the