He had found this oak last summer, after he had fled from another one of Oran’s brutal lessons. Quickly, Tristan scaled her branches, going as high as he could, the leaves beginning to thin with autumn’s glamour.
Oran reached the clearing, panting beneath the massive branches. Tristan held still in the crook of his chosen branch, watched as his older brother walked all the way around the tree, only then conceding to glance up with a squint.
“Come down, Tris.”
Tristan made no noise. He was nothing more than a bird roosting in a place of safety.
“Come. Down. Now.”
He still didn’t move. Didn’t so much as breathe.
Oran sighed, jerked his fingers through his hair. He leaned against the trunk and waited. “Hark, I am sorry for cutting your cheek. I didn’t mean to.”
He did too mean to. He always meant to these days.
“I’m only trying to train you the best way I know how,” Oran continued. “The way Da taught me.”
That made Tristan sober. He could not imagine Da training him. Ever since their mother had died, their father had been ruthless, sharp, angry. No wife, no daughters, two sons—one who was trying desperately to be like him, the other who couldn’t care less.
“Come down, and we will go steal a honey cake from the kitchens,” Oran promised.
Ah, Tristan could always be bribed with something sweet. It reminded him of the happier days, when their mother was alive and the castle was filled with her laughter and flowers, when Oran was still his playmate, when their da still told stories of brave and heroic Maevans by the hearth in the hall.
Slowly, he climbed down, landing right before Oran. His older brother snorted, made to wipe the blood away from Tristan’s cheek.
“Wake her up.”
Oran’s lips were moving, but the wrong words, the wrong voice, came out. Tristan frowned, frowned as Oran’s hand faded, the invisibility eating up his arm, turning his brother into a swirl of motes. . . .
“Amadine? Amadine, wake up!”
The trees began to bleed, the colors dripping as paint off a piece of parchment.
I didn’t realize my eyes had been closed until they opened, and I looked up into two worried faces. Luc. Yseult.
“Saints, are you all right?” the queen asked. “Did I hurt you?”
It took me a moment to fully shift my mind back to the present. I was lying on the dirt, my hair spread out around me, the wooden sword at my side. Luc and Yseult hovered over me as protective hens.
“What happened?” I asked, my voice croaking as if the dust of a century still crowded my throat.
“You fainted, I think,” Luc said, a frown creasing his forehead. “Maybe it’s the heat?”
I took in this morsel of news—I had never fainted before, and to think the shifts might cause such was troubling—but then I remembered what I had just seen, the new memory finding space among my own.
A smile curled on my lips. I tasted the dirt and my sweat, reaching for each of their hands. Luc took my left, Yseult my right, and I said, “I know exactly how to find the stone.”
EIGHTEEN
OBLIQUE
On the last day of August, the first planning meeting was to be held over dinner at Jourdain’s, an exact fortnight since the most crucial of memories had manifested at my first sword lesson. As that date drew near, I continued to meet with Yseult every other day, to broaden my swordsmanship. Jourdain permitted it, thinking another memory might jar forward. But I knew that Tristan Allenach had not been fond of spars or his sword lessons, at least as a ten-year-old boy.
So I continued my sword lessons to improve my skill and to learn more of the queen.
Yseult was older than I’d first thought her to be, ten years my senior. She was friendly and talkative, patient, and graceful, but every now and then, I could see her eyes dim, as if she battled worry and fear, as if she was overcome with the feeling of inadequacy.
She opened up to me during our fifth lesson, when the chamberlain brought us our usual refreshments. We were sitting face-to-face, just the queen and me, sharing ale and mutton pies and sweating in the heat, when she said, “It should be my sister. Not me.”
I knew what she was implying, that she was thinking of her older sister, who had ridden beside her father the day of the massacre, who had been slain on the royal castle’s lawn.
So I said, very gently, “Your sister would want you to do this, Yseult.”
Yseult sighed, a sound inspired from loneliness, from inherited regrets. “I was three the day of the massacre. I should have been killed with my mother and sister. After the slaughter in the field, Lannon sent his men door to door of those who had rebelled. The only reason I was spared was because I was at the estate with my nurse, who hid me when Lannon’s men came for me. They killed her when she would not give me over. And when my father finally arrived, thinking I was dead . . . he said he followed the sound of a child weeping, believing he was hallucinating in his distress, until he found me hidden in an empty cask outside the alehouse. I don’t remember any of it. I suppose that is a good thing.”
I rested in all she had just revealed to me, wanting to speak and yet wanting to remain silent.
Yseult traced a fingertip through the dust coating her boots and said, “In this time of day, it is dangerous to be a daughter of Maevana. My father has spent the past decade preparing me for that moment when I will finally stand before Lannon, to take back the crown and the throne and the land. And yet . . . I do not know if I can do it.”
“You will not stand alone, Isolde,” I whispered, using her Maevan name.
Her eyes flickered to mine, dark with fear, with anxious longing. “In order for us to be victorious, we need the other Houses to follow us, to stand with us. But why would the other lords gather behind a girl who is more Valenian than she is Maevan?”
“You are two in one,” I replied, thinking of Merei, of how my arden-sister had known my heart so thoroughly. “You are Valenia as you are Maevana. And that will shape you into an exquisite queen.”
Yseult mulled on that, and I prayed my words would find their mark. Eventually, she said with a smile, “You must think me weak.”
“No, Lady. I think you everything you ought to be.”
“I grew up here without friends,” she continued. “My father was too paranoid to let me get close to anyone else. You are the first girlfriend I have truly ever had.”
Again, I thought of my arden-sisters, thought of how much my life was enriched because of them. And I understood her loneliness then, felt it as if I had been socked in the stomach.
I reached out my hand, let my fingers link with hers.
You are enough, my touch assured her. And when she smiled, I knew she felt my words, let them settle in the valleys of her heart.