Isarnos eyed him suspiciously, as if he did not understand the distinction.
Truly, there only was one in Rory’s mind—or, he suspected, in that of any person from Innis Lear. But he’d become rather tired of the implication that Ban was better, more known here in Aremoria, even though it was absolutely true. Rory had fostered here for three years and had been perfectly adept at war, but he was always meant to return home to Errigal and be the earl. While Ban had been banished here and by hardship and magic earned a wild yet strong reputation even these civilized Aremore folk admired—if with a tinge of fear. Rory did not like being overshadowed by his brother’s taller reputation, did not like being defined by Ban’s achievements. He was used to being his father’s son, the future Earl Errigal, as was natural and expected, and that was the definition of title, place, and self he understood.
This constant suggestion that he was second to Ban aggravated Rory and chafed at his pride now, as it never had before.
“I wish I had a brother,” Isarnos continued.
“As you should!” Rory exclaimed, crouching to put his face slightly lower than the prince’s. “Brothers are grand—when I was your age, my brother and I used to charge about ruins and play we were valiant warriors, or sometimes earth saints ridding the world of the massive old worms.”
“Dragons!” Isarnos said. “Did you have dogs?”
“We did, sometimes.”
“Can you do magic?”
Rory winced, letting it be exaggerated. “No, alas, I cannot do any magic, though Ban promised once to teach me some. Did he ever teach you?”
“I was too little, my mother said. But he showed me fire in his hand, and he could talk to my birds and the barracks kittens.”
“That seems a very valuable skill. He ought to have taught you.”
Isarnos pursed his lips and nodded hard. “How come your brother went back to Innis Lear? Why isn’t he here with you?”
“He…” Rory paused. The exultant noise of the crowd washed over them, and the parrot flapped its emerald wings. “He’s taking care of our father, and … and there are many things at home to be looked after. He’s very good at looking after them.”
“Wizards have to be. And brothers, too, I suppose.”
Rory agreed, though it sank in, all of it—the itch to go home, his vanity and resentment—and he understood for perhaps the first time that Ban had every reason to never want Rory to reappear.
“I hope,” he said slowly, “you’ll get a good wizard of your own, when you’re king. And that you’ll count me a friend on Innis Lear.”
The prince lifted his chin and stared at Rory with eyes a shade lighter than the king’s. “But you’re here. Will you go back to Ban and trade him to us again?”
Rory laughed—it was rather like a trade. “I might!”
And then he stopped cold. Though he was loath to admit to blame, he knew it had been his long-ago confession to his father about Ban and Elia’s love that had banished his brother here. Rory had been at fault for pushing his brother out of Innis Lear, though it hadn’t been his intention. Ban did not know—at least Rory did not think so.
“Trust me, Rory,” Ban said. “Go.”
“Some villain has done me wrong,” Rory murmured back.
No, Rory refused the weave of that thought. His own banishment could not—could not—be Ban’s fault.
But the courtyard reeled around him, and Rory felt the dizzying sensation from his dreams that somewhere he could not yet see, the city had begun to crumble.
“I have to—go, Your Highness,” he said to Isarnos, and the prince’s face fell, but he nodded.
Rory pushed into the crowd. There the royal guard lined the courtyard and watched from balconies for any danger; there the king’s dais; there a tight circle of musicians with lyres and fiddles; there—there his own mother, a glittering, ginger bird in a huddle of Alsax and Rennai cousins. She saw him, too, and smiled politely: they had little enough to say to each other. Lady Dirbha Errigal had carved a place here in Aremoria, cut her Learish bonds.
He had asked, when she’d happened upon Rory last week at the Alsax townhouse, “Why, Mother, did you never come home?”
She had eyed him imperiously, shocked at his presumption. “And what?”
“Be—well, take your…” Rory had stumbled, for he’d not truly known the shape of his question.
Dirbha took pity on her son and said, “Your father breaks the rules. Why do you think you are here? He chose his bastard over his true-gotten son.”
Rory had shaken his head. “That is not what happened! And I will go home, to be the earl, eventually. When everything is restored.”
“Your father does not restore unless it suits him. He and I were bound together by the laws of Innis Lear, beneath the stars. That is how it should be, and yet, your father loved … her…”
“I loved you,” Rory said.
Dirbha touched his hand. “It was not a lack of love that kept me away. I thought you knew. The thing that tore my title, my self-respect, my home from me was the bastard. That child was proof that my place on Innis Lear was nothing compared to your father’s. Proof flaunted and then manifest. How could I trust your father’s word, or his faith, or that anything he said mattered, if he would thrust before me evidence of how he only did what served his selfish desires? What is star prophecy if he manipulated it to his benefit? What is marriage but a battlefield if he strategized how to win? Marriage—love!—is no war. There should be no enemies, but only friends. Yet he made an enemy of my heart with that singular weapon.”
“Ban,” Rory had whispered.
His mother’s entire body shuddered. The silence following had been a pretty one, tempered by music from delicate wind chimes ringing dimly through the window glass.
“I will not live in a place where I am so constrained, but the men around me are not,” she’d said softly. “That woman—the witch—she lived her own life, but there were consequences for her, too. I hate her, I cannot help it, but she wasn’t the one who broke his own laws. That was only your father, and all the others who looked away, who laughed or accepted his behavior.”
“That still is not Ban’s fault,” Rory had whispered.
“No, it is not, but he remains the constant reminder of it.”
Ban, Ban, Ban, it was all Ban: Rory hardly knew his own name when people looked at him and always saw the other. Oh, it’s the Fox’s brother—What handsome men they have on Innis Lear—Have you heard, he was banished by his own father! Those people are strange! Superstition and star prophecy ruining lives—and their princess gone again, suddenly, will she return? She was too wild to be our queen—the folk of Innis Lear are better spies and wizards than kings and queens! The Fox’s brother! Oh! This one could never hide—such hair! Will he, too, earn the confidence of our Mars?
Rory’s mother had spoken again, looking firmly into her son’s eyes. “I can live with it all here in Aremoria, with the order and constraints that I could not bear under the colder, sharper sky of Innis Lear.”
She’d asked Rory if he would stay, or if the claws of the island had hooked in his heart. Will it ruin you? his mother’s voice asked in his crumbling dreams.
Innis Lear was his place. Rory was the heir to the earldom; he belonged there and wanted it. Elia had gone home because Innis Lear was hers. She’d been cast out by her father but not let it define her. What was Rory doing but playing a sorry victim? Even Ban had never let his bastardy or dragon’s tail moon define him.
All his life, Rory had been promised his name.
But maybe he needed to go home and live up to it.
THE FOX