With a weighty sigh, Kayo said, “She will not accept strength from love, then. And she should, in this mess of a time. Your father threw everything into turmoil by removing you, by naming them both, and by giving himself into their care. He is still technically king until they’re crowned at Midwinter, so Astore and Connley will plot and scheme until the last moment if your sisters let them, with no one left to side for Lear.” The Oak Earl shook his head. “They’ve never stopped such scheming before now, I don’t see why they would now. But maybe it’s in their letters. I’ve brought you some. From Gaela, and Regan, and, strangely enough, from the Earl Errigal. Also one from the Fool to his daughter.”
“Errigal?” Elia took a deep breath. The study smelled of cinnamon and sweetness. Probably from whatever was cooling in the ceramic mugs on the table. She’d written several letters to Ban, but she’d never had the confidence to give them to anybody for delivery. All had ended up ashes in her hearth.
Kayo turned away to rummage in a worn cloth bag. He pulled a flat bundle of letters free and offered them by reaching over the curve of the table. Elia accepted, hugging them to her chest.
“Elia,” Morimaros said, “I would like to know what Errigal has to say to you, but it is only a request.”
She glanced at the king. His close-trimmed beard hid what subtle expression she might’ve otherwise found in the clench of his jaw or the fair skin about his mouth. There was nothing but control to see in his eyes. He was standing very near.
Unwrapping the letter bundle, Elia nervously freed the third letter, closed only with a smear of wax and her name scrawled by a hand she did not know well. Elia set her sisters’ letters, and the one for Aefa, onto the table and unfolded Errigal’s.
A tiny slip of paper fell out of the middle, fluttering toward the floor.
Fast as a cat, Morimaros caught it. He looked up at her from his crouch, proving his eyes did not stray to the note. But Elia nodded her permission. The king read it; his lashes flickered in either surprise or displeasure.
Her heart beat too hard as Elia took it back from him. His hands were calloused and the knuckles pinked and rough. A warrior’s hands, but for the pearl and garnet ring. That ring had anchored her to the earth, when her father cast her away.
“What in heaven is that?” Kayo asked.
Elia glanced at the small scrap. Scratched in the hash-marks of the language of trees, it read:
I keep my promises. B.
“Oh,” Elia said.
“My turn,” her uncle said, gently taking the paper. “But what is the meaning? I never learned to read these ancient marks.”
Elia did not have to glance again to translate, “I keep my promises. From Ban.”
Morimaros said, his chin tucked down and brows together, “The Fox?”
Elia shook her head, but Kayo said, “Yes, though he is most known in Lear as the bastard of Errigal.”
“We were friends when we were children,” Elia murmured, more nervous to open Earl Errigal’s letter itself now than before. Then the king’s inquiry struck her. She looked at him, startled. “You know Ban Errigal?”
“I do. He served in my army for years, and earned his epithet well. What promise?”
The last line was so evenly slipped in, Elia hardly noticed it at first, and nearly spoke unfettered truth. Ban had promised to tear her father down. I will prove it to you, how easy it is to ruin a father’s heart.
The full truth was that Elia was not certain exactly what Ban had so furiously sworn. Heat grew in her neck, in her cheeks, and Elia was glad it could barely be seen, not in the same indecorous way she could see the gentle pink flush reaching up from Morimaros’s beard, the longer it took her to answer his question.
Elia said, “He promised to do what he could for me, from Innis Lear.” Truth, but not all of it.
“To fight for you?” Morimaros said quietly. A tension pained his voice, and Elia remembered what her sisters had said, that this Aremore king would take Lear for himself if he was allowed to. Elia stared at Morimaros and realized it was not nations or war at the fore of the king’s mind.
An answer stuck in her mouth as her eyes stuck on his.
Kayo broke the silence. “The young man is angry at the world, sir. I’ve spoken with Ban, and he carries a fire that will burn down whatever he sets it upon. If he will put it to Elia’s cause, she would benefit.”
The king did not look away from Elia. “You need your friends,” he said.
Though Elia was not entirely sure what had passed in Morimaros’s heart, unbidden relief cooled her own. She did not take the scrawled note back from Kayo; instead she broke the seal on Errigal’s letter to finally read for her uncle, in concession to the king of Aremoria.
But she did not need to be holding the note to feel its weight, or to remember perfectly the fast, flawed lines of Ban’s writing, the deep cuts in the paper where he’d pressed too hard. Only a few words of the ancient language, and yet they might as well have been cut into her skin.
I keep my promises.
AEFA
THE ROYAL KENNEL was tucked into the northeastern curve of the secondary wall of the palace. A two-story structure built with pale wood and shingles, with a round grassy yard, it was warm all the time and smelled of hay, hairy beasts, mud, and the leavings of hectic but well-trained dogs. Aefa loved it, for kennels were the same in Aremoria and Innis Lear, so she found homesickness alleviated. And besides, dogs were a refuge of loyalty, love, and honesty in a world that nurtured the opposite.
Though Morimaros kept his raches and bloodhounds comfortably, as befitting their status as the king’s dogs, it was his nephew, Isarnos, who adored the animals. And as Isarnos was the reason the king could delay marriage as long as he had, Morimaros gave his heir almost complete run of the kennels.
It had been Aefa’s flirtation with one of the young prince’s tutors that led her to the knowledge that there was a litter of puppies, and Aefa’s considerable charm applied to royal grooms gained her access to the whelps. She’d visited every other day this past week.
The litter’s arrival was one of several pieces of intelligence Aefa had collected, with nothing more than the casual acquisition of friends. Another week in Aremoria and she’d determine who to pursue for more dedicated personal cultivation, based on a prioritized list of Elia’s needs. After all, Aefa understood charm to be her best tool for acquiring a web of allies and informants, as she’d learned last winter at the Dondubhan barracks. She’d let the adorable legitimate Errigal son seduce her, and in return she pinned him to his pillows to interrogate him on how he made everybody like him so rotting much. He was good looking, and so was Aefa; he was charismatic, and so could she be. Therefore, what could he teach her?
Plenty about sex, it turned out, and then even more about Lear’s retainers and the state of politics under the king. But he had been unable to teach her how to gain access where she was lacking. Rory Earlson had never had to learn. He simply had access; he’d been born with it, and he rarely noticed its effectiveness as a tool or a weapon. Aefa was not an earl’s son, or even an earl’s daughter. Her parents had been seasonal servants at Dondubhan until her father’s humor caught Lear’s attention; because of that and the lucky virtue of sharing a rare birth star with the king, the Fool was raised high. Though the king himself promptly forgot his Fool had ever been less than the equal of, say, a valued, honored retainer, the vast majority of the king’s household certainly remembered. Here in Aremoria, Aefa was again fettered by status, even elevated as a princess’s most trusted companion.