THE FOX
BAN WAITED IN the hallway outside his father’s chambers, near a window and a low bench set into the smooth wooden wall. This was part of the new Keep, built of wood and plaster, with windows that opened to the southeast. Ban removed the letter from his coat. He’d written in as close to Rory’s sprawling hand as he could manage.
Leaning against the sill, Ban pressed his forehead into his arm and breathed unevenly on purpose, as if desperate to rein in a great hurt. Slip under the enemy’s defenses.
This plan would lead to getting the iron magic for Morimaros. It would prove to Elia exactly the fickle ease with which a father might overthrow a child’s love. It would undercut the stars King Lear adhered to so fanatically.
All Ban had to do was sink to the level they expected of a bastard. It shocked him with an unexpected thrill.
Base and vile, those were the words the king had used, the words Ban’s own father had never argued against. Well. They might have been meant to put him down, but Ban had learned of baseness and vile creatures when he hunted and tracked, when he cut his sword into the guts of another man, when he dug into the ground to bury a comrade or cover the shit of the army. He had seen how the earth accepted base and vile things and transformed them into stinking, beautiful life again. Flowers and fresh grasses. Colorful mushrooms and beds of moss. That was magic. Could the stars do such a thing? Never. Only the earth—the wild, mysterious, dark earth—knew such power.
Ban’s power.
He had spent the winter he was seventeen in the estate of his cousins Alsax in northeastern Aremoria, just near the borders of Burgun and Diota. That past summer he’d continued fighting alongside the foot soldiers in Morimaros’s army, all while quietly working directly for the king. He did all his soldier’s work and every low job the Alsaxes expected of him without complaint, then instead of joining his fellows for food or drink after a shift, would slip away to do Morimaros’s bidding. Often that meant infiltrating the lands of the opposition, whether that was Burgun border towns or the manor houses of rebellious Aremore nobles. He slept hungry with herds of sheep, in precarious nests beside red eagles, and in a womb of heartwood when he found a tree who trusted him entire. Always exhausted, always thirsty. When Ban was missing from the army for days at a time, La Far spoke with his Alsax commander and smoothed it over, though it took a long while to trickle down to the foot soldiers that he was more than just a slippery deserter.
But at the end of that summer’s campaign, the king had invited Ban to spend an entire two months in Lionis, working with Morimaros and La Far together on sword craft and riding and any martial skill Ban thought to ask after. It had been one of the best times of his life, for he’d been trusted and treated as though he deserved nothing less.
When he returned to the Alsax estate for the winter, it was with the king’s own letter in hand. By the king’s orders, he was not to be put with the foot soldiers again, but allowed to use the cold, muffled, snowed-in months for nothing but magical study, and given a room of his own to accommodate it.
Ban was determined to return to Morimaros as great a wizard as possible: his service to the king was the only thing forcing others to recognize his worth, and so he would shine no matter what else tarnished him.
Though some old books had been written on the subject of wizarding by observers of the art, there were no practitioners in Aremore, and Ban was left without access to a teacher. Instead, he chose to learn from the trees and beasts themselves, and studied mainly through experimentation. His small corner room on the top story of the pale limestone estate smelled constantly of pine and wax; musty bats and sweet winter berry poultices; the vibrant, spicy ink made from the heartblood of trees; and fire. He worked on a wolf-skin rug turned leather up to be drawn on with charcoal; there he etched out words in the language of trees and drew circles and root diagrams to guide him. Usually a half-empty plate of cheese and bread and cold, dry meat sat nearly forgotten beside him, and a bottle of wine he never bothered pouring into a cup. When working, he wore little besides heavy wool trousers dyed the brown of the winter forest, so he might easily paint charcoal runes across his chest, or cut the shape of his name against his collarbone.
Thus Rory found him when he shoved through the door joining their rooms, stumbling slightly from all the impassioned sex and the nearly empty bottle of wine he’d so recently partaken of. Flushed and unfocused, he blinked at his older bastard brother, surprised to find Ban even less clothed than himself and covered in streaks of ash writing in the language of trees. “Are you doing magic?” he cried.
Ban frowned from the center of the wolf-skin and settled his hands on his knees. The fingers of his right hand were blackened. In his left he held a trio of black raven feathers. He did not have the patience after midnight to walk his brother through his attempt to whisper a secret to a distant cluster of ravens with a thin rope of pine smoke.
“I am, yet it is late, and I should rest.” Ban eyed his little brother: the loose trousers and bare feet, the fur-lined robe and tousled hair, the long pink scratches distorting the flare of freckles down his neck. Ban pressed his mouth together. Rory had barely been here two weeks and already had a lover—or three.
“I want to know how to do magic,” Rory breathed, kneeling beside Ban.
This wizarding belonged to Ban, it was the only thing of his own, and he did not want to invite Rory to share it. Rory already had so many things that should have been his older brother’s. Ban said, “Listening to the wind demands quietude of the heart, peaceful breathing, and willingness to be still, brother. None of which are skills you cultivate.”
“Your heart is not quiet, either, brother.”
“I can see your flush right now.”
“You just disapprove of my nightly activities.” Rory’s smile was all teasing and smug delight.
“I do, but that makes my words no less true. You’ll never learn magic if you fix your attention and passion so firmly on a course of loud spirit.”
Rory nudged Ban with his elbow. “So that is why you eschew the naked entertainments? For your magic?”
“That, but for the more obvious reason, too.”
“What?” the earlson laughed.
“You could father a bastard,” Ban hissed.
“If he’s like my brother, Ban, it would be quite the thing! I welcome it.”
The bastard scowled, but his brother threw an arm about him, still laughing, and quite obviously meaning every word. “Never fear, Ban, no power in the heavens or the roots could get my lover with child by me.”
Ban began to sneer a reply, but caught the angle of his brother’s smile. “Is that a man in there?” he asked, hushed.
“Erus Or,” Rory confided. “He is strong.”
“You have to stop, you have to be careful.” Ban gripped his brother’s arms. “Didn’t you hear of the man Connley executed for the same?”
Rory shrugged him off. “I’ll be fine. This is Aremoria, not home. Besides, Connley killed that man because he was married to Connley’s cousin and betrayed her, not because he betrayed her with another man.”
Unsettled, Ban went to the window and gripped the cold stone sill. Even if he desired to, he could never take such risks in his position, despite Morimaros’s favor, despite his success in war. All Ban had was the thin iron rod of his reputation.