Regan smiled as he tilted his head, listening to the moths. This young man was a witch. She pushed the great hood off her head so the cool forest air could kiss her wet hair.
Ban turned in one smooth motion. Half the moths rose on a breeze, fluttering around his head; the others remained clinging to his skin, and flourished their wings.
This was the Ban Errigal she only remembered as a scrap of a bastard child, loving her baby sister. Now grown handsome in a wild, tight way, like a hungry wolf prince. One arm slowly streamed blood from a slash just above the elbow.
Ban the Fox, they called him at the Summer Seat.
Ban the Fox, who was beloved of the forest.
Ban the Fox was her answer.
Lady Regan, he said softly in the language of trees.
Ban … the Fox, she replied in the same.
The cherry trees all around them giggled, dropping tiny oval leaves like confetti.
“You’re a witch,” he said, awed, “as well as a soon-to-be queen.”
“And you a soldier as well as a witch.”
He bowed, unable, it seemed, to take his eyes off her.
Regan glanced again at the mantle of moths he wore, sending her own few to alight on his shoulders.
Shrugging as if their tiny feet tickled, Ban said, “They bring a message from my mother. She reminds me I’ve been home weeks, and not visited her.”
For a moment Regan peered at him, as if he were a trick of the White Forest, and then she remembered: “Brona Hartfare is your mother, and I was near when you were born, for my sister Elia was born that same day, while both our mothers resided at the Summer Seat.”
A thing shuttered his eyes, though he did not even blink, when she mentioned Elia’s name. All instincts urging her to slice into that, Regan stepped forward. “You and Elia were childhood lovers.”
The moths burst off him, though Regan did not note even a twitch or shift in his posture. He said nothing, holding her eyes with his.
“I only meant, young Ban,” she soothed, “that once my little sister trusted you, and so would I now.”
He swallowed, barely, and glanced down her body to the water still glistening at her ankles. “You aren’t wearing shoes.”
“I was in the stream, just north of here, begging the forest to lend me aid. The old oak who drinks from that stream said your name, the answer to a question I didn’t know to ask.”
“What is wrong?” Ban stepped nearer to her, the youthful concern in his frown and pulled brow a contrast to the reactions Regan usually garnered from men.
In answer, Regan joined him at the center of the cherry grove and knelt upon a tuft of short, teal-gray grass, flaring her coat around her like a skirt.
Ban sank to his knees. “Tell me what I can do, my lady.”
Regan held her hands, palms up, to him, and he slid his against hers. The pocket between their palms warmed, filling with a tingling spark.
“We are suited,” Regan said, giving him her kindest smile. One she rarely practiced in the mirror, for lack of necessity. “Both of long, powerful bloodlines rooted to Innis Lear.”
He nodded, fingers curling about her wrists.
She noted how roughly attractive he was, again, this near and with his lips parted, the muscles of his chest taut. At least five of his scars were put there for magic. There was an untamed, informal note to the crease of his mouth, the haphazard braids, the thick bands of muscle. The bed of Regan and Connley never had required elegance. His wildness would complement theirs. She said, “I would like to continue my bloodline, Fox, but cannot carry a child well enough that it survives.”
Here her voice hitched, and she allowed it.
“I’m sorry,” Ban murmured. “My mother—she has tried to help?”
“Yes, but only with conception and enhanced potency. I need now to dig into myself, to see deep enough I might understand how to fix myself. And Brona will not go into me like that; she would not risk my life as a man might.”
The young wizard leaned away, though he did not try to let go of her hands. “I do not … I will not go inside you.”
“My husband would destroy you if you tried, Ban Errigal,” she said, “and I would help him. That is not what I meant.” Regan smiled her most dangerous smile, as she found it very telling what he assumed.
Ban cleared his throat. Wind shivered in response, whispering all around them: good good good, for the trees of Innis Lear approved of this alliance. “You don’t seek power, either, then? For Brona is that—powerful.”
“You are rooted with magic, but not only to Innis Lear?”
“I allied with Aremore forests,” he answered simply.
“And you are iron. You are.” Her nails dug at the soft insides of his wrists. “You are forged unlike me, unlike your mother. I would reap your insight, your ideas. Your power.”
His chin lifted: pride at her words. Regan hid her own tiny smile of triumph in favor of a quiet, pleading frown. “Help me, Ban the Fox.”
In reply, he bowed over their joined hands, turning them to kiss her knuckles.
THE FOX
BAN EMERGED FROM the cool cover of the White Forest at the side of Regan Connley. His heart raced, more hare than fox.
He continually glanced at her from the corners of his eyes; she smiled knowingly. Her fingers at the edge of his sleeve were cool and bare, and she wore now a dark red over-dress and leather slippers they’d fetched from beside the creek. She was slightly taller than he, and six years older, and beautiful like the sun on winter trees. As he glanced at her, a small, fluttering sigh escaped her lips. Although Ban knew—absolutely knew—it was an affectation, he felt an answering flutter at the base of his spine.
Meeting her as he had, both of them nearly nude, and her glistening with water in a sleek white shift, with magic sparking in the air and sliding between them back and forth, it was no wonder he felt the bite of infatuation. At least he could recognize it.
And Regan had asked for his aid.
She’d appeared to him like the spirit of an elegant ash tree, an earth saint of old, a witch. And, Ban thought, a queen already. When he stood beside her, the unsettled roots of Innis Lear seemed to calm. Despite everything, it calmed him, too.
Once they’d both retrieved their discarded clothes, once Regan had swiftly wound her wet hair into a low knot, and once she had helped to bind the wound still glistening on his shield arm, Ban asked her why she and her husband had come to Errigal.
“To visit your father,” she said.
He steadied his hand under hers as she stepped over a scatter of rocks pressing up through the path. “To assure yourselves of his allegiance to Connley, you mean.”
Regan smiled quickly, then it vanished. “Is it strong?”
“From what I know, yes.”
“He was distraught when we arrived this morning. I left my husband with him, as Errigal said something about his son’s betrayal? He must not mean … you?”
It was simple to put grief and unease on his face, both being what he felt. “My younger brother, Rory, the one not a bastard. He was discovered to harbor a desire to be earl sooner than my father is like to die, and…”
The lady’s fingers curled around his wrist. “I am so very sorry, Fox.”
“I was out in the forest, hunting after his trail.” Ban shook his head, looking down. It was half-true, for last night he’d pointed Rory in the direction of Hartfare, where he could find shelter. Then Ban returned home, to lie to his father that Rory had fled. Errigal’s rage and grief had been wild, and this morning before dawn, Ban had left his still-drunken father, to lead several parties of men out hunting Rory’s trail. It had been no difficulty to whisper at the trees and ask a handful of crows to divert them all from any path that had his brother’s trace. By the sun’s zenith, they’d all split off, and Ban was alone. He took the opportunity to sink into the forest, to give some blood to the roots of the trees and say hello. Messages had arrived from his mother, on the wings of moths and kisses of wind. Then Regan had come.
“Did you find him? Did he give you that wound on your arm?” she asked.