That destiny belonged to the unborn princess, or perhaps that first daughter, the ferocious warrior who even now cut across the lane outside Brona’s cottage, wooden sword in hand, meeting the boisterous Earl Errigal stroke for stroke.
Brona groaned as she settled onto the floor, her knees bent and splayed to the side, soles of her feet together. The princess eyed her suspiciously, judging the witch’s improper attire, but Brona wrinkled her nose and smiled; Regan mimicked the exact same position with the limber ease of childhood.
“Are we casting bones now?” Dalat’s daughter asked, leaning toward Brona eagerly, yet managing to keep her voice smooth.
“As the princess commands,” Brona replied, holding out her hand.
Regan hopped up to fetch Brona’s bag of bones, reverently offering them to the witch before resuming her seated position.
“Would you like a reading for yourself?” Brona asked.
The princess’s brow wrinkled as she thought. She glanced at her mother and Dalat lifted her eyebrows and nodded, giving Regan what permission she liked. But the princess, all of six years old, touched her flat little stomach and said, “For the babies.”
Brona painstakingly shifted her own seat until she leaned the small of her back against the mattress, where Dalat could put a hand between her shoulder blades, connecting the friends in spirit. Then the witch removed her cards and bones from the leather pouch. She set the bone, crystal, and antler holy bones along her thighs and began to shuffle the cards. Closing her eyes, Brona thanked the stars and worms of her heart for a friend like this queen, vivacious and cunning and gentle, who loved her enough to tuck herself away from the king and his kingdom—all the business Dalat herself saw to on behalf of her absent-minded husband—in order to comfort Brona through her first pregnancy. The witch sighed deeply as she shuffled, casting her thoughts too inside her, toward her little son. Brona listened to the threads of light and earthly shadows weaving around him, those that stretched toward Dalat behind, weaving about the queen’s third daughter.
The witch of the White Forest held her eyes shut as she spread the cards in a spiral. “Choose a bone,” she instructed the queen and the princess. Both did, the former taking the crystal saint of stars, the later picking up a pale bone carved like a leaf: the Worm of Birds. Brona tossed the remaining seven bones across the spiral of cards. “Now,” she said, “please put your bones down where you will. Dalat, yours will be for your daughter, and Regan, if you will bless my son with your casting.”
Regan’s eyes lit up with pride and she bent over the spread in contemplation. The queen put her saint of stars bone against the card for the Bird of Dreams. The princess glanced up at her mother, then Regan reached out, nearly setting the chosen worm bone against the Tree of Thorns card—but a hesitation shifted her hand eastward, and she placed it instead against the linked corners of two others; Tree of Ancestors and Bird of Rivers. “Is that all right?” the princess whispered.
“Of course,” Brona whispered back. “You have rootwater in your heart. You know where these bones belong.”
The princess nodded slowly.
The witch slid her gaze over and around the cards. “What do you see, little witch?”
“I don’t know.”
“Look, and feel, and listen, and there will be something.”
Regan glanced to her mother.
Dalat encouraged, “Go on.”
“Here,” said the witch, pointing to the Bird of Dreams card. Silver lines of moonlight wove throughout the feathers of an elegant songbird, and its shadow was a raven of stars and blood. “What does this card your mother chose tell you about your baby sister, with words or in feelings.”
The young princess pursed her lips.
“Do not think too long,” Brona counseled.
Regan closed her eyes and breathed slowly, lips parted as if to taste the fire-warmed air. “I can’t trust her,” she whispered.
“What!” Dalat frowned.
“She’s not real!” Regan glanced at her mother in a panic. “I’m sorry, that’s…”
“Of course she is real.”
The witch hummed, studying the delicate crystal saint of stars where it lay against the card, connecting the wings of the moonlight songbird and its bloody raven shadow. “She is only a future now,” Brona said. “Nothing but a promise, growing and wanting. But that future she is will be made by our pasts, entwined together—our pasts and our loves and troubles. She is a dream.”
Seeming relieved by the longer, magical explanation, Regan looked to her mother again, for forgiveness.
“I am willing to love a dream,” the queen said.
Regan hugged herself. “I don’t know how.”
Dalat flipped her hands, calling Regan onto the mattress with her. The princess climbed carefully against her mother, and Dalat wrapped her arm around Regan as her middle daughter curled around the bulge of the queen’s belly. “Imagine her, Regan, my pretty shk lab-i. Imagine what she might be.”
As mother and daughter dreamed together, Brona Hartfare glanced again at the spiral of cards and scattered holy bones. Her gaze drifted, bland and unfocused, as she waited for the symbols and names to paint her a story, for the voice of prophecy to whisper.
Suddenly, the witch stopped breathing: neither queen nor princess noticed, for the witch had simply fallen silent, unmoving, and alone. Because in honor of Brona’s son, Regan Lear had put the Worm of Birds bone between the cards of the Tree of Ancestors and the Bird of Rivers.
For months, Brona’s son’s name had echoed her dreams, been whispered in long, ragged songs by the wind and roots of Innis Lear. His heart, blood, and magic would resonate, would echo up and up, outward and even deep into the bedrock of Innis Lear until every inch and crevice of the island knew his name. Knew him, and loved him.
But with the Worm of Birds there, his future of power and love instead became his doom.
Brona flicked her eyes to little Regan Lear, so innocently snuggled against her mother, whispering in babyish confidence.
Such a young girl could not know what she’d done, what she’d revealed like a curse.
Holding her belly in one hand, the witch of the White Forest swept her other across the holy bones, scattering the cards toward the fire.
MORIMAROS
MARS SPRAWLED BACK at the top of a mighty Aremore hill. Beside him gleamed a pile of armor: helmet, greaves, gauntlets, and breastplate; beneath him, a thin blanket. He’d not bothered to remove the shirt of mail and so Mars, too, gleamed in the sunlight. Before him stretched his legs, his muddy boots just off the blanket. Mars tilted his head back to peer at the solid blue sky. Sweat darkened his hair, especially where the straps of his helmet had pressed. He longed for a bath and clean clothes after over a week in the field, but this was pleasant anyhow.
Ianta and her son, Isarnos, had come out with La Far to meet the king and his men for a picnic lunch, and the breeze was gentle, the cool wine relaxing. Nearly enough to help Mars clear his thoughts.
He’d joined his army ostensibly to inspect their winter camp, but truly because he needed time away from the princess, to build up defenses in his heart. To think without her presence diverting him, always. Instead, she had loomed even larger in his mind. Mars thought of her first when he woke at dawn, for he knew she, too, would be awake, and high on his ramparts saying farewell to the stars. He thought of her again when the wind brushed through curling leaves just beginning to turn the same dark copper that streaked her hair. His boots, all the boots in the army, reminded him of hers, peeking from beneath her dresses, a flower suddenly revealing thorns.
Leaving had made him long for her even more.
He sighed, and Ianta patted his knee sympathetically.