THE SKY WAS nothing but stars, and the wizard had drifted into the queen’s rose garden to be maudlin.

It would be some hours before the sleek sickle moon rose. He was alone with his rippling thoughts, without any moonlight to distract him with the dreams and slipping will of the earth saints. The wizard did not fully understand why the saints preferred moonlight to starlight, but perhaps the moon itself was a chunk of earth, a balance for their power against the flickering stars.

Without it, they hunkered in their shadows and under-root halls.

The garden ground crunched lightly with frost as he walked. Pebbled paths curled between small ornamental trees—bare now for the winter, but for the evergreen junipers. A small lawn opened up against the northern wall, and there clinging to the blue-gray stones of Dondubhan grew rose vines. In this darkness the roses were slithering shadows.

Once there’d been a bench here, tucked beneath a trellis, but he’d never used it; he and—they—had preferred to set themselves against the ground, even on a night like this, deep in wintertime.

It was awful to be at Dondubhan again.

Everything was the same, only peopled differently. He remembered too much.

The wizard reached out and pressed his finger to a thorn. It bit his skin, piercing easily through. He welcomed the hot flourish of pain, stinging then gone. Hello, he whispered in the language of trees.

A few tight buds nodded. Hello, the wind said. And, Hellooooooo in a long, snaking hiss. The wizard smiled at the humor. He put the bead of blood to his mouth, smearing his bottom lip.

Memories crowded his mind, some his own, others images and words slipping through the starry breeze: girls giggling together, a young man cradling a book in his lap, a wailing king, a kiss.

Ban, she said.

The wizard jerked, spun around. The voice had not come from the wind. Not the roses nor the gnarled, barren cherry trees.

Hello, said the wind again.

He must have imagined it.

Memories. This place.

The wizard crouched.

He touched his lip and put the blood, like a kiss, against the ground. It was hard and cold, and the garden smelled of nothing but dirt, with a slight tinge of pine and crushed juniper berries. Sharp, bitter.

As the wizard settled in to listen, sounds from beyond the wall reached him: the shush of the Tarinnish lapping at the shore. Better to keep his mind gently dark, the calm of a pristine black shadow. No glimmer of stars like hope, no jarring moonlight memories. No names.

Ban.

He stopped breathing. He pressed his eyes closed.

Ban. Ban. Listen.

Ban.

Help me.

The wizard’s face crumpled and he covered it with his hands, fingers digging into his scalp. The same thing the other had begged. Help me.

On a moonless night, that young witch had said, if you see a reflection on the water, they say Elia the Dreamer is there.

(The Witch of the White Forest, they called that boy, and the wizard had opinions.)

Between one heartbeat and the next, the wizard stepped into the darkest shadow between two juniper trees and stepped out onto the shore of the Tarinnish.

Alone on this rocky strip of land, a narrow curve between the thick base of Dondubhan’s curtain wall and the reaching lake, he stared out. There, far over the slick black waters, was a pale glow. It shimmered and flicked, rather like the reflection of a full moon on choppy waves.

But there was no moon in the sky.

“Elia,” he said quietly.

He’d heard stories of how she died so many times, from so many people: the queen of Innis Lear fell into her father’s madness and drowned herself; she was ill and felt this a softer way to go; she wanted to breathe the rootwaters; she was lured there, murdered; a star had drawn her out, a prophecy, and as her crown had been won by stars, she decided it ought to be lost thus, too.

And the worst story, told in the shaking words of a dying king, Her sister did it, called her name again and again until she couldn’t resist. I wasn’t there, I ought to have been there, how could I not have been there?

The wizard knew the truth now, by the bound bones tucked in a rough bag beneath the mattress where he slept, of what her sister had become.

It had been madness, and she had been lured, and it had been her sister: all three. He suspected there’d been a prophecy cast, too.

The silver light wavered, and he heard his name again.

Help me. Ban.

There were more bones for him to collect.

(I wasn’t there, I ought to have been there.)

He stripped off his quilted coat, and then on second thought the rest of his clothing, too.

(How could I not have been there?)

To the sound of his name (oh, that name, she’d taken it away, and the shape of it on her lips had haunted him for a hundred years), like a summons, a poem, but mostly like gentle, weary sobs, the wizard cut magic into his skin with a sharp rock. Then he drew a deep breath and ran out over the surface of the Tarinnish.

His bare feet splashed lightly; his breath filled his lungs and the wind pushed at his back, lifted him as he raced. Toward the dance of light pinpointed atop the black lake.

Before him the light rose: a narrow column of purest silver and white, edges shimmering. He saw her. A hand reaching. A gasp. Parted lips.

The wizard streaked across the Tarinnish, and when he reached her, she vanished.

With time only to gasp a huge breath, he plunged feet-first into the icy black water.

Down and down as numbing darkness pressed in, so cold it was blue-black fire. Down until his toes found the bottom, slick and silty, and he crouched, bending with the water, its weight helping him. He sifted his hands through muddy bracken, lungs hot, ears tingling.

He dug, he crawled across the bottom of the lake, glad only she’d not drowned at the center, where the island claimed its lake opened for miles below, a channel to the heart of the world. Her bones might’ve sunk forever.

The wizard found a rib first, and a knobby vertebra. Then a sharp, flat shoulder blade.

And her skull.

That he clutched to his chest.

With the rib and scapula in hand, he shoved off the lake floor and kicked up. And up.

And up.

He burst out of the waves with a gasping, wet cry.

For long moments the wizard only breathed. He turned to float on his back and whispered a request that the wind lend aid. It blew, staggering his exposed flesh with frozen goosebumps. The skull against his belly felt warm, as did the tears that leaked down his temples to join the million droplet tears of the Tarinnish.

A man would have died of the cold and the dark waves. But the wizard lived, inasmuch as living described his existence, and when he was near enough to shore he walked up the rocky beach to the land. He dragged on his clothes one-handed, unable to let go of the skull. It gleamed beneath his fingers.

Impossible not to imagine the flesh that once had ridden this bone, the teeth (some of which were missing), the smile, the tightly curled black lashes.

The eyes.

The wizard turned those dark sockets against his chest (not as dark as they’d been when she lived, when her eyes were horn-black, black as the very lake behind him, black as ravens and moonless nights).

With a tightening of his lips and little sigh, he went to the wall of the Dondubhan fortress and stepped into a shadow.

When the wizard stepped out of that shadow into the garden, the queen of Innis Lear stood beside the roses. Her lips parted in quiet surprise (not at his presence, but at the suddenness of it). She held out a blanket. She herself was bundled in cloak and wool and blanket of her own.

“I saw you race over the surface of the water,” she murmured. “I saw the light.”

He did not ask how she knew, then, to come here instead of the shore. When she offered him the blanket, he gave over the skull in return. The queen held it delicately, lovingly, tilting it to catch the new moonlight.

(That scalpel moon had just risen.)