FIVE YEARS AGO, HARTFARE

KAY OAK WALKED alone.

Despite the perfect afternoon, the peaceful clouds so high overhead, every breath was agonizing.

He’d not rested since leaving the wedding ceremony at Connley Castle, but instead taken a horse and ridden hard west, unthinking, a weight like murky water pressing down and all around him, darkening his vision. The horse moved under his urging, into the White Forest, and Kayo only knew to aim for the center, the heart of the woods, where there would be sign in the form of tattered cloth hanging from branches.

He’d never been to Hartfare, and not spoken with Brona in years. Not since that night of his sister’s year memorial, when the witch had told him everything he’d missed while working his trade routes. When the witch—this island—had broken his heart. But he knew the path to her lost village, as everyone did, from songs and rumors.

The blue cloth markers appeared, and he allowed the horse its head for a while. Once they reached the village, he slid off, dropped the reins, and walked on, past curious women and children, and some few men, past barking dogs delighted to meet someone new, past cottages and finely tended gardens and smoking fires. They pointed silently the way to the witch, knowing without asking why Kayo had come.

The door to Brona’s cottage was shut, and he leaned against it, slumping with his forehead to the grainy wood. Beneath his forehead, the door shifted, opening. Kayo stood, lips parted, dark eyes wide.

Brona was there, luscious and tall and numinous.

He said, “I didn’t know where else to go.”

She took one of his hands and led him inside, closing the door behind them.

Daylight poured in through small, square windows, and the fire was low in the hearth. Brona wore a plain blouse and striped skirt, with a bodice loosely holding it all together, tied with violet ribbons. Her feet were bare. She put him at the long table near the fire, on a bench, and silently set about making a plate of food. Kayo slouched wearily, staring at her, feeling dull and undone.

But his pulse had slowed, and gradually his breath evened.

Brona gave him a small crescent pie stuffed with turnips, onions, and savory gravy and set a jug of ale between them, along with two cups. She poured, and they drank.

Kayo ate the pie carefully, letting the simple flavors ground him, and watched Brona’s face. She remained as beautiful as she had been six years ago: dark hair unbound around her tan, freckled face; soft everywhere but the corners of her eyes and the sharp slash of her black brows. Her mouth was too plump not to think of ripe figs.

He’d not tasted a fig since leaving the Third Kingdom.

A shudder passed through Kayo and he finished his food, licking the last crumbs from his thumb. He reached for the ale and drank. All while the witch studied him.

She poured a second helping of ale and said, “I have heard Regan’s wedding was beautiful, though they infuriated the king by sharing a bowl of rootwater.”

“They did, and it did,” he said slowly, suspecting the trees themselves must have whispered the news to her, for no human messenger could have beaten him to her door.

The witch slid his cup nearer to him and cradled her own. “I am here, Kay Oak.”

“I … don’t know what to do,” he said. “Tell me what my sister would wish me to do. All is falling to pieces, and I don’t know that I’ve done any good here.” His own voice was unrecognizable to him, tight with desperation. He hid his face in his hands. Both his elder nieces were married now, to enemies that would tear apart this island—and he couldn’t see how to stop them. Particularly that slick son of salt, Tear Connley. Kayo slammed his hands flat on the table. “And by my sister’s word, I cannot tell Regan why it is so wrong that she married Connley!”

“I know,” Brona murmured. She put her hands atop his. “I know, Kay. And Regan would not listen, if you could.”

He dragged in a deep breath. “My land is dying. And the lands around mine, too. The shepherds must take their flock higher and higher, farther inland toward this forest, because even the moors do not make thick enough blankets of food. The past two years my cows have birthed fewer and fewer calves. The trees blossom only half the time, depending on how far they live from the heart of Innis Lear.”

The witch nodded. “The island pulls inward, to consolidate its power since our king closed the navels and ended all the root blessings.”

“What is to be done? I feel this island in my bones, Brona. I feel the promise I made to Dalat, and I despair.”

“As do I, Kayo.”

“Brona…”

“Wait, and be strong. It will be the right time, when Elia is older.”

His pulse gasped. “Elia! Elia is a shadow of herself, and untouchable. I should take her, spirit her away to the home of our mothers, and save her, if that is the only possible thing.”

“What would she be in the land of your mothers?” Brona asked.

“A granddaughter of the empress, beloved at least, and encouraged to thrive. Her father, stars protect him, strangles her with his devotion.”

“But what would her potential be?”

“Whatever she wished. You cannot know what it is like in the Third Kingdom. Women are … you are the strength and hearts of the world. You rule it and we know why, there deep in the desert.”

Brona smiled a little.

Kayo pushed on, “Her people are there, too. Elia would be among her own. Less rare, but less burdened, too.”

“Does she want to leave?”

“No.” Frustrated, he made his hands into fists. “But she can’t know what it would be like. She’s never known anything but Innis Lear. She’s only fifteen, and you haven’t seen her of late, Brona.” He leveled his eyes on hers. “Her heart broke when Errigal and Lear took your boy away from her. They loved each other, with nothing to gain from the loving but love itself. Have you ever loved that way? I do not know how. Lear does not. There are too many layers of loyalty and lies and half-truths for adults to love so. But Elia had it, and might have carried it into adulthood if not for breaking them apart. And now there is a deep mistrust inside her, worse than her sisters’ fury or her father’s fanaticism.” Kayo snapped his mouth shut and closed his eyes against a wail. He could not speak of this with his brother Lear; the king refused all mention of Ban’s name in his presence, and even more so the suggestion Elia had been influenced by a bastard with terrible stars.

The Oak Earl looked again at Brona. “Don’t you see? I must act.”

“I do see,” she murmured, standing. She moved away, and Kayo felt the loss of it, though she only went to a box tucked to a corner shelf beside the hearth and brought it back.

Carved of dark wood, the box was etched with the hash-marks that represented the language of trees. Kayo understood some of the spoken words, but he could not read nor write it, beyond a basic fertility blessing he’d learned to use as the earl over all those dying moors. He’d never been sure the land truly respected him; he’d asked an old grandmother to teach him to tend the needs within his borders. Was the decay some fault of his own; was he too foreign in his thoughts and wanderings to care for the roots? The grandmother had ignored his anxieties in a practiced way and chided him for not knowing the simplest blessings. For a little while, his land had thrived. No more. Kayo understood in his bones that the king’s rejection of the rootwaters had forced the island to consolidate its power here in the White Forest, and yet—and yet he could not help wondering if, had Kayo himself been somehow more devoted to Innis Lear, never left to travel, rejected the ties to his homeland, the roots would thrive. The witch held her part of the island healthy and whole. Why couldn’t he?

Brona lifted the lid to reveal a stack of worn, gilded cards and a small silk bag. Without speaking, she removed the cards and shuffled them, then handed them to Kayo. He awkwardly did the same, looking at images of crowns and stars, feathers and claws and worms and roots.

Brona took them again and laid out all twenty-seven cards in four circles, spiraling out from center. Then she upended the silk bag into her palm and breathed into her hand. She whispered a blessing in the language of trees and dropped the bones across the spread of cards.

Each of the nine bones hit with a hard knock, vibrating the table in little ripples that ought to have stopped long before they did. Kayo shivered, staring.

“This is always how they fall, Kay Oak,” Brona said after a long moment. “Whenever I throw them for Innis Lear, and for Elia Lear. The Crown of Trees, Saint of Stars, and Worm of Birds aligned atop all nine cards of the suit of stars. Choice, heart, and patience in the core.” She shook her head at him. “Even now with you here it does not change.”

“What does it mean? I do not know the bones. They’ve been forbidden nearly as long as I’ve been back.”

He could not stop staring at the silver lines painted along the roots of every tree card and the perfect blue of the worms. The edges of Brona’s cards seemed soft and worn. Some paint was smeared away, and a drop or two of old brown blood stained a card with a lovely black bird sliced perfectly in half, but still flying.

“It means we must wait for Elia, if the island would thrive forever.”

Kayo made a fist against his knee. “We cannot wait! Elia despairs, and our land does, too.”

“The land will cope, and the heart of the White Forest beats so long as I am here, enough for now. So long as there are folk around the island whispering to the wind, we can be patient. And many do, Kay Oak, despite the edicts of the crown. Including Regan Lear.”

“Regan Connley,” the Oak Earl corrected.

“Regan Connley, then.”

“Which is this card?” he asked, pointing at the bird in two pieces, curious but afraid.

“Oh,” Brona breathed shakily, the first indication that her calm was hard-won. “Oh, Kayo.” She came around the table to him and perched on the edge, taking one of his brown hands in hers. “Why does it call to you?”

With her near, he felt soothed, and her fingers stroked his wrist so kindly as he spoke. “It has not fallen, though it is cut in two pieces, straight through the middle. It lives in pieces.”

“That is the sacrifice the bird makes,” the witch of the White Forest whispered. “Not to be cut in half, but to keep flying despite it.”

Her words broke open the thing inside him, and Kayo bent over, eyes squeezed closed against the tears pulling fire down his cheeks. “Brona,” he choked. “Oh no, oh no. I can’t. I never meant to—I am not—” He gripped her hips, pulling her nearer, and buried his face in her lap.

She petted his head, the three weeks’ worth of thick black curls growing against his scalp. She bent around him, kissed the knob of his skull, murmuring soft nothings as he cried.

Moments, hours, uncountable tears later, he stopped. His breath skimmed along the stripes of her skirt, and Brona lifted the corner to wipe his cheeks. “Remain here for a few days, my oak lord,” she said. “Remain here, and be in pieces. You do not have to fly when you are in my house.”

He nodded, clutching her hands. He needed it. He needed her. “Yes,” he said, voice hoarse.