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.
“What’s that you have, my prince?” Novanos asked Isa, and the prince leaned around his mother and stretched a skinny arm across her lap, offering something to the soldier with grubby hands. He carefully opened his palm to accept it, then showed the small yellow rock to Mars.
The king smiled. It was one of the ribbed stone beetles often found trapped in the cliffs or the limestone of Lionis Palace. Old stories said they were ancient animals transformed by earth saints into rock, as punishment for a crime that varied by the family telling it. Mars reached to pluck it from Novanos’s hand. The beetle was the size of his thumbnail. He said, “I spoke with a man from Ispania who thinks this is a natural process, a thing that happens to some creatures when they decompose, the way our flesh rots and falls away.”
“I’m eating, Mars,” Ianta said.
But Isarnos climbed onto his knees and eagerly poked the stone beetle. “Do you think if we could break inside it, there would be a hollow where its flesh rotted? Or turned to dust, or is all still there, preserved perfectly?”
“Maybe it is beautiful crystal like a geode,” Novanos suggested.
Isarnos gasped in delight.
“Break it open and find out.” Mars gave the beetle back to his nephew.
“Then it will be ruined, if there’s nothing but stone.”
The Twice-Princess nodded, dabbing her mouth with a cloth. “Then have it gilded, and save it forever. Always full of secret possibilities.”
The young prince stroked the ribbed shell and leapt to his feet. “If I find more, I can break one open and still have another to keep!”
Mars laughed, well pleased by his nephew’s strategic and forthright conclusion. The boy dashed through the line of soldiers enjoying their own lunch just down the hill, dodging toward the saddled horses. Most of the men remained with the camp, completing the necessary winter adjustments; this was only an honor escort so that the king did not ride alone.
Novanos got up, too, and trailed after the prince. He shared a glance with the Twice-Princess that told Mars he was facing an inquisition.
“So, Mars, how are your troops?” Ianta scraped soft cheese off the platter between them with her finger, and popped it into her mouth.
“The army is bedding down in the east. They’ve repaired Fort Everly’s spike wall, and should be wintered well. I’ll ride north toward Burgun next, but not get too close to the old line. Wouldn’t want to upset them unnecessarily yet.”
“Are you going to the west coast where the navy is?”
“I will have to tell them to nest or remain prepared for assault if I do.”
“You haven’t decided yet?” Genuine surprise lifted his sister’s voice.
Mars ran his hands over his skull, scrubbing at the thick hair. It needed a new shave.
“Tell me what troubles you most, big brother.” Ianta poured a little more wine into Mars’s cup.
“If I want Innis Lear more than anything, I should go and take it now, when they’re divided. That will be best for Aremoria, with the least risk to us.”
“But there’s something you want more?”
“Aremoria should be—it is—my only concern.”
“You are Aremoria.”
“Father told me how this would be. That being king separates me from all else. That my love—my attention—belongs to my people first, and to myself, rarely.”
“Even the sun is affected by the clouds, by rain and the moon.”
“But are the sun and moon lovers?” he said, amused at the turn of the conversation, but also inexplicably hurt by it.
Ianta laughed. “I suppose you’d have to ask the sun and the moon.”
Glancing up at the sky, scalded silver and nearly impossible to behold by the brilliant sun, Mars nodded.
His sister said, “You could be lover to Elia Lear.”
“She is her own sun, no moon for mine.”
Ianta clapped her hands as though she’d caught him in a trap. “Her own sun! Mars, are you in love with her?”
Fiercely uncomfortable, he sat up. “If I take Innis Lear now, she’ll hate me.”
“Aremoria will be stronger if you have a queen,” Ianta murmured, wheedling. “Haven’t you thought of that? Maybe stronger with a queen than with a conquered Innis Lear.”
“I have an heir.”
“Isarnos is my heir, too, you know, and I might want to protect him from your throne.”
“Or give him to Vindomatos’s daughter?”
Ianta shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind retiring to that north duchy. And strengthening our ties along Burgun’s border. Aremoria wants for you to have your own queen and your own heir.”
“If Elia marries me, I could maybe have Innis Lear, too, in the end,” Mars said.
“And if you go for her island first, she might never willingly marry you.”
“Willingly!” Aghast, Mars stared at his sister. “I do not want a queen unwilling, Ianta, and I’m … offended.”
“Then put the navy to nest for the winter,” she pressed.
This was no counseling, not Ianta’s usual give-and-take questioning, meant to help Mars decide what his choices would be. She argued vehemently for some agenda. Mars said slowly, “By the spring, when we can sail again, her sisters might have consolidated power. It will be harder to invade. More resources spent. More of my men will die.”
“Or they’ll kill each other, those elder sisters, and Elia will hand the island over to you. There are several ways this can go.”
Mars drank his wine, brooding into the cup. Word had come from Ban the Fox, sealed on the wing of a raven, that his mission proceeded slowly but surely. Rory Errigal was unseated, and Ban positioned like creeping poison near his father’s heart. Near enough to cause whatever ailments he wished, to stir trouble ahead and sow discontent further. That seemed more like fast work than a slow infiltration to Mars, but given the resentment that always lived in Ban, perhaps disrupting the earldom was a thing he was only glad to have reason to do, and so had already known exactly which thread to pull. And if it went faster, then the king’s spy could return home sooner.
He missed Ban, the quiet surety of his dark presence, like a shadow always reminding Mars to be the sun. They had not been friends, exactly, but as close to it as a king and a bastard wizard could be.
I keep my promises, his Fox had written to Elia Lear.
Mars rejected jealousy, for not knowing which of them he was more jealous of.
He said instead, “Those sisters will not like it, if she marries me.”
“But they wouldn’t attack Aremoria for it. They can’t. And in the end they can only make conquering their island very difficult. Sue for peace at great expense to themselves, and they are inexperienced queens, taking over a very weakened kingdom, if even half of what you’ve said is true.”
“It would be good for Innis Lear to be part of Aremoria. Our strengths would balance. I wish I could convince Elia of that, too.”
“I like her, Mars. I like her very much. And I’m sure she likes you. She’s hurt and looking for a path to choose. We could convince her to choose you, to choose Aremoria. She needs someone to trust, Mars. To love, and to be loved as you could love her.”
Mars put down the empty wine cup and for a moment watched the wind tease the corners of saddle blankets and the thick manes of the horses down the slope from him. Soldiers ranged in pairs, some eating as they walked, others alert for orders. But all seemed to appreciate the afternoon break. It was perfect here: warm, gilded, all the bold colors of Aremore. “You think I should use her hurt, her losses, to my advantage.”
“It’s just a tool, like everything is, your method to get what you want. And in the long run, it would be to Elia’s advantage, too. You’re a good man; you will be good for her.”
“You’re biased,” Mars said with a wry smile.
“Yes. But also right, in this case.”
“She wants to save her island, Ianta. To win her, I might have to prove my willingness toward alliance over assimilation. Toward supporting her without the ties of marriage, until her sisters have ascended, or until Innis Lear is strong again. That is what she wants most from me: an opportunity to see her island secure.”
“Which is directly opposed to what you, you-as-king, you—Aremoria—want. Because it will make you truly the greatest ruler in a thousand years? Strengthen the lore of our dynasty?”
Mars sighed, knowing exactly what his father would say to this equivocating.
His sister leaned back onto her elbows. Her voluptuous curls tumbled around her shoulders. “That makes me want to throw this wine in your face. You don’t believe in destiny.”
“It isn’t that—it isn’t magic, or myth.” Mars touched the grass beside the blanket, stroking it; the blades had been warmed by the sun. “It is completing what Aramos began. Taking all the stolen parts of Aremoria back. Making Aremoria whole. A single banner. Ours. Mine.”
“Innis Lear was lost to us nearly a thousand years ago. It might just belong to itself by now.”
“If I don’t at least try, what have I accomplished with my reign?”
“Mars!” She leaned over to smack his arm, but winced as her fingers snapped against his chain mail.
It had been a ridiculous thing to say: he’d completed the defeat of Diota after his father’s death, and put Burgun back in its place. He’d restructured the system of loans and guild marks in Lionis. He’d begun to build a new port for trading ships in their south city Haven Point. He still didn’t have a permanent ambassador from the Third Kingdom, however, nor a queen to bear his heirs. And at least three barons along the Vitili border kidnapped Aremore folk regularly, and Mars’s representatives could find no proof the nobles were involved. There were always problems with the stray cats. The roads in the north were appalling. He was a terrible falconer. Oh, and that draft in the queen’s solar. There was plenty left to achieve.
“Have you thought you might accomplish peace?” Ianta asked gently.
The king startled.
“If Aremoria is not at war, you can invite your naturalists to Lionis, as many as you like, a menagerie of them. Bring that one you mentioned to Isa, to cut up all the stone beetles in the world. You can teach Isa yourself, or make Royal Libraries in every city like you wanted as a boy. You can go kill those border barons with your own hands.”
“I should do all those things and take Innis Lear.”
“If you make peace, you can take your time with Elia Lear. And her island.”
He frowned. He should tell his sister about Ban. That Aremore had already dealt the first hand against Innis Lear. Against Elia.
“You have to be happy, Mars. If you let yourself be unhappy, it will spill out into your choices,” Ianta said.
“Are you happy?” Mars looked hard at his sister, locking their eyes together.
“When I can be,” she said. “It was difficult after my husband died. But I had our son. Mother. You. And an entire country to love.”
“I love Aremoria,” Mars said through his teeth.
“Then let Aremoria love you back!” Ianta cried. With a great sigh, she put her hand to the back of his neck. “Go talk to Elia. Tell her what you want most, and why. Tell her everything, and see if she is willing to meet you even halfway there.”
Mars’s stomach churned, rather like it did in the moments when his body-man buckled on the king’s armor before a battle. When Mars had already made a choice among too many possibilities, and was prepared to take that first step leading soldiers to their deaths.