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The Elentari do not kneel.

They don’t kneel to their local thanets or to the thanes above them, those high-born women whose homes are the island’s great stone fortresses, the women to whom the people bear unswerving allegiance and in whose names they fight. They don’t kneel to their high thane, their leader, ruler of the vast isle that is Elentar, though she’s held in the greatest esteem by all in the land. The fact that they don’t kneel is not a slight on their leaders - their leaders understand. It’s a matter of honour, and honour is prized.

The fact is, the Elentari do not kneel. Some have tried to make them, and they’ve failed.

And so it is in turn that Ettan, the high thane of Elentar at present, does not kneel. Three hundred years ago, the high thane of the age didn’t kneel when the king of Stellan came calling with his armies, even when she signed her name to the treaty that made Elentar the final annexe to his lands. The king knew better than to ask her to kneel; had he, every last woman, man and child on their island would have gone to war and, many long and bloody years after that day, they might have won. The Stellani numbers were greater but the Elentari are warriors first and foremost; all their many trades and skills come later. The treaty saved lives on both sides. The Elentari respect that even now.

Today, Elentar is the largest of the Starshot Isles after Stellan itself. And in spite of the war, the Elentari people are the crown’s most loyal subjects, if still the most distinct from all the others. Loyalty, duty and honour have a strength of meaning there that’s equalled on no other isle. They’ll fight and they’ll die for that if they have to, but they’ll never kneel.

The Queen of Stellan is coming to Elentar; Errian, Thane of Elenkor, can see the ships in her glass from the highest tower at Korsend, in the sunlight on the waves just past dawn. They’ll make land in six hours or maybe less, she thinks, judging by their spread of sail and the current fair winds, though Errian knows she’s never been praised for her skill at sea; her skills are in another direction entirely. They’ll drop anchor in the bustling harbour and make their way up the winding road to the castle where Errian and her people will receive the queen and her sprawling, regal retinue. She’ll feast them in her hall and offer the nobles a bed for the night before they continue on their journey in the morning. Their sailors and servants and soldiers will fill her town’s inns, she thinks. A royal visit is good for business. Errian wishes it were as good for her.

She knows the queen’s true destination is the high thane’s castle at Moonfall. The high black towers have stood there for a thousand years or more at the clifftop over the jagged rocks and roiling seas of the bay where their old god died, the keep set above labyrinthine passages cut down deep into the rock. The four daughters of the previous thane all played as children there, in the dark, though only three returned and after a week’s search, they gave the lost girl up for dead. Errian won’t be going there; she sees her sister - Ettan, the high thane - often enough, with her numerous children with their numerous fathers though none of them are from Kor. And she prefers her castle with its warm grey stones to the shining black granite and the ghosts of the Moonfall Keep.

But, as she leaves the tower top and takes the long, winding stair down into her own keep there at Korsend, her home these last fifteen years, she can’t deny she’s been looking forward to this visit just as much as she dreads it. The last time she saw Queen Kerra was years ago now, at the foot of the Starspire, the tower where years before the princess had been crowned and turned queen. She won’t say she’s missed her. She won’t say she’s not. But she remembers a time when the full length of the Starshot Strait didn’t lie between them. She remembers the day they met.

These days, she remembers it fondly and wishes she didn’t.

---

The first time they met wasn’t at the ten-year tournament, though Errian supposes that’s the answer they would both give if pressed.

Errian made the journey to Stellan with her mother and her two elder sisters, just like she had ten years before that, just like she had for the previous ten-year tournament. They sailed nine days out of the great port at Elreth and followed the curving shipping route up the long Stellani coast to Starsholme; the direct crossing from Korsend to Starspoint would have taken less than two days, all told, but the unpredictable currents and jagged rocks that lie between the near point of Elentar and the capital of Stellan mean none but smugglers and fools, and just sometimes the Ragnar, ever try it.

She recalls how seasick her sister Shenan was from the very first moment they set foot on board the ship; Errian had never been much of a sailor herself, truth be told, but she’d travelled enough by her twenty-fifth year to have her sea legs back under her after the first few hours, at least. She recalls how Ettan, the eldest sister, strode about the deck with a smile and her long red hair blazing around her pale shoulders like their mother’s did and recalls how she’d always envied her the easy grace she had, still has, even at sea, even in the freshening salty wind.

At near six and a half feet tall, Errian has never had grace. What she has is her Ragnar father’s height and strength and thick blonde hair that falls down to her waist. What she has is a solid sword arm, thick muscles and the envied ability to pick off a man with an arrow or a crossbow bolt through a wood in the twilight at a good fifty paces. Elentari girls go with their father at the age of ten and stay with them at least seven years; Ettan’s father is the administrator of all the high thane’s lands, Shenan’s is a healer from Kor, and Errian’s is the warrior son of a Ragnar chieftain. Tradition says the high thane should conceive each child of a different father and her mother always said when Errian asked that the third son of a chieftain seemed like the obvious choice for a third daughter of a thane. She was meant to take command of the army one day, but now she’s the thane of Elenkor.

The ride back down south from the mouth of the Kingswater, turning back on themselves in a frustrating manner to reach the capital after their too-safe crossing lasted an infuriating nineteen days, hobbled by the crawling speed of their awkward wagons. She remembered then how much more bearable it had been the first time she’d visited Stellan, making the long ride down from Starsholme to Starspoint with her jovial father by her side and not her sister Shenan with her ice-white hair and dour expression. Shenan hated horses almost as much as she hated ships and they all knew she wished she’d been permitted to stay in far-off Kor with her father’s courtly family. He was the second son of a king and apparently the Korran court was quite the thing to behold. Even the sharp manners of the Elentari court at Moonfall left Errian with a bitter taste in her mouth, though she sometimes thought that was perhaps just her dislike of the castle itself. Sometimes she still dreams of the labyrinth and wakes with a pounding heart.

“For El’s sake, cheer up,” Errian told her as they came at last to the city gates, but Shenan barely noticed her at all. Her eyes were on the Starspire, the high white tower where the king of Stellan lived. Errian thought perhaps it reminded her of Kor, or she was looking forward to the tournament that would start in the morning, for all their haste to arrive there a little early. After all, Shenan wouldn’t be competing - few Elentari did - but she she’d always loved to watch a fight.

The first time she met Kerra wasn’t at the tournament; it was the night before.

Errian didn’t go with her family to the castle and to the official reception of the Elentari delegation by the king; she was low enough down the lists to get away with her non-attendance, more or less, particularly as the Stellani and all the other nobles from across the Starshot Isles have never been much taken with the Elentari. Women there are the heads of the high houses, few ever wear gowns, all learn to fight from the youngest age; women are tall and strong on Elentar and work with the men instead of for them. They pray to no gods and never marry, choose if and when they wish to bear children, take the milk of the moon to stave off their monthly bleed and prevent pregnancy if they should feel they want to - the milkmaids of Mirran do quite the roaring trade.

The innkeeper stared quite openly as she walked in with her people once the wagons were installed and the tents pitched among the many, many others there by the tournament field. Even for an Elentari, Errian is quite notably tall, and though her travel clothes were worn she knew they knew she was an Elentari noble. They knew her by name. She had a reputation, even on Stellan.

“Lady Errian,” the innkeeper said, and behind her two of her soldiers burst into a raucous laugh.

“She’s no lady, mate,” another soldier said, slapping his hands down on the bar with a smile. “We don’t have ladies where we’re from.”

“Bloody right you don’t,” called a half-drunk Stellani man at a nearby table. “You’ve got bitches what need training, mate, that’s sure.”

Errian sighed as her people bristled about her; she knew the signs. “For the love of El,” she muttered and she shook her head, her long blonde braid shifting against her cloak that was muddied at the hem from the long ride. Elentari women didn’t ride in carriages, after all. Then she turned and she pushed back her cloak from her shoulder, rested her hand at the hilt of her long, sharp sword.

“You want to train me, do you?” she said, fixing the fellow in question with her level, leader’s gaze, with the steel-grey eyes she had from her mother and her father’s amused disdain. She’d seen plenty of barroom brawls by that point in her life, by her twenty-fifth year, been involved in more than one, more than two, probably more than she could count on the fingers of both hands. The Ragnars liked to drink and liked to fight, after all, and she and her father had always waded in, in the end, when the situation called for it. But what he’d tried to teach her was to end it before it began if ever she could. “How do you plan to do that?”

“I could take you upstairs and show you,” the man said and he stood, and that was the moment he realised the magnitude of his mistake. He stood perhaps six feet and there on Stellan that made him tall for a man, but Errian stepped closer and she drew herself up. She towered over him, her shoulders broader than his, her hands bigger. He blanched drunkenly.

“I think perhaps I misunderstood your meaning, sir” she said. “Do you care to elaborate?”

He didn’t care to. He didn’t care to at all. He sat down hard on the bench and muttered an apology into his ale while his friends all roared with laughter. They bought a round of drinks for the fifteen or so Elentari after that, for their amusement at their friend’s expense.

The good south Stellan ale came with a girl whose smile when she looked at Errian was leagues away from innocent, something baser that sent a shiver of heat straight through her though she laughed with her people and she shook it off. But the girl was undeniably beautiful, pale-skinned and dark-haired like most Stellani from the south but with the bright blue eyes more common in the northlands, tall for Stellan, perhaps five and a half feet, perhaps a full foot shorter than Errian. Her dress was cinched in the middle with a belt that looked strangely out of place on an innkeeper’s barmaid, the leather fine and the buckle maybe silver, and when she leaned across the table, accidentally on purpose, her hair smelled like the fragrant Korran oils Shenan used in her bathwater. She was beguiling. Errian had to tear her eyes and her thoughts away quite deliberately.

The girl - the woman, Errian supposed even at the time, past her twentieth year but not her twenty-fifth though Errian has never mastered the thorny art of matching a person’s face to their age - served them ale in pewter tankards for hours that evening, on well into the night. Some of the other Elentari, soldiers and servants and then their armourer and blacksmith, came in as time went by until the inn’s tables were all pushed together haphazardly about the room and forty Elentari women and men were singing there drunkenly. Errian left enough coin with the innkeeper to cover perhaps twice over the ale and the rather tasty bread and stew that came out and passed around in hardy little bowls for supper and she sat back in a corner, slightly apart, her boots kicked up on the tabletop as she watched her people with a vague sense of amusement. Several of the men were as tall as she was and their heads bumped against the low beams when they stood with a shout; several of them had dragged the few remaining locals in amongst their party and had apparently won them over with the plentiful profusion of wine and ale. Errian herself was more used to strong Ragnar mead then than either wine or ale but her father had always taught her not to drink to excess anyway. She’d often found it to be good advice.

The night wore on and the Elentari began to disperse, filtering out into the cobbled streets in twos and threes and fours to head back to the campsite and their bedrolls under low-slung canopies, around their low-smouldering fires. Errian watched them go, bid them goodnight when they spoke, told them she hoped they’d had sense enough to recall they had work to do in the morning and several reddened face and sheepish smiles told her their enthusiasm might have run a little too wild. She couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for their neighbours on the campsite, considering the rowdy, drunken song, but then the girl was there again, leaning in close to refresh Errian’s drink, her hands too smooth to be used to the work, and all thoughts of their neighbours were pushed far from her mind.

Errian caught the girl’s wrist and the ale spilled a little on the worn wooden tabletop. Neither of them seemed to care.

“Who are you?” Errian asked.

The girl smiled that same intriguing smile. “Does that matter?” she asked, her blue eyes fairly dancing.

“What’s your name?”

She leaned in closer then, her cheek brushing Errian’s till her lips were by her ear, her long hair hanging against Errian’s chest. She was so very beautiful, curving hips and a slim waist, delicate wrists, the structure of bone beneath her pretty face as fine as any artistry Errian had seen in all her travels.

“I’d say my name matters even less,” the girl murmured, and she brought up her hand, the wrist of which Errian was still clasping, fair and pale and soft. She wriggled her hand free, took Errian’s wrist in her fine fingers, then pressed Errian’s rough palm up against the curve of one ample breast. She did it firmly, purposefully and just out of sight, as the pulse in Errian’s neck throbbed a fraction more quickly. Her breath quickened. Her thumb rubbed a slow circle over roughspun cloth that seemed so out of place. “I have a room upstairs. You’re welcome to follow me.”

The girl left and Errian followed and the following evening, just past dusk when Errian of Elentar stepped off the muddy field of the ten-year tournament both bloodied and aching, when she rose the final victor in single combat, Princess Kerra came down from her seat beside her uncle the king to award the prize in shining gold coins. She was beautiful, pale-skinned and dark-haired but with bright blue eyes that danced and all Errian could think of was a night of candlelit laughter and her own callused hands on perfect, silken skin. All she could think of was the taste of her mouth and the taste of her sex and the arch of her back. She’d undressed her and undressed herself and lain skin on skin like she’d done with the pretty barmaids and the serving girls across the Starward Sea in Ragnar. She’d had the princess of Stellan on a hay-stuffed mattress in a rickety bed above a bawdy inn.

The first time they met wasn’t at the tournament. They just pretended it was.

---

Each and every ten years, the ruler of Stellan and the Starshot Isles holds a tournament in the great open field at Starspoint.

On Stellan, much unlike on Elentar, tournaments are often considered to be entertainment; there’s at least five or six held there in the summer each year and often more, but the tournament at Starspoint is something just a little different. All the nobles throughout the kingdom are expected to attend, and each house must bring a champion. And although there’s jousting and there’s archery, there’s the melee and there’s tests of strength and tugs of war and it’s fun because anyone from the highest noble to a child from the streets can attend - and for the most part anyone can enter - the main event is thought quite serious.

The champions of all the noble houses in the Starshot Isles compete throughout the day in single combat, all seventy-six of them fighting in bouts from which the winner progresses, entering a new bout then another and another until finally only one last champion remains. They start with the daybreak and fight until it’s done. Ten years earlier, Errian had watched the first son of the thane of Rethan, a lieutenant of the high thane’s Elengard, win the prize after a long and hard and bloody day but she hadn’t understood what would happen next because she’d left with her father that evening to start the long journey back to Ragnar. But that evening, so exhausted she could barely lift her limbs to take off her maille, too tired to eat, she learned the winner would accompany the king on his ten-yearly pilgrimage to Temple of the Five. They would go alone, because only the king and his champion would be permitted to enter the valley. Apparently no one had thought to mention this to Errian. When she’s feeling charitable - which isn’t often - she likes to think they all thought she already knew.

“You can’t be serious,” she remembers saying, her temper frayed from her day on the field. Elentari don’t stage their own tournaments. They train every day, every day of their lives, fight fiercely and bravely and their skill is very nearly never rivalled, but none but the ten-year tournament are ever attended. War isn’t a game to them; they train to serve their country, their high thane and the sovereign on Stellan who wears the crown of stars, they’re renowned for it, the reputation as warriors known far and wide, and famed also for the artistry of their weapons. War isn’t a game to them; the Elentari in Errian resented being made to play, though the Ragnar in her had a little less than secretly relished the challenge.

“I realise it sounds incredibly trivial,” her mother replied, from the table in her rather generous palace quarters. She was already writing letters to send home to her administrator in the fine, clear hand she’d learned while apprenticed with her own father, the land’s previous administrator, now retired. “But the Stellani consider the pilgrimage a sacred duty. The king renews his vows before the gods of the five points of Stellan and returns refreshed to rule for ten more years. Go along with it, for El’s sake. It won’t kill you.” She sighed and set down her quill. “You’re sulking like a child, Errian. The king’s a sensible man and you’ll be back home within six months.”

And so she swallowed it because it was her duty and perhaps because she was just too tired to argue but two days later, when she was readying her borrowed horse down in the castle stables, she discovered the king wouldn’t be going after all.

“He says he’s too old,” Kerra said, leaning there against the stable door in a dress that was much too fine for travelling, or would have been for any except the crown princess of Stellan. Errian herself knew how such long journeys could be; she’d packed lightly, wore leather trousers with tunics and a shirt of light maille under her cloak. They’d buy what else they needed along the way. “He says I should make my first pilgrimage so I can be crowned within the year.”

Errian found she didn’t particularly care for the whys or the wherefores, and so she didn’t reply. She mounted her horse. For once in her life, she was sick to death of travel.

They left to some fanfare, people lining the street all smiles and waves as their princess departed to make the long ride to the temple with her rightful sworn protector, winner of the ten-year tournament. Stellan had been named in the old Elentari tongue for the five-pointed star it resembled roughly in form and the Temple of the Five lay at the centre of that star, in a valley hidden between the peaks of the Stellate Mountains, at the foot of the towering Mount Starsheart. There has only ever been one official map, the one that was tucked into a pouch at the familiar belt around Kerra’s waist, and it was just as well she was carrying it because Errian had found over the years she had next to no sense of direction. She knew which way to point her sword and that was all she’d felt she’d ever need.

They barely spoke for the first five days, or rather Errian barely spoke. Kerra seemed perfectly content to speak enough for both of them as they rode on at an easy pace, about her childhood in Starspoint, about trips to stay with her odd cousins in Starsholme, about her parents’ death as they’d sailed one day on the Kingswater. Her mother’s elder brother was the king of Stellan, Kerra’s uncle, and as he had no children of his own he’d adopted her as his heir; she’d have been next in line anyway but the adoption back in her seventeenth year had apparently made it all the clearer. She’d be queen by the time she was twenty-four. She’d marry one of the Holmes of Starsholme, one of her father’s brothers’ children who she didn’t much care for though her uncle told her they were of good old Stellani stock, and there’d be children and feasts and tournaments and by the sixth day, as they exited another small village where Kerra was over-generous with her coin, Errian had thoroughly despaired of surviving the fifty-day ride there, let alone the return journey, without actually gagging her. She took to sharpening her sword or her knives to let the melody of the stone against the blade drown out a little of the chaos.

“You realise you won’t be able to go around sleeping with strange women in strange taverns when you’re the queen of Stellan, don’t you?” Errian said, almost snapped, interrupting one of Kerra’s more indecorous stories sometime just past dusk on the seventh day. They’d stopped to make camp for the night, made cups of steaming tea over the fire at Kerra’s insistence as they’d found themselves quite far from the nearest obliging village and apparently the pilgrimage demanded they spend at least half of their nights sleeping in the open air anyway, gazing at the stars, the brightest of which the five Gods of Stellan were named for.

The rules of the pilgrimage seemed utterly arbitrary to Errian, all the dos and don’ts of the waste of time that was occupying long days that Errian could have spent returning home with her people, to her station as commander of her mother’s guard, to her room in the Moonfall Keep with her scrolls and her books all full of the old tales she’d collected on her travels. Those rules seemed completely arbitrary to Kerra, too, who had wasted no time in explaining that the Five were very little more than an old Stellani superstition, but she’d gone on to tell their tales in detail anyway. Errian hadn’t bothered to tell her she’d already heard them. She hadn’t much felt like admitting that they shared an interest.

“She speaks at last!” Kerra said, flopping down dramatically onto her bedroll by the fire that Errian had started. She was entirely the strangest noble that Errian had ever encountered in her life and she’d spent a surprising amount of time around them, across Ragnar and through Elentar, in Kor and Keth and Herran and the old kingdom of Vithrani where some lived long past their two hundredth year. Perhaps she’d been indulged too often as a child or perhaps it was her last hurrah before she put on a crown and left all this behind. “Did I do something to offend you or are you always this bull-headed?”

“You lied to me, princess,” Errian replied, quite simply, as she unbuckled her sword from her waist and settled herself down with her back to the broad trunk of a tree.

Kerra chuckled as she turned onto her front in a rustle of her ungainly and slightly dusty skirts, propping her head up with her chin in her hands as she looked at her. “I like to think it was the good kind of lying,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“I’m not sure such a thing exists,” Errian said, and closed her eyes against the warm glow of the fire.

“Are you trying to tell me there’s no lying on Elentar?”

“Not so much as there seems to be here, princess.”

“Call me Kerra.”

“Is that an order?”

“Does it need to be?”

“Yes, princess, it does.”

Kerra didn’t answer. Errian went to sleep with one eye open, dozed the way she’d been taught to by her father just in case. On the long journeys with the Ragnar, with her father and her uncles and her cousins and half-brothers, her grandfather once or twice, they’d taken watches in the night because there were dangers there, not just men of the wild clans who liked to raid livestock from Ragnar lands but bears and wolves and maybe other things, too, if the tales could be believed at all. In Keth and Herran there were jackals and wild dogs. They’d met lions in Vithrani. But nothing came for them in the night, that night.

Three men tried to rob them the following day. Errian, tired from her watch and unimpressed, took them down with three short blows of her sword and left them in the grass. She understood why the princess had required a protector; for all that the people loved her, it seemed Stellan was full of thieves and curs and bandits, and Kerra had more coin in her purse than the journey could possibly warrant.

Six men tried to rob them three days after that. They weren’t terribly adept but fighting six at once was more of a challenge, especially saddle-sore from the unfamiliar horse and weary from the nights’ semi-sleep; she bloodied her knuckles on one man’s teeth while Kerra watched her do it, clutching a small dagger in her hands. When two were dead, the others fled.

“Do you know how to use that, princess?” Errian asked as she stooped to wipe her sword with a dead man’s cloak. The ends of her long braid brushed against the bloody blade and she sighed, wiping them off too as best she could. She knew the smell and the taste and the texture of blood all too well even then at twenty-five. She didn’t need it clinging to her.

Kerra tucked the dagger away inside her cloak. “I’ve never needed to,” she said. “The threat of it was always enough in the inns.”

“I think you might need to now.” She didn’t offer to teach her; she just left it at that and they rode on again.

Four days later, another two men crossed their path. These were better, practiced and skilled and Errian’s bloodied knuckles were infected by then, weakening her grip unpleasantly. She ran one through with the length of her sword and pulled a knife from her knee boot to shove through the other’s neck. She set her jaw and turned to Kerra as she sheathed her sword. She was clutching her dagger again, her knuckles white but her face hard and in that instant Errian could see the queen she’d be.

“They’re not thieves,” Kerra said.

“No, they’re not,” Errian replied.

She rifled their pockets and pouches and packs for food and for evidence; she found plenty of the former and none of the latter but the suspicion was still there, so strong it was akin to certainty.

They were being hunted. They had a price on their heads much larger still than Princess Kerra’s weighty purse.

---

Leaving the Starspoint Road and taking to the countryside had hardly been up at the top of Errian’s to do list. The road had been worn, overgrown or derelict in places, but it had first and foremost been a road; now what they had was a map so old the paper was crumbling at the edges and the vague gestures onwards from shepherds and farmers in fields.

She’d rather have stayed at Moonfall with the Elengard - the city guard, the high thane’s guard - that she’d commanded for the past two years. She’d rather have stayed in Ragnar before that, or at least stayed with her father and his men, mercenaries and ale-swilling louts that they were no matter which land they’d strayed to. But her apprenticeship had ended and though she’d been allowed three more years when she’d asked for the first time, when her father’s ship had sailed into Moonfall Bay and she’d requested still more time away, her mother had reluctantly rejected her request. Errian was Elentari first and foremost, the high thane had said that day, and she supposed she understood and still understands. Besides, she’d always dreamed of going back one day, once she’d made her name. She’d hoped her mother would give her castle that had stood empty for so long at the farmost point of the Elenkor, the great moonwood. She’d hoped to be thane of Elenkor since childhood.

She’d even have rather stayed at Starspoint, though the Stellani welcome to the Elentari delegation hadn’t in general been particularly warm, nor their applause for the Elentari champion’s win in single combat. She’s never had her second sister’s enthusiasm for court, for gowns and fine jewellery and love like they sing about in Kor and Vithrani and Stellan, knights riding off to war for their swooning beloved. Errian wears just a simple silver torc around her neck to this day and she’s always preferred the Ragnar epics to the Korran songs, the old heroes and monsters in the snow; she’s always thought she’s more like Rentha, the giantess who slew the dragons of the north in Ragnar’s elder days, than the lady Sorra whose tears of mourning brought her lover back from death. Even the Elentari tales of war aren’t much in comparison with the stories from Ragnar, Errian still thinks, all except perhaps for the Fall of El.

They’d spent thirty-five days on the road by the time they were forced to err from it, no longer stopping at inns or sleeping outside villages along the way as they had, buying food when and where they could. The countryside had changed from the scrubby, rocky ground that surrounded the capital at Starspoint to marshes by the great Stellan lake to lush green hills and fields of wheat as the land opened out, but now the rocks were returning in their path as the mountains began to rise up ahead. Errian had lobbied for turning back or veering east to Starsholme and Kerra’s cousins’ keep, but Kerra was stubbornly convinced that the priests at the temple would know what to do and exactly what was happening, at least more than they or the villagers they passed did. And so they’d gone on, bone-weary, thirty-seven days, thirty-nine, their horses tired and supplies dwindling now they were off the beaten path, colder the higher the land climbed because they couldn’t risk a fire. Kerra said the Stellan heartlands were cold, even in summer. No one had thought to remind the princess she’d need gloves to match her pretty scarf and cloak. Errian’s worn leather gloves were too big for Kerra’s hands but she lent them to her anyway, without a word. She thought perhaps it repaid the debt she felt still lingered from a night by a fire before they’d quenched them for good, when Kerra cleaned and bound her scraped knuckles, her fingertips lingering at her wrist in the firelight, though that seemed so long ago by then.

“I’m hungry,” Kerra said one night, nearly petulant about it as she pulled her cloak tighter around herself. Errian suspected the princess had never been truly hungry in her life; Errian had been herself, once, when her father’s ship had been blown off course by a storm. Three weeks of salt pork in ever lower quantities till there was none to be had and they’d started eyeing their skinny horses had taught her exactly what hunger was and frankly, she was just glad they had a plentiful of water on their journey to the temple. Those three weeks on board the Pride of Karn had been thirsty ones. That would have killed them long before the hunger.

“I’m really hungry,” Kerra said, hugging herself around the middle.

“So am I,” Errian replied. “Do you think my being larger means I need to eat less?”

“Can’t you kill something?”

“I’m not a hunter, princess,” Errian said, sliding her hands under her arms with a shiver. The air was definitely getting colder day by day. “I’m a soldier.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Ask the rabbits which they’d prefer to meet.”

They went on into the hills, conversation dying out past forty-five days, stopping by streams to refill their canteens, making the dregs of their supplies last as long as they were able as they picked their way up into the mountains, followed what they hoped were the paths marked there on Kerra’s map. They dismounted and led the horses by the reins after a while, as the paths grew steeper and narrower; they stopped to tie their scarves over the animals’ eyes when they started to turn skittish. She’d seen a man dragged to his death once by his horse from a path just like this one, on the hard road up to the high capital of Keth, and Errian would not leave the world that way. They’d found his broken body when they’d made their way back down, picked down to the bone by the birds in places. She wouldn’t be a feast for hawks and cats and bears.

Three men set about them up there in the hills, on a winding path above a high, sheer cliff and Errian heaved one of them over the edge with a roar that echoed loudly, watched the others as they listened to their companion scream, and then stop screaming, before they attacked her as a pair. The hilt of her sword struck one in the face and he stumbled, gushing blood from a broken nose, slipping on the coarse gravel underfoot; it wasn’t until she’d dispatched the last with the point of her sword that she realised she couldn’t see Kerra. She wasn’t there. Errian’s stomach fell.

“Princess!” she called. “Kerra, where are you?”

“Here!” Her hands were barely visible at the edge of the cliff, fingertips clinging to jagged rocks. “For the Five’s sake, Errian, get me up!”

She did just that, dropping her sword on the path with a clang, skidding down to her knees on the gravel to take her by her wrists and she hauled her up and back and over, wrenching her shoulders though in that instant, in the dread of it that pumped hard through her, it was just like Kerra weighed nothing at all. They went down on the path in a heap, breathing hard, and Kerra shook as she rolled away, bent over on her knees in her torn dress with hands bloodied by the stones. Errian went down heavy on her back, rubbing the dust from her eyes with the heels of her hands.

“I remember the first time I almost died,” Errian said, suddenly, surprising herself as much as it seemed she surprised Kerra. “It was my twelfth year. I almost drowned when I went through the ice on the lake outside my father’s town.”

Kerra looked at her, pale and dishevelled and still shaking from the shock. “But you didn’t drown.”

Errian sat as she smiled a wry smile and then she stood, dusted herself down with her hands, knocked off the stray gravel; she held out her hand to Kerra and she took it, let herself be helped up to her feet. Errian’s hands went up to Kerra’s jaw then, cupping her face as she looked down at her, a clear foot of height separating the two of them though it seemed the princess was tall for a Stellani woman. She caught Kerra’s gaze and held it, feeling her still shaking as they stood there.

“No, princess, I didn’t drown,” she said. “And you didn’t fall.”

Kerra smiled. She knew she’d been saved.

---

The priests at the Temple of the Five seemed genuinely surprised to see the two of them when they came into the valley on the fifty-second day since their departure from Starspoint.

One of the brothers in his long black robe took them to the temple gates, practically jogging through the small field full of growing vegetables there in the valley that seemed surprisingly temperate for its high altitude and down the trodden-down dirt path, though the princess and her knight - what passed for a knight on Elentar, at least - were far too tired to keep the pace. Even their tired horses would have struggled, such was his excitement. And frankly, Errian was somewhat surprised that they recognised their princess with her dusty, muddied clothes and the bandages Errian had tied around her injured hands, though the bandages at least were hidden under the too-big gloves that Errian had lent her.

“The Five welcome you, your grace,” said the high priest, an aging man with long grey hair he wore pulled back severely and pinned in an odd-looking coil at the back of his neck. He glanced at Errian, and she had to admit he at least did so somewhat apologetically. “I’m afraid your companion will have to remain outside.”

Kerra tried to protest but Errian shrugged it off; this was hardly the first time she’d been denied entry and frankly, she couldn’t have cared less about seeing the Temple of the Five. She’d seen so many temples in so many lands that they’d ceased to hold any particular interest for her, all except for the abandoned place she’d once come across deep inside the bounds of the Elenkor, lost in the woods as a child before she’d left her home for Ragnar. The Elentari had burned all the temples to El in the old days, her mother had told her, her teachers had told her, but there it was and there it had been, some of the stones pushed through by tree roots, its roof long rotted away to nothing. But the structure was there, various paving stones missing from the floor in great gaping black holes, but she’d managed to pick her way across to the spiral stair and go down and down and down into the dark. It reminded her of the labyrinth beneath her mother’s castle and she struck a fire with her flint, put together a torch as best she could and saw the altar, the polished black granite of it still smooth after all that time. There were still bones spread across it. There were still stone jars where other things would have been kept, blood, preserved flesh, though they must have rotted to dust long ago. It was just like the labyrinth, the day her younger sister died, that day that back then she still couldn’t recall in any detail.

The brothers brought her food while she waited and she ate with them in a small stone room by the temple doors. They seemed pleasant enough even if they did seem to stare; of course, not only was she a good eight inches taller than the majority but the valley was apparently a strange little commune composed entirely of men. She wondered vaguely when they’d last seen a woman. She wondered if they’d find it rude if she sharpened her sword at their table.

“The high priest said they didn’t let the last Elentari who came here inside, either,” Kerra told her once she’d returned and settled herself down, with a bowl of something hot and full of vegetables that had no doubt been grown outside the stone room in the valley. “I’m not entirely sure what the problem is.”

Errian sighed as she flattened her palms to the tabletop; she knew precisely what the problem was. “The Elentari killed our god, princess,” she said. “You can see why they priests are hesitant about us being around yours.”

But Kerra didn’t seem to be interested in her food or any further conversation and Errian watched her, a spoon in her hand, suddenly vastly less hungry herself. Kerra glanced at her then looked away. Kerra set her jaw then sighed and then set her jaw again. Then she dropped her own spoon into her stew with a splash and sat back hard in her chair, so abruptly that she came near to tipping herself onto the dusty floor.

“My uncle’s dead,” she said, bluntly. “And your mother. They can’t tell us how. They’re not even sure when. But they think they know who did it and I don’t think I disagree.”

Errian remembers that moment clearly, sitting there in the Valley of the Five at that table with Kerra, how she turned cold and then hot and then angry where perhaps there should have been grief and she could see so clearly the difference between herself and the princess who would be queen. Kerra was quiet then but it wasn’t grief and it wasn’t close to the anger that Errian felt; she was puzzling it all out as they sat there, making sense of her uncle’s murder because that was what it was, the high priest said: it was murder. And Kerra’s cousin Berryn Holme had claimed the throne because, he’d said, the princess Kerra had died on her pilgrimage, robbed and killed at the side of the Starspoint Road with her Elentari ‘protector.’

“Have there been any changes in your mother’s behaviour?” Kerra asked, abruptly, breaking Errian from her thoughts. “Or in your sisters’?”

Errian’s anger flared again at the insinuation but she knew then exactly what had happened. It was clear as day, clear as the mountain air, stark as her second sister’s ice-white hair in torchlight in the labyrinth.

“My mother’s been unwell,” she said. “My sister’s been caring for her. Her father’s a Korrani healer.” She shook her head, rubbed one hand over her eyes and then her mouth. “You know about the Korrani?”

Kerra nodded. “I know,” she said. “I know we call them healers, but that’s just because we don’t know what else to call them.”

“My second sister apprenticed in Kor.” Errian felt sick. “She spent fifteen years there.”

“So it was poison.”

“It had to be poison.”

“And so she’s let my cousin from Starsholme take the throne with her. I should have known the greedy brat wouldn’t let himself be called king consort.”

Perhaps it had never been the courtly romance that Shenan had loved, Errian thinks, as she thought then. Perhaps it was always the power that enthralled her.

Perhaps, Errian thinks, as she thought then, the king and the high thane were just the latest in a line of sacrifices Shenan had made to the great god El.

Four sisters went down into the labyrinth in Errian’s fifth year. Three returned. No one ever asked why there was blood beneath Shenan’s fingernails.

---

They knew what to do. It was a poor plan, but they knew what to do. They had to do it.

“I wouldn’t advise it, your grace,” said the high priest, but Kerra wasn’t asking for advice. And so the priests packed food in leather skins, refilled their canteens and they took three canoes down into the deep dark caves at the foot of Mount Starsheart. The Kingswater had its source in the peaks and flowed down through the caves beneath the Temple of the Five, the life-blood of the gods of the five points of Stellan. And, in times of emergency, the very greatest emergency, that was the route that the priests would take out of the valley and into the world beyond.

The water was freezing and fast and treacherous. The priests told tales of the spirits of the fallen who slept beneath its surface, who’d wake when boats passed and snatch men down into the dark. They were the godless people who’d died in the attempt to take those lands from the Five, they said, Korrani and Vithrani and Elentari, and Errian didn’t tell them the Vithrani worshipped three gods and the Korrani a sprawling thirty-seven, the thirty-seven gods of life and death and joy and pain. Four priests volunteered to go with them, said they’d be protected by their faith and Errian didn’t say she doubted it so she couldn’t say I told you so when Kerra’s canoe went under as they emerged from the caves and swept over the fall. Errian grabbed her wrist and pulled her out, her heart pounding hard and sick and scared, but the priest with her was lost.

The water was treacherous and freezing and fast; they landed each night, one hard day after another, their muscles aching; they ate and slept in watches though ten days saw them down toward the mouth of the Kingswater there at the new king Berryn’s old home at Starsholme. They pulled up their hoods and bade farewell to the priests who turned to the small temple on the hill outside the town for their lodgings, and they two went down to the dock and asked for the captain at the very first Ragnar ship they found at anchor. It was the Pride of Korrell, and Errian very nearly held her breath as the crewmen bade them wait.

“Cousin,” she said, when they entered the captain’s cabin some minutes later. She threw back her hood and watched the captain’s eyes widen and brighten.

“Cousin!” said Ferrick, her father’s brother’s son; the family resemblance was still as striking then as it ever was, blonde hair and broad shoulders, ruddy complexion and strong arms though she still had a couple of inches on him in height. “We heard you’d died.” He strode to her, clasped her by the arms and she let him, did the same in return. “Needless to say, I’m glad you’re not.” He jutted his chin in Kerra’s direction. “Is that…?”

“The princess?” She patted Ferrick’s blonde-bearded cheek in a familiar gesture and nodded to Kerra. “Yes, cousin, it is.”

“Her cousin’s taken the gods-damned throne, you know.”

Kerra pushed back her own hood and took a step closer on the creaking ship’s boards. “We know,” she said. “I’d like to take it back.”

Ferrick laughed. “You’ll be wanting an army for that,” he said, and a smile spread across his face. “I think we can help with that.” Errian had hoped he could. Perhaps chance had smiled on them, if not on the king and or on Errian’s mother.

Kerra wasn’t well-suited to life at sea, it seemed. She was just like Shenan in that way, seasick from the moment they weighed anchor at Starsholme, pale and shivering though Errian draped her cloak around her shoulders in the captain’s cabin that he’d been more than happy to cede to the two of them. Errian recalls she never actually slept in there with her but did go in to share meals, to make her eat the bland ship’s biscuit and salt pork that sadly Kerra’s seasick constitution couldn’t bear. She was better off in bed and so Errian left her there through most of their journey, told her old Stellani tales to make her smile and drift to sleep then stood outside the cabin door or she sat there sharpening her sword, slept there with her back to the cabin’s rough facing because she knew what rapscallions the men of the Ragnar crews could be. The princess wasn’t in danger, at least, because they knew to throw out the few bad apples, but being ogled strange men while throwing up salt pork in a bucket was perhaps an indignity she didn’t truly need to suffer.

The crossing to Ragnar was quick, one of the quickest Errian had known, barely a fortnight with excellent winds but every day counted, every turn of the glass, every chime of the bell. She knew she could have just sailed home to Elentar but she also knew that her sister Ettan would have been confirmed high thane by then and as such sworn to the Stellani crown; as legitimate as Kerra’s claim was, Ettan would have had to swear fealty to Berryn Holme. And so they made landfall at Karnask and went inland up the river at high tide, spent seven more hours on board and then moored at the dock at Karn.

“Are we there?” Kerra asked, not for the first time, as Errian opened up the cabin door.

“We are,” she said. And she’d never seen a person look so grateful for good news in her life; she’s never seen any better since.

Karnhall stands up on the top of the cliff before the wood and before the lake where Errian once almost lost her life, the long wooden hall with its stone pillars and worn, paved floors often scattered with hay that felt so familiar underfoot. Her grandmother greeted them warmly with smiles and gently heated mead and while her cousins’ children played among the pillars, they waited there. Her cousin Ferrick came in with his wife Petta at his side and Kerra ate tentatively at the long wooden table. Then the old chieftain, Errian’s grandfather Kellan, came in with a grin and a bellow of greeting with her huge bear of a father at his side.

“Your cousin tells us you’re here looking for an army,” her father said, his voice a low and familiar rumble, his hand on the hilt of his massive sword. He must have been fifty years old at least by then but he was still the strongest man that Errian had ever known as well as the tallest, up over seven feet, bearded and long-haired like the rest of the men in the family. He held out his hand and she took it; he pulled her up into a tight hug, warm and familiar and smelling faintly of mead and meat and fire - he liked to work with metal in the forge on occasion, had the hands and the muscle for it, dwarfing her entirely. “He says your friend’s the Stellani princess.”

Errian took a step back so he could see it when she nodded and then Kerra stood, gingerly since it would be some days yet till she’d look any less gaunt from their trip, but she held out her hand to the giant of a man who stood near two feet taller than she did.

“Kerra of Stellan,” she said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Her hand disappeared in his and he shook it, looking terribly amused. “Karn, son of Kellan,” he told her. “I’ve an idea I’ll regret making yours.”

But Kellan, son of Kerran, chieftain of Karn, sent out the word. Two weeks, he said, and they’d have the seven Ragnar clans together. Two weeks and they’d sail for Starspoint and take the crown for Queen Kerra at the point of a sharp Ragnar sword.

“There’ll be a price to pay,” Errian told her, that night, at her father’s table in the hall. She murmured it lowly, beneath the music and the singing and the laughter that was the way there in Karn, so no one else would hear.

“And I’ll pay it,” Kerra replied.

From the look in Kerra’s eyes, Errian didn’t doubt that she would.

---

It felt good to be home, she remembers that. She goes into her library in the keep at Korsend and she settles at the table by the window. The warm light through it reminds her of summer dawns in Karn, the shiver as she’d leave her bed and her feet would touch the stones of the floor, cold even through the thick woollen socks that her grandmother liked to knit for the entire, extensive family while she sat in her seat at the chieftain’s side and heard petitions from their people there with him. Even summer mornings began with a chill in Karn, though the days warmed and blossomed into heat by noon, and winters were white with drifts of snow, the air bitter and biting with it. There’s barely ever snow in Elentar except for there at Korsend. She wonders if that’s why she wanted it for her home.

She remembers those two weeks before the Ragnar fleet sailed. Sitting back in her chair in the Korsend Keep she remembers waking that next morning in her bed in her room that was just as she’d left it years before. She remembers dressing quickly and going into the hall at breakfast, eating with her cousins like she hadn’t been away, speaking to her father who turned to her and said your mother was a good woman and I’m sorry she’s gone and Errian realised the grief she’d expected would come never had. She’d barely known her mother, never had cause to resent her but never loved her as more than an abstract, either. She still felt more anger that she’d been murdered than she did real sadness that she was gone, though in a way she wished she could have felt sad. But the fact was she’d spent so long away from Moonfall that in the end they’d been little more than strangers; all Errian had now was the daughterly duty to avenge her death.

She remembers washing her face and hands in a bowl there at the breakfast table though it was far from enough to make her feel clean. And so after that she went down to the baths, through the narrow, winding corridors that began at the back of the hall and led down into the caves where steam rose up from the hot springs beneath. She took off her clothes and sank into the warm water of the stone bath set down into the ground, the lip of it flush to the paved floor. She untied her long braid and brushed it out with a comb as she sat there, soaking.

“Errian.”

She didn’t turn because she’d heard the footsteps and she knew them well. “You followed me, princess,” she said.

Kerra didn’t answer. She just stepped into the water there in the big open bath and she settled down. Errian lent her her comb and watched her brush out her long dark hair, threw her a sponge and after a few more minutes they left the cleaning bath for the clearer, purer water; Errian stole a look as they went, at the pale skin turned pink with the heat, her slim waist, full breasts to which her long dark hair was clinging, the dark hair lower down that marked her sex. Kerra looked at her with a smile as they waded into the water and for a moment she was back in that inn back in the city at Starspoint, Errian’s hand between Kerra’s thighs, Kerra’s bottom lip caught between her own white teeth. Errian chuckled wryly at herself and she closed her eyes. The memory of it hadn’t left her just because Kerra had turned out to be a princess. She didn’t desire her any the less for that; she just felt less inclined to act on it.

She remembers what happened next, once they’d dried off and dressed and Kerra brought out the dagger from her cloak as they wound their way up into the daylight.

“Teach me to use this,” she said. And Errian recalls her own frown scepticism but she did it anyway, perhaps because of the look on Kerra’s face as she said it, perhaps because she thought it might make a welcome diversion. They went out into the yard beside her grandfather’s hall and Errian drew her knife from her boot and she started to teach her, taught her how to grip the hilt, told her she’d have to be quick, told her the best way to attack would be from behind, light-footed unnoticed. She taught her the places to put the point and press it in, which would kill quickest, which would hurt most. Then she strode in quickly and caught Kerra unprepared, took a handful of her hair to pull back her head and held her own knife right up against her throat.

“Don’t ever let your guard down, princess,” she said, tilting the blade, scraping the well-sharpened steel against her skin as Kerra’s eyes widened but to her great credit she didn’t flinch at all. “Don’t let them cut you. At best, you’d be dead before you even saw it coming.”

Kerra nodded and Errian released her. She’d learned one lesson at least.

She remembers the next day, the next morning, when Kerra came to her in an ill-fitting pair of Ragnar trousers with her long hair braided down her back and she showed her the sword that Ferrick’s wife had given her. Once she’d rubbed at her eyes in consternation she’d taken her outside and found her twelve-year-old cousin Erran, a tall blonde girl in an ill-fitting dress who scampered away happily to find her own sword as Kerra raised her brows at this turn of events.

“You think it’s only the Elentari who teach women to fight?” Errian asked, with a quirk of her brow of her own, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “Where do you think I learned this, princess?”

They trained for an hour or more, for a turn of the glass on the blacksmith’s windowsill, Errian stepping in to correct Kerra’s stance with a hand at her hip or a nudge of the toe of her boot at Kerra’s heel. She pressed up behind her to correct her grip on the sword, to correct her angles, maybe little more than an excuse to feel the warmth of her in the crisp morning air, and then they broke for lunch. Kerra looked at her across the table in the hall and all Errian could do was look away. Out of danger, in the one place she’d ever truly felt at home, the lies Kerra had told her seemed to matter so much less. The way Kerra’s gaze made her chest pull tight, the way the swell of her breast or the curve of her hip made her cheeks flush, those things seemed so much more important.

She remembers three days passed that way and then four; Errian borrowed her cousin each time, in the morning then the afternoon until Ferrick’s wife, her cousin’s mother, came over and took a turn. And while Kerra was getting better, she’d never had a chance to be good in four days and so Petta disarmed her in seconds. Kerra cursed in a way most unlike a princess that made Petta and her children laugh. Errian found herself smiling.

It rained the following day and perhaps Kerra expected that to halt their training. It did not.

“No Ragnar ever let a drop of rain stop their sword,” Petta said, clapping Errian on the back as they made their way outdoors with Erran, the girl who’d persuaded her mother to let her pull on trousers and a tunic against the weather. Three hours later, muddied and wet and cold but laughing with it anyway, they trudged back inside, conceding defeat for the day against the cold, beating rain. Kerra was stronger by then from her lacklustre sea journey, already stronger still from her training, but Errian took her down into the baths to wash and warm anyway, just in case; it would hardly have been fitting for Queen Kerra to expire from pneumonia before she ever took the throne, after all.

She remembers how Kerra’s eyes moved over her in the torchlit baths once they were alone down here, how the heat spread in her as Kerra set her muddy clothes aside and stood naked by the edge of the bath as she brushed out her hair. Kerra didn’t look away, a kind of challenge that Errian found to her surprise she accepted as she sponged her neck and watched her, Kerra’s long dark hair brought forward over one shoulder. Kerra put down the brush and she stepped into the water.

Washing was done quickly and they exited; Errian went down into the warm, clear bath set there down into the stone and she watched as Kerra followed after her, leaving footprints on the stone floor. She went in, took a seat on the ledge beneath the water at the far side, settled opposite with the water right up to her neck but then she brought herself up again, seated herself at the side of the bath instead of in it till only her calves dangled down into the water. She arched her back; she spread her legs; one hand came down between her thighs as she leaned back on the other. Errian watched as Kerra’s palm pressed over her sex, rubbed there slowly for one long moment before her fingers teased her lips apart.

She should have looked away but it seemed she couldn’t. She moved instead, remembers how her stomach warmed and tightened as she did it, as she stood in the bath and she slipped her wet hands over Kerra’s calves, over her knees and her thighs and her belly and up to her breasts. She remembers how Kerra’s breath quickened softly, how her legs parted wider, how she arched into her touch and then Errian knelt on the ledge there between her thighs beneath the water and ran her mouth down between her breasts along the way, pressed her lips over her sternum, over her ribs, her navel, her hands there at her thighs. Kerra leaned back on both hands and Errian’s mouth found her sex, as her tongue teased between her lips, found the little nub there that she circled slowly with the tip of her tongue as her fingers played down lower. She was so wet there that Errian’s fingertips slipped inside her easily, teased her till she pressed her hips down, till she was pushing herself against her mouth, against her fingers, and Errian’s free hand slipped down between her own thighs, rubbed hard, made her tingle as Kerra moaned softly.

It was over quickly, near disappointingly so but not quite as Kerra stifled a shout with her palm and bucked hard against Errian’s fingers. It wasn’t long after that that Errian finished too, her mouth buried in the crease where Kerra’s thigh met the folds of her sex. Then Kerra kissed her, pushed her back into the bath and came down into it with her and she kissed her hotly, kissed her hard, her fingers in Errian’s hair, Errian’s arms around Kerra’s waist until they almost couldn’t breathe from it.

Errian cupped Kerra’s face in her hands as they parted; Kerra’s fingertips traced the long lines of Errian’s collarbones.

“Errian…” Kerra said.

“We should leave before we’re missed,” Errian replied.

She still knows it wasn’t what she’d meant to say at all.

---

The princess who would be queen fared better in health on the return journey, in the cabin of the Pride of Karn. Errian had always appreciated the double meaning of the way her father’s ship was named, Pride of Karn, the ship belonging to a man named Karn, son of Kellan, named in turn for the place he was born. Her father loved that ship, even if he didn’t enjoy the sea as much as he enjoyed dry land and battle and women and song. He’s always complained about salt in his beard and how fiercely he loathed salt pork; he still complains when the Karn’s launch comes into the harbour at Korsend. He’s north of his sixty-fifth year now, but he’s still strong as a bear.

The Karn has three cabins and Kerra slipped into Errian’s each night the way she had into her room after that day in the baths under Karnhall. That first night back on dry land Errian had heard her door squeak open and her hand tightened on her knife but Kerra put down the candlestick on the little chest of drawers her father’s younger brother had made in his workshop and she slipped into the bed beside her. Errian let go of the knife as Kerra’s mouth found the crook of her neck.

“Tell me a story,” Kerra murmured that first night, as her hands slipped in beneath Errian’s roughspun tunic. “I’ve told you all of mine.” And so she did, told her a tale of gods and men and monsters, her voice catching as beneath the sheets Kerra’s mouth teased in between her thighs.

They were more discreet on the ship, she recalls. Family lived in the bedrooms in Karnhall and none had ever cared who shared Errian’s bed, from the blacksmith’s daughter to the tradeswoman who came with good furs from Korrell. None of her father’s men had cared a bit when she’d bedded the woman who kept the inn by the harbour of the capital city of Keth, the one with the flame-red hair, watchful eyes and quick tongue, or the high Vithrani noblewoman, long-limbed and tall and regal with the most beautiful dark skin that Errian has ever seen. She asked Errian to stay and take command of her army and sometimes she still wonders what her life would have been if she’d done that instead of going back home to Elentar. Vella of Vithra was powerful and strong with a will as hard as iron, who made love just as fiercely as her army fought. She’s probably still just the same now, Errian thinks, though it’s been twenty years since then. Vella will likely live to her two hundredth year and longer still; she’ll still be living long after Errian’s dead and gone.

They were more discreet on the ship because there she was Princess Kerra, Queen Kerra, Kerra of Stellan and the Starshot Isles. Before they’d set sail with the seven clans, she’d just been Errian’s friend the Stellani girl and it hadn’t mattered when Kerra went to Errian’s room at night, hadn’t mattered who caught her in the corridor, hadn’t even really mattered how much noise they might have made except they did at least try to keep proceedings quiet. On board there was no time for them to take off all their clothes, no time for them to take their time and learn the curves of one another’s bodies the way they had in those brief days in Karn, no time for Errian to tell the old Ragnar tales she’d learned as a girl like she had in her bed under her grandfather’s roof with Kerra in her arms. Errian wonders sometimes if they could have been happy there. She knows she could have been for her part, at least, but beneath Kerra’s bravado she was always the princess who would be queen. As far back as the journey to Starsheart she’d seen that queen in glimpses.

And then there they were, rounding the headland, coming into Starspoint Bay. They’d braved the fierce currents and the jagged rocks in the way that only smugglers and Ragnar might and then they went ashore, seven clans’ worth of Ragnar warriors roaring into battle with Karn, son of Kellan, and Errian of Elentar at their head. The Stellani soldiers had no chance against them; they’d come so swiftly and so suddenly that there’d been no time to call for Elentari troops to keep them safe, the only army sufficient to keep the Ragnar at bay. And so Errian flung open the doors of the Starspire with her sword in her hand and she and her father and her father’s men cleared the way to the throne for Queen Kerra.

“Cousin,” Kerra said, as Berryn’s hands clutched white-knuckled at the throne he’d claimed with such bare illegitimacy. “I believe you’ve made a mistake.”

“Cousin,” Berryn said. “I believe the mistake’s yours.” But he was scared and it showed and it flowed over him in the moment that Errian seized her sister by her long white hair and threw her down the steps that led to the throne. He stared, wide-eyed, comedic, his handsome face stricken.

“It was you that killed them,” Errian said, as she held her there by her long white hair. “The king and our mother and our little sister too.”

Shenan smiled, her teeth smeared with blood from a split in her lip. “I’d have killed you all if you’d stayed here,” she said, and so Errian pulled back her sister’s head and she slit her throat with the knife from her boot. When she fell to the floor, her white hair was pink with blood.

“That’s what we do with traitors to the crown,” Kerra said, as Berryn fell to his knees at her feet. “You stole from me, cousin.”

“I’ll give it all back.”

Errian wished he’d been stronger, at least half as strong as her sister had been who lay dead at her feet on the floor. She still wishes he’d had the courage to stand and to face her, that he’d had at least the courage of the conviction that had led him to the throne, but he begged for his life and so Kerra spared it.

“You’ll take her body home to Kor,” she said. “You’ll stay there if they’ll have you. And if they won’t, don’t you ever come back here.”

He agreed to her terms, of course, though Kor was hardly famed for its hospitality, and all because he didn’t want to die. Of course, Errian’s always believed the Korrani healers did the job for them.

Kerra didn’t have to use her dagger, but Errian knows she saw the flash of the blade in the sunlight as Kerra returned it to her cloak. She was ready to kill that day; Errian realised she’d have killed a hundred men just so Kerra would never have to.

She loved the queen just as much as she loved the woman.

---

She eats a light lunch in her library, her two Ragnar hunting hounds snuffling under the table until she tosses them hunks of cold meat from her plate. She doesn’t feel much like eating anyway. She’s excited or she’s nervous or she’s at a midway point between the two and it’s such a personal humiliation to feel this way after all this time that she almost wishes Kerra would have bypassed Korsend and sailed straight on for Moonfall. Almost.

It’s been fifteen years since then, since the day Berryn Holme was exiled from Stellan and sent away to Kor with Errian’s sister’s body, fifteen years since Queen Kerra’s joyful coronation. Errian was there that morning at dawn when they threw open the doors of the Starspire and placed the crown of stars at Kerra’s brow. She was there at the feast in the evening and she knew, or almost knew, what to expect would come next. Kellan, son of Kerran, chieftain of Karn, offered Kerra of Stellan his grandson in marriage. Kerra accepted. The crown of stars carried a price, and Kerra paid it willingly.

Errian left before the marriage, stayed the night in the inn where they’d met and then made the long journey back to Elentar, Starspoint to Starsholme, Starsholme to Elreth, Elreth to Moonfall. When she arrived there, when she went into the hall in the keep that was her mother’s and her mother’s mother’s through thousands of years and now her sister sat there just a little earlier than they’d always known she would, Ettan gave her Elenkor. On a clear day, with the strongest glass, she can make out the silhouette of the Starspire from the tallest tower at Korsend. She knows most days all that’s between them is the Starshot Strait but Kerra’s married now, with four children of her own. And Errian has the home she always thought she wanted.

It’s been fifteen years now since the coronation but that wasn’t the last time Errian saw her. It was the ten-year tournament once again and of course the thane of Elenkor was expected to attend it; she travelled with her sister though by then, just as now, they have little to speak of; she’s never told her what Shenan did beneath the Moonfall keep because Ettan, the eldest, perhaps already knew and perhaps she never has or ever will. Errian was in her thirty-fifth year then, blonde hair just starting to grey, but there’d still been no doubt that she was the strongest and most skilled of all the Elentari. So she fought again and she won again because honour and duty wouldn’t let her do otherwise and she went before Queen Kerra and King Fentan with sweat and blood all through her hair and her hand at the hilt of her sword. They didn’t expect her to kneel and she didn’t. If a Stellani had won, he would have knelt.

She left with Kerra two days later. They mounted horses side by side and rode down through the castle gates, through the streets of Starspoint through the happy crowds.

“I didn’t expect you to compete,” Kerra said.

“Are you disappointed, princess?” Errian replied.

When Kerra laughed, the sound was almost bitter. She didn’t correct her though she hadn’t been a princess for ten years by then.

There were no bandits on the road this time and certainly no assassins. The fair weather held the whole way there and there was no need to stray from the Starspoint Road. Kerra told the old Stellani tales of knights and ladies and valour and Errian told her stories from Elentar by the firelight in the evenings when the ground began to rise into the mountains. They’d both remembered to pack gloves.

“Why did the Elentari kill their god?” Kerra asked, as they stood outside the Temple of the Five. There was a new high priest - the old one had passed away peacefully in his sleep, they said - but the new one wouldn’t let in the Elentari either. And so Errian told the story, because it was one she’d never told to the princess before.

“The great god El made all the lands,” she said, “and named his favourite for himself: he called it Elentar, the moon land. The people there he took as slaves; he took mortal women as his wives and ordered sacrifices, time and again, in each of his temples across the land, so he could maintain his physical body on earth outside the heavens. The tales say he was cruel and hard and killed every one of his half-mortal children until their sad souls speckled the heavens as stars.

“In the end, as is always the case, his wives couldn’t go on. The five of them made a pact and one day they took El up to the top of the cliff above the bay, enticed him, promised him a wonderful surprise. They pushed him to his death down there on the rocks in the Bay of El and he returned to the heavens as the moon that glowers over all the world.

“The woman who pushed him became the first high thane of Elentar, my ancestor; the others became the thanes and their second and third children the thanets and they built their castles in Rethan and Mirran and Fallan, while the high thane’s sister went to Elenkor, the moonwood, that covers a full fifth of the land today as it did in the old days.

“That’s my land now, princess.” She smiled, just a little bitterly. “That’s my reward for what I did.”

They stayed there a week in the valley that was just as surprising in its warmth as it had been the first time, climbed the hills together, went down into the caves to the rushing heart of the river they’d run down so many years before. They bathed together in an icy stream that ran down Mount Starsheart and Kerra waded closer to her, ran her bold hands over Errian’s thighs and they warmed together in the dappled sunlight through the branches of an apple tree, blades of lush grass sticking to their drying skin. Kerra was still beautiful, perhaps more so then with the first faint hints of grey in her long dark hair, with the first faint wrinkles gathering there at the corners of her eyes. She was so much more woman than girl then, in her thirty-third year, a mother and a ruler and a wife. Errian has never married. She’s never felt inclined to. It’s not the Elentari way, besides; the Elentari don’t marry and Errian is grateful for that.

They stayed there a week, walking together, sitting together under trees on Errian’s spread woollen cloak. They slept in a bed with a hay-stuffed mattress that reminded them both of another time and Errian let Kerra’s soft, pale hands unlace her tunic, pull off her boots. Kerra undressed herself in the moonlight and she pressed her palms to Errian’s, smiled at how much broader and coarser Errian’s were than her own, how much longer her fingers were. The two of them had always been different from each other but Kerra hadn’t changed in any way that mattered except one: she was a queen now. It was clear it weighed heavy; she laughed less, and she smiled less, but she bore it well.

And when they set off again, left the valley to return to Starspoint, Errian understood why they were both so quiet. The return was goodbye. There would never be another time like this again.

---

The page comes to Errian’s door and she tells her the queen’s ship has dropped anchor in the harbour.

Her heir will meet the royal party at the harbour. Errian has never married, has never borne children, but that’s of very little matter there in Elentar; lines don’t need to be written in blood to be legitimate the way they do on Stellan or in Ragnar or in Kor. Ferrick and Petta sent her their daughter at the age of fifteen because they knew there’d be a life for her on Elentar that she’d never have in Ragnar and so one day Erran will be thane of Elenkor when Errian’s gone. They still visit when they can, Ferrick more often than Petta. Erran took a Ragnar man to father her children, gave birth to the first near four years ago now, and Errian can’t say that she objects. Errian’s always felt the tug of her twin heritages pulling in different directions and she wouldn’t wish that on Erran, so she’s let her keep Ragnar close.

She’s not sure how the brief visit will go, at least not in its particulars. She’ll go down to the gates quite soon now, with her sword at her waist, and she’ll greet Queen Kerra on the high thane’s behalf. They’ll go into the castle, through into the keep and perhaps they’ll speak, if just a little, small talk, pleasantries for public viewing. They’ll sit side by side at the high table at tonight’s feast - there are cooks scurrying through the halls already as Errian leaves her table and buckles her sword by her hip on the way through the door. It’s the same one she used back then, the one her father’s people gave her in Karn the day she landed there and that she struggled to lift for the first two years. It’s the same one that killed assassins on the road to Starsheart. Elentar is famed for the beauty of its weapons, for their lightness and balance and the shine of the steel, but in Ragnar weapons are made to last hundreds of years.

Perhaps afterwards they’ll speak, or at least speak a little more freely. She’d like to think Kerra will come to her library once they’ve dined, to the small stone room with its window that looks out over the harbour and over the sea. She’d like to sit there on her worn leather couch with Kerra’s head resting at her lap and she’d read her the Elentari tales Kerra loved to hear but has likely never read for herself. She’d like to think they’d go through into her bedchamber and though Kerra is in her thirty-eighth year now, though Errian is in her fortieth, she’d like to think they’d still know each other beneath their unfamiliar clothes. Errian would unbuckle her sword; Kerra would loosen her belt and they’d smile and smother their laughter in each other’s loosed long hair, against each other’s bare skin. Kerra’s hands on her would feel just like they always did, soft and smooth and warm as they traced the lines of her muscles, through her arms that she’d stretch out above her head, between her breasts, across her stomach, down to tease between her thighs. She recalls how she’d shiver at the touch of Kerra’s breath on her skin and she thinks she might still. In the night, her mind filled with Kerra of Stellan, she does still shiver as her own hands stray. Over the years she’s taken other bedmates; it’s not frowned upon on Elentar or across the sea in Ragnar the way it is on Stellan. She can’t say she’s never wanted another woman after Kerra but it’s to her that her mind still strays. It always will.

She goes to the gates and she waits and then Kerra’s there, smiling, waving to the people that have gathered. She’s walked from the harbour and that’s like her, exactly like the girl and the woman she knew so briefly all those years ago, all smiles to win over the gathered crowds, wearing the crown of stars with its bright shining diamonds. Korsend is perhaps a little different to the rest of Elentar in that respect, since the moonwood was given to Errian and its city-port reopened to any who might wish to visit there; the majority of its inhabitants have been Ragnar and Kethi and Herrani, with just a few enterprising Stellani here and there, and the Elentari live there in only small but still ever-growing numbers. Perhaps the Elentari have never feared mixed blood the way the Stellani have but their way of life has meant most others have stayed away from the other Elentari cities. Elentari aren’t impressed by royalty, but the people in the streets of Korsend are.

“Errian,” Kerra says. There’s no formal address for the thanes of Elentar; Errian> is correct.

“Princess,” she replies, lowly, so low no one else will hear, and Kerra smiles a small, tired smile. That will never again be Kerra’s formal address. She’s her majesty the queen.

They sit side by side at the first table at the feast that’s done in the old manner, long benches at long tables just the way they do in Ragnar. They don’t speak and Errian has no appetite but makes herself eat as she listens to her cousin; Fentan is a good man and she’s sure he’s a good father and he likes to talk and talk like so many Ragnar do. There was uproar amongst the Stellani nobles when his marriage to Kerra was announced but their grandfather chose quite well, quite shrewdly; Fentan has cut his hair and shaved his beard and put on fine Stellani clothes and even his accent’s faded over the years. He’s assimilated in a way that Errian never could have. She’d always have been the Elentari bitch, the woman-knight. She’d never have fit in.

But then the feast is over and while the guests drink and talk and sing around the hall, Errian slips away. She leaves the hall and she climbs the winding stair, goes up and up, her bootheels clacking against the worn old stone. She’s spent so long repairing the castle and its keep and the town and the port, put in so much effort and now, after fifteen long years, it’s the way she’d always hoped it would be, the way it always was in her mind’s eye. She comes out onto the top of the tallest tower and she looks out over the town with its low lights, looks out to the sea beyond, the moon hanging low, picking out the waves in a white-gold shimmer. She hears the sound of footsteps that follow. She doesn’t ask who it is.

Kerra’s hands go up to Errian’s hips, go around her waist as she steps up against her back and rests her head between Errian’s broad shoulders. She’s still strong and she will be for a good time yet but she knows she’ll recommend that Erran be made champion at the next ten-year tournament. She won’t put herself through it again. She won’t live the rest of her life for journeys to a temple she can’t enter and a woman who can never be hers. Besides, Erran is almost as good now as Errian was at that age. She’s more than fulfilled her duty.

“I never lied to you, you know,” Kerra says.

“Did I say you had?”

“You did.” Kerra’s arms tighten around her, her palms warm over the tunic at Errian’s waist. “You said I lied to you that night in the inn but I didn’t. I asked you if my name mattered.”

“It turned out in the end that it did.”

Errian turns and she cups Kerra’s face in her hands in that old familiar way, looks at her in the moonlight, under the light of the old dead god of Elentar who Errian is sure would mock her if he could. If centuries ago the thane of Elenkor hadn’t stood aside and let the king of Stellan besiege Moonfall when he came, if she’d joined the other thanes and beaten him back, there’d have been no need for the treaty, no need to defer to the Stellani. There’d have been no need for the high thane to put the thane of Elenkor to death, to resettle her people in the other four thanelands and bar all access to the moonwood. If three hundred years ago a woman whose names were then stricken from all records had done her duty then Errian, third daughter of the high thane, would not have been called to the ten-year tournament. She understands how petty her thought is, how small her part in history, but if the last thane of Elekor before her had risen to the challenge then Errian would never have met Kerra of Stellan. There’d have been no need to.

“Sometimes I wish we’d stayed in Karn,” Kerra says, but Errian knows that could never have happened. “Sometimes I wish you’d stayed in Starspoint. I’d have made you the captain of my guard. I’d have seen you every day for the past fifteen years.”

Errian smiles but there’s no joy left in it. “We all wish things, princess,” she says, and she rests her forehead down against Kerra’s just for a moment before she steps away.

“Will you come with us to Moonfall?” Kerra asks. Errian shakes her head and Kerra cocks hers. “I hear there are bandits on the way. Won’t you protect me?”

It’s a joke, poorly conceived but a joke nonetheless and Errian tries to take it as intended, though in the end she fails. She draws her sword instead and though Kerra’s eyes widen in the moonlight, she doesn’t step away, she doesn’t flinch just like she never did. Errian watches her watching as she rests the point of her sword against the worn grey stones beneath their feet, watches her watching as she pauses, then she moves. Kerra’s eyes are on her when she goes down on one knee before her, her hands on the hilt of her sword. She’s never knelt before, and Kerra knows it. The Elentari do not kneel.

“I’ll protect you to my dying breath, my queen,” she says, and Kerra nods as her smile slowly fades away. She touches her fingertips to Errian’s cheek and she nods again as she turns. She understands. She walks away.

It’s a few minutes more before Errian takes takes the stair down, winds through the long corridors to the door of her room, though she supposes all the rooms there are hers. She shucks her clothes and leaves them as they lie, there on the floor though her usual practice is meticulous folding; she’s angry at herself, though she’s learned to control that anger down the years. Kerra might have shared her bed tonight just one last time and they might have talked of what might have been, of the life they hadn’t shared, of stolen moments between the queen and her captain on battlements at the Starspire, down by the stables, in the inn where they met on the hay-stuffed mattress in a bed that rocked against the floor as they moved together. They might have talked of Karn, of Errian claiming her as her lover there openly, of nights under furs as the snow fell outside, of the baths after practice in the yard.

Kerra always could tell tales and no doubt she’d have wondered aloud what it would have been to come to Korsend with her, to live there, to make her home there in Errian’s keep, to sit on her lap at the dinner table like a Ragnar woman might and laugh and drink or climb the stair with her to the tower top and watch the sea with Errian pressed to her back, with Errian’s strong arms around her. She’s imagined having her there, on the stones, overlooking the Starshot Strait, imagined it with her belt loosed and one hand erring down between her thighs. But Kerra lives at the far side of the sea in a tower whose shadow she can see sometimes in her best glass on the clearest day. Sometimes she’s found herself looking for it even when the mist rolls in from the water.

Queen Kerra of Stellan and the Starshot Isles will leave in the morning. She’ll set out for Moonfall after dawn, make the month-long journey down the Moonwood Road to the capital where Ettan, High Thane of Elentar, will greet her. They’ll stay perhaps a fortnight, perhaps a month, then they’ll ride a week into the thaneland of Rethen and sail home from the great port of Elreth. Kerra will hate the sea voyage home but she won’t show it.

Kerra is a queen now, regal and beautiful and strong. All that Errian can be to her now is one knight amongst many, and she knows now that’s all that she should have ever been.

But she’ll be the most loyal. She’ll swear it on her knees if she has to.