“Survive…” Aefa’s clever eyes darted to the poison circlet on the ground. “What aren’t you telling us, Elia Lear? You don’t mean war; you mean something else. What is it that would kill your middle sister, were she to try to rule?”
“I know how to become queen,” Elia replied softly, glancing around at all her allies. “In a way that not even Gaela can stop, not without killing me herself.”
“The Longest Night ritual,” Brona said.
“Do you know what it is?” Elia asked.
“No.”
Kayo said, “Talich at Dondubhan does. The old priest who led your father through it. He married them, too, your mother and father.”
Elia knelt and lifted the hemlock crown. Eat of the flower, drink of the rootwater, she said in the language of trees. She repeated herself for her allies, aloud and in their own tongue: “Eat of the flower, drink of the roots. That is all.” She took a deep breath. “I swallow the poison, and the rootwaters cleanse me of it, and so is the bargain between crown and island set. My blood becomes its blood, and its blood mine.”
Her uncle let go of Brona abruptly, shaking his head. He put his hand to his bandage, grimacing.
But Brona touched her mouth, and nodded yes. She understood in her gut, as Elia did.
“You can’t,” Morimaros said, and Aefa shot to her feet.
“I agree with the king!” the Fool’s daughter cried. “Poison, Elia, you can’t think it, who told you that? Was it Ban? Was it Regan? Think where the message came from and mistrust it!”
“The island told me,” Elia said.
Rory put his arm around Aefa. “It sounds like magic. It sounds like the oldest earth saint stories and festivals.” His voice was full of wonder, and dread—but also hope.
“I—” Elia nodded. “Thank you for your counsel, all of you. I am going to meet my sisters in two nights. I will bring a crown of hemlock, and between the three of us, before the night ends, there will be a queen of Innis Lear.”
“One of you will do as the island bids.” Aefa’s distress heightened her voice.
“Or all three of us,” Elia said soothingly, feeling calm and cool—but it was not the distance of stars, it was the strength of certainty. “In two nights, we shall meet them. And it will be done.”
“Ban will be with them,” the king of Aremoria said suddenly.
“Yes.”
“I want to go at your side. I need to.”
“I will allow it,” she replied, and then left them all, without another word. As was her right.
Outside the great hall, Elia turned in a full circle, unsure where to go. But of course, the answer was high toward the stars.
Up and up she went, through the old part of the Keep and into the black stones of its most ancient tower. The stairs narrowed, and Elia climbed higher, until she reached the pinnacle, ascending through the trapdoor and into the bare sky: this platform, with barely room for two or three men, had been built for a watch in the days when kings ruled only pieces of the island, constantly on guard for attack.
Stars gleamed; she could see them in every direction, though wind cut harshly from the southeast. Elia sank down against the crenellations.
Tilting her head back, she stared into the night, tracing the shape of blackness, not the points of light. She resisted all thoughts, flattening her mind into nothing more than the patterns between stars. No signs revealed themselves, and Elia discovered no hidden meaning; long ago star priests had suggested the void beyond the heavens was the origin of chaos, the home of pain and love, of all wild instincts. That it had been the coming of the stars that brought order into the world.
Footsteps on the narrow stairs below the platform roused her.
It was Brona, lifting the trapdoor.
“Did I upset everyone, enough so they sent you to chide me?” Elia asked.
But the witch said nothing, staring at Elia with a strangeness, a hesitancy. “Say what you’ve come to say,” Elia ordered gently.
Brona lowered herself to sit beside Elia and stared across the small tower at the opposite stones. “Dalat, your mother, took hemlock and died of it.”
A great, raw pulse of fear drained Elia of all warmth, and she remembered that morning suddenly: her mother’s dull, dead gaze, her father’s choking grief, her sisters’ fury, and Gaela’s accusation that Lear had poisoned her. Elia shook her head. “No, Father would not have done that. I cannot believe it.”
“Dalat did it to herself.”
Elia’s lips fell open, as if she could taste the delicate petals of hemlock. “She tried to be the island’s queen?”
“No,” Brona said. “No, it was not for that. She did not intend to be saved.”
Elia’s tongue dried and her gorge rose. No.
Brona continued gently, “Dalat loved you, and your sisters, and even your father and this country, so deeply that she died to preserve it. She died to keep everything alive, to hold your place and your father’s authority.”
“No,” Elia said, pressing away from Brona. “She … the stars … she would not have done that. If she loved us.”
“If the prophecy concerning Dalat’s death had proven false, everything your father had built would have crumbled. Not only his personal faith, but his rule and the provenance of his crown. All would have questioned you. Connley’s mother and Earl Glennadoer would have questioned your entire bloodline, and Dalat’s very presence on the island. Everything, don’t you see? If your mother had not…”
Elia stared at her small, brown, trembling hands. Dalat had killed herself? For politics. For stars. To stop war. To protect her daughters and her people. Oh, Mother, she said to the wind.
“Elia.”
She needed—she needed to breathe, to think through this. Three long, deep breaths were all she allowed herself. Each shook. “It was not my father,” she finally said.
“No, Lear did not know her plans.”
Elia shook her head, opened her mouth, was silent, and then tried again. “Why didn’t you tell my sisters, at least? So they would know, and not hate him? Why didn’t she?”
“Dalat did not want you to know,” Brona said. The witch sat straight, old grief bowing her mouth. “She wanted all of you to have faith in the stars and in your father, too. She thought—she thought her death would bring you all together. Make you stronger.”
Elia laughed pitifully and looked up at the sky. Wind blew hard enough to blur the constellations. “Oh no. She trusted none of us, not even my father. Her husband! She did not—did not let us be her family.”
“It was bold, brave even, to take her own life for the island. To remove the uncertainty, prove that your father and his ways were true. I admire that … a singular choice, one that changed everything, solidifying the power of the crown.”
“It didn’t work,” Elia said.
“It could have. The choices your father made afterward are what ruined it: Lear alienated his daughters, and as king he adhered to such a strict form of star worship he cut out all other avenues. If he’d merely kept his faith, and continued to rule—without closing the wells, for example—if he’d striven for connection with his daughters … maybe Dalat’s sacrifice would have been successful.”
“She should have trusted him, and told him.”
“Maybe, but Lear was always so impulsive. He might have stopped her and ruined her plans.”
“Because he loved her! He might have given her to the rootwaters to save her.”
Brona frowned.
“You truly never knew of the hemlock ritual?” Elia asked, feeling accusatory but not caring. She might accuse the whole world tonight.
“I did not.” The witch’s brow crumpled, and tears shone in her dark brown eyes. “I’d have brought her rootwater. She might have died on Gaela’s birthday, then been reborn.”
Compassion pierced Elia’s heart, but she was crying again, too. She glanced toward the stars. Would they ever have comfort to offer her again? No longer could she imagine t
hem pure and righteous, nor even bright, crawling beetles. What if the prophecy had been written: On the night of her first daughter’s sixteenth birthday, the queen will be reborn?
It was such a similar prophecy. Depending on the wind, or roots. Depending on the entire shape of the sky.
“Are you going to do it?” Brona asked.
“Yes,” Elia said. “To give myself entirely to the fight, I must transform. But I will offer my sisters the same chance. I will not make my mother’s mistake, or my father’s.”
“I will follow you to the very end, Elia Lear, and not only because I loved your mother.”
Elia nodded but closed her eyes in dismissal. She wanted to be alone with the night. Brona’s steps creaked gently on the old wood, and the sound of the trapdoor closing settled the shadows in Elia’s heart. She breathed, listened to the angry night, and said to the wind, Thank you.
Eat the flower, drink the rootwater, the wind snarled back.
ELEVEN YEARS AGO, NEAR DONDUBHAN
“HOW DID MY sister die?” Kayo whispered into Brona’s hair.
He stared at the valley of candles and stars—Dalat’s year memorial, where the family she’d lost mourned—and it came to him that he should take Elia away from here, away from this island that had killed Dalat, before it sank into his niece’s bones, before she was too much a part of it. The old empress would welcome another daughter for her line.
To answer Kayo’s question, the witch of the White Forest turned to face him, and the star field cast her in fire, a salamander woman, a dragon with lips and curls and deep, sorrowful eyes. “Come,” she murmured nudging him farther away. “I have a message from Dalat, come.”
Breathless with surprise, he obeyed.
Brona led him back, along a winding route, through the moonlit field of stone and starfire. Near the trees again, she stopped. She took both of his hands; hers were cool and dry, gentle. “What know you of your sister’s marriage, as it relates to how the island viewed her queenship?”
Frowning, Kayo said, “The marriage was foretold by the religion of the stars, and Lear never questioned it.”
“Yes. And they loved each other.”
“So it seemed to me,” he agreed. Kayo remembered the way Dalat had watched her older husband, and how their heads leaned together always, sharing conversations and secrets and caresses.
“Before Dalat came, another woman was to be queen. The daughter of the old Duke Connley was married to our king’s elder brother. Connley had believed the marriage contract would survive the deaths of Lear’s brothers, but he underestimated Lear’s devotion to the stars.”
A hot flutter began in Kayo’s stomach: this was aged politics, and he had asked Brona for the story of Dalat’s death. “This Connley—I remember him.”
“Do you remember the rest of the marriage prophecy? That Lear’s destined wife would give him strong children, rule beside him well, then die on the sixteenth anniversary of her first daughter’s birth.”
“She did,” Kayo whispered again.
“She did.” Brona smiled. It was a dangerous, flat smile.
“I did not believe in it! Or I would have been here. I thought … I didn’t think of it when I left because it was ridiculous. Stars do not know such things—they are merely lights in the sky!” Kayo pulled away from her. “How can you—”
“Listen, Kay Oak of Lear.”
It was not his name. She said it, though, with raw certainty, and it echoed in his skull like a spell. Brona had, with four words, rooted him here.
He was rigid. He did not want to hear more. He could hardly breathe.
“Two years ago, rumors reached Dalat’s ears: if the queen did not die on her appointed day, she could not be the woman the stars had ordained. If fate’s finale proved wrong, what of the start?” Brona’s voice was hollow now, but not soft. She was angry.
Kayo understood.
The moon flashed behind a swift-moving cloud, then was bright again. Time sped, it seemed to him, and the island trembled.
Brona said, “It was not only Dalat in danger, do you understand? It was her daughters and their entire legacy. There might have been war if Connley had convinced enough people that Dalat was not the true, star-ordained queen. And if she was not, how could her daughters be true? How could their foreign blood belong to Innis Lear? Do you see? If Dalat did not die…” Brona shook her head. “But she did.”
“Was it—Was it Lear?” Kayo could hardly bite out the words. “Did he murder my sister for his stars?”
“Lear would do nothing. He knew of the brewing danger, but he was ever paralyzed by heaven. He said again and again that Dalat must have faith, because she was his true queen—their daughters, his daughters—and the stars would offer satisfying answers. Hold with me, he said, have faith with me, we will do and be as the stars require. For that is what we must always do.”
Kayo tried to crouch on the ground for balance in this dizzying, swaying world, but Brona held him upright.
“If I had been here,” he said, “I would have protected her—you should have! And … he did not protect her. He—”
“Now, Kay Oak, listen to me.” Brona knelt, and he collapsed with her. They faced each other on the rough moor, and Brona closed her eyes. She drew a deep breath.
Kayo’s eyes burned; his heart pounded in his ears and wrists and temples. All the sky was darkly silver.
And Brona Hartfare shocked him to his soul by speaking in the language of the Third Kingdom, “This is my choice, son-of-my-mother. I make it for myself, your mother’s-daughter, and for your sister’s-daughters, and I ask that you accept it now. I ask that you give yourself to them, to their protection, for they will need your heart-strength and generosity. Never tell them of my choice, but keep them well. Son-of-my-mother, I love you.”
Kayo dragged himself free with a cry, turning away as if to retch. But there was nothing, nothing inside him except grief and regret. He gripped the roots of a strong tree, bending against them.
Brona’s hand found his shoulder.
He squeezed his eyes shut, and tears leaked through his curled lashes.
“I have said these words, Kay Oak, every night and every morning for a year and three days. The island’s roots and the wind of our trees know what Dalat of Taria Queen and Innis Lear has asked of you. It knows what she asked of herself.”
Kayo did not think he was as strong as the daughter-of-his-mother. He barely felt Brona’s touch as he dug his fingers into the cold earth around the oak’s roots, as if he could grip the very heart of this dangerous, unforgiving island. To strangle it, to bury himself, or only to grasp hold, he could not say.
THE SISTERS MET in a pavilion erected over the rocky Errigal moor, built of canvas in the neutral gray colors of death, with massive torches flickering bright against the black sky.
Innis Lear raged, tossing flags and leaves sharply, grabbing at anything not tied down. The wind stung the eyes of retainers and servants, tore at the horses’ manes, rattled tack, and shoved wagons. Half the tents could not be put up, taking thrice as many men to hold and stake down, and even then the gale blew harder.
The youngest princess had sent word, offering instead the shelter of Errigal Keep, but the eldest denied it. Let the skies scream at our meeting, she said to the messenger.
And so they arrived.
Wind gusted from the north, drawing the cries of the island in its wake, from the mountains, karst flats, cliffs, meadows, and moors, arrowing toward the iron marsh, toward the daughters of Lear.
Gaela Lear had brought with her an army twelve hundred strong from Dondubhan, with more following at a slower pace—though some from those barracks had deserted, running here to the daughter they knew best from her time at the northern star tower, and out of friendship with Rory Earlson. The Astore army camped in a wide, flickering fan to the west, right up to the edge of the White Forest. To Regan’s bloodred banner five hundred from Connley had joined, and the Earl Glennadoer as well, with his
mud-and-feather-painted soldiers.
Toward them from the fortress of Errigal Keep came the party of the youngest Lear daughter, all in the midnight blue and white of Innis Lear itself, dotted throughout with the wintry pale blue of Errigal. Her force was the smallest, a bare two hundred from Errigal and the surrounding farmland, but four hundred and then three hundred more had arrived today with the Earl Rosrua and Bracoch. Plus their dead father’s hundred loyal retainers, not a one of whom had broken toward Gaela and Regan.
The wind roared, tearing at hair and tabards.
None could predict what might happen this night, not with all the holy bones in the world at their feet.
Elia Lear stopped at the base of the pavilion to glance at the canvas roof slapping hard in the wind. “Why do my sisters hide from the stars?”
Of course Lear’s youngest did not need to hide from the sky because she was a piece of it: her silver chain mail glittered like a shirt woven of stars, and her dress was cream and gray like a priest’s, but from shoulder to knee a tabard hung in a rich dark blue, vibrant enough to catch the light, and at her breast a single, blazing white star.
All who saw her understood: Elia Lear would not submit.
Kay Oak stepped to her side, leaning heavily on an old oak cane. The wound on his face was revealed: a swollen gash sewn with pale thread, a path of moonlight across his brown face. It marked out the earl’s left eye, and the surrounding bruise flared like a deadly dark flower. Beside him stood the witch of the White Forest, and with her a dozen women of Errigal and Hartfare, then the old king’s Fool, iron wizards, and more. There came the cragged Earl Bracoch, and the younger Rosrua, with Rory Errigal holding the chain of his father’s title instead of wearing it across his chest; the youngest man’s eyes hunted only for his bastard brother.
At Elia Lear’s other shoulder stood a gilded man, beardless, dressed like a noble retainer also in Learish blue: the king of Aremoria.
The Queens of Innis Lear Page 61
