The Queens of Innis Lear

by Tessa Gratton

  Regan set three clay cups upon Elia’s small dining table, and Gaela poured them to the brim, chasing Aefa away with a haughty scowl. Both had removed most of their finery from court: Gaela had on her deep red dress, but without pauldron or symbols of armor, and only clay held up her crown of twisting hair; Regan’s fingers remained jeweled, but she’d taken off her elaborate belt and had most of her chains and ribbons pulled out of her hair, to be bound in a simple knot at her nape. Elia had not changed at all, though Aefa, still crying herself, had washed the smeared red paint from Elia’s lip and eyes.

  She wished it had been reapplied, to face this moment.

  “To returning,” Gaela said, holding her cup in the palm of her hand.

  Regan finished the blessing. “When the old fool is dead.”

  Elia knocked her cup over with a shout, spilling wine across the pale table like a wave of fresh blood. Her anger surprised her.

  Regan stood abruptly, though the motion sloshed her own wine onto the wrist of her very fine gown. “Elia,” she snapped.

  Gaela only laughed. “What a fine mess, baby sister.” She drank her full cup of wine. Then she slammed her hand flat down into the puddle, splattering tiny drops onto Elia’s face. They hit like tears on her cold cheeks. “Drink some.”

  Regan flicked her wine-covered hand at Elia, too, as if to add her irritable benediction to Gaela’s.

  A laugh tugged out of Elia, though it was tremulous and dry and annoyed. Her sisters were terrible, but so desperately themselves.

  She did not wipe her skin, but leaned forward and poured more wine into her toppled cup. Lifting it, she said, “To peace between us, and sisterly love, and reconciling with our father.”

  Her sisters drank with her: Gaela with a raised, wry brow, and Regan smiling her untouchable smile. Regan said, “Reconciliation will never happen. We are queens now, Gaela and me. He declared so himself.”

  Not until the Longest Night, they weren’t, Elia knew. But this set them as near as possible. Wine swirled in her belly, and Elia pressed her hand there. She risked herself by saying, “He asked me, when he first sent letters from Aremoria and Burgun this winter, if I thought I would make a good queen. I should have known then, that he was planning something like this.”

  Gaela laughed, but Regan peered closely at the youngest of them. “And do you think it?” she asked.

  “Compared to what?” Elia asked, letting Regan see the challenge there. The burned-out, desperate challenge. Compared to my cruel sisters? she thought at Regan.

  It was Gaela who sneered now. “Do not put yourself against us in this; we have strength at home, while you are only yourself. It would be a butterfly against birds of prey.”

  Elia was too used to the lack of sisterly support to be surprised or even newly injured. She lowered her eyes to the spilled wine, gave Regan and Gaela a moment to understand she was not truly challenging them; she was only so tired, so raw. So afraid for their father, for her future. She had done nothing at all, and yet her life was torn away. She could barely breathe, had felt lightheaded and breathless all afternoon. “I do not wish to be the queen of Innis Lear. I only wish to be home, and take care of him.”

  “He does not deserve you,” Regan said.

  “What will you do with him, then?” Elia asked. “Be kind, I beg you.”

  Gaela said, “We will disband his retainers but for some hundred or so of them, and share the burden of housing him and them between us.”

  “You could stay, Elia,” Regan said seductively, “if you marry some harmless man of Lear, and never stand against us.”

  “Some harmless man?”

  “Perhaps Rory Errigal,” Gaela said.

  “No,” Elia said quickly, thinking instead of Ban, though she’d not let herself do so for years. It was only brotherly affection she held for Rory.

  “No, Gaela,” Regan agreed. She tapped dangerous fingernails at the edge of the spill of wine. “You only want her to eek Errigal’s iron and loyalty away from my Connley with that, dear sister.”

  Gaela smiled. Regan smiled.

  Elia swallowed a heavier drink of wine.

  “And so,” Gaela said, “Elia cannot remain here now. She must stay in Aremoria until Midwinter, and so keep herself out of the minds of any who remember Lear wished for her to be the next queen.”

  “If you return before the Longest Night we will take it as a hostile act,” Regan added.

  Sighing sharply, Elia finished her wine. She would be drunk soon, and she welcomed it. She felt exhausted. The brief silence among them was strangely comfortable, until Regan said, “Beware of Morimaros.”

  “What?” She thought of his hands, the garnet and pearl ring, the rough, pinked knuckles.

  Gaela said, “They say in Aremoria that the greatest king will reunite our island to their country. That what was sundered will be returned. Morimaros’s ambition will lead him to desire Innis Lear for his own. You must prove to him we three are Lear now, and we three are strong.”

  Elia pinched her eyes closed. “Are we? You just told me my presence here threatens you.”

  “Elia!” snapped Regan. “It is what we will make ourselves, do you understand?”

  “I understand,” Elia said, leaning forward, “that my sisters played some vicious game today, that my father disowned me and believes he hates me, and I must leave my home because of it.”

  Both her sisters smiled again, so familiar and yet unknowable to Elia. Regan’s was small and cold, Gaela’s wide enough to display her shield of white teeth.

  “Why do you hate him?” Elia whispered, grasping at anything to make her understand why she was empty and broken, while her sisters triumphed.

  Regan leaned in so Elia could see the tiny flecks of blue in her dark eyes. “Why don’t you?” she whispered back.

  The wine gurgled in Elia’s belly. She touched a hand there, setting her cup down hard. “You won’t be better than him. The two of you will let the island break into war. Worse; you’ll encourage it between your husbands. How can you? How can you wish for such a thing?”

  Gaela said, “We will encourage what we must to achieve what we desire.”

  It was mysteriously said, low in voice, and most unlike Gaela. Elia stared at her eldest sister, the one whose face reminded her of their mother; or else she’d been told so often that Gaela resembled the queen that she’d invented some memory to account for it. She did not know what was real. “I want Innis Lear at peace. I want my family whole,” Elia said.

  Regan reached for Gaela; their palms met, and they clasped hands.

  Elia understood: they were whole, but apart from Elia, because Elia had been too young to choose against Lear when their mother died. Her sisters could only give her so much now, too many years later. Elia said, “I don’t want to be here.”

  “You’ll go soon enough,” said Gaela.

  Elia shook her head. She felt hollow where she was supposed to be overwhelmed: flooded with anger, or burning with grief. She hated the numbness, but she did not know how to change it or chase it away—and if she thought about anything else it was her father’s grimace as he took away her name, as he said—as he said—

  She was shaking all over.

  Her sisters dragged her onto her feet and suddenly embraced her. Elia covered her face, surprised, and pressed into Gaela and Regan. “You take care of him,” she said, muffling her own order. “You do as you promised today and love him. Make those words true.”

  “Do not teach us our duty,” Gaela said, pinching Elia’s hip.

  Elia gripped the hard arm of her eldest sister and the thin ribs of her middle sister. When was the last time they’d stood thus? When their mother died? No—when Ban Errigal had been sent away and she’d believed it her own fault, she’d come to Regan, begging for some plot to get him back, and Regan had taken her to Gaela’s room. They gave her wine like this, though she choked on it like the child she’d been, and they told her to forget her friend. Told her to hope for nothin
g but that he come home someday, stronger. That is always the way, Gaela had said. Go, but return home stronger. And Regan had said, If you are lucky and willful and brave. Lear would have us weaken away from him, but we will never do as he wishes, Elia. We would rather die than give him what he wants, even if all he wants is his stars.

  “Go, but return home stronger,” Elia whispered now.

  “If you can,” Regan said.

  Gaela snorted, amused. “If she can.”

  Elia pulled free of them. Stumbling to the door, she wished to cling to a single memory of a time she’d felt like their sister, part of them equally, a true triad, a triplet star, anything. The memories were there, faded and locked away in salty cliff caves, under the high table on the Longest Night, and in a cottage at the center of the White Forest. But in this moment she was untethered, shorn from her father and family because there was nothing in her sisters tying her heart secure.

  THE FOX

  FAR OUT PAST the Summer Seat, against the cliffs facing the fortress, a ragged half-circle of stones stood like the bottom row of a monster’s teeth, growing up out of the patchy moor. Thirteen stones, twice as tall as a man but not half so wide, worn raw by the salt wind.

  Ban should’ve loved it. A temple of roots and rock, biting hard against the sky.

  His boots scuffed against grit and gravel. The wind brushed through, humming around the stones, drawing thin purple clouds off the ocean. Heather clustered on the south sides of a few standing stones, bowing gently in the twilight. Ban reached out to the nearest stone, mottled with coins of black lichen and paler moon lichen. The rock was warm, purring like the wind.

  Stepping fully into the half-circle, he tilted his head up. Purple and great swaths of rich indigo crawled across the sky, letting through only the strongest stars. A full moon glowed over the easternmost standing stone. The top was slanted, and Ban walked until the moon was pierced by its higher, sharper tip. This had always been his argument with Errigal and the king as a boy: the patterns Ban saw depended on where he stood. One needed the perspective of the earth to understand the stars.

  Errigal had cuffed him and the king explained disgustedly, “A man should stand where he is supposed to stand, and from there see the signs and patterns around him. That is how you read the stars.”

  Ban’s brother, Rory, had obediently taken a place beside Lear, grabbing Ban’s skinny wrist and dragging him there, too. “With me,” Rory said, hugging Ban’s shoulders in his arm and putting their faces together. “Look, brother!”

  Then, Ban had smiled with Rory, leaned into the embrace. He’d tolerated the lesson so long as Rory had hold of him.

  Elia would pace around and around the stones, counting the space, writing down her numbers to later draw a map of the circle. Lear had been proud when his daughter overlaid the stone map with a simple summer star map and showed how clear and smart the ancient star readers had been to lay this circle out just so. See, Ban? The earth itself made into the shape of stars!

  Show me, Lear had said, dismissing Ban as irrelevant.

  Now, Ban turned his back against the center stone and slid down to crouch at its base. Flattening his hands on the cold ground, Ban whispered, Blessings for Elia Lear, in the language of trees.

  The words scratched at his tongue, and the standing stone warmed his back. Ban drew a breath, sinking against the earth and the stone, relaxing his body. His eyes drifted shut. He listened.

  Chewing waves tugged out from the island with the vanishing tide. The purr of stones and the beat of his heart. Wind kissing his cheeks, scattering seed husks and dark petals across the gravelly earth here. Distant whispering trees clustered around streams and the thin Duv River that flowed from the northern Mountain of Teeth, through the White Forest, catching on boulders and the roots of ancient oak and ash, slick with spirits. Ban whispered, My name is Ban Errigal. My bones were made here with you.

  Ban Errigal, the trees hissed quietly.

  The island’s voice should have been stronger. It should have spoken to him last night, even far out on the Summer Seat ramparts. Or perhaps Ban was spoiled by the vibrant, glorious tones of Aremoria.

  Innis Lear.

  Here he smelled late summer roses and dry grass, salty sea and the tinge of fishy decay. Stone and earth, his own sweat. Maybe his memories of being a boy-witch here were thin; maybe the island always had spoken so tightly.

  But no: Ban was certain. Lear had done this. The fool king had weakened the ancient voice of the island when he forbade the rootwaters from flowing. Both earth and stars were needed for magic: roots and blood for power, the stars to align them. Without both, everything was wild, or everything was dead. Here, it was dying.

  Ban couldn’t—he wouldn’t let it happen. Not to the trees and wind. Not to this hungry island that birthed him. The only thing in his life to never let him go, to never choose someone else.

  Kneeling, Ban drew off his thin jacket and then untucked his linen shirt and removed it, too. Dropped both in a pile beside him.

  From a small folded pouch on his belt, he drew a sharp flint triangle and pressed the edge to his chest, over his heart. Blood, he whispered in the language of trees, slicing fast. Blood welled as the sting flared. It dripped a thin, dark line down his chest. Ban allowed it, but caught the stream upon his finger just before it reached the waist of his trousers. There, against his skin, he smeared it into the jagged language of trees, writing Innis Lear with marks like naked winter twigs.

  His chest ached with every breath, a low fire heating his skin and heart. Ban pressed his palm to the wound, caught trickling blood, and then clasped his hands together until both palms glinted scarlet.

  Here I am, he said to the wind, and leaned forward onto his hands and knees, giving the bloody prints to the earth. My power, and your power.

  Ban Errigal, the island trees hissed. Ban the Fox, the Fox, the Fox.

  The slice over his heart bled onto the ground, a dull dripping, a narrow thread of life between him and the island.

  The puddle shaped itself into a crescent, tips reaching away.

  Ban opened his eyes and looked into the crimson pool. He saw a word marked there, something close to promise.

  I promise, he whispered tenderly. I swear to you.

  Wind flew off the island, a cry of trees, rushing past him, dragging at his hair, and tears pricked suddenly in his eyes. The wind snatched his tears and shrieked off the cliff, crashing down, down, down to the rocks and sea foam.

  WELCOME!

  Ban smiled.

  He leaned back onto his heels, holding his bloody, dusty hands before him. Light, he said.

  Five tiny silver baubles of moonlight blossomed over his palms.

  He laughed, delighted.

  A soft noise echoed in response.

  Then a human voice: “You’ve become a wizard.”

  Ban lifted his head. Elia Lear stood across from him, part of the violet shadows. He wondered how long she’d been watching. Did she still understand the language of trees?

  The moon washed out her eyes and dress and found the reddish glints in her dark chainmail curls. It turned her face into a gold mask like the kind an earth saint would wear: black eyes, slash of mouth, wild ribbons and scraggly moss and vines for hair.

  Balancing the tiny stars still in his hands, he stood up slowly, his heart somehow lighter. That had always been her gift to him: she cut through all the angles of his anger and need, to a hidden spark of peace. “Elia,” he said, then, “Princess.”

  Elia’s face crumpled, becoming human again, in painful motion. “No more,” she whispered. Her fingers pulled lines into the front of her gown.

  Ban went to her and caught up her elbows, leaning in to offer her comfort. The balls of light dropped slow as bubbles, fading just before they hit the earth again. Elia clung to him, despite the blood and dust on his chest and hands. He put his arms full around her, his heart gasping between beats.

  “Ban Errigal,” she whispered, her cheek
pressed to his shoulder. “I never knew if I’d see you again. I hoped, but no more than hope. It is so good, so very good, to be held by you now.”

  “Like the last time,” he said, low in his throat, forcing the words out, “your father made a terrible decision.”

  She shuddered against him. Her hair teased his chin and jaw, smelling of spicy flowers still. Elia pulled away, though slid her hands down to his. She lifted one, touching the blood.

  “Wormwork,” he said.

  “It was beautiful.” She raised her eyes to his.

  “The earth has its own constellations.”

  Elia touched his chest, and Ban’s entire body stilled. Her finger skimmed above the heart-wound.

  He said, “Your father makes wormwork filthy, severs himself and all of you from the island’s heart for nothing but the sake of pure stars and insincere loyalties. It’s hurting the magic. And the island.”

  She pushed away from him, going to the nearest standing stone. Elia scratched her fingers down it, hard enough to flake off tiny edges of silver moon lichen. “There have been more poor harvests than good these past years, since you left. I’ve heard of sickness, too, in the forests, and fish dying. Fish! I thought—I thought when Gaela was queen it all would revive. That there was nothing to do but wait. The island does not love him, but we can all survive without love, for a time. All places have bad years, hard seasons. Especially an island like ours.”

  “Does Gaela speak to the wind?” Ban called softly.

  Elia shook her head and walked to the next stone, then the next, until she reached the center stone that he’d been crouched against. She wrapped her arms around it as far as they could go. “I can barely remember the language of trees.”

  He nearly smiled but was too sad. “In Aremoria, the trees sing and laugh.”

  “I thought they did not have magic there.”

  “It is unused, uncultivated, but still present. A current under all.” No one he’d met in Aremoria spoke to the trees, which made it seem like they’d been waiting just for him.

  Elia pressed her forehead to the stone. “My father…”