The Queens of Innis Lear

by Tessa Gratton

  Lear’s nose wrinkled. “My retainers are all star-blessed; this boy is not. His wrongful birth and dangerous stars offend us. And he must be farther away, so as to end the influence his stars have upon you. Your stars deserve more from you both.”

  Horror opened up her face. “Father!” she breathed, eyes wide, having never before realized how deeply he scorned Ban.

  “You’re jealous,” Ban said quietly. “Elia doesn’t love you best, and she doesn’t hate wormwork like you do, because she’s not a coward.”

  The king stepped forward, hand raised, and Elia threw herself between her father and Ban, ducking, waiting for the explosion of pain.

  It did not come.

  “Get away from him,” Lear said, dangerously soft.

  Fear slid through her blood, freezing her still and silent.

  Ban was wrenched away from her as Errigal dragged him to a horse. “Get on, boy,” he growled, rough in his attempt to boost Ban up.

  Lear took Elia by the back of the neck and held her. “This is the right thing,” he said. “The dragon-tail moon set too near Calpurlugh on your birthday, too near those base roots—that influence will ruin you. And if it poisons your heart, it will poison all the island.”

  Tears fell hot and straight down Elia’s cheeks. She said no more, staring at Ban.

  He returned her stare, face ashen in the dawn light, and Elia remembered leaning against the rose-vine-covered wall in the garden only yesterday, Ban’s head in her lap; she’d toyed with the ends of his thick hair and traced the shape of his lips. He’d said, Tell me a prophecy for us, and she’d replied, I am the stars to your roots, Ban Errigal. Together we are everything we need.

  But if she’d taken the time to think through the star patterns as they had been, instead of answering merely as she wanted, would she have foreseen this? In enough time to change it?

  Why hadn’t she taken the star-signs seriously before now?

  Had Elia lost her way in the worms and roots? Could her father be right about her focus?

  She moved her lips in the shape of his name.

  Rory was beside her, suddenly, taking her hand. “I’m sorry,” he said very softly, voice thick with regret. “I’m so sorry, Elia.”

  She nodded. Of course he was sorry; he’d miss Ban, too. But not like she would, not as if his heart were sliced in two. Then Rory was gone, joining his brother and father, and Errigal’s party left through the thick gate.

  The wind teased at her ears, licking her hair, and said, Don’t let me go, Elia.

  Elia could not speak a response, in any language. Her heart too full of tearing, crashing pain. She gasped and held her breath, held everything still.

  Her father’s fingers dug into the muscles of her neck, and he sighed. He petted her then, gently. “You’ll understand one day,” Lear said. “I adore you, my star, more than anything, and the heavens do as well. The stars will protect you, they and I. You’ll need for nothing else.”

  The more she tried to speak, to shape some farewell in the language of trees—words the wind might deliver to Ban—the faster her tears fell, the thicker her throat grew. Elia thought that if she spoke those words—any words now—she would burst into a thousand shards of hot glass, never to be repaired. Would Ban die in Aremoria? Would she ever see him again?

  She took another deep breath, held it, and slowly, slowly let it go, breathing away all the pain, pushing it out to the rising dawn. Every breath sank deeper into Elia’s cracks, into the dark spaces behind her heart, into her stomach and blood and bones, and as she exhaled the hurt was expelled, too, leaving only starlight inside her.

  Her father said, “Yes, my Calpurlugh, my truest star, things will be set right. You’ll see. Better to let him go now, than when it is too late, when it would have irreparably ruined you. I know. I know. We might bring him home someday, if ever such a path is discovered by the stars.”

  Lear put his hand against the crown of her head, and Elia closed her eyes, choosing to believe him, because the alternative was to die.

  Part

  FOUR

  ELIA

  THE ISLAND TREMBLED when Elia Lear set foot upon it again.

  Dawn cast her a pale violet shadow, reaching ahead along the white beach. Tiny grains of sand shifted, slipping toward the waves as if drawn by an invisible tide.

  Elia Lear, the island whispered, first to itself, then to her. Elia is home!

  In the three days since, the island had not yet fallen silent.

  All she needed to do was listen.

  For years Elia had been only watching, as if her eyes were all: watched the stars shift in their perfect patterns, watched her father study and proselytize and grow ever frailer, watched her sisters expand and retract and conform to expectations and to losses, watched her own self diminish until she was nothing, reflecting only her sisters’ disappointment, her father’s obsession, a sky with a single fading star in the north.

  What about the stars taught you to forget the wind? The island pressed. What was the moment when you stopped hearing us whisper?

  As Elia sat on a cliff now, overlooking the churning sea, listening and listening and listening to the voices in the wind, she could not pinpoint such a time in her memory.

  The loss had been so gradual, she did not even realize.

  A slow-forming mist, a wasting disease.

  The island told her stories to fill her aching chest: that Elia’s first words in the language of trees had been thank you. She had once known the names of every tree along the road between Dondubhan and the Summer Seat, and made a rhyme of them when she was twelve. Her favorite game had been finding constellations in the splatter of lichen on an old tree. She wove a cloak of emerald beetles, to wear beside a young boy with a shield of golden butterflies. Hearing the stories in the voice of the wind brought them back to her, and Elia cast her memories further and deeper, recreating a legend for herself until she found the answer to the island’s question.

  Her father had said, We might bring him home someday, if ever such a path is discovered by the stars.

  So Elia had stopped listening to the wind, had taken fully to the stars in order to hunt down that path, with calm and focus and trust. Until she was so calm, so focused, so filled with trust in the stars alone, that the island’s voices quieted, and fell away. This was what the island revealed to her, now that she could hear again: though she had still walked with her feet against the roots, Elia had let her father put boundaries on her magic, built ramparts so subtle and strong she had thought they’d been her own design.

  He did not do it on purpose, she whispered in the language of trees.

  But he did do it, the wind said.

  I let him, Elia said, I did not notice. He was my refuge, a strong father who loved me, who chose me … over my sisters. Leaning back against the ragged grasses and gorse of the cliff top, Elia stared at the afternoon sky, at the billowing heavy white clouds, and wondered what the stars would say, if they could speak back to her. How their voices might sound.

  The wind rushed, the wind tugged.

  Tell me about Ban, she said.

  Ban is loud.

  Elia laughed, loud, too, and surprised herself at the boldness of it.

  “Talking to yourself?” Aefa called, gasping as she climbed the steep path. They’d made their stay here in a small abandoned cottage suggested to them by the people of Port Comlack, where they’d first walked together upon arrival. Of course Elia was eminently recognizable: she’d even frightened some of the townspeople with her sudden appearance, for they’d all heard startling tales of her flight to Aremoria and Lear’s wild Zenith Court. Though efforts had been made to accommodate Elia and her attendant, to feed them and offer beds and even once an entire house for their use, Elia had said no, though with much thanks. She’d said she came home to make things right, but needed only solitary rest, and did they know of an unused place for her to sleep, a place that had become nearly part of the land again? Where she might comm
une with the voice of Innis Lear?

  Until the island claimed her, Elia deserved nothing from its people.

  “Yes,” Elia said to Aefa now, still spread on her back. The sharp blue sky burned her eyes. “I talk to myself, though I think the island is listening.”

  Strange she’d seemed, no doubt, to those she encountered, but enough still believed in the spirit of the island, and honored the earth saints, that they liked to hear the daughter of their king, the one given to the stars, speaking with the roots.

  She and Aefa had been directed to this old lookout, abandoned when a newer lighthouse was erected on a promontory slightly more northward, one which could see farther up the coast from Port Comlack. Built of stone into one room, the old cottage perched at the edge of a limestone cliff slowly crumbling into the sea. Crusted in salt, it held only an ancient hooded hearth, a table, and a bedframe she and Aefa filled in with collected grass, to sleep on together. Elia had boiled water and scrubbed it all down, chapping her fingers, while Aefa concocted thin soup from supplies La Far had pressed upon them, and tended the fire. The first evening, Elia had stared out the window, listening to the hiss of wind and crash of waves. The ocean did not speak a language she knew, though she wondered if words concealed themselves in the rush of salt and water.

  After Aefa fell into an exhausted sleep, Elia wrote letters to her father and Ban Errigal in the ashes atop the hearthstone, then wiped them away.

  She did not yet know the words to write to her sisters.

  All the first night, Elia had remained awake, shoulder pressed to Aefa’s spine, and stared at the heather thatching that hung thick but tattered between rafters. Moonlight streamed in the window, and Elia listened.

  The sun rose, and she wandered outside onto the cliff, to listen more. The island chanted long strings of words and offered poems about things she’d known but forgotten, and things she’d never guessed about the lives of bumblebees and blackbirds. The island knew her, and gave her tender songs; it gave her the truth of where to find a new vein of rubies in the north; it gave her a word for the fleeting light between shadows in a windblown forest; it gave her the death of a beautiful ghost owl, blood spilled into the earth with violent magic; it told her a joke she did not quite understand. Elia laughed anyway to make the island happy, for in every other way Innis Lear was miserable.

  This was a fractured island, an island of one people torn between loyalties and faiths, all in conflict: what mattered most? A king must at least hear his people, who in turn hear the island, but Lear had cut it all away, and listened only to the stars. The trees had not grown strong new roots in years, not since they’d had a king who spoke with them. Her father had closed off the rootwater so the people could not share it, and the island forgot the taste of people’s blood and spit, so how could it recognize its own? The wind raged or sagged, uncertain and frustrated without strong trees to chatter with, or clever birds to lift high. It forgot the patterns to dance for the best seeding, how to keep animals ready for the change of seasons. Her sisters, the island whispered, did not trust the wind, not even the one who longed for rootwater, the one who bled onto the roots of the island as if she could provide all the sustenance it needed. As if they could be replenished by one who took ever more than she could give, wrapped in her own loss.

  We remember when all of you were born, and your mother laughed, singing a song with words we do not know, but that is broken now.

  How do I weave it all back together? Elia asked.

  And the island said, Be everything.

  An impossible answer to an unfair question.

  So Elia listened throughout her second day, until Aefa returned again for the night, from another foray into Port Comlack and along the outer edges of the farmland nearby. She had asked all she met after the king or his Fool, for rumors and loyalties and even just opinions, about anything, learning only that a contingent of Lear’s retainers camped at the south foot of the White Forest.

  “I have fresh fish!”

  Smiling, Elia listened to the wind flutter Aefa’s skirt as the girl collapsed to the ground, and it teased Elia’s earlobes with tiny fingers, tugging her hair. The princess smelled the fish then, and said, “I’ll help you prepare them.”

  “Already clean, ready to cook, for neither of us knows better.” Aefa plopped beside Elia, the bag of fish in her lap. “We’d end up choking on tiny bones if we tried ourselves. We are helpless in some areas.”

  Elia rolled her head to touch it to Aefa’s knee. “Me more than you.”

  “True, but that’s a princess’s prerogative.”

  The girls cooked their fish on the hearthstone at the cottage and ate it messily together outside. Aefa asked when they would go, and Elia said, “Soon. Our fathers are safe, for now. The trees say both Lear and his Fool are in Hartfare with Brona and Kay Oak.”

  “With my mother, then, too,” Aefa said happily, raking the coals she’d kept glowing as they ate.

  “Aefa…” The princess hesitated, reached out and touched her friend’s knuckles. “You’ve never stopped making fire.”

  Aefa’s eyebrows flew high. She snapped and whispered fire in the language of trees, and a spark lit at the tips of her fingers. It burned for a flash and went out.

  “Are you a wizard, too?” Elia whispered. She did not think so, but she had to ask.

  “No. I only make fire, and honestly, sometimes when I’m not with you it doesn’t work. But I couldn’t stop.”

  “Why?”

  “I needed to remind you that such things are possible.”

  Elia slept that night weary and relaxed, falling away to the island’s low, rough lullaby.

  Again at dawn, Elia wandered down into the lowlands, where the grass grew tall over the edges of the Innis Road, that long path leading from the Summer Seat in the southwest to Errigal at the southeast. Once the road had been set with granite, but now grass and weeds grew up over it, and the flat stones were sunken into the earth. Heather pulled away in all directions, streaking over the hills and valleys like low purple mist, and boulders and rough rocks jutted up, ruining the land for farms. This was grazing land, or land for digging up great star stones. And then for collecting well caps, too. It was harsh and beautiful and Elia’s favorite part of the island. Unlike the rocky cliffs of the Summer Seat, unlike the furious ocean, unlike the emerald hills north at Dondubhan, or even the thick, wet shadows of the great White Forest, these southern moors gave her the feeling of flight. The wind gusted, nothing slowing it down. It roared with vivid life.

  When Elia had given her heart to the stars, she’d stopped loving her island, too.

  Dark clouds gathered far to the north: a storm brewing at the far end of the White Forest. By this afternoon, it would rage. For now, the wind sang, brushing her hands against the bearded wheat: she remembered how she’d loved the sensation when she was a girl, how it would make an almost-conversation, a loving murmur between her skin and the earth. The breeze blew, drawing her attention back again: there halfway up a sweeping hill stood a hawthorn tree, bent and scraggled by pressing, constant wind. She climbed to it and grasped the peeling old bark. Most leaves had dropped away, and the bright red haws already budded along the twigs and branches.

  The tree shuddered under her touch. Elia shivered, too. What would you tell me, ancient lady?

  You were missed, the tree croaked out, slow and so very quiet.

  Tears pricked her eyes, and Elia closed them, pressing the side of her face to one rough line of trunk. She knew the tree did not mean only this month, since she’d gone to Aremoria: it meant since she was a child, since she sang magic and practiced duets with the roots. She felt sad for herself, and for her father, who had never done such things. And then sad for everyone who did not listen to trees, who lived alone and in silence.

  Kneeling, Elia cried harder. She touched her cheeks and put her tears from her fingers to the hawthorn. Her weeping shook her shoulders, as the hawthorn shook, too, and she bent over herse
lf. This was not the overwhelming, unknowable grief from before; no, she understood now what she had lost, and why. A wild tree grew in her heart. Its roots wove throughout her guts, thick with worms of death and rebirth; it stretched its crown up into the bright, open space in her mind, where she worshipped the shining stars.

  The hawthorn shifted its trunk, bending around her, making a lap for Elia to curl against.

  Elia cried, and she let go of so many things, even those she had no names for, so she called them instead by the trees’ word for the light between shadows. And let them all go.

  When she finished, Elia lay quiet and soothed, scraped empty as bark peeled in a storm. She thought she might finally be ready to fill herself up again with a new thing, this time born of her own choosing.

  The hawthorn whispered, Are you ready?

  Elia shuddered, and kissed the hawthorn tree. Ready to what, grandmother?

  An urgent wind tugged at Elia’s curls, drawing her attention to the gathering storm.

  The island answered, To become a queen.

  THE FOX

  BAN THE FOX did not hold his liquor well, or much at all.

  It was perhaps the thing that made him most aware of his relative youth, despite having aged so fast in Aremoria’s frequent border wars.

  Leaning against the smoke-stained wooden walls of what passed for the Errigal Steps public house, Ban was surrounded by soldiers and retainers, those belonging to his father and those from Connley. Once again, the morning had been spent in war exercises, and Ban was exhausted. He’d led three charges and organized the overall structure of the games, both to prove his martial worth to Connley as well as to instruct the duke’s army in the techniques he’d learned during his fostering in Aremoria. But island soldiers were unused to facing cavalry or mounted spearmen, and the new methods were harder to teach than Ban had expected.

  He tried not to imagine what Morimaros would say if he found Ban exposing their army’s weaknesses so readily. Even if the Fox did it to further ingratiate himself to Connley, in order to spy on behalf of Aremoria, it was a tenuous rope to walk.