The Queens of Innis Lear

  His mouth went rigid. “That is my great regret, and for it I will not abandon him.”

  “What about us?” Gaela shoved herself toward him, glaring right into his dark gray eyes. “Do not abandon us, Uncle. Let that old man go.”

  “He needs my loyalty.”

  “You should obey your new, better king!”

  “Yet you are not that, Gaela Lear. And perhaps never shall be.”

  Fury darkened Gaela’s sight with spikes of crimson. She grabbed her uncle’s collar, drew her knife, and slashed it across his face.

  Kayo cried out, thrusting free of her grip. He stumbled, hands up and pressed to his cheek and eye. Blood poured through, as red as Gaela’s anger.

  A king had no need of brothers, nor uncles, she thought viciously, and cried, “This Oak Earl is no more. As the king before me stripped him of his titles, so do I. If he is seen upon my lands again it will be his death. Now get him out of Astora.”

  Gaela turned and raged back into the halls of the castle, mortally bruised, with her mother’s name on her tongue and a curse in her heart.

  TEN YEARS AGO, INNIS LEAR

  KAYO OF TARIA Queen did not know how to be a farmer. His people were caravanserai and noble governors, though he supposed perhaps five hundred years ago his ancestors might have herded goats along the dry steppe of the Second Kingdom.

  This wave-racked island squished beneath his boot; vibrant green moss and lush short grass surrounded him in this valley, marked by scatters of tiny yellow and purple flowers whose names Kayo did not yet know. He thought he recognized a mountain thistle—he could understand a fellow creature’s need for such a protective layer. Kayo tugged his own bright purple coat tighter, looking beyond the meadow to where, at the curve of the shallow stream, a cottage was tucked. Smoke lifted from the chimney; he was expected. Kayo wrinkled his nose at the long-haired cow chewing at a large bale of hay, and wandered toward the hill behind the cottage. It was bare of trees, but bright green, too, and little white sheep made slow grazing trails. Despite the verdant mossiness, it smelled most like stale rain and mud. Dampness clung to Kayo’s nose, and his short black curls seemed thrice as thick.

  “I’ve made you an earl. My Oak Earl,” the king of Innis Lear had said to him, four days ago at the Summer Seat. “Found you a steward and good stone manor. You’ll oversee several villages, and their reeves will report to you. The land is yours.”

  They’d walked along the yard together, during the break between rains that morning, in search of where Elia had hidden herself. “Thank you, Lear,” Kayo said carefully, rubbing his hands together against the dank ocean wind. It was late spring, but his bones had not yet thawed from the long winter. He’d months ago given in to Learish fashions, wrapping himself in wool and dark leather, and a fur-lined coat with a hood. His headscarf clung around his neck; Kayo couldn’t quite bear to leave it behind.

  He’d been given a choice: stay, become the Oak Earl, and sever ties of family to the Third Kingdom, rooting himself permanently to this island and the fortunes of the Lear dynasty. Or go. Be a caravan master, wander and travel, serve the empress, but lose privileges of family on this island, become no more than an honored guest when he chanced to pass through.

  Traditions and training pulled him toward the Third Kingdom, where he’d lived half his life, where he’d spent years building a reputation as a negotiator to run his own caravan on behalf of the empress one day. But a part of him had belonged to Innis Lear since he’d been sent to foster with Dalat as a boy. She’d been more a young mother to him than a sister, and her foreign husband had welcomed Kayo without fuss. This island had been her home. She’d loved it here, the fluffy sheep and harsh wind, the eating ocean and hearty, temperamental people. The roots were so deep and mysterious, Dalat said, she felt as though God had put her here, in a place where her curious spirit would never fall to satisfaction.

  Kayo felt the same sense of mystery, though it unnerved him where Dalat had been intrigued.

  Kay Oak of Lear. The witch of the White Forest had named him so the night of the first anniversary of Dalat’s death.

  My Oak Earl, Lear himself had said.

  They did not communicate, the witch and the king, of that Kayo was certain. So how did they call him by the same Learish name? What mystery of this island’s roots explained that? Did the trees whisper names into the king’s dreams?

  Lear had put a hand on Kayo’s shoulder, there in the front courtyard of the Summer Seat. The king was some thirty years Kayo’s elder, and it was apparent by the silver in his loose brown hair, the wrinkles making his long face longer.

  “Kayo, I know yours to be a difficult decision,” the king said. A seriousness focused his blue eyes in a way Kayo was unused to; usually Lear appeared more dreamy, looking through people and walls. “To choose one loyalty over another, exchanging family and name for family and name. But I must insist, just as I must consolidate what I can now. There are those on this island who would challenge me. And my girls. And for that, I would have you stay. Be mine.”

  Kayo frowned, knowing plenty about those who would challenge the king. But Lear smiled and continued, “I’ve had a prophecy read for you, and your stars are rather interesting, Kayo. One thing is certain: we will be great friends so long as I am king. So”—Lear winked like a mischievous child—“tell me you will stay, and be my brother.”

  It was said on Innis Lear that their king had been born under two constellations: the Twin Star, and the Star of Crowns. One promised he would be pulled in many directions, and the other that he would be king. But as the third-born son it had been very unlikely he would rule, unless tragedy struck the crown. So he believed, so all believed. But the last great king, his father, trusted in the prophecy and named Lear his heir, but Lear was a boy and full of dedication to the stars. He left the island instead, to study in the greatest star cathedrals on the continent for years. His brothers had remained, learning the laws and the people. When the king grew ill, Lear was sent for, and he returned, taking up his heavenly work in the chapels and towers of Innis Lear. The great king died, and his final wish was that Lear take the crown, witnessed by his first and second sons, witnessed by his retainers and earls, witnessed by dukes and healers. But Lear refused. The stars were his vocation: he was crowned for the stars, not by them, he argued. How better to serve the people, the kingdom, than as a royal star-reader, the most gifted and precise of them?

  In only three short weeks from this refusal to take the throne, both his brothers were dead. By accident, and by sudden illness. Lear had no choice but to take up the crown in the midst of tragedy, and never again questioned the will of the stars—if he had not, his brothers might well have lived. His devotion had been a thing Dalat admired in her husband, for her heart, too, was devoted to a singular faith.

  But Kayo’s was unsure. He questioned God and also the stars, constantly, and could think of a dozen interpretations one might apply to the Twin Star and the Star of Crowns that would spool out very differently than Lear’s. As he’d learned, the way everyone on Innis Lear must learn, what stars meant and how the prophecies worked, he’d come to realize they could function as a decision-making tool. When he faced a choice, a prophecy could suggest one path, and upon hearing it, Kayo immediately knew if he agreed or not. The prophecies made clear to Kayo not truth or destiny, but his own mind.

  As for God—well, God created Kayo curious and questioning, so God could handle the inquiries.

  “What is the prophecy?” he asked.

  “The Star of Third Birds touching against the horizon at the same place as the Root of the Oak, and the silver-smiling Moon of Songs, Kayo, crowning its course almost exactly. You and I travel this life together: me on a certain, constant path, you moving parallel to, but with me, until my crown sinks below the horizon. I can have it drawn out, if you like. The shapes are fluid, and repeating, in the way your people put in your art so much. Yes, she’d have liked it, too,” the king murmured, and his body stille
d in sorrow.

  Kayo shared the moment of remembrance by putting his hand on Lear’s shoulder. Dalat shouldn’t have died so young, no matter the reasons.

  “I remember you had only twelve years when you came to be with her,” Lear said softly. “Just older than Elia now.”

  “We should find her,” Kayo said, honestly glad of an interruption. He longed to set eyes on his youngest niece again. It had been months, for at the start of winter he’d gone with the elder two sisters to Astora, where ferocious Gaela chose to foster herself. She’d been training with Astore’s retainers, and invited Kayo there to teach what he knew of fighting, which was not too much. He was trained to protect a caravan and his own body, not attack mounted or steel-armored soldiers. Gaela had taken his tutelage, and asked a hundred questions about the queens and empresses of the Third Kingdom. Kayo tried to turn all his responses back to Innis Lear, to Dalat and how Gaela could use the history of the empresses to shore up her education and eventual rule. Regan always listened, too, and sometimes Astore, though the duke laughed at putting women in charge. He said, “Unless they make themselves like our princess Gaela, it seems a waste of women’s talents.”

  Kayo was not fond of the Duke Astore. The man was proud, and a bully, and Kayo had been reluctant to leave Gaela alone there under his domineering influence. But the ever-loyal, ever-cool Regan had reminded him, “No one does a thing to Gaela that she does not permit. Besides, Astore is strong, as are his stars. He understands how the throne of Innis Lear works.”

  Kayo had understood then: Gaela intended to marry Col Astore. He tried to tell Dalat’s firstborn that she should not join herself to a man already married to himself, that she needed a husband who would support her in all. Gaela frowned as if Kayo had begun to turn blue. “Astore holds the most power on Innis Lear aside from the king. I will make his power mine, and support myself.” She said it as if any fool could see.

  He’d sworn on the memory of his beloved sister to protect her daughters, but it seemed to him the elder two hardly needed his help.

  The valley where Kayo now stood was at the southern end of the tract of land Lear had granted him. Beautiful, though he knew that except for these three months when the flowers bloomed, it would be swathes of pale yellow and a gray, dripping green under cold blue skies and sheer clouds. He would miss the red and gilded desert.

  “Be mine,” Lear had said.

  He meant, Give up your allegiance to your grandmother the empress. Let go of Taria Queen. Be only Kay Oak, brother to the king, uncle to three ferocious and cool and gentle princesses. Sink your name into the rocks of my island.

  Yet the king had asked, not ordered. And the king did not know the secret Dalat and the witch of the White Forest had begged him to keep. The king merely expected a man to want a title, to want the friendship of a king, and the ties of family, to prefer this mossy island to the vast deserts, fertile riverbanks, and desperately sharp mountain peaks of all the lands of the Third Kingdom, despite the milky people here, despite their confusion of force and strength. They did not even believe in God here, only in whispering winds and the navel of the earth and the cold promise of dead stars.

  But Lear was right. Kayo did want a title. He did like being respected on sight and never asked who his mother and grandmother had been, as if only their names made him matter. Here he mattered for being himself.

  That alone almost convinced him.

  They had found Elia Lear playing alone at the Summer Seat’s navel, a well that ran straight down forever into the dark depths of the rock beneath their feet. It was a plain well, in the center of a courtyard where roses crawled up the painted walls. A single woman, pale-skinned and unadorned, sat upon a bench mending trousers. It was not one of Dalat’s attendants. And Kayo realized in that moment he’d not seen his sister’s women at all. He touched Lear’s forearm, pausing before they entered the court.

  “Where is Satiri? Where is Yna?”

  Lear’s stark eyebrows lifted. “I sent them home.”

  “Why? They’d been here for nearly twenty years! This was their home. They were hers.”

  “Yes,” the king whispered. His face bent with grief. “So I remembered any time I saw them. They had to leave.”

  “But … Elia is alone.” Horror made him release the king too abruptly. Dalat had made a thriving home here, surrounded herself with friends both born of Innis Lear and brought from the Third Kingdom. It had been a braided compromise, now all undone. He looked at the king, up at the sheer sky, then to Elia, a brown little nut of a girl.

  “She has me,” Lear said. “She is my daughter, and she has me. And all her people, those of Innis Lear. And we must have you.”

  Kayo shook his head once. “But her mother, her sisters, they’re not here. And now her mother’s people are gone from around her, too?”

  “We are enough, Kayo. We will make it so.”

  Even Kayo would not be enough. It wasn’t fair; it unrooted the girl before she could understand or choose on her own. “You should let me take her to visit her mother’s people.”

  The king looked dazed. “No. Maybe—someday, but no.”

  Frustrated, unsure why he felt so violently upended, Kayo called out, putting all the warmth he could muster into his voice. He strode ahead of the king and opened his arms. “Elia!”

  The girl smiled brightly, then quickly the smile dimmed into a softer one, as if she’d checked her own instinct. Kayo’s heart rolled. He lifted her up and hugged her, swinging her a little so that her toes knocked against his knees. A small giggle pressed against his neck; the princess was wet. Her dress stuck to him, her skin was clammy, and the kiss she put on his cheek was cold. Kayo set her down. “Were you out in all the rain?”

  “Yes,” she admitted shyly. “It felt good, and I thought I could hear the roses, whispering about…”

  “About what?”

  “Nothing. Hello, Father,” she said, smoothing down her dress. The tilt of her chin and wide black eyes were so like Dalat’s that Kayo was struck speechless. The girl’s hair was bound back plainly under a soaking wet green scarf.

  “Elia, you should find shelter when it rains, and this well … it is dangerous.” The king touched one long finger to the black rocks of the well.

  “I won’t fall in, Father,” she said, hiding her laugh, but not that she found him silly.

  The king maintained his frown.

  “Come here, Elia. Let me see you.” Kayo knelt, holding Elia’s shoulders. He put her exactly at arm’s length. “You’re taller since the winter, aren’t you? And beautiful as your mother. Are you well?”

  She nodded, staring into his eyes. “Your eyes are so very gray,” she said with a little awe.

  “My mother’s second husband was a Godsman,” Kayo said, then corrected himself: “My father, that is.”

  “Oh,” she said. “A Godsman.” She touched his face, and Kayo felt such a swell of affection for her, tears blurred the edges of his sight. “It’s all right, Uncle,” she said calmly.

  “I know, starling.”

  “Or it will be. One of those. I helped Father look at your stars, did you know?”

  “I did not!” Kayo let his brows rise. “You must be very skilled.”

  “I like to draw the patterns. What is a Godsman?”

  Kayo smiled sadly. “Holy men, a tribe of them, but I cannot tell you more, for their secrets are held close—even from their sons, if we do not become one of them.”

  King Lear said, “What do you think, Elia, if we call Kayo our Oak Earl?”

  “I don’t think it will make up for not being a Godsman like his father.”

  A thing pinched his heart, and Kayo gripped her shoulders a bit too tightly.

  Elia leaned in and hugged him. “But we’ve never had an Oak Earl on Innis Lear before.”

  Without hesitation, Kayo had said, “Then I will be your first.”

  So he would learn to farm.

  Kayo walked now across squishy bog, east
toward the center of his land. His land. He wondered how long it would be before he would be used to stewardship of something so entire as land; a piece of an island. Would it change him, to finally have a place all his own, stationary and complete? His mind shied away from it, rather imagining his ownership fell upon the revenue or produce only, the parts that were defined by a king or a man, not the land itself, which only God, surely, could claim.

  Though on Innis Lear, they said the land claimed itself. The trees had their own language, some of which Kayo had learned. The wind whispered and the birds sang messages from the stars to the roots or the roots to the stars. Kayo took deep, questing breaths, as if to bring the island into himself.

  That witch last year had said, The island’s roots and wind of our trees know what Dalat of Taria Queen and Innis Lear has asked of you. The trees know your worth.

  Kayo found a copse of trees, small and spindly, with white and gray bark. Their narrow leaves shivered and tittered together, flapping pale green. He touched a ruffle of leaves, and asked, “Can you understand me? I need a place to begin.”

  Wind fluttered the end of Kayo’s headscarf, where it looped casually around his neck. He unspooled it reverently, kneeling at the base of one white tree. His trousers soaked up muck and cold water. The scarf had been a gift from his mother when Kayo reached his majority. All his life he’d been of both Taria Queen and Innis Lear, moving from one to the other over the three-month-long journey. Tied here by adventure, love, and his sister, tied there by blood and tradition.

  The headscarf was vibrant ocher, and edged with teal silk. Precious and too fine for daily wear, it overwhelmed his eyes, making them like empty mirrors in too much sun; but teal, Dalat had told him once, was his best color.

  Kayo of Taria Queen pressed the scarf into the cold, unfamiliar earth. He used his hands to dig a nest for it between two ghostly gray roots, and buried it there.

  When he stood up, he was Kayo, the Oak Earl, so named by the island, a princess, and the king of Innis Lear, called to walk a parallel path with his brother, until the day Lear’s crown lowered beyond the horizon.