The Queens of Innis Lear
If only the island would counsel her, perhaps Elia would not feel so alone and unsure. But since her father had died, the voice of the wind and the trees had been nothing but a rush of air, a hiss of grief and pain, and the stars too seemed dim, hiding behind mournful clouds.
Brona said the island hadn’t reacted so badly when the last king died. She’d only been a girl, but she remembered. There had been raining and storms then, too—though nothing quite like the great gasp of wind that had accompanied the moment of Lear’s final breath. And never before could Brona recall this terrible silence.
But finally, tonight, the island called her.
Elia.
She moved more quickly, turning through the calm, dark forest in the direction she was beckoned.
Brona had guessed this, too. Soon the island will show you how to be queen, if you keep listening. There is a bird of reaping that flies through all my holy bones, in the direction of the saint of stars. That is where the future is sanctified by the past, Elia, and life and death are nothing but different shapes of the moon. You will listen, and the island will know you.
Her boots crunched over drying autumn leaves, and Elia could see everything before her: layers of gray and silver shades, the darkest purples and flashes of emerald when the sliver of moon caught a glimpse of her through the wind-tossed trees. A trickle of liquid starlight when she came across a stream, slipping and weeping around stones and swirling pools, splashing the eager roots that dug down the bank.
Elia.
She found a wall of sudden darkness, rising behind a hedge of rose vines and ash trees.
A real wall, built of very old granite and limestone, blue as the moon and creamy light. Black vines tangled and braided like wild hair all along the walls, darkening the stone, dry and wrinkled in many places.
It was the first star cathedral.
Lear had come here, a decade ago, and brought with him a round stone to close off the navel well. As he closed them all across the island, denying any power but that of the stars.
Elia’s heartbeat slowed to a crawl, as if to join the creeping, dark pace of this entire world. She walked around the structure, thinking of the one time she’d come here as a child, before her mother died. Perhaps she’d been six or seven, holding Dalat’s hand as they entered the grand cathedral, with both Elia’s sisters at her side and a retinue behind. Lear himself had not been there, that Elia could recall, but most of the memory was a faded curl of smiles and bright blue sky. She remembered making pretty noises, softly touching the edges of a copper bowl half filled with water, and reading the poem marked into the north wall with her mother helping her form the words.
Now Elia found the doors open for her, though barely. As if they’d been closed tight, but something—the size of a deer or smaller—had shoved one side, leaving a crescent smear through the rotten leaves and mud piled against the outside. The thick wood smelled moldy, and she touched her hand to it, brushing gentle fingers against the rough corner and down to the iron handle. Splotches of lichen decorated both metal and wood, and Elia breathed deeply of the earthy wet smell as she slipped between the heavy doors.
Starlight seeped through the ruin. It never had known a roof, but now the effect was more haunting than holy. It felt like a place gone to seed much longer than ten years ago: half a century or more.
The benches and wooden chairs had split and been overgrown with not only moss, but tall and wispy grass. Abandoned nests from squirrels and doves moldered and fell to pieces in the old sconces and narrow shelves where earth saint statues and little altars once stood, most in pieces now scattered against the floor. Vines had grown across the southern aisle, and roses overtaken the entire eastern wall. A tree, an entire living ash, had broken through the floor in the west, pushing up and up with elegant limbs toward the night sky.
And there, in the center, stood the well.
The round granite cap Lear had once deployed in enmity had cracked down the middle, great stone halves fallen to either side like broken, tired wings. They leaned against the well itself, revealing the mouth to the night.
From the black waters came a soft, whispering song that smelled of decay and spring flowers.
Elia picked her way there, eyes stuck on the stone mouth, her lips parted so she could taste the air.
Water darkened the fissures between the rough rocks of the well. She touched her fingers to the dampness, and then touched her tongue.
Wet, healthy earth, metallic and heady.
Elia.
“I am here. Elia, of Lear,” she said, her voice echoing softly all around. I’m here, she said again in the language of trees. I’m listening.
Drink, breathed the voice of the well.
She leaned over the edge, peering into the darkness. She saw a bare glint far below, but no rope nor bucket. No dipper with which to reach toward the water that glimmered and beckoned.
The darkness reached up toward her, and Elia felt herself falling forward. She slipped slowly down and down the stone channel toward the heart of Innis Lear. Roots caressed her as she fell, and a soft bed of moss finally caught her, damp and soaking, gloriously bright green and smelling like springtime. Lights winked all around, waves lapping against a far shore, crystals in the black cavern, sparkling and laughing like stars but made of stone. Elia opened her mouth, and the moss lifted her up, giving her into the embrace of roots that tugged and rolled her through the island’s bedrock, through the fertile mud fields and beneath stretching moorland. Trees whispered hello, worms caught at her hair, and the tickling legs of root insects kissed her in passing. She laughed, though earth pressed against every part of her, even her lips and tongue and eyes.
And then the wind came, and she flew up again, her blood soaring through her veins, her heartbeat a dance, a song, and Elia was not alone. She spun upright with a group of silver spirits, weaving through the flashing shadows of the White Forest. Where their toes tapped, mushrooms and wildflowers grew, and in their wake floated perfect heart-shaped moon moths, lighting a path.
A crown was gently placed on her head, woven of tiny white flowers, and Elia sat down on a throne of ancient blue-gray granite, worn smooth from a hundred queens and kings.
The crown fell apart, then, and petals tumbled down her hair and cheeks, landing in her palms and on her tongue. Elia swallowed, and a sharpness slithered down her throat, slowing her heart, turning her flesh to stone and her bones to water, until she sank into the granite seat, part of the world.
She sighed, and the island’s wind sighed, too; she laughed, and the island laughed. When rain dripped onto the roots and leaves and peaks of the mountain, she wept.
Elia came back to herself slowly. Curled on the ruined floor of the star cathedral, pressed to the well, her arms pillowing her head. Sitting, she blinked: light in the sky told her it was morning, though whether a morning immediately following her midnight sojourn, or a morning a hundred years later, Elia could not immediately say.
She thought of dancing with the earth saints in her dream. A flash of white, a flit of bright shadow high above, startled her, and she looked up toward the spires.
It was no saint, but an old ghost owl; it drifted silently down toward her in a graceful arc. Elia got to her knees, watching with her breath held, in case by exhaling she might scatter the spell.
The fierce owl was beautiful, creamy and white with a pattern of speckles down its wings and a heart-shaped face, with solid black eyes calm on her own.
Held in its small, sharp beak was a crushed wreath of hemlock. Like the one her father had worn when he died, like the one that had disintegrated in Elia’s dream.
The owl landed on the stone floor with a click of talons and dropped the crown at her knee.
She shivered, and listened to the island.
Eat of the flower, and drink of the roots, said the White Forest around her, and the wind blew the message against the four cathedral spires.
Eat of the flower, and drink of the roots.
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Elia understood.
A bargain between herself and the island. This would make her the true queen of Innis Lear.
She carefully picked up the crown. Thank you, she said to the owl, bowing her head. It shrugged its folded wings.
And so Elia Lear knelt, as dawn rose over the star cathedral, across from the watchful owl, with a hemlock crown in her lap. Listening, and thinking. And wanting.
She did not wish to be the queen.
The sun rose, warming the sky to a pale blue. Wind growled and whined overhead, still longing for order, still sad over the lost king. The trees hissed and whispered, though not to Elia any longer. Everything waited. They would have her choose.
If she did this, she was the queen of Innis Lear.
Not her sisters, who would hate her and fight her forever.
If she did this, Elia could never again dream of only stars, or only a small taste of magic. She would be the warp and weft of the island’s life, between the harsh land and the people.
Am I the only possibility? she asked, desperately. Surely there could be someone else, another who could take up this burden, someone to delight in the joys and the power. Regan would speak with the trees, accept this love, and Gaela was strong, ready for hardship. But would either woman listen to the heart of the island?
Elia, whispered the trees.
She did not want to make this choice.
Brona Hartfare had kept the rootwaters alive for twelve years. She deserved this honor, the allegiance of Innis Lear. And Kayo could be an excellent king by her side, raised as he had been to leadership, to mediation and economy. The island loved the witch. Loved both of them. Elia should bring the hemlock crown to Brona, and tell her the secret to getting rootwater running in her veins, to have the island see her and support her reign. Then Elia could leave, could be what she’d always wanted: a priest, a witch. Or even a wife—she could find Ban, save him, take him from his hatred and anger: choose him, choose a life of magic together, simple and belonging and easy.
Was that the way to save everyone, to be everything and fail at nothing? To give up this power and responsibility?
Or was that only what she thought she wanted, because she was afraid?
Elia, whispered the trees.
The witch is calling your name.
Your girl is calling your name.
We are calling your name.
Elia stood and held the hemlock carefully in her hands.
Sisters,
Our father is dead.
I send this letter in four copies, to find you either at Dondubhan, the Summer Seat, Astora, or Connley Castle, hoping to reach you in one of the corners of Innis Lear.
He died with me, suddenly, underneath a starry sky. I suspect you would prefer it had been painful, but he was at peace.
The island is not.
It longs for a king, and we must choose now amongst ourselves. We must be enough together to meet the island’s needs. Come to me at Errigal Keep, and we will decide there, where the iron sleeps.
Regan, the trees told me of your loss—I am so very sorry that your husband, too, has died. I know you loved him. I am learning something of love lately, and I hope you are finding strength in Gaela as always, and in the presence of Ban Errigal, and in knowing Connley’s bones will always be part of the stones and roots of Innis Lear, which were so loved by you both.
Your sister, Elia
AEFA
IT BOTHERED AEFA greatly that her lady still carried her crushed, dangerous flower crown.
Obviously it was hemlock, and the king had died wearing hemlock, and Aefa did not think anything symbolic or sentimental was worth the risk of Elia getting the poison on her fingers or accidentally swallowing some. Or worse just having it close to hand, and then deciding in one sad moment to die.
“I’m not suicidal,” Elia promised softly when Aefa tried (for the seventh or eighth time) to coax the crown from around the princess’s arm where she wore it hooked around her elbow like a large and deadly bracelet.
The reassurance was good, until Elia added, “Though I cannot promise to never eat it.”
Aefa’s huge eyes must have said plenty, because Elia hugged her and kissed her cheek and swore not to die by her own hand.
This was only marginally encouraging.
It had been four slow and worrisome days since the night Elia vanished and reappeared, and nearly a week since the fateful storm. Once Kayo could move, they’d traveled from Hartfare to Errigal Keep in a small, rather funereal procession, leaving the king under guard in the meadow where he’d died. They did not announce his death, but it was an impossible secret to keep on an island so tense, so ready to believe the angry wind was personal, an ominous message rather than mere late-season weather. The news seeped out, and by the time their party had reached the Keep, the doors were thrown open to them despite the order from Regan Connley that none be allowed to enter—none but her own people in Connley colors or those under the banner of Ban the Fox.
It was good to be in a well-functioning castle like Errigal Keep in the midst of mourning, because if the inner workings hadn’t been so solid, Aefa and her mother would’ve been hard pressed to keep everything running alone. They seemed to be the only two folk in all the world not brought low by sorrow. The Fool had been Lear’s friend for twenty years, and Kay Oak wore a face like he’d lost a brother—with what was left of his face. Even Brona grieved, though for the dead Earl Errigal more than the king. Wasn’t that a surprise. The Keep was full of mourning—for the earl and Connley, too. The iron wizard had ordered all the fires in the valley banked in deference, and the Keep’s cook had organized a group of women to venture into the White Forest in order that they might bathe Errigal’s body in rootwaters.
In the great hall, Aefa hummed to herself, an old wormwork prayer for new growth, while seated at Elia’s feet with a length of dark blue cloth in her lap. She sewed a white star across the breast of the tabard, for Elia to wear when her sisters came: the colors of the house of Lear, but Elia’s own standard instead of the swan. Perhaps a crown of stars or a spray of hemlock would’ve been more appropriate, Aefa thought darkly, but her skills with a needle were more suited to this large, basic pattern.
“This is an excellent idea,” her mother Alis Thornhill, had said yesterday, when Aefa had been hunting around through old cloth in the storage room beside all the companion ladies’ quarters. They’d chased out a last Connley cousin, who’d opted to flee north, but the rest of the Keep’s women from highborn to low- had remained, making a welcoming home for their youngest princess. Alis had especially taken to Sella Ironwife, married to the Keep’s wizard.
The women gathered in the great hall most mornings—the wind pounded constantly, dragging at the moors and snuffing out all fires but those carefully contained in hearths. They brought the day’s work to their quiet, kind lady, watching Elia from the corners of their eyes as they chattered. The women certainly had a lot to say about Ban Errigal. They mused on his roots and his prowess, wondering whether he might stay on once his brother inherited the Keep—they assumed Rory would return home, innocent. Especially now that Elia was home, too. Surely Rory was soon to follow. Because Ban was gifted with iron, with all forms of magic both secretive and strong, most women refused to consider aloud that the bastard might have betrayed Rory on purpose. Though Aefa could tell by the glances shared that they suspected it was so.
Elia had taken up residence at the Keep just in time to get word from the Alsax: they were sending a barge to bear home a contrite and determined Rory of Errigal. The message suggested that the ship itself would arrive by the dark moon. Tomorrow.
Aefa slid a look up at her princess, who stared at her mending with a calm that almost seemed dull. But Aefa knew the pinch at Elia’s brow that meant she was thinking hard, in layers and spirals, rather like the intricate patterns of the stars.
“You can talk out any plan, any wish, with me,” Aefa had said, late last night, when she’d h
eard Elia turn over on the very fine bed the women of the keep had convinced her use in the earl’s quarters. Aefa had cocooned herself in a pile of pillows and blankets in the servant’s nook beside the massive stone hearth, near enough to hear her princess if she stopped breathing.
“I’m not ready,” Elia had answered. “But when I am, I will. I promise, Aefa.”
It required every ounce of Aefa’s training and self-respect not to climb into the grand bed and shake Elia, or kiss her and lend comfort, or maybe pinch her until the princess laid everything out and shared. And if Elia had for even a moment lost all expression, had blinked and gone cold, Aefa would have done. She feared Elia would fall back into what she’d been before, the unfeeling star, the glass saint her father had molded her into. It had been Aefa’s greatest worry, that Elia would lose all she’d gained, the strength and resilience and passion she’d recovered when she lost everything. When she’d begun to build her own stage upon which to stand. There was always the chance the princess would react to her own loss as her father had: by hiding in his grief and burying his rage, and then ruining everything around him.
Elia, though, had Aefa and Brona Hartfare and Kayo, and Aefa’s parents, too (whom Aefa wasn’t certain were in love any longer, but seemed to comfort each other and were sleeping together again, to her delight and trepidation). None of them would allow Elia to close herself off as her father had done in his refusal to listen—to his daughters, and to his island. And that Elia had been willing to chance new friendships and encourage confidences, to let herself smile and brighten this Keep’s dark halls, promised that she had no intention of becoming her father.
Some of that, Aefa bitterly admitted, had to do with Ban Errigal. She’d never thank him for it, even if hope in him was the strongest thread widening the channels in and out of Elia’s heart.
The star-cursed bastard.