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Lear’s daughter scooted nearer the bastard and dug her hand into the mud with him, dragging out a long, fat worm. “Elia,” the king said, frowning.
His daughter glanced at him, thrusting out the worm with a smile of triumph. It was pale and slick-looking in her eleven-year-old hand. No elegance or rich gleam like the sorts of ribbons that should curl around her noble wrist. The king shuddered at the grotesquery and opened his mouth to chide her, but she giggled at something the bastard muttered, turning away from her father.
The boy, wiry and smaller than his gilded brother, smaller than the king’s favorite daughter even, though they were of age, splayed his left hand. It was nearly as dark as the princess’s, though less smooth, less bright: she was a statue molded from fine metal, and he a creature built of mud and starshadow. The king had always thought so: the boy had been born under a dragon’s tail moon, and forged in an unsanctioned bed. What a disaster for Errigal, the king had always said, always counseled his friend the earl against such passionate dalliance. But some men refused to govern their bodies as they would their minds.
The bastard displayed on his outstretched hand a shining emerald.
No—merely a beetle shimmering all the colors of a deep summer day. The boy plucked the beetle from his hand and placed it upon the princess’s.
She squealed that the tiny legs tickled her skin, but she did not toss the insect away.
The king watched through narrowed eyes as their heads leaned together, temples brushing until her puffed curls and his black braids blended. “Elia,” the king said again, this time a low command.
She tossed him a smile and glance, then showed him the emerald beetle clinging to her finger like a union ring, as Dalat once had presented her own hand to Lear, so long ago. “See, Father, how its shell shimmers like a pearl,” she said.
It pained the king, vividly reminded of his queen, his dearest queen who had loved Innis Lear, had seen beauty in every piece of his island, even in him. The king blinked: his queen was dead, no longer able to love him, or his island, or anything at all.
“Insects are not suitable rings for princesses,” he said, harshly.
Surprise shook Elia’s hand; the bastard gently caught the beetle as it fell.
The princess dashed over to her father. “But there were stars in its eyes,” she whispered, pushing aside hair from her father’s ear.
He murmured fondly, softening as he always did with her, and pulled her gently back to her proper place, seated beside him on the woven rug. Where her mother, too, had sat.
A cool evening wind brushed its way through the meadow. Elia leaned her head against his shoulder, both of them tilting back to watch the sky. The king told her quiet lines of poetry about the wakening stars as the bastard lowered his fingers to the earth so that the beetle could crawl off him and back into the dirt. Always the boy kept the princess in the corner of his eye. The king was aware. And displeased.
The brother, Rory, stomped over, sweating and triumphant. “Ban!” Rory threw his pretend sword to the ground, scattering grubs and beetles in one swoop. “What is that terrible thing?” He scuffed his boot near a curled white creature with several thin legs. The bastard did not answer.
The king called for Rory to come to the rug, to join him and his daughter, to look at the darkening sky. “The first star you see will be a portent of your year, children, for tonight is halfway between the longest night and the longest day. Cast your gaze wide.”
Delighted, the princess rounded her black eyes and tried to see the entire sky at once. Rory, a year younger, flopped down at the king’s feet and knocked his skull against the rug-softened ground. He peered directly up to the dome of heaven, focused on one spot.
The king watched them both affectionately. His youngest daughter and his godson, intent upon his will, intent upon the prophetic stars. As he bid them, as was right. He could abide the bastard for the evening, since his presence pleased Elia.
His daughter gasped and said, “There!” Her little hand shot up, pointing near the horizon.
The king laid his old white thumb against her burnished brown forehead. “That, my daughter, is Terestria, the Star of Secrets. Terestria was so beloved by the stars that they drew her up with them when she died, so her body was buried in the blackness of the night sky instead of swallowed by the earth. I would make for you, my Elia, my dearest, a grave of stars, if you were to die before me.”
His daughter smiled in acceptance while Rory squinted his face more tightly to find another star above. The bastard gripped his brother’s discarded sword-stick and jammed it into the ground.
“You won’t find stars in the mud, boy,” the king admonished.
Elia frowned but Rory laughed, while the bastard dropped the stick and stood still as a tree, staring at the king with eerie light eyes. “I’m not looking for stars,” he said.
“Then go from here, for we are about the stars tonight, and your petulance will mar their shine.”
The bastard’s jaw squared stubbornly, then he dropped his gaze to the princess, who clutched her dress, caught between the king and the boy. His eyes lowered, and the boy turned away without a word. Good riddance.
“I found one!” crowed Rory, leaping to his feet. “Ban, look!”
The king angled his head up to see.
“That, godson,” the king said, “is the Star of the Hunt, also called the Hound’s Eye.” He declined to elaborate, but Rory didn’t care, elated to have captured the sight of such a glorious-sounding first star. He ran after his half-brother, crying Ban’s name and inventing fulsome meanings for the Star of the Hunt.
Easily, the king put both Errigal sons from his mind, curling around his favorite daughter, his Elia. She needed him, she trusted him.
The king held his youngest in the shelter of his love as he described the portents revealed by how the stars appeared tonight, through the vivid purple and pale blue evening. He would raise her in their clear light, he promised, to be the starry jewel in the crown of Lear, a radiant heir to the skies and proof that wisdom and purity would forever outshine base emotions and the filth of mortality.
ELIA (#ulink_e2c2ef94-f4a0-57b3-856c-58a019e325e3)
THE LAST MEAL Elia took at the Summer Seat was only wine, a dark red that had been her mother’s favorite, borne in a cool carafe by her sisters. Elia could not read their faces, and was too tired to guess their intentions. She wanted them with her so badly she ignored her suspicions and let them enter.
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 nothing 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 (#ulink_9647efa2-3555-5503-bedc-c1b6899b9dd7)
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.
