THROUGH THE COLD night came a summons:
Elia of Lear.
Elia.
She’d been dreaming of something, but it was gone now, leaving only flowery vestiges in her memory.
Elia sat up in the small bed, awake.
Silence—but for the wordless wind and the crackle of straw as her own body settled.
Elia.
It was the trees.
Leaping to her feet, Elia grabbed her boots and shoved them on. Fumbling for her overdress, she was glad it laced up the sides instead of the back; Aefa stayed every night with her parents, and couldn’t have helped tie anything tonight. The days had grown colder, so Elia grabbed the wool blanket from the bed and wrapped it over her shoulders before stepping outside.
Hartfare slept.
Overhead stars turned, winking and shimmering as if they crawled and moved of their own accord. Elia saw too many patterns, too many possibilities, the constellations weaving in and out of each other, rivers of stars and potential. She blinked.
The sky stilled.
Elia drew a deep breath of cold air. She listened, hoping to hear the call of Innis Lear again.
Hello, she whispered.
Wind blew in reply, flicking small, cold fingers against her messy crown of braids, teasing her nape until she drew the blanket tighter around herself.
Elia, said a few trees—those at the southwest of the village.
That was the way she walked.
For three days she’d lived in Hartfare, enduring as the island mourned. In all that time, the wind had not stopped howling and keening in sorrow, though Elia had cried herself out the first night. They’d brought her father here, to Brona’s cottage, and washed him, put him in a simple gray shift. Elia had dotted his birth stars down his forehead with the white of star priests. She cast a final chart for him, too, based on the stars showing at the moment of his death: he should be interred when the Autumn Throne crested, a week before the Longest Night, the stars said. Nearly three months from now. And so with Brona and Kayo, Lear’s youngest daughter had bound her father’s body in cloth and settled him into a box built of oak, lined with flint and chips of blue granite. The once-king rested now back in the meadow where he’d died, guarded by a trio of his retainers until Elia was ready to have him sent north to Dondubhan.
Brona advised that Elia must consolidate her strength here in the south, and Kayo agreed, once he was able to speak again, after two feverish days when Brona fussed and worried the infection would take his other eye. The worst had passed, and he would see again, if dimly and incomplete. Aefa argued still that Elia ought to take residence at the Summer Seat, because it made a powerful statement. Elia had listened to them, but wished she was able to hear the trees’ opinion.
Elia had promised to choose by the time the Star of First Birds awoke at dusk, inside the heart of the Throne. That would be within two nights. Then Kayo could send messengers to the Earls Bracoch and Rosrua, to the Earl Glennadoer, and to the retainers at the Summer Seat, that Elia was on Innis Lear. That the king had died.
She was fairly certain she would go first to Errigal Keep as she’d promised Ban, in hope that he too would keep his promise and bring Elia’s sisters to her there.
They needed to speak together, even more now with their father dead. And Elia did believe Kayo when he insisted she should not go to Gaela, for it would appear that Elia was the supplicant, that she agreed to her eldest sister’s ruinous claim to the crown. No, Elia must have her sisters come to her, it was the only way to establish any power in their dangerous triangle. Or hope to sway Regan on behalf of these most beloved wells and roots.
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.
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.