FOR THREE DAYS Elia had awaited her sisters at Errigal Keep. She moderated the line between Lear’s retainers and those of Errigal still loyal to Ban the Fox, meeting those she could at Rory’s side. He knew all the women and servants and the families of his father’s retainers, and they welcomed him, even when Elia cast suspicions upon Ban. She spoke twice, for long hours, with Curan Ironworker, the wizard, gleaning what information she could on the recesses of the forest and the changes in the song of the iron marsh, as well as asked him questions about Ban. Elia had made herself available to all, as best she could, letting go of her old instincts to withdraw, to remain apart. She was not a star, she told herself, but a woman. A sister. A friend. A princess, as well as a star priest. A daughter still, and one day, she hoped, a mother, though she was not with child now.
Nor yet was she a queen.
With the crushed-hemlock crown circling the crook of her elbow, Elia went to the ramparts in the evenings to see the first stars, to mourn her father alone and allow herself to feel anger toward him and all the mistakes he’d made. To explore the unfamiliar fury burning in her heart: that he’d put Elia in this position, and brought the island so near to ruination. But in many ways, the stars had ruined him, too. They had been Lear’s everything, perhaps more so than even Dalat, and surely more so than himself. That singular focus had made him weak. If the stars were always to blame, there was no way to hold oneself responsible for anything.
And Elia understood the answer was not to do the opposite: to obey the island roots unthinkingly. She could not eat the flower and drink the water on the island’s word alone. Ruling Innis Lear should be a partnership, a conversation, and she would not rush the moment, though she believed one would come.
There were many conversations to have first. The morning after Rory’d arrived, Elia tended the dead Earl Errigal at his side. The body had been laid out in the cellar, washed and dressed, with his sword and chain of earldom. Elia held Rory’s hand while he breathed through great pain, and when he calmed, she asked, “Why are you here at my side, Errigal Earlson?”
His full name startled him, and he wiped under his eyes. “My father—” he said thickly.
Elia took the earl’s chain off the dead father’s chest. “I mean, why did you come home, why are you with me? Your brother is gone to my sisters, and they will take this chain from you for defying them, and give it to Ban. They have already declared it—you’ve heard what the iron wizard said was Regan’s order.”
“It’s mine,” Rory said. “Maybe Ban should have been my father’s heir, because he’s oldest, or because he’s smarter than me, but he isn’t. I am. I want it.”
“Your stars are suited to it.”
“They are.”
“Why not go to Gaela and demand your rights of her?”
“Gaela alarms me.”
Surprise widened her eyes.
Rory pressed on, distraught, “She doesn’t … Do you know anything about war games? Gaela wins them, but always the same way. Even when her specific tactics vary, the strategy is the same. It is always an aggressive one, always driven and determined, but she cuts losses without a thought. She is a great commander, but a queen should not leave fields trampled behind her every time, nor use a village as a point of play. They’re homes, and they matter beyond winning that single battle.”
“And Regan?”
“Regan is a witch, not a—a queen. Maybe with Connley, she might’ve … but not alone.” He winced at the sound of his prejudice. So like his father’s, and he seemed to know it.
“And me?” Elia murmured.
“I trust you,” he said, as if it were that simple.
“Rory.”
He smiled, flirting just a little. “I’ve loved you since we were children, and I’ve seen you. You always made us stop to say hello to anyone we passed when we played. You knew their names, everyone.”
“You do that, too.”
“I’d probably make a good king, then,” he joked.
But a moment fell between them, and they stared. Elia wondered what would happen if she married him right now, today. An old friend, a soldier, one of her father’s favorites, the heir to Errigal iron. A man she could control better than her other options. It would rearrange many pieces of this dangerous puzzle.
“If you ask me, Elia,” Rory said, low and serious, “I will say yes. But you shouldn’t.”
“Tell me why.”
“We shouldn’t do things that will hurt more than they heal.”
It broke her heart to hear the regret in his voice, and Elia realized she did not want to know what caused it.
He told her anyway. “It was my fault they sent Ban to Aremoria, that spring.”
“How?” she whispered. “It was my father, afraid of Ban’s stars, and thinking Ban was unworthy of me.”
“I told my father…” Rory glanced at the slack face of the body laid out beside them. It was a gruesome location for such intimate talk. “I told him that Ban loved you, and that the two of you should be married, and then we’d all be happy. It was only a week later that—” He stopped.
Elia covered her mouth and turned away. “You didn’t know,” she said, muffled by her hand. She forced it down to hang rigid at her side and repeated herself.
“It doesn’t matter. I didn’t think. About much at all. And if Ban did know, or realized it…” Rory sighed. “I deserve that he’s returned the favor. Though I won’t—I won’t just submit to his revenge.”
“No.” Elia turned back and offered Rory the earl’s copper chain. “Take it.”
Rory kissed her temple and refused, grief thickening his tongue. “When this is over, either I or my brother will put it on. Only then.”
When the sun set each night, Elia crouched with Brona to cast holy bones. While Brona read the cards and bones, Elia would read the position of the stars. Together they wove stories of skies and roots: the first night came a tale of loss, where the stars dominated all and soon there was no place for the birds of any world to land.
The second night the story was about Kayo, who was in love. That story was a spark of warmth, a reminder that affection could still blossom and grow on Innis Lear, even in the past six years. Elia found herself teasing Brona, happy. Kayo himself admitted it in the morning, and admitted, too, that he’d asked Brona to marry him before and the witch’s answer remained always patience. “She will need to be patient with me now,” her uncle said, his hand hovering over the bandage on his face. The wound healed slowly, and Kayo had to be gentle with it or an infection might spread and blind him in his other eye, too. That Gaela had done this to him, so viciously, with such disregard, put Elia firmly in agreement with Rory: Gaela would make a terrible queen, even regardless of the island’s will.
Last night the bones and stars had told of a queen slowly being born.
Elia avoided the king of Aremoria completely: he and La Far lived with the retainers to keep knowledge of his identity shrouded in as much secrecy as could be managed. They did as her father’s retainers did, so it was easy to keep her distance. If she spoke to him, Elia was certain she would do irreparable damage between their countries. She did not forgive him—she could not, if she was to be queen of Innis Lear. But she did wish, some moments, she could find the strength to confront him, and then together they might commiserate over their hopes and fears regarding Ban the Fox.
Waiting put an edge to her voice; she could not relax. Neither did the island. Wind ravaged them, always, until only those who accustomed themselves to the noise were able to sleep. It begged and screamed wordlessly, but for the occasional cry of her name. Even under the brightest autumn sun, birds huddled in the crooks of tree branches and horses resisted leaving their barn.
She took several men to the navel well of Errigal Keep and pried off its cap. The well burped up a gasp of wind that ought to have been rancid but instead smelled like wine, sharp and sweet and heady. Drink, whispered the well. Eat, said the wind.
The hemlock crown had lost all its scent, and most of the petals had fallen in Elia’s wake. Aefa seemed relieved, but there was poison in the leaves and stems, too. Any part would suffice. And if she needed it, the island would show her where to find more starweed.
But Elia would not eat it, not yet. Not until she faced her sisters. She refused to take action that could not be undone.
And then the letter came, in the hand of a messenger in pink, who tore into the Keep sweaty and desperate.
Elia was in the great hall, seated at a long table near the hearth, peeling and chopping onions with women and boys from the kitchen. The stinky, tearful work was made better by the poetry and songs of the folk, who’d spread out here at her invitation because of the space and warmth; the gale outside had turned frigid.
Eager, ready, Elia opened the letter immediately. She read it, then again.
She sank to the rush-covered floor, sitting in a pool of bright red skirts, and read the message a third time.
Aefa knelt beside her and read the letter, too.
“Worm shit,” she said.
“Aefa.” Elia took a deep breath. “Aefa, send everyone away, and bring me Kayo, Brona, and Rory. And Morimaros. I would speak with them.”
“Morimaros?”
“This is the business of kings and queens. It is time.”
While Aefa hastened to comply, Elia hauled herself to the tall-backed chair just beside the hearth. She lifted the hemlock crown from the seat, sat herself, and settled the crown onto her lap. She read the letter again. Death or exile will be the only way.
Ban had failed her, refused to bring her sisters here. This stank of his destructive work: turning family against itself, lighting sparks for war to burn everything to ashes instead of nurturing growth, instead of protection.
And her sisters threatened to kill her.
Elia closed her eyes. She did not want to feel the betrayal. Not this time. Better to turn cold and still, better to breathe the emotions away, to diffuse them into air and mist.
But no. She had to feel in order to fight.
Tears flicked down her cheeks, and she did not break. She put her hands on the arms of the chair, leaned her head back, and let herself be hurt. And angry. And so very sad. All the whirling emotions gathered around her heart, squeezing, lifting, and she wept quietly as she waited. Tears dripped off her chin to tap the letter itself.
Her sisters claimed to be queens, but high overhead the wind threaded itself angrily through the stones of the keep, blowing frustration down the side of the mountain. The island disagreed. They had not made the bargain.
Warmth from the whispering fire enveloped her; she tried to pull comfort from it. The shuffle of folk leaving with onions and knives had vanished, replaced by the sure footsteps of those summoned. Elia left her eyes closed.
“Elia?” Kayo said.
She stifled the urge to leap up and offer him aid. Instead she smiled sadly. “I have news from my sisters.”
Chairs were moved, and a bench, too.
Kayo settled in a heavy chair to support his weary body, and Brona sat beside him on a stool; Aefa, Morimaros, and Rory shared a bench. Rory leaned forward, elbows on his knees, eager for her word, though with a slight frown as he could see how she’d been affected. Morimaros positioned himself nearest to her on the bench, and his gaze branded her with its weight. Kayo shifted and opened his mouth; Brona touched his knee to quiet him. His bandage was pristine: no yellowing from the witch’s tonics, no blood.
“They will be here to speak with me in two nights,” Elia began. She no longer wept, but the evidence was clear on her cheeks, if not in her voice. “They have crowned themselves at Dondubhan, so many months before the Longest Night, flaunting the conventions of Innis Lear, and demand I submit to them here, or go into exile. Or die.”
Rory yelled wordlessly. Kayo grunted as if in pain. Brona closed her eyes. Morimaros held his expression reserved.
“I have asked you all here to advise me, as a council to a queen. My proven allies all, but for you, Morimaros. No matter how you came, you are the king of Aremoria, and I expect you to show it.”
He nodded, jaw clenched.
It was not an impressive group, Elia suddenly thought: Kayo never a warrior, so gravely wounded and near blind, Aefa her Fool, a half-deposed earl, and the witch of the White Forest. Though Brona was powerful, she rarely looked it. There was something, Elia supposed, to that tactic.
“What will happen if I submit?” she asked. “If I give in to them and be what they would have of me: little sister, star priest. Inconsequential. What is the worst that would follow? What consequence?”
“You will not,” Kayo said, gripping the arm of his chair shakily.
“This island will break,” Brona answered, as if her lover had not. “Gaela cannot rule Innis Lear. She is as bad as Lear himself, and worse than her late husband, Astore, for she embraced her path with wholeheartedness as fanatical as your father’s. She is the continuation of Lear’s rule, not a break from it, no matter what she believes. A zealous refusal to listen is no better than a zealous devotion to the stars.”
Elia agreed, and saw Rory nod vehemently. But she said, “Maybe Innis Lear is destined to break.”
Kayo leveled his niece with a vivid frown. “You do not believe that.”
The pain in his voice seemed physical, and Elia looked at Brona, worried she ought not to have summoned her uncle from his sick bed. But the witch nodded, though her brow wrinkled and she put her hand to Kayo’s back, caressing in soft circles.
Elia met her uncle’s open, unwounded eye, and said, “Ban believes it. He said Innis Lear should burn to ash. That it is the only way to remake the island better. I’ve seen nothing in the stars to suggest otherwise. And the roots are determined to tear us apart, with ill crops and wailing wind.”
“Is that what you want?” Kayo asked.
“No.” That, at least, Elia knew. “I want Innis Lear to thrive.”
“So you cannot submit.”
“This is yours, Elia,” said Rory, as he had claimed Errigal for himself beside his father’s body. “Don’t give it away to your sisters.”
“How should I fight them? Should I cast Innis Lear into civil war? Raze the island with war machines and drown the rootwaters in blood?”
Kayo said, “Rosrua and Bracoch will be with us.”
Rory said, “Rosrua today, Bracoch tomorrow. If we fight, it will be near equal in numbers.”
“With the island on your side,” said Brona.
Elia looked at Morimaros, who had remained silent.
“Aremoria will eventually go to war with Gaela Lear on the throne,” he said, roughly as if he’d not spoken in days.
“But not with me.”
“That is not what I want from you.”
“You would take me, marry me, and scour Innis Lear of my wretched family? Give Ban and Gaela what they want? Destruction for his part, war for hers?”
“It is an option. If the island must break, make it break in the shape you want.”
“I don’t want it to break at all.”
“Something will,” he said, hands fisted on his thighs. “Do not let it be you.”
Elia stood, furious. The hemlock tumbled down her skirt to the stone floor. “So I should let my sisters destroy themselves? And all my island?”
“It would be a slow destruction, if you submit,” the king said. “Gaela could rule for years, until someone rebels, or until famine or this cursed wind drives the people against her. That might be sooner than I think. There are no heirs, and will never be, from what I understand. So under her crown the island is doomed. But if you went with me there would be time.”
“Time. To think, to plan, you mean. On your own behalf or mine? To analyze and find alternatives to submission or death. Exile is the safe choice.”
Morimaros pulled his mouth in a small grimace. “I want you too badly to pretend objectivity.”
“I appreciate the honesty,” she said flatly, even as Aefa gasped and Rory widened his eyes. For a moment, Elia had forgotten she was not alone with the king of Aremoria. To recover, she asked, “If you were me, would you retire? What would you do?”
“Fight.”
Elia sucked in a breath. He had not hesitated a second, despite it going against his own advice for her.
Morimaros said, “This is your country, your island, and you love it. If you can lead Innis Lear, the people and trees and all of it, to something better than your sisters, mustn’t you? If people will follow you and fight for you, choose you, if that is your gift, how can you run? How can you submit?”
Heart pounding, Elia asked, “Is it my gift? How do I know?”
The king tilted his face to hers; she stood over him, hands clenched at her sides. He said, “Will people come for you? I have. Kayo did, and your father’s retainers. These earls Rosrua and Bracoch with their armies. This witch, who holds more power than most. Are there more? Will your wind summon them, and the roots pass the call? What makes a king or a queen, besides the will of the land and the people together?”
Elia backed away from the intensity of his gaze. She knocked the backs of her thighs against the tall seat beside the hearth and looked to the witch of the White Forest for escape. “You are powerful, Brona, and have thrived all this time. You gather people to you; you create sanctuary; the roots and stars trust you. You would make a better queen than me.”
Silence fell. Elia glanced at the wretched, dead crown of hemlock at her feet. She knew what she believed in her heart, but she waited to hear what Brona would say.
Rory and Aefa both fidgeted. Kayo held Brona’s hand but said nothing, and by that Elia thought he agreed, or at least would not argue either way. A remnant of his upbringing, to let the women in his life decide for themselves.
Morimaros’s jaw was tight.
Finally, Brona said, “It is not my name the island calls.”
Closing her eyes in relief, in sorrow, Elia nodded. She understood. She agreed. “The island won’t have Gaela, either. Brona is right: my sister can call herself king, and all the people of Innis Lear can follow her, and the island still will not submit. She would have to tame it with fire and iron, and I cannot imagine Innis Lear would endure it. And Regan might once have been able to survive the ascension, but no longer, with her withered heart.”
“Survive…” Aefa’s clever eyes darted to the poison circlet on the ground. “What aren’t you telling us, Elia Lear? You don’t mean war; you mean something else. What is it that would kill your middle sister, were she to try to rule?”
“I know how to become queen,” Elia replied softly, glancing around at all her allies. “In a way that not even Gaela can stop, not without killing me herself.”
“The Longest Night ritual,” Brona said.
“Do you know what it is?” Elia asked.
“No.”
Kayo said, “Talich at Dondubhan does. The old priest who led your father through it. He married them, too, your mother and father.”
Elia knelt and lifted the hemlock crown. Eat of the flower, drink of the rootwater, she said in the language of trees. She repeated herself for her allies, aloud and in their own tongue: “Eat of the flower, drink of the roots. That is all.” She took a deep breath. “I swallow the poison, and the rootwaters cleanse me of it, and so is the bargain between crown and island set. My blood becomes its blood, and its blood mine.”
Her uncle let go of Brona abruptly, shaking his head. He put his hand to his bandage, grimacing.
But Brona touched her mouth, and nodded yes. She understood in her gut, as Elia did.
“You can’t,” Morimaros said, and Aefa shot to her feet.
“I agree with the king!” the Fool’s daughter cried. “Poison, Elia, you can’t think it, who told you that? Was it Ban? Was it Regan? Think where the message came from and mistrust it!”
“The island told me,” Elia said.
Rory put his arm around Aefa. “It sounds like magic. It sounds like the oldest earth saint stories and festivals.” His voice was full of wonder, and dread—but also hope.
“I—” Elia nodded. “Thank you for your counsel, all of you. I am going to meet my sisters in two nights. I will bring a crown of hemlock, and between the three of us, before the night ends, there will be a queen of Innis Lear.”
“One of you will do as the island bids.” Aefa’s distress heightened her voice.
“Or all three of us,” Elia said soothingly, feeling calm and cool—but it was not the distance of stars, it was the strength of certainty. “In two nights, we shall meet them. And it will be done.”
“Ban will be with them,” the king of Aremoria said suddenly.
“Yes.”
“I want to go at your side. I need to.”
“I will allow it,” she replied, and then left them all, without another word. As was her right.
Outside the great hall, Elia turned in a full circle, unsure where to go. But of course, the answer was high toward the stars.
Up and up she went, through the old part of the Keep and into the black stones of its most ancient tower. The stairs narrowed, and Elia climbed higher, until she reached the pinnacle, ascending through the trapdoor and into the bare sky: this platform, with barely room for two or three men, had been built for a watch in the days when kings ruled only pieces of the island, constantly on guard for attack.
Stars gleamed; she could see them in every direction, though wind cut harshly from the southeast. Elia sank down against the crenellations.
Tilting her head back, she stared into the night, tracing the shape of blackness, not the points of light. She resisted all thoughts, flattening her mind into nothing more than the patterns between stars. No signs revealed themselves, and Elia discovered no hidden meaning; long ago star priests had suggested the void beyond the heavens was the origin of chaos, the home of pain and love, of all wild instincts. That it had been the coming of the stars that brought order into the world.
Footsteps on the narrow stairs below the platform roused her.
It was Brona, lifting the trapdoor.
“Did I upset everyone, enough so they sent you to chide me?” Elia asked.
But the witch said nothing, staring at Elia with a strangeness, a hesitancy. “Say what you’ve come to say,” Elia ordered gently.
Brona lowered herself to sit beside Elia and stared across the small tower at the opposite stones. “Dalat, your mother, took hemlock and died of it.”
A great, raw pulse of fear drained Elia of all warmth, and she remembered that morning suddenly: her mother’s dull, dead gaze, her father’s choking grief, her sisters’ fury, and Gaela’s accusation that Lear had poisoned her. Elia shook her head. “No, Father would not have done that. I cannot believe it.”
“Dalat did it to herself.”
Elia’s lips fell open, as if she could taste the delicate petals of hemlock. “She tried to be the island’s queen?”
“No,” Brona said. “No, it was not for that. She did not intend to be saved.”
Elia’s tongue dried and her gorge rose. No.
Brona continued gently, “Dalat loved you, and your sisters, and even your father and this country, so deeply that she died to preserve it. She died to keep everything alive, to hold your place and your father’s authority.”
“No,” Elia said, pressing away from Brona. “She … the stars … she would not have done that. If she loved us.”
“If the prophecy concerning Dalat’s death had proven false, everything your father had built would have crumbled. Not only his personal faith, but his rule and the provenance of his crown. All would have questioned you. Connley’s mother and Earl Glennadoer would have questioned your entire bloodline, and Dalat’s very presence on the island. Everything, don’t you see? If your mother had not…”
Elia stared at her small, brown, trembling hands. Dalat had killed herself? For politics. For stars. To stop war. To protect her daughters and her people. Oh, Mother, she said to the wind.
“Elia.”
She needed—she needed to breathe, to think through this. Three long, deep breaths were all she allowed herself. Each shook. “It was not my father,” she finally said.
“No, Lear did not know her plans.”
Elia shook her head, opened her mouth, was silent, and then tried again. “Why didn’t you tell my sisters, at least? So they would know, and not hate him? Why didn’t she?”
“Dalat did not want you to know,” Brona said. The witch sat straight, old grief bowing her mouth. “She wanted all of you to have faith in the stars and in your father, too. She thought—she thought her death would bring you all together. Make you stronger.”
Elia laughed pitifully and looked up at the sky. Wind blew hard enough to blur the constellations. “Oh no. She trusted none of us, not even my father. Her husband! She did not—did not let us be her family.”
“It was bold, brave even, to take her own life for the island. To remove the uncertainty, prove that your father and his ways were true. I admire that … a singular choice, one that changed everything, solidifying the power of the crown.”
“It didn’t work,” Elia said.
“It could have. The choices your father made afterward are what ruined it: Lear alienated his daughters, and as king he adhered to such a strict form of star worship he cut out all other avenues. If he’d merely kept his faith, and continued to rule—without closing the wells, for example—if he’d striven for connection with his daughters … maybe Dalat’s sacrifice would have been successful.”
“She should have trusted him, and told him.”
“Maybe, but Lear was always so impulsive. He might have stopped her and ruined her plans.”
“Because he loved her! He might have given her to the rootwaters to save her.”
Brona frowned.
“You truly never knew of the hemlock ritual?” Elia asked, feeling accusatory but not caring. She might accuse the whole world tonight.
“I did not.” The witch’s brow crumpled, and tears shone in her dark brown eyes. “I’d have brought her rootwater. She might have died on Gaela’s birthday, then been reborn.”
Compassion pierced Elia’s heart, but she was crying again, too. She glanced toward the stars. Would they ever have comfort to offer her again? No longer could she imagine them pure and righteous, nor even bright, crawling beetles. What if the prophecy had been written: On the night of her first daughter’s sixteenth birthday, the queen will be reborn?
It was such a similar prophecy. Depending on the wind, or roots. Depending on the entire shape of the sky.
“Are you going to do it?” Brona asked.
“Yes,” Elia said. “To give myself entirely to the fight, I must transform. But I will offer my sisters the same chance. I will not make my mother’s mistake, or my father’s.”
“I will follow you to the very end, Elia Lear, and not only because I loved your mother.”
Elia nodded but closed her eyes in dismissal. She wanted to be alone with the night. Brona’s steps creaked gently on the old wood, and the sound of the trapdoor closing settled the shadows in Elia’s heart. She breathed, listened to the angry night, and said to the wind, Thank you.
Eat the flower, drink the rootwater, the wind snarled back.