The Queens of Innis Lear - Tessa Gratton

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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.

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       THE FOX

      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.

      Here he smelled late summer roses and dry grass, salty sea and the tinge of fishy decay. Stone and earth, his own sweat. Maybe his memories of being a boy-witch here were thin; maybe the island always had spoken so tightly.

      But no: Ban was certain. Lear had done this. The fool king had weakened the ancient voice of the island when he forbade the rootwaters from flowing. Both earth and stars were needed for magic: roots and blood for power, the stars to align them. Without both, everything was wild, or everything was dead. Here, it was dying.

      Ban couldn’t—he wouldn’t let it happen. Not to the trees and wind. Not to this hungry island that birthed him. The only thing in his life to never let him go, to never choose someone else.

      Kneeling, Ban drew off his thin jacket and then untucked his linen shirt and removed it, too. Dropped both in a pile beside him.

      From a small folded pouch on his belt, he drew a sharp flint triangle and pressed the edge to his chest, over his heart. Blood, he whispered in the language of trees, slicing fast. Blood welled as the sting flared. It dripped a thin, dark line down his chest. Ban allowed it, but caught the stream upon his finger just before it reached the waist of his trousers. There, against his skin, he smeared it into the jagged language of trees, writing Innis Lear with marks like naked winter twigs.

      His chest ached with every breath, a low fire heating his skin and heart. Ban pressed his palm to the wound, caught trickling blood, and then clasped his hands together until both palms glinted scarlet.

      Here I am,

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