The Queens of Innis Lear

GAELA

IN INNIS LEAR it was believed that the reign of the last queen had been predicted by the stars—and had ended, too, because of them.

Lear had been middle-aged when his father and brothers died: too old to have planned for ruling, too old to easily let go of his priestly calling, his years of sanctuary in the star towers. So the first thing the new king ordered was a star-casting to point him in the direction of a bride. He needed a queen, after all, as he needed heirs of his own to ensure the survival of his line. Every star-reader on the island joined together and offered their new king a sole prophecy: the first woman to set foot on the docks of Port Comlack at the dawn of the third dark moon after the Longest Night would be his true queen. She would give him strong children and rule justly beside him, then die on the sixteenth anniversary of her first daughter’s birth.

Lear arranged to be there, ready to greet this star-promised woman, and waited all night long under the third dark moon, despite icy winds so early in the year. As the first sunlight broke through thin clouds a ship came limping to port, too many of their rowers weak from struggling against the roiling ocean. It was a trader’s ship from the Third Kingdom, an ocean and half a continent away, where an inland sea and great river met in a gulf of sand and stone. First to emerge were the dark-skinned captain and five dark soldiers; they were royal guards along to protect a granddaughter of the empress, who’d traveled north searching for adventure. Lear welcomed them, inviting the princess to come forward. She descended like a slip of night, it was said, black-skinned and robed in bright layers of wool and silk against the cold ocean. Glass beads glinted from her roped black hair like ice or tears or—like stars.

Lear married her, though she was less than half his age, and loved her deeply.

She died at dawn on her first daughter’s sixteenth birthday, twelve years ago this winter.

The pain was as fresh to Gaela as every morning’s sunrise.

Anytime she was at the Summer Seat, Gaela would make this pilgrimage, down to the caves pocking the cliffs below the keep. Dalat had brought her here at least once a year, for all of Gaela’s childhood. At first only the two of them, then when Regan was old enough they were three, and finally in the last few years even baby Elia tagged along. They’d descended to the sea farther to the southeast, where the cliffs became beaches and bluffs with more ready, safe access to the hungry waves, and with an escort of heavily armed retainers in separate boats, they rowed back up the rocky coast here to the caves. Gaela remembered especially when she’d been eleven, and Elia only three years old, wrapped up against Gaela’s chest so she could protect her baby sister while Dalat held nine-year-old Regan’s hand. Elia had danced with all her limbs, excited and gleefully singing a childish rhyme, clutching at the collar of Gaela’s tunic and at one of her braids.

Dalat had dragged the boat as high onto the beach as she could, then smiled like a young girl and dashed with her daughters to the largest cave. She laughed at the spray of salt water that splattered her cheeks, and then when they were far inside the cave, knelt upon the wet stone, disregarding the algae and saltwater staining her skirt. “Here, Gaela,” she said, patting the earth beside her, “and here, Regan. Give me my littlest in my lap.” When all were situated, Dalat taught them a soft prayer in the language of the Third Kingdom. It was a layered, complex language filled with triple meanings depending on forms of address, and to Gaela it always sounded like a song. She fought hard, scowling, to remember the prayer after only one recitation. Regan repeated the final word of every phrase, planting the rhythm on her tongue. Elia mouthed along with their mother, saying nothing with any meaning, but seeming the most natural speaker of them all.

Today the tide was out, and Gaela was strong enough she didn’t need to row up from a beach or bring retainers to assist.

The emerald grass capping the cliffs bent in the sea wind, and she unerringly located the slip of rock that cut down at an angle, crossing the sheer face of the cliff at a manageable slant. She’d left off any armor and all fancy attire, put on dull brown trousers and a soldier’s linen shirt, wrapped her twists up in a knot, and tied on soft leather shoes. Carefully, Gaela made her way along the first section, forward looking but leaned back with one hand skimming the steep rocks for balance.

As Gaela climbed down, she muttered her mother’s prayer to herself. She didn’t believe in Dalat’s god, but it was the only piece of the language she remembered fluently, having stopped speaking it three days after the queen died.

Sun glared off the water, flashing in her eyes. Gaela turned her back to the sea, placing toes where they would not slip, and gripped the ridge in her strong hands. Wind flattened her to the cliff, tugging at her shirt. She glanced down at the steep gray-and-black precipice, toward the clear green water and rolling whitecaps. Her stomach dropped, and she smiled. The rock was rough under the pads of her fingers, scraping her palms; her knees pressed hard, she climbed down, and down, until she could hop the final few feet to land in a crouch on the slick, sandy shore.

Her shoulders rose as she took a huge breath, filling her lungs with salty air. She blew it out like a saint of the ocean, summoning a storm.

Walking along the beach, Gaela eyed the mouth of the cave: a slanted oval, wider at the base and twice taller than her. At high tide the ocean swallowed this whole beach, and only tiny boats could row in, though there was danger of becoming trapped. This cave that Gaela had climbed to was directly below the Summer Seat, but unfortunately too wet for storing castle goods, and there were times smugglers would need to be cleared out. Gaela glanced up the cliff toward the black walls of the castle, high above and leaning over in places. She thought perhaps to install stairs, or some system of ladders, and wondered, too, if the cave could be transformed into cold storage, if they could put in high shelving to keep the water off. But it seemed too complicated to be practical.

She reached the mouth of the cave and paused, one hand on the rough edge of the mouth, her lips curled in a frown. For five years now she’d only come alone, since Regan had married. Elia hadn’t been welcome in the caves, not since she chose Lear over her sisters, damn her. Today, Gaela would’ve preferred to have Regan with her again, but her sister had kept herself away in Connley unexpectedly, even since their summons.

On her own these two days, Gaela had been assessing the state of her kingdom behind her father’s back, first meeting with the strongest earls, Glennadoer and Rosrua and Errigal, and discussing a tax for the repair of that blasted coastal road, if her father did refuse funds from the treasury. It was necessary, especially that the worst erosion be bolstered before the fierce winter storms. She and Astore had been appalled at the state of Lear’s accounting records in the past three years, demanding Lear’s stewards find a path through the mess. The earls had promised records from their own holdings that would make up for some of the confusion. When Gaela took the throne, she’d be ready to put resources exactly where she wanted them: trade and a stronger standing army. Her grandmother was an empress, and Gaela would transform Innis Lear into a jewel worthy of such a relationship. By the time she died, no longer would this land be a blight clinging to the sea, its inner woods a mystery of ghosts and hidden villages, the people known for superstition and old magic. Kay Oak had told Gaela that Lear’s star prophecies were considered an artful, childlike folly in the Third Kingdom, where the study of stars was a science. Even in Aremoria the king was building great schools, and his father had turned his people away from magic. Innis Lear was a backward holdout.

Gaela would change it all. She would not be remembered only as the prophesied daughter who killed a beloved mother, but as the king who dragged Innis Lear away from venal superstition and filthy wormwork.

She entered the cave. The floor was sand; her boots sank into watery puddles and the meager warmth of the sun vanished. Layers of rock, slick with algae and striped gray with pale green stratification, cut away, curving deeper. Salty, wet stone-smell filled her nose, and she even tasted the delicate flavor of dark earth on her tongue. The air seeped with it. A drip like a pretty chime echoed farther back, where she could not see.

It was like standing in a frozen moment of rain, surrounded by a refreshing, cool breeze and droplets of water that never quite touched her. Gaela’s mother had said there was nothing like this in the desert. And that standing here, breathing, was as near to sharing God’s breath as Dalat had found since leaving her old home.

Gaela often wished she could visit the Third Kingdom, but Innis Lear was her birthright. In Dalat’s home, Gaela might be allowed to govern a city, or work her way up in the ranks of the armies to general. But here she would rule over all. If she had a god, it was this island. She would make her name, and the name of Innis Lear, so strong and great that the words and spirit of them would travel to the desert in her place.

“I am so close, Mother.”

Her voice remained low, but Gaela had no need to be heard. It was the memory of her mother to whom she spoke, no ghost. She had not brought a candle to light; a thousand candles burned for Dalat every night in the north. Nor did Gaela bring mementos: eagle feathers pinched her heart, but what good were they buried in this sand or tossed into the ocean? Gaela was unsentimental, and her mother was gone. Taken from her by Lear, by the reign of his stars. Nothing could bring Dalat back, no rootwater nor blood, no star prophecy nor faith in even the great god of her mother’s people.

When Gaela spoke to her mother’s memory, she really was talking to herself and the island.

“There are things I’ve done you would not approve of,” Gaela said, crouching. Her bottom leaned on the craggy wall for balance, and she rested her wrists on her knees. “My barren body, my loveless marriage. You were so happy when I was young, because you loved him, and you had us, and I remember you found so much joy in so many mundane things I still don’t understand. But I did what I had to do, and I’m not sorry, Dalat. I will rule Innis Lear, and Regan’s children will be my heirs.”

Gaela pictured her mother’s face, though Dalat looked rather more like Gaela herself than she truly had; it was the best a daughter could do so many years later. Kayo had brought a small bust of Dalat-as-a-girl from the desert, and her orange clay face at fifteen was so much like Elia’s instead: round and sweet and smiling. Gaela had rejected it.

“Mother,” Gaela said, “I miss you. You wanted me, despite everything, but he never did. You gave me the ambitions to rule this island. You taught me I could, encouraged me to find my own way to strength, because our ancestors are queens and empresses. He pretended I was nothing, tolerating me despite the prophecy, because he loved you. When Elia was born, and her … her stars were perfect, he’d have named her heir if she’d been a boy. If I wasn’t married to Astore and hadn’t made myself into a dangerous prince, he’d try it now. Fortunately for all of us she has no ambition of her own, or I’d have to kill her. He and his stars would necessitate it.” Gaela closed her eyes. The ocean outside matched the roar of her blood. Sometimes she thought that men had created star prophecies solely to benefit themselves.

“I don’t understand how you loved him, Mother. He used you, and me, to prove the truth of the stars, and I will never let that happen again. My kingdom will not be defined as yours was, and I will not let him, or any of them, trap me as you were trapped. I love you, but I will not be like you.”

She spat on the ground, leaving that piece of herself there, her body and water, for the sand and tide and Innis Lear.

MARS

MORIMAROS, THE KING of Aremoria, was annoyed.

He’d been directed outside to a nearly empty garden, along with his personal escort of five polished soldiers, to await a second audience with King Lear. Mars had assumed that meant an immediate audience, an intimate discussion of his matrimonial goals, but instead he’d been waiting long enough for the shadow of the stone table at the center of the yard to shift a hand-span. The walls of the courtyard reached high, lime-washed and painted with gray trees, star shapes, and graceful flying swans, the art faded now and in need of retouching. Pine boughs and sweet-smelling lavender littered the earthen ground. Deep wooden boxes in the four corners grew with emerald moss and creeping rose vines that bloomed bloodred and creamy orange.

Though it was altogether a lovely atmosphere, something tugged at Mars’s awareness, as if invisible cracks had formed in the very air. As if the roses wanted his attention.

Mars was not practiced at idleness. It led him to imagine fantasies.

He wondered if his Fox had arrived yet.

I have a game for you to play, Mars had said, the afternoon he’d received his invitation to this Zenith Court. Did you know her, Elia Lear? His Fox had lied when he answered, Barely, sir, with something of shuttered grief in the tremble of his words.

The Fox had served Mars passionately and well for years, discovering secrets no other spy even thought to look for, slipping into fortresses and enemy camps as if he could spin himself invisible or as quick as the wind with which he spoke. Yet that always hidden thread of angst was too easy for Mars to pluck and set against Innis Lear. Until now, Mars had held back from doing so. Things built so easily tended to be just as easily broken.

But it was time. Mars was here for one thing: Innis Lear itself, and he stood at the center of several paths to claim it. The Fox was one. The princess was another.

Waiting in this empty, albeit lovely, courtyard was not.

The king’s eyes returned to the central stone table.

It was only a man’s length across, and circular, cut of the same or similar hard black rock that this entire castle was made of. Mars was reminded of the stone circles that clung to this island, or the ancient dolmen to be found in the less civilized parts of Aremoria. Remnants of the oldest cults of earth and root.

That was it.

Mars, though he’d been still and standing beside one of the walls this entire time, strode suddenly to the table and crouched. He put one hand to the rough edge and peered beneath it.

The wide foot of the table was like the stump of a mushroom, built of small black rocks held together with mortar. He smelled damp moss, and despite the shadows that must perpetually cling to this underside, he saw glinting water, trickles that had seeped through the mortar. The tabletop had been set upon the foot, but not plastered in place. Like a heavy, precarious lid.

This had been a well once.

Sucking in a breath, the king of Aremoria realized he was not only surprised, but shocked in the way of a man confronting some desperate heresy.

Clutching the edge of the table, Mars stood carefully and looked around the rose courtyard again. The vines themselves, at every corner, and the lack of ceiling, should have been enough of a hint: this courtyard had been a chapel.

In Aremoria, long ago, the people had worshipped the earth, made their temples in the river caves and around natural springs. As the country grew, they built churches and cathedrals of earth, wood, and stone, always with the central well that dove deep into the heart of the world. Passages to life and death. When the worship of stars spread, Aremoria came entirely out of caves and knocked the roofs off their churches, marrying wells and starlight.

Mars remembered it being similar on Innis Lear. Their star towers rose high, but at Dondubhan where he’d once been a guest, eleven years ago, the black lake Tarinnish had been called the Well of Lear. He knew from his Fox that the White Forest was pocked with springs and wells, and the Fox’s own witchcraft came from the rootwaters and worms.

But this well, in the heart of the Summer Seat of Innis Lear, had been capped off.

It shook him, though Mars could only guess at why. He had no religion himself, nor trust in prophecy and magic.

And yet.

Yesterday, Lear himself had greeted Mars outside the Summer Seat, waiting across the land bridge, seeming modest, clad in only a finely made robe, his hair unbound, and without the impressive regalia of armored retainers and cavalry that Mars himself had brought. Then, Mars thought Lear had wished to create a welcome that put little pressure on Mars to be formal, and Mars had hoped it meant the king of Innis Lear and his youngest looked kindly on Mars’s intentions, to receive him so casually, as if already they were family. Then dinner had come, and Ullo of Burgun arrived, too, and Mars had gritted his teeth, holding his expression blank the entire time. Lear had behaved just as informally, giving no clear preference to either king.

Though Mars understood politically why Lear entertained Ullo of Burgun as another suitor to his daughter, it rankled nonetheless to be set on an equal footing with such a buffoon. Either it was a purposeful affront to the obviously greater alliance with Aremoria, or Lear was no statesman. Mars had taken every opportunity to remind Ullo of the folly of going against him. Ullo’s response had been to flirt his way through every conversation, making Mars almost hope Elia Lear never arrived at all, to be subjected to the attentions of this featherbrained flatterer-king. Lear himself either did not mind Ullo’s flavor, or did not notice. Then Lear had commented to Mars in such a way that made it sound as if they’d never before met, when they had, though briefly and now over a decade prior.

Last night it had merely irritated Mars, but now, it unsettled him.

Was the king of Innis Lear capricious, or losing his mind to his age? Something was out of balance on the island, Mars could feel it, and more than any conversation he’d overheard or participated in, this diminished holy well was proof. There’d been reports that the king of Innis Lear had shut down the wells, but in Aremoria they’d moved their folk away from holy wells and cave worship a generation ago. To the betterment of the country, and to its strength.

The difference, Mars thought, was Lear had not offered anything to replace rootwater and faith in the hearts and minds of his people. No wonder there was imbalance and unease threaded through everything. When Mars had returned home after his long-ago visit, curious and fascinated by the tightly knit faith of the Learish people, his father had, with little fanfare, dispelled his son’s awe:

That place is haunted, Morimaros, and you’d do well not to admire whatever magic granted it such power. Here in Aremoria we’ve given the people something better than ghosts and stars and trees to believe in: they have us. And if you’re ever to retake that island and rule it, as is your birthright, you need to recognize credulity when you see it, and accept that superstition is a tool, not a guarantee. Magic is untrustworthy; only loyalty matters to kings.

A soft breeze kissed Mars’s cheek, turning his attention to the open arched gate of the rose courtyard, just as Ullo of Burgun walked through. Though a warm afternoon, the king wore heavy fur to compliment his thick head of hair and full beard, both no doubt intended to make him appear more mature. Mars suddenly wished he’d managed to confront Ullo directly on the battlefield last month, and had captured him against a ransom, which he could then have denied, keeping Ullo locked in a fine room in the Lionis Palace and far away from Innis Lear.