The Queens of Innis Lear
Tessa Gratton
To Laura Rennert, who believed in this book even more than I did.
Part
ONE
IT BEGINS WHEN a wizard cleaves an island from the mainland, because the king destroyed her temple.
The island is raw and steeped in her rage, making the people who grow there strong, and sharp, and ever quick to fight. Mountains claw upward in the north, and a black river gushes south and west, spreading fingers east into smaller streams that trip through the center of the island. The rush of water gathers up all the trees and flowers, giving them the blood to grow wild and tall, feeding the roots until they dig through the rock itself. Where roots merge with stone, new clear springs are born.
The people build stone shrines around these rootwaters, making holy wells in which to bless themselves, their life rituals, and their intentions. Soon these wells are the centers of towns and at the heart of every fortress or castle, connecting the people always to the blood of the island. Lords from each quarter of the land come together to build a cathedral in the White Forest, where their four domains kiss. That is the heart of the island.
Every generation a child from each quarter kingdom is given to the wild forest for dedication or sacrifice. One lord offers his firstborn, and that is a beginning, too: the beginning of a line of wizards so strong, the other lords rise up together and bury the ashes of the unruly family in saltwater sand.
But the magic survives.
For centuries after, the island bristles and growls, all wind and scoured moors, valleys of pasture lined with protective oak forests, and the jagged north mountains break for rubies and the western cliffs gleam with copper. There is iron in the southern marshes, too, raw mineral that whispers to those who can hear, and when it is forged with magic, it never cracks. The rootwells run strong, and the thin earth is more fertile than it should be, and so the island thrives, fed on the blessing of star prophecies and the teeming love of the roots.
*
IT BEGINS WHEN a lord of the island reads ambition’s reward in his stars, and rallies the strength of iron and wind to defeat his rivals, uniting all under one crown. He calls himself Lear, after the wizard who cleaved the island. In her honor, he raises a great fortress in the north, along the shores of a black lake so deep many call it the island’s navel. He crowns himself on the longest night, the holiest time for star prophecy; offers his blood and spit to the island’s roots, his breath to the birds and the wind, his seed to the iron, and his faith to the stars.
*
IT BEGINS FAR away from the furious island, in a place so different in name and air that the one could not recognize the other as being born both of the same earth. There, a young woman asks her grandmother for a ship with which to sail out past the edges of their empire, for she has a hunger to understand the world, to experience something not more broadly but more deeply, until that one thing becomes an entire universe. She says her curiosity is like sand in a storm, scouring bones smooth as glass. Her grandmother agrees, though suspects she’ll never see this daughter of her line again. “God will bring us back together,” the young woman says, and her grandmother replies to her with only an old desert prayer:
“Do not forget: you will be air, and you will be rain, and you will be dust, and you will be free.”
Perhaps that is an ending, too.
*
IT BEGINS ON the day two bright hearts are born to the island, one just past dawn as a crescent moon rises, and the other when the sun is brightest, obscuring the glow of stars. Their mothers knew they would be born together, as witches and best friends often do, and though it is the first child for one and the last for the other, such does not come between them. They sit beside each other, arms stretched to touch the other’s swollen belly as they grit their teeth and tell stories of what might become of their children.
*
IT BEGINS WHEN a queen sits in a pool of stars.
*
IT BEGINS WITH seven words with which to bind a crown, whispered in the language of trees: eat of our flower, and drink of your roots.
*
IT BEGINS AS the sun sets, the last time the final king of Innis Lear enters the cathedral at the heart of the island. This Lear has never been devoted to the roots, or paid much mind to well or wind. He is a man driven by the stars, by their motions and patterns, their singular purity and steadfastness, bold against the black reaches of night. To him, the cathedral is redundant; a person devoted to star prophecy has no need of rootwater or navel wells.
Two vast halls of carved limestone and blue-gray granite cross in the middle of the holy place, east-west arms aligned with the sky to trace the path of the sun at the summer solstice, so the Day Star rises precisely over the eastern spire; the other hall aims as true north as the ever-constant star Calpurlugh, the Eye of the Lion. In the center point where the halls cross, a well sinks deep into the core of the island, fresh and mossy, a dark channel from the womb of the earth. No ceiling caps the edifice, for what would the purpose be in closing away the sky?
When it rains, water scours the stone floor and soaks the wooden benches. It cleanses the quarter altars and fills tiny copper bowls, making simple music with only the natural touch of water to metal. On sunny days, shadows caress living vines and the poetry and icons etched into the walls, counting seasons and time of day. Clouds lower themselves in the spring to nest around the highest spires, curling soft and dewy and cool. Nothing separates sky from land here at the heart of Innis Lear.
Now it is night, and a heavy moon tips against that eastern spire. Another beginning, ready to burst.
The king walks on the soles of thin slippers, his embroidered robe dragging off his shoulders. He is old, though not old enough to look as ravaged as he does, his hair wild and damp, his eyes tight from grief. An undyed tunic falls to his knees, nearly the same pale gray as his lined face and those long fingers. Straight to the well goes this royal wraith, and he presses his hands to its stones, breathing deep of the moss, the metallic smell of the earth’s blood water. A shudder wrenches down his spine, and he grimaces.
“Now,” he commands, turning away.
Seven strong men come forward with a flat, round piece of granite. Carved off one of the massive standing stones that once marked this holy well, before the cathedral was erected around it, the granite glimmers bluish in the moonlight. The retainers roll and twist it awkwardly, straining against the ropes that bind it. Slowly they walk, turning it up the aisle. One of them is glad of this mission, two unmoved by the significance of their actions, three too worried to be quite as indifferent as they would prefer to be, and the last one alone wishing, with every ounce of his heart, that he’d been strong enough to stand against his king, to protest that this was wrong and unholy.
The men position the stone, and in a moment of desperate hesitation, the last retainer looks fearfully at the king’s expression, hoping for a reprieve. But the king’s brows are drawn as he glares at the well, as if the well itself is responsible for everything. The retainer lifts his eyes instead to the open sky above, consoling himself with the reminder that his king does nothing without permission from the stars. And so this must be fated. It must be.
Tears glimmer in the king’s lashes when the granite slab falls forward, the sound of stone on stone filling the sanctuary. With a final pull of ropes, the navel is eclipsed.
The smell of rootwater vanishes, as does a slight echo that the king had not even noticed, until it was silenced. He puts his hand atop the stone cover, caressing its roughness, and smiles grimly. With his fingers, he makes the shape of the tree of worms, a sorrowful, dangerous constellation.
*