Ban said, terribly calm, “Because it’s true. Here, there, everywhere I go I am a bastard, Elia. A spy and liar, and I am not good.”
“You could be! I see better in you, and I always have. Take my word over my father’s! Over your father’s. I loved you, Ban, and I wanted your friendship, your heart—over anything else—and you wanted mine. So it didn’t matter because I was just a girl, just a princess? The opinions of our fathers shaped you, but my heart knew better. Believe that if nothing else, you stubborn man.”
Ban nodded, slowly, understanding a pit in his belly. “I believe you.”
She threw herself at him, relief blowing out of her in a sigh. Elia hugged him, her mouth on his neck. “Good. Good,” she murmured.
“But I can’t help you save your father.”
“Help me save Innis Lear, not my father. Us, our island. Our home.”
They stared at each other for a long, dark moment. Outside the storm had calmed. Only the wind remained, blowing strong and steady through Hartfare, ruffling roofs, nudging at shutters and doors. It whistled down the chimney; their fire spit back.
“Ban, don’t do this. Don’t choose against me, not you, not now.”
“Everything is a choice. You chose a long time ago.”
Elia said, “No. Not love. Love is not a choice between different things like this. Love has to be growing, making your heart expand. It’s not narrowing. I love you and Innis Lear. I love my sisters and my father. Not one or the other. You can be more—you can be what you were and what you are, and—and whoever you want to be.”
Ban reached up and touched the corner of her mouth, slid his fingers along her jaw. “Your father sent me to Aremoria to get rid of me, because he hated me, whether because of my stars, as he told himself, or because he was selfish, and wanted you to himself. Do you understand? Such a man doesn’t deserve your love.”
“But he’s my father still, and I do love him. I know you don’t understand that, and I’m sorry. I wish you could. I deserve to love him.”
“He rejected your love.”
Her hand flattened over his heart. “I think … he tried to, maybe, because he was confused about the stars, or what he needed. He was afraid. He’s dying and losing himself, and maybe it reminds him of losing her. Dalat. My father loved her more than anything. More than the island, more than us. That was his choice. And when she died he fell to pieces because there was nothing else! That’s what comes of choosing to love something above all others, instead of widening your heart. If he’d loved stars and Dalat and my sisters and everything, maybe he wouldn’t have broken without her…” Elia touched her lips to Ban’s shoulder and whispered against his skin, “I won’t love anyone so much more than everything else that I lose it all if that person is lost. If it makes your world smaller, it isn’t love.”
Ban shook his head and stared at the first subtle dawn light glowing at the window. “I would have chosen only you. And risked it.”
“Choose me and Innis Lear! Choose me, and everything.”
“That isn’t how it works. Something always comes first. My mother chose Hartfare over me. My father chose Rory, always. Morimaros would never even consider me first; he must choose his crown and country. Even you chose your father, and the stars, rather than me, never made me first in your heart.”
“I was a child,” she whispered.
“I was, too.”
“But we’re not anymore. I can’t love one person above all. Some things are bigger than just one heart, but that doesn’t mean a heart can’t love completely!”
“If you had let me, Elia, I would’ve given everything I am to you. That’s all I’ve ever wanted: to be something that matters most of all for just one person.”
“I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t leave everything for you, I can’t … pick only you. I won’t! I love you and I love Innis Lear, and if I must choose to put Innis Lear first it does not mean you don’t matter to me, Ban Errigal. We’re people, not saints, not stars; we have to move in some kind of structure. I can, and will, pick you and the island, you and my father, but I can’t put you always before—”
Ban felt himself fall away from her. “Stop,” he said, “I know you can’t. I know it. No one ever has.”
“Ban, that is an impossible thing you ask! I cannot separate your well-being from that of Innis Lear, or that of my father! It is all connected!”
“No, it isn’t.” His chest hurt, his eyes burned. “I know because Regan and Connley will always choose each other. Your father chose your mother, and then when she died he chose you. Over the island!”
“And look at what a disaster it was!” she cried, throwing out her arms. “No one thing alone keeps Innis Lear alive or its heart beating! That is not love! That is selfishness. That is pretending we are all only one thing. Only a star, only a woman, only a bastard. You’re more than that, and I am, too: woman and daughter of a foreign queen and a star priest. I’m all of that. Take one piece away and the rest shifts and changes, just like … just like this island, or any land. If the stars are crying and lonely, the tide doesn’t rise and the trees cannot speak! Or if the trees are all we hear, then there is no future or heaven for our dreams!”
They stared at each other across several steps of darkness. Fire at Elia’s back, dawn at Ban’s.
He did not know if the pain growing inside him was love or longing or something far worse. She was glorious. Bold and beautiful like her sisters, but stumbling in her passion, because it was new. He thought he was witnessing the birth of a star.
But a star was not what he needed. He was rootwater and poison, hissing wind and shadows. She was the first wink of holy fire that would light the sky for thousands of years.
Ban held out his hand, palm up. For a few brief moments at dawn, stars shone even against earthly sunrise, bright as butterflies or a meadow full of flowers—or iridescent beetles.
This had been their moment, and it was fading away.
Elia slid her fingers into his.
“I will choose everything,” she promised. “I will be everything.”
Ban thought of the storm. “I will be exactly what I have always been.”
REGAN
REGAN REMEMBERED ONLY three things from the night of her mother’s year memorial: her father grasping little Elia’s hand too tightly; the squelch of mud in the Star Field ruining the silk shoes her mother had given her, which were embroidered with the same blue Dalat had prized in the flecks of her middle daughter’s eyes; a glass of cool red wine appearing exactly when she needed it most.
Long after the lighting ceremony, when they all returned to Dondubhan Castle for a mourning supper, Regan had kept herself at Gaela’s side. She had listened to Gaela’s vexed commentary with half an ear, studying all the players as they mingled in the dining hall with the rest of her attention. The two sisters had held the honor table themselves, for Lear had roamed the long room with Elia in tow, speaking only to his retainers and earls, the young Duke Astore and the old Duke Connley, and, surprisingly, their mother’s young, handsome brother, from the Third Kingdom. Regan had despised the white-knuckled grip Lear maintained on Elia’s shoulder, pressing the folds of her mourning gown askew.
With a little sigh, Regan had turned, catching herself at a pair of eyes the dull blue-green of old copper. The young man to whom they belonged had bowed and offered her a goblet, full of wine. He’d been no servant, wearing a vibrant red jacket over the gray-and-cream wool expected for a funeral, and a gold chain about his neck too rich for a mere retainer. His mouth was lovely, though thin-lipped, and his nose admirably regal, she had thought, fascinated. Cherry-gold hair flopped across his forehead, too unchecked. His pink cheeks did not flush further, though she had stared quite boldly. Regan then lifted the goblet and sipped proffered red wine.