“Help me put him now against the earth.”
With Connley spread against damp, yellow grass, Regan pushed Osli back and then took off her heavy outer dress. She knelt in wool shift and stockings to undress him, quickly, unwrapping his wound. He breathed slowly and shallowly, skin too pale, she thought, but the moon was behind the storm, and the sun too far away. Another storm, one made of blood and bile, had formed a violent bruise that covered Connley’s chest, ribs, and stomach.
He was bleeding inside.
There was nothing she could do alone. Nothing any healer could do.
Water pattered off distant forest leaves. Wind glided more gently now over the moorland, teasing before dawn like a weary sigh.
Save him, Regan told the wind. Tell me what to do, she said to the earth. She brushed her hands on the grass, tugging. Tell me. Help me.
He is dying, the wind whispered.
We cannot save him, said the trees.
“No!” Regan cried. She tore up chunks of grass, then grabbed her own hair, pulling until it burned. Tears filled her eyes. She blinked hard, leaned over him so the tears fell onto his face. “Wake up,” she said, and wrote heal on his cheek using the cool slip of her tears.
Please, she begged the island. Innis Lear, I am your daughter, and I would give you anything to save him.
Below her knees, the ground shifted. A small ripple, as if from a tide pool. Regan flattened one palm against the earth and the other over his sternum. Tendrils of earth crawled up his sides, like tiny worms.
Saints of trees and stars, she whispered, birds of the sky and fire, worms of the dreamtime, lend me strength!
Connley shuddered as the earth entwined him.
The sky brightened along the eastern horizon, creamy and gilded.
Regan grasped the small knife she’d plucked from her husband’s boot and slashed the back of her wrist. Blood dripped onto his chest and she wrote heal, wishing with all her power that the rootwaters still flowed freely, that she could bathe him in the navel well, find the nearest star chapel and break it open until the island’s heart-blood pumped out and over Connley.
Wind jerked at her hair, and she dragged her heavy overdress against Connley’s legs, blanketing him up to his belly, keeping him warm.
Hidden inside the wind’s voice was a sorrowful whisper: Lost and fading, it mourned already.
Then I will die, Regan cried.
This was the limit of earth magic, and star prophecy, too: neither could force a body to do what it was not capable of doing on its own. Roots might encourage, water direct, wind gift with speed, stars shine hope, but if something was too broken, not even the blood of the island or the tears of the stars could mend it.
Regan kissed him. She opened his mouth with hers, tasting the corners of his lips, the edge of his teeth, and he tilted his chin, sighing a harsh breath. Connley kissed her back. One hand found her neck, slid up to her skull, fingers dug roughly through her tangled dark hair. A spark—the last star Regan might ever claim. His grip tightened, then went slack as his arm sank slowly again. His breath softened. Hitched.
“No,” she whispered, and the knife in her hand flipped; she aimed the point at her ribs, pausing just a moment to lift her voice to the wind: My heart for his, my life blood for his, take it, take anything.
Weight hit Regan’s shoulder as Osli tackled her, knocking the witch to the ground and snatching at the knife with quick skill.
“No!” Regan screamed, and again, gasping, crushed beneath the other woman’s weight.
“My lady would murder me if I let you die,” Osli said. She tossed the knife far away, pinning Regan still. Regan tried to reach for her husband. Her fingers only grazed his hair.
“Get off me,” she ordered, but in a quiet, desperate whisper.
The captain obeyed.
Regan crawled nearer to Connley, tucking her cheek against his shoulder from upside down, and wrapped one arm around his head.
Sunlight flashed in a long line at the horizon, a signal to the dying night.
ELIA
DAWN BROKE THROUGH the storm clouds lingering over the White Forest, and the tattered, torn trees glistened with sun-pink drops of rain.
Elia opened the door of Brona’s cottage for Ban’s departure.
Though Elia only had wrapped herself in a blanket over the long shift she’d gone to bed in, Ban wore a clean shirt borrowed from Kay Oak’s traveling bags, and a coat of his mother’s that fit his shoulders. They’d done what they could with his hair, braiding pieces of it back from his face. Still he seemed wild, though that might have been his expression or those hollow cheeks. He paused, framed in the door. His eyes rested on hers, heavy with the weight of all that had passed between them.
But Elia felt grounded for the first time in years. She could see the paths they’d followed, and why, the choices they’d been forced to make for themselves and never for each other. Before she let him go, she needed only one more answer.
Elia folded her hands before her: not in pain, not holding some great, gnawing wound inside, merely regal and sure like the queen she was supposed to be.
She asked, “What do you want, now that this storm has passed?”
“I am the storm,” Ban murmured. He leaned closer to her, until his forehead brushed hers and his words tickled along her cheekbone to her ear. “I want this island to crumble, and see what rises. Discover who can transform all the shattered power into something strong. Will it be you?”
“Stars and worms, Ban Errigal,” she whispered, shivering.
“I had to come home because this is what I was meant to do. To pull Innis Lear apart. To show your father and my father and everyone who believes as they do how fragile everything truly is, and how wrong they have been.”
“Am I wrong, too?”
Ban pressed her against the doorframe. Body to body. “What do you want, Elia Lear?” he asked, then kissed her tenderly.
She welcomed the kiss, relishing its warmth and simplicity, when nothing about this was simple. His lips, her tongue, their teeth and hearts.
Elia leaned back and said, “I want to save everyone.”
“So we are opposed,” he whispered, muddy green eyes too near her own.
“No.” She touched his lips with her fingers, nudging him away. “I’m going to save you, too.”
It was clear from the bleakness in his face that Ban did not believe her. Well, she would make him believe, just as she would make her sisters. “Go to Gaela and bring her to me at Errigal Keep. I will get my father and go to Regan. We will wait there, and when you and my eldest sister arrive, you’ll see what I can do.”
“I’ll go to Gaela.” Ban’s lips barely moved under her fingers.
“Good.” She began to kiss him again, but Aefa suddenly appeared.
“Elia,” said a wide-eyed Aefa, approaching through the squelching mud with another woman behind her. “You—um.”
“I must go,” Ban murmured.
“Be well, Ban,” Elia said. He nodded, then picked up his sword belt and left.
She had watched him go when they were children, crying, shoulders shaking with young agony at the injustice. He had watched her go last month at the standing stones: him blazing like a torch trapped in its sconce, her heart-frozen, numb.
Here was the third departure, and Elia was neither shuddering with agony nor stuck in place. She was ready.
And Elia was glad for last night’s storm, glad for all its raw power that had thrust her together with Ban. She’d streaked across the sky last night, a star falling through the blackness, and landed where he’d been born, landed in the roots of Innis Lear, in this thicket of thorns and wild shadows. No matter what came next, threads of starlight had planted here, and Elia understood them.
At the edge of the woods a handful of moon moths floated, pale spirits darting in the flickering shadows, just where Elia could not quite see. In the gentle rush of a stream, Elia heard the hopeless echo of her starless sister’s name, but the forest would say no more.