Hartfare slept.
Overhead stars turned, winking and shimmering as if they crawled and moved of their own accord. Elia saw too many patterns, too many possibilities, the constellations weaving in and out of each other, rivers of stars and potential. She blinked.
The sky stilled.
Elia drew a deep breath of cold air. She listened, hoping to hear the call of Innis Lear again.
Hello, she whispered.
Wind blew in reply, flicking small, cold fingers against her messy crown of braids, teasing her nape until she drew the blanket tighter around herself.
Elia, said a few trees—those at the southwest of the village.
That was the way she walked.
For three days she’d lived in Hartfare, enduring as the island mourned. In all that time, the wind had not stopped howling and keening in sorrow, though Elia had cried herself out the first night. They’d brought her father here, to Brona’s cottage, and washed him, put him in a simple gray shift. Elia had dotted his birth stars down his forehead with the white of star priests. She cast a final chart for him, too, based on the stars showing at the moment of his death: he should be interred when the Autumn Throne crested, a week before the Longest Night, the stars said. Nearly three months from now. And so with Brona and Kayo, Lear’s youngest daughter had bound her father’s body in cloth and settled him into a box built of oak, lined with flint and chips of blue granite. The once-king rested now back in the meadow where he’d died, guarded by a trio of his retainers until Elia was ready to have him sent north to Dondubhan.
Brona advised that Elia must consolidate her strength here in the south, and Kayo agreed, once he was able to speak again, after two feverish days when Brona fussed and worried the infection would take his other eye. The worst had passed, and he would see again, if dimly and incomplete. Aefa argued still that Elia ought to take residence at the Summer Seat, because it made a powerful statement. Elia had listened to them, but wished she was able to hear the trees’ opinion.
Elia had promised to choose by the time the Star of First Birds awoke at dusk, inside the heart of the Throne. That would be within two nights. Then Kayo could send messengers to the Earls Bracoch and Rosrua, to the Earl Glennadoer, and to the retainers at the Summer Seat, that Elia was on Innis Lear. That the king had died.
She was fairly certain she would go first to Errigal Keep as she’d promised Ban, in hope that he too would keep his promise and bring Elia’s sisters to her there.
They needed to speak together, even more now with their father dead. And Elia did believe Kayo when he insisted she should not go to Gaela, for it would appear that Elia was the supplicant, that she agreed to her eldest sister’s ruinous claim to the crown. No, Elia must have her sisters come to her, it was the only way to establish any power in their dangerous triangle. Or hope to sway Regan on behalf of these most beloved wells and roots.
If only the island would counsel her, perhaps Elia would not feel so alone and unsure. But since her father had died, the voice of the wind and the trees had been nothing but a rush of air, a hiss of grief and pain, and the stars too seemed dim, hiding behind mournful clouds.
Brona said the island hadn’t reacted so badly when the last king died. She’d only been a girl, but she remembered. There had been raining and storms then, too—though nothing quite like the great gasp of wind that had accompanied the moment of Lear’s final breath. And never before could Brona recall this terrible silence.
But finally, tonight, the island called her.
Elia.
She moved more quickly, turning through the calm, dark forest in the direction she was beckoned.
Brona had guessed this, too. Soon the island will show you how to be queen, if you keep listening. There is a bird of reaping that flies through all my holy bones, in the direction of the saint of stars. That is where the future is sanctified by the past, Elia, and life and death are nothing but different shapes of the moon. You will listen, and the island will know you.
Her boots crunched over drying autumn leaves, and Elia could see everything before her: layers of gray and silver shades, the darkest purples and flashes of emerald when the sliver of moon caught a glimpse of her through the wind-tossed trees. A trickle of liquid starlight when she came across a stream, slipping and weeping around stones and swirling pools, splashing the eager roots that dug down the bank.
Elia.
She found a wall of sudden darkness, rising behind a hedge of rose vines and ash trees.
A real wall, built of very old granite and limestone, blue as the moon and creamy light. Black vines tangled and braided like wild hair all along the walls, darkening the stone, dry and wrinkled in many places.
It was the first star cathedral.
Lear had come here, a decade ago, and brought with him a round stone to close off the navel well. As he closed them all across the island, denying any power but that of the stars.
Elia’s heartbeat slowed to a crawl, as if to join the creeping, dark pace of this entire world. She walked around the structure, thinking of the one time she’d come here as a child, before her mother died. Perhaps she’d been six or seven, holding Dalat’s hand as they entered the grand cathedral, with both Elia’s sisters at her side and a retinue behind. Lear himself had not been there, that Elia could recall, but most of the memory was a faded curl of smiles and bright blue sky. She remembered making pretty noises, softly touching the edges of a copper bowl half filled with water, and reading the poem marked into the north wall with her mother helping her form the words.
Now Elia found the doors open for her, though barely. As if they’d been closed tight, but something—the size of a deer or smaller—had shoved one side, leaving a crescent smear through the rotten leaves and mud piled against the outside. The thick wood smelled moldy, and she touched her hand to it, brushing gentle fingers against the rough corner and down to the iron handle. Splotches of lichen decorated both metal and wood, and Elia breathed deeply of the earthy wet smell as she slipped between the heavy doors.
Starlight seeped through the ruin. It never had known a roof, but now the effect was more haunting than holy. It felt like a place gone to seed much longer than ten years ago: half a century or more.
The benches and wooden chairs had split and been overgrown with not only moss, but tall and wispy grass. Abandoned nests from squirrels and doves moldered and fell to pieces in the old sconces and narrow shelves where earth saint statues and little altars once stood, most in pieces now scattered against the floor. Vines had grown across the southern aisle, and roses overtaken the entire eastern wall. A tree, an entire living ash, had broken through the floor in the west, pushing up and up with elegant limbs toward the night sky.
And there, in the center, stood the well.
The round granite cap Lear had once deployed in enmity had cracked down the middle, great stone halves fallen to either side like broken, tired wings. They leaned against the well itself, revealing the mouth to the night.
From the black waters came a soft, whispering song that smelled of decay and spring flowers.
Elia picked her way there, eyes stuck on the stone mouth, her lips parted so she could taste the air.
Water darkened the fissures between the rough rocks of the well. She touched her fingers to the dampness, and then touched her tongue.
Wet, healthy earth, metallic and heady.
Elia.
“I am here. Elia, of Lear,” she said, her voice echoing softly all around. I’m here, she said again in the language of trees. I’m listening.
Drink, breathed the voice of the well.