At the center, smaller blue stones created a pit as black as anything she’d ever seen. At the fore was a flat boulder, like a ledge, and another made a roof across two of the largest boulders to shelter this most ancient well.
The star priests moved to stand at each corner of the small grove, cupping the clay bowls of fire carefully before them. All looked to the oldest; a cragged and drooping old man with pale brown eyes and a spotted white face, who had stationed himself beside the well and now pointed at the clusters of tall spindled plants growing in the damp soil beside the well. “There is no ritual but this,” he said. “Eat a handful of the blossoms, and dip your hands into the well to drink. Then, in the light of the stars, by the power of the rootwaters, you will be recognized as the rightful monarch of Innis Lear.”
Gaela waited for the rest of her people to filter in around her, studying the flowers. The green stalks reached higher than her waist, spreading like fingers or thin, miniature trees. The leaves were feathery and green, and tiny white blossoms made starbursts and swaying baubles. She wondered why they seemed so strange, so out of place in this grove, when they were no more than a common weed, and weeds abounded in these northern reaches of Innis Lear.
“They should be blooming in the late spring,” Regan murmured. “Not now. Now they should be dried seed heads. Might we, too, have blossomed here, my Connley?”
Gaela frowned, concerned for her grieving sister’s state of mind.
“Death rattles,” Regan’s wizard, her Fox, murmured. Then, louder, his voice like ice, “It’s hemlock.”
“You would poison me?” Gaela turned with careful, coiled control to the old star priest.
Led by Osli, her retainers drew their swords, aiming furious blades at the four priests.
The old priest inclined his head and held her gaze. “It is the only way to gain the crown of Innis Lear, Princess.”
Wind hissed across the tops of the low trees, tossing thin yellow-and-brown leaves toward them. It shivered the pines at the north of the grove. Gaela stared at the old man, wondering if this could be true.
“My father ate such poison?” Regan asked, strangely calm to Gaela’s ears. Curious, almost wondering.
“Yes.”
Ban the Fox stepped up to the edge of the well. “I believe it,” he said in a taut voice. “The roots of the island and the blood of the king become united, sacrificing for each other. So one who would take the crown must take the poison, and then let the rootwater cleanse them, transforming death of the self into rebirth as the king. This is the way of wormwork.”
“It is safer on the Longest Night, when the roots are strongest and waters blessed by the brightest, boldest stars. If fear pauses you now,” said the old priest.
Gaela’s skin chilled, and slowly began to tighten against her own flesh. Surely this was not fear, but fury.
Regan knelt by the star-bright weeds and brushed her fingers against the flowers. “So beautiful,” she whispered.
“Put your swords down,” Gaela ordered her retainers. She glanced to see it done, catching the gross tension on Osli’s face. Her captain did not trust this magic, either, and she was loath to leave her lord so unprotected.
The rootwaters had never done anything for Gaela. Why should they keep her alive now? Gaela had rejected them again and again. Had rejected everything of magic, of star prophecy and the island. She intended her power for herself and her sister, not to share it with fickle wind, stubborn earth, prideful stars. Why should she put her life into—
The thought hit her like a ballista’s bolt: Dalat had been poisoned this way.
Gaela had always suspected poison. She would never have been able to prove it had been her father’s own hand, not just his fault—his requirement—his prophecy. Gaela had guessed, between the wagging tongues at court and her own ears, but never, until exactly now, had she known how. If this priest told it true, Lear had known of the hemlock here, as well as he knew his own stars.
Lear had poisoned Dalat to bring about the prophecy that she would die on her eldest daughter’s sixteenth birthday.
The night before, the queen had been healthy, with an appetite and shining eyes. No fever or illness, nothing to claim her in the night so suddenly.
By dawn, Dalat simply had ceased to breathe.
Or so Lear had claimed. But he was alone with her during that night, and alone with her first thing in the morning.
If this hemlock grew so near Dondubhan, how easy would it have been to make certain she partook?
Gaela’s shoulders heaved as she thought it all through, as she stared at the weedy hemlock, at the way the flowers looked like constellations. Of course it was such a star shape he would use; of course it was such a thing that he preferred.
Her heart burned with this new understanding. As if the island had collaborated in her mother’s death, Gaela lifted her foot and brought it down upon one of the hemlock plants.
Regan gasped, and one of the priests grunted in protest.
“This will not happen,” Gaela said. Her voice shook, from fury and a swelling panic. “I am changing the way this process works, changing ritual and the relationship between the crown and the land. I will not poison myself to suit dead ways of dead kings. I will be my own sacrament.”
“It is supposed to be faith that guides the hand!” cried the oldest star priest. “To wear our crown, you must believe in the roots, in the island’s blood and the prophecies of the stars!
“No.” Gaela crushed more of the hemlock. “I am here for my own blood, which is of this island, and my own will, which shall be my only prophecy.”
She drew out her knife and sliced at the green stalks, ripping up others and tossing them against the mossy boulders. Some leaves and petals fluttered down into the black pit of the well; lonely, fallen stars.
“Gaela.” Regan clutched at her wrist. “I’ll do it. I want to! Let me do this!”
“No. I won’t allow you to be such a fool. And neither was our father, though he became one by the end. He would not have done this, hating the roots so, disdainful of all but the skies of his beloved stars. A coward, one who doomed his wife to save his own seat, but he’d never have wagered his own life. He lied, if he said he did.”
The old priest shook his head frantically. “No, I was there. I saw it, then. He ate of the flowers, and drank of the waters, before he grew dizzy and collapsed. Lear went still for a long hour as the stars wheeled overhead, and then the king opened his eyes, and the stars shone upon his awakening.”
“A pretty story.” Gaela did not care.
Tears glittered on Regan’s cheeks, and she knelt beside the well. “I don’t mind if it kills me, Gaela,” she whispered. “The reward is greater, to be what we always wanted. What Connley wanted. I would be made full—new.”
“How dare you offer to abandon me,” Gaela said, so low in her throat she could hardly believe it was her own voice. “Remember who you are, Regan, and who I am, and what we are to each other. What we will be to this land.”
Silence fell all around, but for the constant pressing wind, and Regan’s hard breathing. Gaela put her hand on her sister’s neck. She was sympathetic; she hated for Regan to weep, to hurt so badly and desperately, but Gaela was angry, too, furious that Regan felt so bereft without Connley, when they still had each other. And Regan could still try for a babe, perhaps with the Fox, his seed surely more cunning than Regan’s dead husband’s, and enough power between them to spur life.
No other love should be able to drag Regan away from Gaela! As if they could not be all to each other, beyond the ways of men, and their rules, and their stars. No.
“Regan,” she said, resolute but not unkind.
Her sister’s head nodded, wearily.
“Ban,” Gaela ordered, “hold my sister up.”
The young man took Regan’s elbow and leaned her against his chest. His eyes were bright, slightly too wide, and he murmured softly into Regan’s ear.