Brona frowned and slid her arm around Gaela’s waist, rubbing the heel of her hand against the layers of gambeson and mail, into the small of the princess’s back. “All this weight you carry. Your mother spent this difficulty naked as a babe, so she could be rubbed and soothed.”
“I remember,” Gaela panted. Dalat had withdrawn from court during these times to share the experience with her daughters and ladies, but that was not Gaela’s way. She crouched, alleviating the tightness in her back, but not the ache inside, not the viscous pain filling her hips like a cauldron of poison. The mail shirt dragged at her shoulders, shivering gently. It was a comfort to Gaela: her true, epicene skin.
In silence they waited together for Gaela’s pain to pass. She breathed deeply, forcing her body to relax as best she could, and the witch held her cool hand against Gaela’s neck, patient and maternal.
Gently, Brona said, “You need not marry if you find the thought of sexual congress so terrible, Gaela. If you cannot bring yourself to lie with a man, do not.”
Gaela snorted at a woman like Brona offering such advice. “You know my stars, and you know Innis Lear. I will never rule if I am not married,” she said, upset at the raw quality of her voice.
“I see,” Brona murmured. “Then what is it you need from me?”
“I won’t bear children.”
“I can help with that, yes.”
The princess shook her head. Her brow pinched with misery. “No, I do not mean I want your potions or skins or abortifacients. I want this inside me destroyed. Burned out or removed, or erased with your magic, Brona. I want you to make me a man.”
In the bright afternoon, against birds calling high and pretty from the edges of the forest, with the sounds of Hartfare warm and welcoming all around, Gaela’s voice was hard. Harsh, and determined as fire.
Brona said, “This is not what makes a woman, or the lack of which that makes a man.”
“Do not be pedantic or poetical with me, Brona. Do not philosophize or moralize. Only tell me if you can.”
“I can.”
Gaela said, “And you will?”
“You might die of it.”
“I am prepared to die in battle.”
Brona’s expression darkened. “Good, for that is what this shall be. A battle inside you, and all you will have is the strength of your heart. Your determination.”
“I can conquer my body,” Gaela whispered.
“Hm.” Brona frowned, nodding at the same time, studying the warrior in a thoughtful yet daunting manner. It relieved Gaela to be reminded that Brona was an authority in her chosen work, and yet it still brought a swift pinch of annoyance that anyone could still elicit such timidity in her at all. “You will need some weeks to recover, perhaps. Are you ready now, or shall I come to you?”
Gaela’s instinct was to insist on an immediate surgery. She was ready, had been ready; she needed this as she’d needed almost nothing in her life. But then she thought of Regan’s fury if Gaela were to go into this alone, were to leave without a word. Regan did not get to make this decision for Gaela, or even with her, but that did not mean she would not be there to squeeze their fingers together, to clench her jaw in shared pain, to hold Gaela through the worst of it.
Sweat broke along Gaela’s hairline, and she said, “I need Regan. Come with me now, and do it at Dondubhan, so I may be sick where she is.”
“And nearer to your mother,” Brona murmured.
“No, this is nothing to do with her. She would not…” Gaela stopped. She touched her fists to the damp earth of the garden.
“She wanted you, Gaela. Your father was afraid of the prophecy, but Dalat wanted her girls, no matter what. Motherhood was a gift to her, not a curse.” Brona touched her tan hands to the backs of Gaela’s. She was so much paler than Gaela, though not so pale as Gaela’s father or her future husband.
This is the only match that matters, Dalat had said.
Perhaps her mother had the luxury to think so because she’d grown up in the Third Kingdom where everyone was rich and dark and proud. Where Dalat and her daughters would have belonged. But Gaela knew that to most people on Innis Lear it mattered more what she did not look like than what she did. She did not look like her father; she did not look like a king.
Gaela would not give up her mother’s skin for anything, but she could make herself into a king for Innis Lear.
It had been nearly five years since Dalat’s death, and Gaela alone of all the daughters felt it hard and sharp still, for she alone had grown up with a mother, been sixteen when she died—as the star prophecy had promised. The grief filled her with rage sometimes, and she embraced it as a hot, scouring ocean wind, keeping her clear and focused on what she wanted: the throne.
Gaela opened her mouth to say so to Brona, for Brona had known Dalat longer even than Gaela herself had. They’d been friends, dear friends, and if anyone missed Dalat as fiercely as Gaela, it would be the witch.
“How can you bear to be parted from your son?” Gaela asked instead. “How can you allow yourselves to be separated?”
“My son?” Brona’s face was near enough to Gaela’s, as the two women knelt there, that Gaela could count the hair-thin lines of smiling and sorrow and age skirting Brona’s eyes. Gaela nodded, and Brona squeezed her fists. “I would prefer he be here still, with me. But mothers must let go, someday. He carries pieces of me inside him, and words I’ve given him. He will make or break himself, as all children must. Your mother would say the same.”
Gaela lurched to her feet. “I must make or break myself.”
More slowly, Brona stood. She stepped back from Gaela, enough to take her in with one sweep of her gaze. “Yes,” she said, “Make or break yourself, Gaela Lear, and take this island with you.”
“I will break myself in order to make myself,” Gaela whispered, shivering suddenly with pain and promise.
And perhaps then this island, too.
THE FOX
THOUGH HE COULD never think of it as home, Ban found he rather admired the oddly shaped Keep of the Earls Errigal.
The Keep had been destroyed in his grandfather’s grandfather’s time, when the island of Lear had been a chaotic cluster of tiny kingdoms. The then-king of Connley had sacked Errigal Keep, knocking two of the black stone walls down with the unmatched strength of his war machines, gutting and burning the inside and executing the inhabitants in waves until Errigal surrendered. King Connley brought every little territory to its knees in this way, and made the island into his own; he renamed himself Lear—after the wizard who had cleaved the island from Aremoria—and turned the former kingdoms into dukedoms. The new line of Lear forced Errigal to swear allegiance and promise never to rebuild the Keep into the great stone fortress it had been.