“Come here, Elia. Let me see you.” Kayo knelt, holding Elia’s shoulders. He put her exactly at arm’s length. “You’re taller since the winter, aren’t you? And beautiful as your mother. Are you well?”
She nodded, staring into his eyes. “Your eyes are so very gray,” she said with a little awe.
“My mother’s second husband was a Godsman,” Kayo said, then corrected himself: “My father, that is.”
“Oh,” she said. “A Godsman.” She touched his face, and Kayo felt such a swell of affection for her, tears blurred the edges of his sight. “It’s all right, Uncle,” she said calmly.
“I know, starling.”
“Or it will be. One of those. I helped Father look at your stars, did you know?”
“I did not!” Kayo let his brows rise. “You must be very skilled.”
“I like to draw the patterns. What is a Godsman?”
Kayo smiled sadly. “Holy men, a tribe of them, but I cannot tell you more, for their secrets are held close—even from their sons, if we do not become one of them.”
King Lear said, “What do you think, Elia, if we call Kayo our Oak Earl?”
“I don’t think it will make up for not being a Godsman like his father.”
A thing pinched his heart, and Kayo gripped her shoulders a bit too tightly.
Elia leaned in and hugged him. “But we’ve never had an Oak Earl on Innis Lear before.”
Without hesitation, Kayo had said, “Then I will be your first.”
So he would learn to farm.
Kayo walked now across squishy bog, east toward the center of his land. His land. He wondered how long it would be before he would be used to stewardship of something so entire as land; a piece of an island. Would it change him, to finally have a place all his own, stationary and complete? His mind shied away from it, rather imagining his ownership fell upon the revenue or produce only, the parts that were defined by a king or a man, not the land itself, which only God, surely, could claim.
Though on Innis Lear, they said the land claimed itself. The trees had their own language, some of which Kayo had learned. The wind whispered and the birds sang messages from the stars to the roots or the roots to the stars. Kayo took deep, questing breaths, as if to bring the island into himself.
That witch last year had said, The island’s roots and wind of our trees know what Dalat of Taria Queen and Innis Lear has asked of you. The trees know your worth.
Kayo found a copse of trees, small and spindly, with white and gray bark. Their narrow leaves shivered and tittered together, flapping pale green. He touched a ruffle of leaves, and asked, “Can you understand me? I need a place to begin.”
Wind fluttered the end of Kayo’s headscarf, where it looped casually around his neck. He unspooled it reverently, kneeling at the base of one white tree. His trousers soaked up muck and cold water. The scarf had been a gift from his mother when Kayo reached his majority. All his life he’d been of both Taria Queen and Innis Lear, moving from one to the other over the three-month-long journey. Tied here by adventure, love, and his sister, tied there by blood and tradition.
The headscarf was vibrant ocher, and edged with teal silk. Precious and too fine for daily wear, it overwhelmed his eyes, making them like empty mirrors in too much sun; but teal, Dalat had told him once, was his best color.
Kayo of Taria Queen pressed the scarf into the cold, unfamiliar earth. He used his hands to dig a nest for it between two ghostly gray roots, and buried it there.
When he stood up, he was Kayo, the Oak Earl, so named by the island, a princess, and the king of Innis Lear, called to walk a parallel path with his brother, until the day Lear’s crown lowered beyond the horizon.
REGAN
REGAN BLED STEADILY as she sewed downy owl feathers into the hem of a linen shift.
She chose, like her mother would have, to be surrounded by the women of Errigal Keep during her monthly blood, and they were arrayed in front of her now: the chatelaine Sella Ironwife, married to the wizard Curan, and their two daughters; three other ladies who were cousins to Connley; and one younger sister of the former Lady Errigal, who had stayed behind when the lady departed to Aremoria, perhaps in trade for the missing elder. For their benefit, Regan had chosen a careful position, seeming to lounge on a low cushion, skirts arranged voluptuously all around.
In truth, Regan perched carefully and uncomfortably upon her knees, a shallow bowl between her legs to collect what blood she could, in preparation for the wormwork she and the Fox would perform in less than a day. The occasional gentle drip could not be heard over the chatter of the assembled ladies, who sewed and embroidered and mended.
The ache in her belly was nothing compared to the pain of miscarriage, and the tightness in her legs as Regan held the wretched pose with a gracious smile was well worth the reward of discovering what ailed her womb, and the hope that it could be fixed.
And Regan enjoyed the presence of other women, who, though they did not know of the dead spirits that plagued her nor of her desperation and feral sorrow, would understand if they did.
When she had daughters of her own, Regan would build them a room like this, with women like this. Friends, maids, cousins, witches, allies, enemies, all of it, but only women. Regan had experienced such a thing when Dalat lived, when Elia was such a baby still, and when sometimes Brona Hartfare had spent weeks living in Dondubhan or the Summer Seat with Dalat, as her companion and advisor. Together they attracted other women like crows to sparkling glass beads. There Regan learned the seeds of magic, and learned, too, to read the holy bones. Brona never hesitated to whisper answers and new questions in Regan’s ear, and though Dalat did not believe in the stars as magic, or the earth saints even as tiny gods, neither did the queen say it could not be so. Dalat prayed to a god of her own, an expansive desert deity of love and vengeance, who apparently favored family and loyalty and heat. But Dalat had wished her daughters to be truly of Lear, and so to Regan, her mother would say, My God is all and has no name but God. God is more than stars and trees and worms, and is all those things, too. I pray, but with action and choice, and God knows it, no matter where I am, because God is in me, and in you, and everything.
Does God speak to you?
Not with words.
The island must be stronger, then, Mama, to have its own voice.
Dalat then smiled, cupped Regan’s chin, and said, That depends on what strength is, and would offer no more.
Maybe if her mother had lived, Regan would understand better what kind of strength Dalat had believed in.
The argument ongoing between Sella Ironwife and Metis Connley touched on strength, too: they disagreed over the behavior of one of the apprentices, who’d been lately seducing another. Sella found it unprofessional, while Metis was in favor of strengthening lines of iron magic, so if two apprentices formed a union, all the better. Regan agreed with Metis: they needed all the strong magic on the island they could find, to counter the cold stars.
The debate was halted by a sharp knock, and Regan granted permission for the doors to be opened. Into the brightly lit room came a dirty retainer wearing the dark blushing pink of Astore.
Going still against the desire to stand, Regan lifted her cool brow but rather suddenly realized it was a woman retainer. “Osli.”
The woman bowed like a man, and brandished a rolled letter, sealed at both ends with thick wax. “My lady Astore sends this letter to you.”
Regan extended her hand, glad as always for word from Gaela, and even more to remember that, despite choosing the life of a man, Gaela still put women around herself. “Go take your rest, and then join us, Osli. You are welcome.”
“I would rather stay in the barracks, my lady.”
“Gaela would join me.”
Osli hesitated, then bowed again, in definite agreement. “I will wash and rest, then, first.”