Tessa Gratton - The Queens of Innis Lear

Elia was too used to the lack of sisterly support to be surprised or even newly injured. She lowered her eyes to the spilled wine, gave Regan and Gaela a moment to understand she was not truly challenging them; she was only so tired, so raw. So afraid for their father, for her future. She had done nothing at all, and yet her life was torn away. She could barely breathe, had felt lightheaded and breathless all afternoon. “I do not wish to be the queen of Innis Lear. I only wish to be home, and take care of him.”

“He does not deserve you,” Regan said.

“What will you do with him, then?” Elia asked. “Be kind, I beg you.”

Gaela said, “We will disband his retainers but for some hundred or so of them, and share the burden of housing him and them between us.”

“You could stay, Elia,” Regan said seductively, “if you marry some harmless man of Lear, and never stand against us.”

“Some harmless man?”

“Perhaps Rory Errigal,” Gaela said.

“No,” Elia said quickly, thinking instead of Ban, though she’d not let herself do so for years. It was only brotherly affection she held for Rory.

“No, Gaela,” Regan agreed. She tapped dangerous fingernails at the edge of the spill of wine. “You only want her to eek Errigal’s iron and loyalty away from my Connley with that, dear sister.”

Gaela smiled. Regan smiled.

Elia swallowed a heavier drink of wine.

“And so,” Gaela said, “Elia cannot remain here now. She must stay in Aremoria until Midwinter, and so keep herself out of the minds of any who remember Lear wished for her to be the next queen.”

“If you return before the Longest Night we will take it as a hostile act,” Regan added.

Sighing sharply, Elia finished her wine. She would be drunk soon, and she welcomed it. She felt exhausted. The brief silence among them was strangely comfortable, until Regan said, “Beware of Morimaros.”

“What?” She thought of his hands, the garnet and pearl ring, the rough, pinked knuckles.

Gaela said, “They say in Aremoria that the greatest king will reunite our island to their country. That what was sundered will be returned. Morimaros’s ambition will lead him to desire Innis Lear for his own. You must prove to him we three are Lear now, and we three are strong.”

Elia pinched her eyes closed. “Are we? You just told me my presence here threatens you.”

“Elia!” snapped Regan. “It is what we will make ourselves, do you understand?”

“I understand,” Elia said, leaning forward, “that my sisters played some vicious game today, that my father disowned me and believes he hates me, and I must leave my home because of it.”

Both her sisters smiled again, so familiar and yet unknowable to Elia. Regan’s was small and cold, Gaela’s wide enough to display her shield of white teeth.

“Why do you hate him?” Elia whispered, grasping at anything to make her understand why she was empty and broken, while her sisters triumphed.

Regan leaned in so Elia could see the tiny flecks of blue in her dark eyes. “Why don’t you?” she whispered back.

The wine gurgled in Elia’s belly. She touched a hand there, setting her cup down hard. “You won’t be better than him. The two of you will let the island break into war. Worse; you’ll encourage it between your husbands. How can you? How can you wish for such a thing?”

Gaela said, “We will encourage what we must to achieve what we desire.”

It was mysteriously said, low in voice, and most unlike Gaela. Elia stared at her eldest sister, the one whose face reminded her of their mother; or else she’d been told so often that Gaela resembled the queen that she’d invented some memory to account for it. She did not know what was real. “I want Innis Lear at peace. I want my family whole,” Elia said.

Regan reached for Gaela; their palms met, and they clasped hands.

Elia understood: they were whole, but apart from Elia, because Elia had been too young to choose against Lear when their mother died. Her sisters could only give her so much now, too many years later. Elia said, “I don’t want to be here.”

“You’ll go soon enough,” said Gaela.

Elia shook her head. She felt hollow where she was supposed to be overwhelmed: flooded with anger, or burning with grief. She hated the numbness, but she did not know how to change it or chase it away—and if she thought about anything else it was her father’s grimace as he took away her name, as he said—as he said—

She was shaking all over.

Her sisters dragged her onto her feet and suddenly embraced her. Elia covered her face, surprised, and pressed into Gaela and Regan. “You take care of him,” she said, muffling her own order. “You do as you promised today and love him. Make those words true.”

“Do not teach us our duty,” Gaela said, pinching Elia’s hip.

Elia gripped the hard arm of her eldest sister and the thin ribs of her middle sister. When was the last time they’d stood thus? When their mother died? No—when Ban Errigal had been sent away and she’d believed it her own fault, she’d come to Regan, begging for some plot to get him back, and Regan had taken her to Gaela’s room. They gave her wine like this, though she choked on it like the child she’d been, and they told her to forget her friend. Told her to hope for nothing but that he come home someday, stronger. That is always the way, Gaela had said. Go, but return home stronger. And Regan had said, If you are lucky and willful and brave. Lear would have us weaken away from him, but we will never do as he wishes, Elia. We would rather die than give him what he wants, even if all he wants is his stars.

“Go, but return home stronger,” Elia whispered now.

“If you can,” Regan said.

Gaela snorted, amused. “If she can.”

Elia pulled free of them. Stumbling to the door, she wished to cling to a single memory of a time she’d felt like their sister, part of them equally, a true triad, a triplet star, anything. The memories were there, faded and locked away in salty cliff caves, under the high table on the Longest Night, and in a cottage at the center of the White Forest. But in this moment she was untethered, shorn from her father and family because there was nothing in her sisters tying her heart secure.

FAR OUT PAST the Summer Seat, against the cliffs facing the fortress, a ragged half-circle of stones stood like the bottom row of a monster’s teeth, growing up out of the patchy moor. Thirteen stones, twice as tall as a man but not half so wide, worn raw by the salt wind.

Ban should’ve loved it. A temple of roots and rock, biting hard against the sky.

His boots scuffed against grit and gravel. The wind brushed through, humming around the stones, drawing thin purple clouds off the ocean. Heather clustered on the south sides of a few standing stones, bowing gently in the twilight. Ban reached out to the nearest stone, mottled with coins of black lichen and paler moon lichen. The rock was warm, purring like the wind.

Stepping fully into the half-circle, he tilted his head up. Purple and great swaths of rich indigo crawled across the sky, letting through only the strongest stars. A full moon glowed over the easternmost standing stone. The top was slanted, and Ban walked until the moon was pierced by its higher, sharper tip. This had always been his argument with Errigal and the king as a boy: the patterns Ban saw depended on where he stood. One needed the perspective of the earth to understand the stars.

Errigal had cuffed him and the king explained disgustedly, “A man should stand where he is supposed to stand, and from there see the signs and patterns around him. That is how you read the stars.”