Tessa Gratton - The Queens of Innis Lear

Harper Voyager

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the UK by HarperCollins Publishers 2018

Copyright © Tessa Gratton 2018

Tessa Gratton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008281878

Ebook Edition © 2018 ISBN: 9780008281892

Version: 2018-03-09

To Laura Rennert,

who believed in this book even more than I did.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One

The Fox

Elia

Regan

Gaela

The Fox

Elia

AEFA

Gaela

Mars

Elia

Five Years Ago, Astora

Regan

Elia

The Fox

Eleven Years Ago, Innis Lear

Aefa

Elia

The Fox

Nine Years Ago, West Coast of Innis Lear

Elia

The Fox

Part Two

Five Years Ago, Eastern Border of Aremoria

Elia

Gaela

Seven Years Ago, Hartfare

The Fox

Elia

Aefa

Morimaros

Five Years Ago, Hartfare

Gaela

The Fox

Elia

Regan

The Fox

Gaela

Elia

Six Years Ago, Innis Lear

Part Three

The Fox

Twenty-One Years Ago, Hartfare

Morimaros

The Fox

Six Years Ago, Innis Lear

Elia

Gaela

Ten Years Ago, Innis Lear

Regan

Elia

Ten Years Ago, Hartfare

The Fox

Five Years Ago, Dondubhan

Part Four

Elia

The Fox

Elia

Regan

Eleven Years Ago, Dondubhan Castle

The Fox

Elia

The Fox

Regan

Elia

The Fox

Gaela

Seven Years Ago, Astora

Aefa

The Fox

Elia

Part Five

Rory

The Fox

Elia

Aefa

Morimaros

Five Years Ago, Eastern Border of Aremoria

Gaela

Elia

Eleven Years Ago, Near Dondubhan

The Fox

Morimaros

Aefa

Regan

Gaela

Twelve Years Ago, Dondubhan

Elia

The Fox

Regan

Twenty Years Ago, The Summer Seat

Elia

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

IT BEGINS WHEN a wizard cleaves an island from the mainland, because the king destroyed her temple.

The island is raw and steeped in her rage, making the people who grow there strong, and sharp, and ever quick to fight. Mountains claw upward in the north, and a black river gushes south and west, spreading fingers east into smaller streams that trip through the center of the island. The rush of water gathers up all the trees and flowers, giving them the blood to grow wild and tall, feeding the roots until they dig through the rock itself. Where roots merge with stone, new clear springs are born.

The people build stone shrines around these rootwaters, making holy wells in which to bless themselves, their life rituals, and their intentions. Soon these wells are the centers of towns and at the heart of every fortress or castle, connecting the people always to the blood of the island. Lords from each quarter of the land come together to build a cathedral in the White Forest, where their four domains kiss. That is the heart of the island.

Every generation a child from each quarter kingdom is given to the wild forest for dedication or sacrifice. One lord offers his firstborn, and that is a beginning, too: the beginning of a line of wizards so strong, the other lords rise up together and bury the ashes of the unruly family in saltwater sand.

But the magic survives.

For centuries after, the island bristles and growls, all wind and scoured moors, valleys of pasture lined with protective oak forests, and the jagged north mountains break for rubies and the western cliffs gleam with copper. There is iron in the southern marshes, too, raw mineral that whispers to those who can hear, and when it is forged with magic, it never cracks. The rootwells run strong, and the thin earth is more fertile than it should be, and so the island thrives, fed on the blessing of star prophecies and the teeming love of the roots.

IT BEGINS WHEN a lord of the island reads ambition’s reward in his stars, and rallies the strength of iron and wind to defeat his rivals, uniting all under one crown. He calls himself Lear, after the wizard who cleaved the island. In her honor, he raises a great fortress in the north, along the shores of a black lake so deep many call it the island’s navel. He crowns himself on the longest night, the holiest time for star prophecy; offers his blood and spit to the island’s roots, his breath to the birds and the wind, his seed to the iron, and his faith to the stars.

IT BEGINS FAR away from the furious island, in a place so different in name and air that the one could not recognize the other as being born both of the same earth. There, a young woman asks her grandmother for a ship with which to sail out past the edges of their empire, for she has a hunger to understand the world, to experience something not more broadly but more deeply, until that one thing becomes an entire universe. She says her curiosity is like sand in a storm, scouring bones smooth as glass. Her grandmother agrees, though suspects she’ll never see this daughter of her line again. “God will bring us back together,” the young woman says, and her grandmother replies to her with only an old desert prayer:

“Do not forget: you will be air, and you will be rain, and you will be dust, and you will be free.”

Perhaps that is an ending, too.

IT BEGINS ON the day two bright hearts are born to the island, one just past dawn as a crescent moon rises, and the other when the sun is brightest, obscuring the glow of stars. Their mothers knew they would be born together, as witches and best friends often do, and though it is the first child for one and the last for the other, such does not come between them. They sit beside each other, arms stretched to touch the other’s swollen belly as they grit their teeth and tell stories of what might become of their children.

IT BEGINS WHEN a queen sits in a pool of stars.

IT BEGINS WITH seven words with which to bind a crown, whispered in the language of trees: eat of our flower, and drink of your roots.

IT BEGINS AS the sun sets, the last time the final king of Innis Lear enters the cathedral at the heart of the island. This Lear has never been devoted to the roots, or paid much mind to well or wind. He is a man driven by the stars, by their motions and patterns, their singular purity and steadfastness, bold against the black reaches of night. To him, the cathedral is redundant; a person devoted to star prophecy has no need of rootwater or navel wells.