“No,” Regan hissed, scraping her nails too hard on the stone altar. One cracked, and that pain she welcomed. Her breath caught like a broken necklace, dragging up, up, up, and chattering her teeth. She bared them in rage and forced her breathing into long, slow rolls.
Was it her? Was this failure some greater symptom of the island cracking?
Any beast could be a mother—there were babes in nests and hovels and barnyards. It was only Regan who seemed unable to join them.
When the next cramp caught her, she cried out, shoved away from the altar, and curled tightly over her knees. She whispered to herself that she was healthy and well and most of all strong, as if she could change what happened next by ordering her body to obey her.
A pause in the pain left her panting, but Regan ground her teeth and stood up on her bare feet. Though preferring quite formal attire, even in her husband’s castle, Regan had come to the altars today in only the thinnest red wool dress and no underthings. She’d left her slippers outside the arched gate and untied the ribbons from her wavy brown hair, allowing it to spill past her waist. Hers was the longest, straightest hair of her sisters, and her skin the lightest, though still a very cool brown. There was the most of their father, Lear, in her looks: the shape of his knifelike lips, and flecks of Lear’s blue lightened his daughter’s chestnut eyes.
Regan walked carefully to the ropey old oak tree to pray, her hands on two thick roots. I am as strong as you, she said in the language of trees. I will not break. Help me now, mother, help me. I am strong.
The tree sighed, its bulk shivering so that the high, wide leaves cast dappled shadows about like rain in a storm.
Regan went to the northern altar and cut the back of her wrist with a stone dagger, bleeding into a shallow bowl of wine. Take this blood from me instead, she whispered, pouring the bloody wine over the altar, where north root was etched in the language of trees. The maroon liquid slid into the rough grooves, turning the words dark. Take this, and let me get to my room where my mothers’ milk tonic is, where my husband—
The princess’s voice cut away at the sensation of blood slipping out of her, tickling her inner thighs with dishonest tenderness.
She returned to the grand oak tree on slow legs, sat on the earth between two roots, and slumped over herself. Despair overwhelmed her every thought, as hope and strength dripped out of her on the heels of this treacherous blood.
The sun lowered itself in the sky until only the very crown of the oak was gilded. The courtyard below was a cold mess of shadows and silver twilight. Regan shivered, despite tears hot in her eyes. In these slow hours she allowed herself a grief she would deny if confronted by any but her elder sister. Grief, and shame, and a cord of longing for her mother who died when she was fourteen. Dalat had birthed three healthy girls, had done it as far away from her own land and god and people as a woman could get. And Regan was here among the roots and rocks of her home. She should have been—should have been able.
The earth whispered quiet, harsh sighs; Regan heard the rush of blood in her ears and through the veins of the tree. She saw only the darkness of her own closed eyes, and smelled only the thick, musty scent of her womb blood.
“Regan, are you near?”
It was the sharp voice of her husband. She put her hands on her head and dug her nails in, gripped her hair and tore until it hurt.
His boots crunched through the scattered grasses, over fallen twigs and chunks of stone broken off the walls.
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere, wife,” he said, in a tone more irritable than he usually directed at her. “There’s a summons from your … Regan.” Connley said her name in a hush of horror.
She could not look up at him, even as she sensed him bend beside her, too close, and grasp her shoulders to lift her up off her knees. “Regan,” he said again, all tenderness and tight fear.
Her eyes opened slowly, sticky with half-dried tears, and she allowed him to straighten her. She leaned into him, and suddenly her ankles were cold where air caressed streaks of dark red and brown, left from her long immersion in blood and earth.
“Oh no,” Connley said. “No.”
The daughter of the king drew herself up, for she was empty again now, and without pain. She was cold and hungry and appreciated the temporary bliss of detachment. “I am well, Connley,” she said, using him as a prop to stand. Her toes squished in the bloody earth. Regan shuddered but spoke true:
“It is over.”
Connley stood with her, blood on the knee of his fine trousers, the letter from her father crushed against the oak tree’s root, forgotten. He was a handsome, sun-gilded man, with copper in his short blond hair. His chin was beardless, for he had nothing to hide and charm enough in his smile for a dozen wives. But now Connley had gone sallow and rigid from upset, his smile sheathed. He put his hands on Regan’s face, touched thumbs to old tears just where her skin was the most delicate purple, beneath her eyes. “Regan,” he whispered again, disappointed. Not with her, never with her, but still, that was how it sounded to her ears.
She tore free of him, storming toward the eastern altar that had not been blessed this afternoon. With one bare foot, she shoved and kicked at it, jaw clenched, hands in fists, hair wild and the tips
