It was her father’s fault. When he’d killed Dalat, he’d killed their entire line.
“Stop, stop!” Connley ordered, grabbing her from behind. He grasped her wrists and crossed them over her chest. He held her tightly, his cheek to her hair. She felt his hard breath blowing past her ear, ragged and unchecked. His chest against her back heaved once, and twice, then his arms jerked tighter before he released his stranglehold, but did not quite let her go. They slumped together.
“I cannot see what’s wrong with me,” Regan said, her head hanging. She turned her hands to hold his. All her hair fell around her face, tangling with their clasped hands. She gazed at the altar, which she had only shifted slightly askew. “I have tried potions and begged the trees; I have done everything that every mother and grandmother of the island would tell me. Three months ago I visited Brona Hartfare and I thought—” She sobbed pure air, letting it out rough and raw. “I thought this time we would catch, we would hold on, but it will never now. My thighs are sticky with the brains of our babe, Connley, and I want to rip out my insides and bury it all here. I am nothing but bones and desperation.”
He unlatched his hands and turned her toward him, gathering her hair in one fist. “This is the only thing that makes you speak in poetry, my heart. If it were not so terrible, I would call it endearing.”
“I must find a way to see inside myself! To find the core of what curses me.”
“It might be a thing wrong with me. More than a mother is required to get a strong child.”
Regan scratched her fingers down the fine scarlet of his jacket, tearing at the wool, the velvet lining the edge. “It is me. You know the stars I was born under; you know my empty fate.” When she said it, her father’s voice echoed in her memory.
“That is your father talking, Regan.”
She reeled back and slapped him for daring to notice. The edge of his high cheek turned pink as he studied her with narrowed, blue-green eyes. Regan knew the look in them: the desire, the scrutiny. She touched his lips and met his gaze. He was a year younger than her, ambitious and lacking kindness, and Regan loved him wildly. Every sign she could read in those damnable stars, every voice in the wind and along the great web of island roots had cried yes when she asked if Connley was for her. But this was her fourth miscarriage in nearly five years of marriage. Plus the one before they’d been married at all.
Connley drew her hair over one shoulder, kissed her finger as it lingered on his bottom lip.
“I don’t know what to do,” the princess said.
“What we always do,” her lover replied. “Come inside and bathe, drink a bit of wine, and fight on. We will achieve what we desire, Regan, make no mistake. Your father’s reign will end, and we will return Innis Lear to glory. We will open the navel wells and invite the trees to sing, and we will be blessed for it. Our children will be the next kings of Innis Lear. I swear it to you, Regan.” Connley turned, his eyes scouring the darkening courtyard. Though Regan did not wish to release him, she did. She stared as he picked his way back to the oak tree and lifted up the letter. It was crumpled now, torn at one corner. He offered it to her.
Regan smoothed the paper between her hands and lifted it to the bare, hanging light of dusk.
Daughter,
Come to the Summer Seat for a Zenith Court, this third noontime after the Throne rises clear, when the moon is full. As the stars describe now, I shall set all my daughters in their places.
Your father and king,
Lear
“Would I could arrive heavy with child,” Regan murmured, touching her belly. Connley put his hand over the top of hers and moved it lower to the bloody stain. He cupped her hand gently around herself.
“We will go heavy with other things,” he said. “Power, wit, righteousness.”
“Love,” she whispered.
“Love,” he repeated, and kissed her mouth.
As Regan returned her husband’s kiss, she thought she heard a whisper from the oak tree: blood, it said, again and again. She could not tell if the tree thanked her for the grave sustenance she’d fed its roots, or offered the word as warning of things to come.
Perhaps, as was often the case with the language of trees, the word held both meanings—and more too unknowable to hear.
GAELA
THE CREAK OF the war tower was like thunder in her blood. Gaela Lear ground her teeth against too-wide a grin, feeling like a child, gleeful and alive as she played with her toys.
But these were not a child’s trinkets, they were dangerous siege weapons, marring the valley with their mechanical violence. To this eldest daughter of the king, commander of Astora’s forces, they were more than mere tools: they were her treasures.
Gaela raised her gauntleted hand in a fist, then swung it down hard. Archers clinging to the inner scaffolds of the war tower loosed arrows at the targets set atop the ruined castle wall ahead, while the men hidden at the base pushed it inexorably nearer, crushing soft green grass and stinging thistles beneath its huge wheels. Wood and taut wet wool protected the soldiers from any retaliation, or it would have, if the ruined castle were in truth alive with enemy archers and men throwing rocks and flaming spears.
When the tower landed against the ruined old wall, archers covered soldiers as they leapt out to secure it in place, so a horde of miners could then rush in and use the shelter to dig beneath the twelve-foot-thick wall, until the earth
