Would it be different if Dalat had lived?
Elia hardly remembered her mother’s voice, or face, but she remembered Dalat had liked to get dirty in a garden, or milking goats—“There are a dozen reasons for a princess to know how to milk a goat,” Dalat murmured, wrapping Elia’s tiny brown hand around the pink teat. Yet Dalat had also enjoyed the hours it took to create her elaborate hair, drinking wine and gossiping with her companions as they pampered her. The queen had suffered harsh pains when she bled, and allowed only her daughters and favorite women around her at such times. Elia learned to link her mother’s sweat and pain with intimacy, while Gaela learned her ferocious warrior’s grimace from the same, and Regan learned to hide any agony she felt behind a solid mask of ice, because pain was not for your enemies—or even your husband—to see.
Elia was too young when the queen died to hear the rumors that some enthusiastic star-reader, or even the king himself, had forced their prophecy to come true. But she heard it later, from Gaela’s own sharp tongue. Shocked and incredulous, Elia had defended Lear, and her own beloved stars, making them her point of constancy in the lonely roaming island court.
You’re such a baby, her sisters had said. His baby.
That moment was the end of any chance the sisters might have had for a close-hearted relationship. It was clear to Elia now, though they’d never spoken of it again. The divide with Gaela and Regan on one side, and Elia and Lear on the other, had begun that day in earnest, and gaped wider and wider as the girls grew, fairly or not. Gaela allied herself with Astore, first as ward, then as wife, and though this might’ve been a chance for Regan and Elia to connect, Regan gripped even tighter to Gaela. And when Regan married Connley against Lear’s direct wishes, his anger became the final divide between them all. Elia had grown so used to it, she’d accepted the fallout as if she’d never expected anything else.
People died every day, and their loved ones mourned, then lived on. Why could it not be so with her own family? Elia had been just as gutted as the rest of them by Dalat’s death, but it amazed her, even so, that one person could have so much power to break so many strong people, just by dying.
Did my father murder my mother for his stars? Elia whispered to the roses. She didn’t want to believe it. But then, it could perhaps explain Lear’s behavior. How easily and angrily he’d banished—and disowned—her, his favorite daughter. His baby. She had disobeyed his stars.
A breeze ruffled the grass, tickled the nape of Elia’s neck, and brought up such sweet autumn smells from the garden. But no voice came with the wind, no hissing answer from the earth. Either these foreign lands did not know, or would not answer a girl who’d abandoned the tongue of the earth for the stars.
And she’d forsaken it so readily. Because her father commanded it. Had she fought him at all? Had she struggled to keep a memory of Ban, had she begged to continue loving the trees? What was the last tree word she’d spoken? Elia hardly knew. She remembered grief and weeping and then finally the emptiness, but could not recall any fight.
Today was the first zenith since her father disowned her. Elia had never before sat alone beneath a zenith sun.
Just a month past, Ban Errigal had crouched at the base of a standing stone and called tiny silver lights to dance at his fingers; when Elia was a child, she had done the same. Once, it had been easy. She’d seen Aefa do similar, snapping fire, though the princess always would turn away, refusing that they could outshine the stars while so far from the sky.
Elia placed her hands in her lap, palms up, gently cupping the air. She took three long, deep breaths, and whispered, I would hold the sun in tiny mirror, a ball of warmth between my hands.
Her eyes flew open in apprehension. She scrubbed her hands together, then put them flat on the grass. She leaned forward, bent on her hands and knees, digging her fingers through the thick green grass to the cool earth beneath. Perhaps the trees of Aremoria would not speak to her, but Ban had made magic here. There was a voice to find in the roots of this land. There had to be.
My name is Elia, once of Lear, she said. I’m listening again.
The scrape of footsteps on the crushed shells of the narrow path leading here from the arched gate shocked Elia up from her crouch. She twisted, staring toward whomever had interrupted her, angry at Aefa and the royal guard who had allowed it.
Morimaros of Aremoria stood some several long strides away.
She supposed, bleakly, none would have even tried to stop him from entering.
“Elia?” he said, very quietly. “Are you well?”
“No,” she said sitting back on her bare feet. Her empty boots slumped together in the shade of a soft lamb’s-ear plant.
The king came to her and went down to one knee. He was fresh in trousers, boots, shirt, and short burnt-orange tunic, untied at the collar. Water glistened along the lines of his trim hair. Elia fought an urge to brush it away, to skim her fingers against his temple and skull. Was hair that short stiff, or soft? Warm as summer grass? Did it tickle like fox fur? Would his beard, exactly the same length, feel the
