“We are enough, Kayo. We will make it so.”
Even Kayo would not be enough. It wasn’t fair; it unrooted the girl before she could understand or choose on her own. “You should let me take her to visit her mother’s people.”
The king looked dazed. “No. Maybe—someday, but no.”
Frustrated, unsure why he felt so violently upended, Kayo called out, putting all the warmth he could muster into his voice. He strode ahead of the king and opened his arms. “Elia!”
The girl smiled brightly, then quickly the smile dimmed into a softer one, as if she’d checked her own instinct. Kayo’s heart rolled. He lifted her up and hugged her, swinging her a little so that her toes knocked against his knees. A small giggle pressed against his neck; the princess was wet. Her dress stuck to him, her skin was clammy, and the kiss she put on his cheek was cold. Kayo set her down. “Were you out in all the rain?”
“Yes,” she admitted shyly. “It felt good, and I thought I could hear the roses, whispering about…”
“About what?”
“Nothing. Hello, Father,” she said, smoothing down her dress. The tilt of her chin and wide black eyes were so like Dalat’s that Kayo was struck speechless. The girl’s hair was bound back plainly under a soaking wet green scarf.
“Elia, you should find shelter when it rains, and this well … it is dangerous.” The king touched one long finger to the black rocks of the well.
“I won’t fall in, Father,” she said, hiding her laugh, but not that she found him silly.
The king maintained his frown.
“Come here, Elia. Let me see you.” Kayo knelt, holding Elia’s shoulders. He put her exactly at arm’s length. “You’re taller since the winter, aren’t you? And beautiful as your mother. Are you well?”
She nodded, staring into his eyes. “Your eyes are so very gray,” she said with a little awe.
“My mother’s second husband was a Godsman,” Kayo said, then corrected himself: “My father, that is.”
“Oh,” she said. “A Godsman.” She touched his face, and Kayo felt such a swell of affection for her, tears blurred the edges of his sight. “It’s all right, Uncle,” she said calmly.
“I know, starling.”
“Or it will be. One of those. I helped Father look at your stars, did you know?”
“I did not!” Kayo let his brows rise. “You must be very skilled.”
“I like to draw the patterns. What is a Godsman?”
Kayo smiled sadly. “Holy men, a tribe of them, but I cannot tell you more, for their secrets are held close—even from their sons, if we do not become one of them.”
King Lear said, “What do you think, Elia, if we call Kayo our Oak Earl?”
“I don’t think it will make up for not being a Godsman like his father.”
A thing pinched his heart, and Kayo gripped her shoulders a bit too tightly.
Elia leaned in and hugged him. “But we’ve never had an Oak Earl on Innis Lear before.”
Without hesitation, Kayo had said, “Then I will be your first.”
So he would learn to farm.
Kayo walked now across squishy bog, east toward the center of his land. His land. He wondered how long it would be before he would be used to stewardship of something so entire as land; a piece of an island. Would it change him, to finally have a place all his own, stationary and complete? His mind shied away from it, rather imagining his ownership fell upon the revenue or produce only, the parts that were defined by a king or a man, not the land itself, which only God, surely, could claim.
Though on Innis Lear, they said the land claimed itself. The trees had their own language, some of which Kayo had learned. The wind whispered and the birds sang messages from the stars to the roots or the roots to the stars. Kayo took deep, questing breaths, as if to bring the island into himself.
That witch last year had said, The island’s roots and wind of our trees know what Dalat of Taria Queen and Innis Lear has asked of you. The trees know your worth.
Kayo found a copse of trees, small and spindly, with white and gray bark. Their narrow leaves shivered and tittered together, flapping pale green. He touched a ruffle of leaves, and asked, “Can you understand me? I need a place to begin.”
Wind fluttered the end of Kayo’s headscarf, where it looped casually around his neck. He unspooled it reverently, kneeling at the base of one white tree. His trousers soaked up muck and cold water. The scarf had been a gift from his mother when Kayo reached his majority. All his life he’d been of both Taria Queen and Innis Lear, moving from one to the other over the three-month-long journey. Tied here by adventure, love, and his sister, tied there by blood and tradition.
The headscarf was vibrant ocher, and edged with teal silk. Precious and too fine for daily wear, it overwhelmed his eyes, making them like empty mirrors in too much sun; but teal, Dalat had told him once, was his best color.
Kayo of Taria Queen pressed the scarf into the cold, unfamiliar earth. He used his hands to dig a nest for it between two ghostly gray roots, and buried it there.
When he stood up, he was Kayo, the Oak Earl, so named by the island, a princess, and the king of Innis Lear, called to walk a parallel path with his brother, until the day Lear’s crown lowered beyond the horizon.
REGAN
REGAN BLED STEADILY as she sewed downy owl feathers into the hem of a linen shift.
She chose, like her mother would have, to be surrounded by the women of Errigal Keep during her monthly blood, and they were arrayed in front of her now: the chatelaine Sella Ironwife, married to the wizard Curan, and their two daughters; three other ladies who were cousins to Connley; and one younger sister of the former Lady
