“Elia,” someone said.
It was no tree voice, or the wind, but a woman. Elia let go of the rose vine, but the thorns stuck in her flesh and she stopped.
Someone spoke in the language of trees. Elia could only understand, then, two words: rose and you. She did not move except to glance sideways.
A boy had stood there, not the woman who’d spoken before. He was her size, with ruddy cheeks and a thicket of black hair in tangles like a wild thing. His eyes were mud-gray and chipped with green. He repeated himself.
“I don’t understand,” Elia had said, tears in her eyes. “My sister only teaches me words that my mother wants to hear.”
Behind them both, the woman spoke again. “He said the roses don’t want to let you go.”
Elia had choked on a cry, nodding and shaking. “My mother is dead.”
The words themselves became the ocean of grief in her chest, and so Elia did not breathe for a long moment.
“I know,” the woman said. She stepped to Elia, touching the princess’s thin shoulder. It was Brona, the queen’s friend, and witch of the White Forest. “This is my son, Ban. Do you remember him?”
Elia did not think she’d met the boy before, and she glanced at him more curiously. He did not smile or frown, only studied her with those large muddy eyes.
“I will ask them to let you go,” he’d said finally, then whispered to the roses.
The vine shuddered and sighed, and the wind teased Elia’s loose cloud of hair, without touching Ban’s or his mother’s.
And with a little extra shiver, the rose thorns released Elia’s flesh. She’d pulled her hand back, and Ban snatched her wrist instead in his small, dry hand. Before she could speak, he had touched the smears of blood in her palm and drew three marks on the skin. “Thank you,” he said, and then, Thank you, this time in the language of trees.
Thank you, Elia had repeated.
Ban tugged her hand and then pressed her palm against the bark of the nearby cherry tree. Elia Lear, he’d whispered.
Then the door to Elia’s bedroom had crashed open, echoing through the empty garden, and her father, the king, called her name.
“Your mother loved you,” Brona the witch had said as Elia pulled herself free of Ban. Elia backed away, shaking her head. There had been too much inside her, too many unnamed winds and currents still lifting, growing, pushing out and out to overwhelm her heart.
The boy Ban had vanished in a scatter of grass and fallen leaves, rushing away, and Brona had smiled sadly at Elia, then bent to pick something out of the roots of a cherry tree. She tucked whatever it was into her skirts and left, too.
Elia had turned to face her father, who strode blindly toward her, kicking his nightrobe and long blue coat in his hurry. His feet were bare. He’d picked her up under her arms and hugged her too tightly.
His hair smelled of Dalat’s bergamot oil, and Elia had wrapped her arms around him, burying her face in his neck.
“Oh, Elia,” the king had murmured, “Oh, my baby, my little star. You won’t leave me. Never.”
“No, Father,” she’d whispered.
Hitching her onto his hip, though she was eight and wild and gangly, he’d carried her to Dalat’s bench. They sat, Lear cradling Elia and crying, too. She’d gripped the edge of his coat, crusted as it was with embroidered stars. Dalat had let Elia sew three of them, up near the collar, and she touched one with her finger. The king shook, and Elia smeared her tears onto his chest.
“The stars promised this day would be as it is,” the king had whispered, his nose in Elia’s hair. His breath hissed through the curls to warm her scalp. “We can only give in to them, my star. They see all, and know what will become of all of us. You, you were born under Calpurlugh, the loyal and constant Child Star. My heart, my star princess.”
Elia held tightly to him. The cherry trees bent around them, sheltering the princess and the king in their grief.
Thank you, she whispered in the language of trees.
“No.” Her father sat up straight. A certain fire lit his eyes. “None of that.”
Elia touched his cheek. The lines of his face pulled harder this morning, heavy with grief and age, and through her watery vision she saw a shimmer of gray in his short beard, just beside his ear. Like a spray of late starlight.
“No tree tongue?” she asked, confused. It had been the natural language of Innis Lear since the island rose from the sea.
“Nothing but stars now,” the king vowed.
He took her chin in long white hands.
“The stars are all for Innis Lear.”
* * *
THE STARS ARE not all, a much older Elia whispered now, in the language of her island.
She studied her palms for scars, as if their memory could repair the scars grown over her heart.
The king shivered and woke. He grumbled to himself, “The wind is not listening.”
“It is,” Elia said. “Especially while the stars are hidden by the light of day.”
“They still watch us, always guiding our path,” he argued, but without any heat.
Elia tilted her head back to search the sky. The sun had lowered beyond the western trees, and overhead all was creamy pink and sheer violet.
The girl is returning, and more. Family, said the ash tree.
Elia kissed her father’s sagging fingers and stood. There, at the southeast edge of the meadow, they appeared: seven or eight folk from Hartfare, as well as all those promised by the trees. She waved, lifting onto her tiptoes. Aefa waved back.
A large fur was spread on the soft ground, and several woolen blankets. Elia got her father atop them, and gave him some wine. He nodded regally, as if the drooping hemlock crown he still wore was made of gold, as if his tattered robe were imported silk.
