Elia’s tongue dried and her gorge rose. No.
Brona continued gently, “Dalat loved you, and your sisters, and even your father and this country, so deeply that she died to preserve it. She died to keep everything alive, to hold your place and your father’s authority.”
“No,” Elia said, pressing away from Brona. “She … the stars … she would not have done that. If she loved us.”
“If the prophecy concerning Dalat’s death had proven false, everything your father had built would have crumbled. Not only his personal faith, but his rule and the provenance of his crown. All would have questioned you. Connley’s mother and Earl Glennadoer would have questioned your entire bloodline, and Dalat’s very presence on the island. Everything, don’t you see? If your mother had not…”
Elia stared at her small, brown, trembling hands. Dalat had killed herself? For politics. For stars. To stop war. To protect her daughters and her people. Oh, Mother, she said to the wind.
“Elia.”
She needed—she needed to breathe, to think through this. Three long, deep breaths were all she allowed herself. Each shook. “It was not my father,” she finally said.
“No, Lear did not know her plans.”
Elia shook her head, opened her mouth, was silent, and then tried again. “Why didn’t you tell my sisters, at least? So they would know, and not hate him? Why didn’t she?”
“Dalat did not want you to know,” Brona said. The witch sat straight, old grief bowing her mouth. “She wanted all of you to have faith in the stars and in your father, too. She thought—she thought her death would bring you all together. Make you stronger.”
Elia laughed pitifully and looked up at the sky. Wind blew hard enough to blur the constellations. “Oh no. She trusted none of us, not even my father. Her husband! She did not—did not let us be her family.”
“It was bold, brave even, to take her own life for the island. To remove the uncertainty, prove that your father and his ways were true. I admire that … a singular choice, one that changed everything, solidifying the power of the crown.”
“It didn’t work,” Elia said.
“It could have. The choices your father made afterward are what ruined it: Lear alienated his daughters, and as king he adhered to such a strict form of star worship he cut out all other avenues. If he’d merely kept his faith, and continued to rule—without closing the wells, for example—if he’d striven for connection with his daughters … maybe Dalat’s sacrifice would have been successful.”
“She should have trusted him, and told him.”
“Maybe, but Lear was always so impulsive. He might have stopped her and ruined her plans.”
“Because he loved her! He might have given her to the rootwaters to save her.”
Brona frowned.
“You truly never knew of the hemlock ritual?” Elia asked, feeling accusatory but not caring. She might accuse the whole world tonight.
“I did not.” The witch’s brow crumpled, and tears shone in her dark brown eyes. “I’d have brought her rootwater. She might have died on Gaela’s birthday, then been reborn.”
Compassion pierced Elia’s heart, but she was crying again, too. She glanced toward the stars. Would they ever have comfort to offer her again? No longer could she imagine them pure and righteous, nor even bright, crawling beetles. What if the prophecy had been written: On the night of her first daughter’s sixteenth birthday, the queen will be reborn?
It was such a similar prophecy. Depending on the wind, or roots. Depending on the entire shape of the sky.
“Are you going to do it?” Brona asked.
“Yes,” Elia said. “To give myself entirely to the fight, I must transform. But I will offer my sisters the same chance. I will not make my mother’s mistake, or my father’s.”
“I will follow you to the very end, Elia Lear, and not only because I loved your mother.”
Elia nodded but closed her eyes in dismissal. She wanted to be alone with the night. Brona’s steps creaked gently on the old wood, and the sound of the trapdoor closing settled the shadows in Elia’s heart. She breathed, listened to the angry night, and said to the wind, Thank you.
Eat the flower, drink the rootwater, the wind snarled back.
ELEVEN YEARS AGO, NEAR DONDUBHAN
“HOW DID MY sister die?” Kayo whispered into Brona’s hair.
He stared at the valley of candles and stars—Dalat’s year memorial, where the family she’d lost mourned—and it came to him that he should take Elia away from here, away from this island that had killed Dalat, before it sank into his niece’s bones, before she was too much a part of it. The old empress would welcome another daughter for her line.
To answer Kayo’s question, the witch of the White Forest turned to face him, and the star field cast her in fire, a salamander woman, a dragon with lips and curls and deep, sorrowful eyes. “Come,” she murmured nudging him farther away. “I have a message from Dalat, come.”
Breathless with surprise, he obeyed.
Brona led him back, along a winding route, through the moonlit field of stone and starfire. Near the trees again, she stopped. She took both of his hands; hers were cool and dry, gentle. “What know you of your sister’s marriage, as it relates to how the island viewed her queenship?”
Frowning, Kayo said, “The marriage was foretold by the religion of the stars, and Lear never questioned it.”
“Yes. And they loved each other.”
“So it seemed to me,” he agreed. Kayo remembered the way Dalat had watched her older husband, and how their heads leaned together always, sharing conversations and secrets and caresses.
“Before Dalat came, another woman was to be queen. The daughter of the old Duke Connley was married to our king’s elder brother. Connley had believed the marriage contract would survive the deaths of Lear’s brothers, but he underestimated Lear’s devotion to the stars.”
A hot flutter began in Kayo’s stomach: this was aged politics, and he had asked Brona for the story of Dalat’s death. “This Connley—I remember him.”
“Do you remember the rest of the marriage prophecy? That Lear’s
