The Queens of Innis Lear

Ban Errigal noticed her looking, and he smiled.
Light flickered in Elia`s heart, and she wondered if he still talked to trees.
Her breath rushed out, nearly forming whispered words that only he would understand, of all the folk in this hot, bright hall.
But she did not know him, not anymore. They were grown and distant as stars from wells. And Elia had her place under her father`s rule; she understood her role, and how to play it. So she averted her gaze and sipped her wine, reveling silently in the feel of sunshine inside her for the first time in a long while:
Ban was home.

"He does not fear me, no, nor I him. But Connley feels a more possessive thing for me, one that will not drive him away as fear or pity or sorrow might drive yours."
"Surely you do not speak of love," Gaela scoffed. "Love is no strength."
"Not even between us?"
Gaela scofed. "This is not love beteen us, we are one. We are beyond love!"
"Are we?" Regan touched her sister`s earlobe, tugged gently. She knew Gaela had a heart of iron in her chest and cared only slightly for anything she did not feel in her very bones. Worse yet was Gaela at expressing emotions that were not hte fiery sort, were not the powerful feelings allowed to great warriors and kings; she disdained all things considered womanly as she disdained her own womb. Regan could not remember if Gaela had been born so, or learned it from their father, his stars, and Dalat`s death. All Regan knew was that her sister had the stars of conquerors in her sky, and such men did not love well. Gaela thought she wad beyond love`d reach, while Regan believed herself to be composed of nothing but love. Terrible, devastating, insatiable love.

She lost herself in the frenzy of danger, in the cuts and blocks, in the fight to prove herself. She kept on as the battle raged, her teeth clenched, alert, pounding again and again toward the center of the horde. Pain jolted through Gaela`s body with most blocks; she cried out; she screamed. She reveled. This was the nearest she`d come to war, to the desperation and danger; some men would die in this game, and some would be injured too badly to fight again for a long while. Their swords should be blunted, or wraped. This should be less deadly, but Gaela did not care. She would survive, and she would win, today and tomorrow. It was not reckless. It was vital. Her husband could never understand how this brought her to life as nothing else did, how she needed the immediacy of this danger. This -- this -- brought her to the edge of her strength, made her feel the mettle she possessed in the very core of her bones. When she fought, Gaela knew she did not need any root blessing or star prophecy.
She was born to be king.

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 with child," Regan murmured, touching her belly. Connley put his hand over the top of hers and moved it lower to the bloody stain. Her 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 fet 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.

The star signs these past nights had offered Elia no comfort, no guidance, though Elia had charted every corner of the sky.
Can I save my Lear? she had asked again and again.
No answer had emerged, though she wrote down and dismissed a dozen smaller prophecies: the storm is coming; a lion will not eat your heart; you will give birth to the children of saints; the rose of choice will bloom with ice and rage. They meant nothing. There was no star called the Rose of Choice, only a Rose of Decay and a Rose of Light. Lions had never lived on Innis Lear. Earth saints had long ago left the world. And ther ewere always, always storms at the end of summer. The only way to piece out the true answer was to ask the trees, listen to the voices in the wind, or sip of rootwater. This was the wisdom of Innis Lear.

She breathed deeply and imagined the feelings diffuse out of her with every breath, making her cool and calm as a star. Singular. Pure. Apart. She had learned long ago that stray passions needed to be leashed.
It was difficult, for Elia was a daughter of Lear. All her family were born of the same material, and all tended toward high emotions: Gaela, the eldest, wore her anger and disdain like armor; REgan was a skillful manipulator of her own heart as well as the hearts of others; and the king caught his grief and leftover love up in layers of rigid rules, though they never quite contained him. Elia, unfortunately, had loved too easily as a child: the island, her family, and him, the wind and roots and stars. But love was messy. Only the stars were constant, and so it was better to be exactly what her father wanted: loyal, strong, pure starlight. A saint for Innis Lear, rather than a third princess.

It begins far away from the furious island, in a place so different in name and air that the one could not recognize the other as being born of the same earth. There, a young woman asks her grandmother for a ship with which to sail out past the edges of their empire, for she has a hunger to understand the owrld, to experience something not more broadly but more deeply, until that one thing becomes an entire universe. She says her curiosity is like sand in a storm, scouring bones smooth as glass. Her grandmother agrees, though suspects she`ll never see this daughter of her line again. "God will bring us back together," the young woman says, and her grandmother replies to her with only an old desert prayer: "Do not forget: youwill be air, and you wil lbe rain, and you will be dust, and you will be free."
Perhaps that is an ending, too.