Her father’s fingers dug into the muscles of her neck, and he sighed. He petted her then, gently. “You’ll understand one day,” Lear said. “I adore you, my star, more than anything, and the heavens do as well. The stars will protect you, they and I. You’ll need for nothing else.”
The more she tried to speak, to shape some farewell in the language of trees—words the wind might deliver to Ban—the faster her tears fell, the thicker her throat grew. Elia thought that if she spoke those words—any words now—she would burst into a thousand shards of hot glass, never to be repaired. Would Ban die in Aremoria? Would she ever see him again?
She took another deep breath, held it, and slowly, slowly let it go, breathing away all the pain, pushing it out to the rising dawn. Every breath sank deeper into Elia’s cracks, into the dark spaces behind her heart, into her stomach and blood and bones, and as she exhaled the hurt was expelled, too, leaving only starlight inside her.
Her father said, “Yes, my Calpurlugh, my truest star, things will be set right. You’ll see. Better to let him go now, than when it is too late, when it would have irreparably ruined you. I know. I know. We might bring him home someday, if ever such a path is discovered by the stars.”
Lear put his hand against the crown of her head, and Elia closed her eyes, choosing to believe him, because the alternative was to die.
Part
FOUR
ELIA
THE ISLAND TREMBLEDwhen Elia Lear set foot upon it again.
Dawn cast her a pale violet shadow, reaching ahead along the white beach. Tiny grains of sand shifted, slipping toward the waves as if drawn by an invisible tide.
Elia Lear,the island whispered, first to itself, then to her.Elia is home!
In the three days since, the island had not yet fallen silent.
All she needed to do was listen.
For years Elia had been only watching, as if her eyes were all: watched the stars shift in their perfect patterns, watched her father study and proselytize and grow ever frailer, watched her sisters expand and retract and conform to expectations and to losses, watched her own self diminish until she was nothing, reflecting only her sisters’ disappointment, her father’s obsession, a sky with a single fading star in the north.
What about the stars taught you to forget the wind?The island pressed.What was the moment when you stopped hearing us whisper?
As Elia sat on a cliff now, overlooking the churning sea, listening and listening and listening to the voices in the wind, she could not pinpoint such a time in her memory.
The loss had been so gradual, she did not even realize.
A slow-forming mist, a wasting disease.
The island told her stories to fill her aching chest: that Elia’s first words in the language of trees had beenthank you.She had once known the names of every tree along the road between Dondubhan and the Summer Seat, and made a rhyme of them when she was twelve. Her favorite game had been finding constellations in the splatter of lichen on an old tree. She wove a cloak of emerald beetles, to wear beside a young boy with a shield of golden butterflies. Hearing the stories in the voice of the wind brought them backto her, and Elia cast her memories further and deeper, recreating a legend for herself until she found the answer to the island’s question.
Her father had said,We might bring him home someday, if ever such a path is discovered by the stars.
So Elia had stopped listening to the wind, had taken fully to the stars in order to hunt down that path, with calm and focus and trust. Until she was so calm, so focused, so filled with trust in the stars alone, that the island’s voices quieted, and fell away. This was what the island revealed to her, now that she could hear again: though she had still walked with her feet against the roots, Elia had let her father put boundaries on her magic, built ramparts so subtle and strong she had thought they’d been her own design.
He did not do it on purpose,she whispered in the language of trees.
But he did do it,the wind said.
I let him,Elia said,I did not notice. He was my refuge, a strong father who loved me, who chose me… over my sisters.Leaning back against the ragged grasses and gorse of the cliff top, Elia stared at the afternoon sky, at the billowing heavy white clouds, and wondered what the stars would say, if they could speak back to her. How their voices might sound.
The wind rushed, the wind tugged.
Tell me about Ban,she said.
Ban is loud.
Elia laughed, loud, too, and surprised herself at the boldness of it.
“Talking to yourself?” Aefa called, gasping as she climbed the steep path. They’d made their stay here in a small abandoned cottage suggested to them by the people of Port Comlack, where they’d first walked together upon arrival. Of course Elia was eminently recognizable: she’d even frightened some of the townspeople with her sudden appearance, for they’d all heard startling tales of her flight to Aremoria and Lear’s wild Zenith Court. Though efforts had been made to accommodate Elia and her attendant, to feed them and offer beds and even once an entire house for their use, Elia had said no, though with much thanks. She’d said she came home to make things right, but needed only solitary rest, and did they know of an unused place for her to sleep, a place that had become nearly part of the land again? Where she might commune with the voice of Innis Lear?
Until the island claimed her, Elia deserved nothing from its people.
