Behind Gaela followed her graceful sister, who though still full of impossible sadness, was just as eager to be queen. They were accompanied, too, by that dark slip of a wizard, and Osli, with three more star priests and a dozen retainers for witnesses.
The star priest leading their party slowed as they entered the well’s grove. He stepped aside for Gaela so that she might face the entrance. Massive, moss-covered boulders surrounded the grove, encircling it and creating a mouth of rocks and soft earth, damp and darkly green. Some trees grew here, lean as bone and gray as the moon. Few leaves remained, shivering in the omnipresent wind.
At the center, smaller blue stones created a pit as black as anything she’d ever seen. At the fore was a flat boulder, like a ledge, and another made a roof across two of the largest boulders to shelter this most ancient well.
The star priests moved to stand at each corner of the small grove, cupping the clay bowls of fire carefully before them. All looked to the oldest; acragged and drooping old man with pale brown eyes and a spotted white face, who had stationed himself beside the well and now pointed at the clusters of tall spindled plants growing in the damp soil beside the well. “There is no ritual but this,” he said. “Eat a handful of the blossoms, and dip your hands into the well to drink. Then, in the light of the stars, by the power of the rootwaters, you will be recognized as the rightful monarch of Innis Lear.”
Gaela waited for the rest of her people to filter in around her, studying the flowers. The green stalks reached higher than her waist, spreading like fingers or thin, miniature trees. The leaves were feathery and green, and tiny white blossoms made starbursts and swaying baubles. She wondered why they seemed so strange, so out of place in this grove, when they were no more than a common weed, and weeds abounded in these northern reaches of Innis Lear.
“They should be blooming in the late spring,” Regan murmured. “Not now. Now they should be dried seed heads. Might we, too, have blossomed here, my Connley?”
Gaela frowned, concerned for her grieving sister’s state of mind.
“Death rattles,” Regan’s wizard, her Fox, murmured. Then, louder, his voice like ice, “It’s hemlock.”
“You would poison me?” Gaela turned with careful, coiled control to the old star priest.
Led by Osli, her retainers drew their swords, aiming furious blades at the four priests.
The old priest inclined his head and held her gaze. “It is the only way to gain the crown of Innis Lear, Princess.”
Wind hissed across the tops of the low trees, tossing thin yellow-and-brown leaves toward them. It shivered the pines at the north of the grove. Gaela stared at the old man, wondering if this could be true.
“My father ate such poison?” Regan asked, strangely calm to Gaela’s ears. Curious, almost wondering.
“Yes.”
Ban the Fox stepped up to the edge of the well. “I believe it,” he said in a taut voice. “The roots of the island and the blood of the king become united, sacrificing for each other. So one who would take the crown must take the poison, and then let the rootwater cleanse them, transforming death of the self into rebirth as the king. This is the way of wormwork.”
“It is safer on the Longest Night, when the roots are strongest and waters blessed by the brightest, boldest stars. If fear pauses you now,” said the old priest.
Gaela’s skin chilled, and slowly began to tighten against her own flesh. Surely this was not fear, but fury.
Regan knelt by the star-bright weeds and brushed her fingers against the flowers. “So beautiful,” she whispered.
“Put your swords down,” Gaela ordered her retainers. She glanced to see it done, catching the gross tension on Osli’s face. Her captain did not trust this magic, either, and she was loath to leave her lord so unprotected.
The rootwaters had never done anything for Gaela. Why should they keep her alive now? Gaela had rejected them again and again. Had rejected everything of magic, of star prophecy and the island. She intended her power for herself and her sister, not to share it with fickle wind, stubborn earth, prideful stars. Why should she put her life into—
The thought hit her like a ballista’s bolt: Dalat had been poisonedthisway.
Gaela had always suspected poison. She would never have been able to prove it had been her father’s own hand, not just his fault—his requirement—his prophecy. Gaela had guessed, between the wagging tongues at court and her own ears, but never, until exactly now, had sheknown how.If this priest told it true, Lear had known of the hemlock here, as well as he knew his own stars.
Lear had poisoned Dalat to bring about the prophecy that she would die on her eldest daughter’s sixteenth birthday.
The night before, the queen had been healthy, with an appetite and shining eyes. No fever or illness, nothing to claim her in the night so suddenly.
By dawn, Dalat simply had ceased to breathe.
Or so Lear had claimed. But he was alone with her during that night, and alone with her first thing in the morning.
If this hemlock grew so near Dondubhan, how easy would it have been to make certain she partook?
Gaela’s shoulders heaved as she thought it all through, as she stared at the weedy hemlock, at the way the flowers looked like constellations. Of course it was such a star shape he would use; of course it was such a thing that he preferred.
Her heart burned with this new understanding. As if the island had collaborated in her mother’s death, Gaela lifted her foot and brought it down upon one of the hemlock plants.
Regan gasped, and one of the priests grunted in protest.
