his spirit and bind him.
The wizard put the blade of the shovel against the hard ground and began to dig.
He worked steadily, welcoming the burn in his lower back and shoulders; he’d competed in today’s tournament, defeated the rightful heir to the throne with a simple shadow trick. He missed the struggle of wrestling and swordwork, wished he might’ve been invited to fight for Prince Hal as a soldier instead.
This work put his sweat to the cold air, his breath a mist around him. He heaved earth away from the base of the monument, and every motion grounded his heart deeper into the island.
If he dug forever, perhaps he could stay forever.
But the wizard reached his goal too quickly. Undyed wool, thin and worn to strips, cradled ashes and chunks of bone, well preserved for a hundred years thanks to the kind of earth upon which the Star Field had been built.
He set the shovel down again and reverently touched a bone, cracked by old fire. “I found her,” he said.
The queen stood, holding her fur around her shoulders, and brought the bag to him. “This will settle them?”
Taking the bag, the wizard nodded. “Neither was given the release of fire and ritual, neither buried here with their ancestors. Nor were they transformed with shadows and rootwine into proper earth saints. Gaela was alone—the island claims she never wandered, never cried out from death. I’m not surprised. In life she did nothing half-assed, so of course she would die well and hard.”
“Irreverent wizard,” the queen murmured.
Together they knelt and withdrew the bones of two sisters from the bag: all unburned, uncracked, but easily distinguished because the heart of an ash tree had stained ribs and femurs in lines of gold and reddish brown, and the Tarinnish had put green and blue into the seams of the Dreamer’s skull.
A shaking sigh parted Queen Solas’s lips, and the wizard touched her wrist, concerned.
“It is only overwhelming,” the queen said. “These three sisters, my great-aunts, their bones together finally. I can feel the island shivering beneath me, and the gaze of the stars sits upon my brow.”
The wizard nodded. He placed the Dreamer’s skull against the earth and took his own shaking breath: he smelled candle wax and sharp dirt, a gentle blanket of damp decay coating everything. The wind gusted, a great gasp of relief from the island.
Here the queens, daughters of Lear, he whispered in the language of trees.
Solas said, With their sister queens, and daughter queens, and mother queens. Elia the mother of my grandmother, her daughter Gaela, the mother of my mother, her daughter Astora, my own mother, and one day me.
Part of Innis Lear forever, the wizard said.
Part of Innis Lear forever, repeated the queen.
And the wind cried, Welcome, queens!
It blew, and the clouds overhead raced, streaking across the stars; clouds were stripped away from the face of the moon, the full bright moon that bore witness, and the vast array of stars.
The queen slipped a flask out of her skirt pocket and uncorked it with her teeth. She dumped clear water—rootwater—over the bones, splashing them all. Then, putting the flask away, she snapped fire into her hand. That she cupped away from the keen wind; the wizard wrapped his hands around her hands, and together they lowered the fire into the small pit.
Pale orange flames skittered across the bones, burning the rootwater, making a mist of it all. Sparks leapt toward the stars, turning blue and silver, stars themselves.
The wizard used his hands to drag earth back into the pit, covering the bones. After a moment, the queen joined him. They dug through the heavy, dark earth, burying these queens again.
Both Solas Lear and the wizard panted into the cold night, breathing harder than the exertion necessitated: their hearts were drawn out, and the island wind tugged and pushed. The wizard’s thick hair ruffled, charms and red threads shifting like streams of blood and clicking bones. Around the queen’s face her hair curled in tired wisps.
Regan, the witch. Elia, the dreamer, said the wizard in the language of trees. “That is what should be carved there on the memorial. Beside rightful.”
Solas sat back and nodded, gazing at the bright limestone monument, at the flickering candle flames surrounding them, above, below, and everywhere.
The wizard dropped to the ground beside the queen, leaning back onto his hands. He shivered, and the queen reminded him there was wine tucked against the tall plinth against which she’d waited. Fetching it, and