Rowan was not meant to understand, he was meant to act. The dragon had showed him, years ago:
a line of starlight stretching like a road between Aremoria and Innis Lear. Rowan, somehow, at both ends
That was his only part left to play.
Cealla wiggled, and Rowan was glad to have pressed her against his bare chest, beneath shirt and tunic, both of them wrapped by the cloak. This was enough. She was enough.
His daughter had taught him this: one act could alter all.
One moment, and this tiny, perfect creature had been made between himself and Banna Mora. Even if he did nothing else to ever influence her, Cealla existed.
One act could change the world forever. He did not have to manipulate a hundred possibilities, persuade or command or even understand. He only needed to choose.
Rowan laughed a little, changing his song to a merry jig with silly rounding verses. A round was the way to weave disparate threads together again. A round, a round, around! It put a spring in his step, and before too long the prince arrived at his destination.
The mouth of the secret spring where kings and queens were made.
Grief dampened his smile as he stepped inside the grove.
Shaded from the final rays of twilight and the first glow of a full moon lifting over the trees, the spring rippled with black water. Boulders surrounded it like thick earthen lips, and new sprouting starweed grew spindling fingers and ruffled leaves. Rowan held his daughter against him with one arm and removed his boots, then the cloak. He crouched and drew away his tunic and shirt, then set her down beside a cluster of hemlock to remove the rest of his clothing, until he and his little daughter were naked before Innis Lear.
Cealla muttered, sucking her lips, and her eyes opened wide. She saw her father, who smiled and whispered, Welcome, little queen in the language of trees; she saw the blur of leaning trees and the distant pinprick of loving stars.
For a moment, Rowan hesitated, caught in the memory of the Longest Night.
After he’d held his mother’s bloody body, he’d chased the path of his traitor father to this very grove.
He’d charged in, mail shirt ringing, and skidded to a stop at the sight of his half sister Catrin sprawled upon the earth, one hand trailing toward the spring, her fingers dipped beneath the clear waters. Dawn spread pink over everything in a bloody tinge, and Rowan had yelled for his retainers to search for Glennadoer (not knowing, not yet, his father already was dead, gutted by the sword of that Aremore prince!). Rowan himself had knelt at Catrin’s shoulder and rolled her against him. Her mouth had been pulled tight in a grimace of pain, blood and spit dried at the corner, and the pale skin of her face was bluish from suffocation.
Starweed numbed a person first, put them into a stupor, and then when it had won control, sent muscles convulsing with the most wretched waves of pain until every part of the body loosened into death. Rowan had never fallen through to the tremors except once, and nightmares that he might had plagued him for three years after.
My sister is not a queen, he’d whispered. The wind had answered,
Not now, now not ever.
Rowan Lear had stared down at his half sister’s body and thought about how much of his life he’d misinterpreted his father—his murderous, brutal father. Rowan had told himself that Glennadoer loved him, and when there was fury or hatred, it was only because Glennadoer knew no other way to teach or love or prepare a son for the throne.
That had been wrong. Glennadoer never intended Rowan to wear the crown, no matter what any queen or any voice of Innis Lear wanted. His father had betrayed him long before he put a knife to Ryrie’s throat. And betrayed Catrin, too, and all his people. Glennadoer had wanted to rule over Innis Lear.
And in the shadowed grove, surrounded by horror and the grieving retainers, Rowan had remembered the lesson of the Dreamer’s journal: You do not rule, you do not control, you become.
And he had laughed, startling the retainers who murmured to their friends and wives later that the Poison Prince’s mind had already slipped away; thank the stars he’d married a queen. Kings of Innis Lear would always go mad.
Rowan had laughed because his life already belonged to Innis Lear, and because in the end he was going to be something greater