She gritted her teeth then, wishing this were real battle, not mere posturing and practice. At her back, a ballista was mounted to the platform of a cart, capable of swinging in any direction to aim its heavy bolts. She had six of them ready, and a half dozen more were being fitted with wheels for enhanced mobility. In addition to the fifty who charged the wall, three hundred soldiers and retainers stood in rank surrounding her, in the dark pink of the Duke Astore, their mail bright as moonlight and their bucklers polished, their swords naked and pointed at the sky like the teeth of a massive sea snake. It was an impressive force, and only a fraction of the army she’d command under the crown of Innis Lear. These men all wore her husband’s colors, but their loyalty belonged to her.
She did not turn her head toward the east, where folk from the nearest town had come to see the ruckus. That town sat across the border of Astore lands, on the Connley side, and Gaela hoped the people crouched behind rough limestone boulders and shuddering with the skinny trees of the ridge would spread tales of this afternoon. The moment Gaela was king, they should be prepared to submit to her, or face these very men and these very war machines.
She’d chosen this location not only for the nearness of Brideton and the border, but for the ruin specifically. It had been a Glennadoer castle stronghold three hundred years ago, before the island united under the Learish dynasty. The Glennadoers had promoted so much magic in their bloodline all others had joined together to defeat them. Glennadoers still lived now, but confined in the far north, and powerful in name only. Though they leaned toward Connley in loyalty, they were earls under the banner of Astora. This ruined castle symbolized the strength they’d lost, both by opposing a united island and by thinking magic could protect them.
Gaela’s smile turned scornful. Look at this beautiful valley, rough and growing lush despite the holy well capped off just to the north. It was only superstition that had sent the island folk scrambling in a panic when the king ordered all such wells closed ten years ago. When she was king, she would allow towns to open their wells again if they liked, but keep the castle wells closed except on holidays, a sign of her generosity to an easily awed populace. She did not need the rootwaters, but neither did she fear them as her father did. Neither wormwork nor star prophecy made Gaela strong: she did that all herself.
“Withdraw!” she yelled to her soldiers who’d cleared the wall, knocking down targets and hanging the Astore banner: a dark pink field with a white salmon leaping over a trio of four-point stars. “Solin, you and your men reset the tower; the rest of you form up for a melee. I want to see broken shields, and for everyone in Brideton across that hill to hear your roar!”
The soldiers cried and growled, banging their bucklers against hard leather chest pieces to cause a swell of noise. She laughed, and they jumped into action at her signal.
The broad blue sky glinted off Gaela’s chainmail hood, pulled up over the tighter linen hood that protected her twists of thick black hair from the shifting metal. Her dark brown eyes narrowed as that same sun glared off the sea of blades and bucklers turning the valley into a meadow of steel. Gaela posed for a moment at the edge of it, hands at her hips, boot heels dug into the damp earth. She was tall but not broad, though she’d spent her life encouraging muscles where few women wanted them. Her posture could have her mistaken for a man from behind, a resemblance Gaela appreciated.
Gaela had been anxious as a child about how different she looked from all the people of Innis Lear: her deep brown skin and thick black curls made her too easy to identify. Everywhere she went, she was not only the heir to the throne, the black princess, but that dreaded first daughter prophesied by the unrelenting stars to be her mother’s death. A son would not have born such a burden. But Gaela could not escape her body, her stars, or the prophecy.
When she was six years old, she’d destroyed a stack of thin songbooks imported from Aremoria. All the beautiful ladies in the songs were pale as the moon or soft as cream or sunlight on sand. Dalat and the Fool had been learning them together, a favored pastime while the king himself focused on the alliances necessary to open the docks at Port Comlack to wider trade. Gaela had told the Fool that if he did not compose a song about the queen’s dark beauty, she would gut him with his flute. So the queen and the Fool had taken Gaela and her younger sister Regan on a long walk, cataloguing all the pieces of the natural world he might put in his poem for Dalat.
The Fool was an imbecile, bringing pink flowers and bright yellow butterfly wings to little Regan, teasing her and trying to tease Gaela, too. She remembered it still, always with a scowl. Are there green undertones in your mother, do you think? Let’s compare … Dalat smiled and tilted her head to allow the young man to brush a leaf to her cheek until Regan declared a babyish yay or nay. Gaela had been more determined, more precise. She had gathered walnut bark and a deep purple flower, smooth black river rocks, gleaming acorns, a shining crow feather, and a feather mottled rich brown from an eagle’s wing. The last her mother had accepted like riches, and woven the quill into the tight knot of braids at the base of her neck. Like my grandmother’s imperial crest, Dalat smilingly declared. It stood out like a horn, or a slender, delicate wing all its own. It’s still not right, Gaela had said angrily. The Fool sang, Poetry is about perception, little princess, not accuracy. It is about what it means to compare the Queen’s dark and curving mouth to a powerful eagle’s wing. Then her mother took Gaela’s hand, spread it out against her own, and said, This is the only match that matters.
But Dalat was dead, the Fool attached like a wart to the king, and Gaela had no use for poems. Poems did not create power, and Gaela intended to be king when her terrible father died, or sooner. Nothing would stop her.
The urgency of the soldiers now thrummed in Gaela’s bones, lending satisfaction to her resolve. She wished she could march with her army to the Summer Seat, drag her father to his knees, and take the crown. How her satisfaction would grow at the sight of him bowed before her, trembling and afraid. Did my mother die on her knees? Gaela would ask. Did you touch poison to her lips with a kiss, or put it in her nightly mug of warm honeyed milk? Did you ever trust me as she trusted you? Of course, he never trusted anyone or anything except the vicious stars. And so Gaela would thrust her sword into his neck, and watch as he gasped and gargled, as he sank into an undignified pool of blood at her feet.
But no matter how she longed to take the crown in such a way, it was not the most direct, most efficient, or even most secure path. No, the people of Lear took their king-making seriously, claiming them fast and hewing hard to the anointment and the secret, specific traditions of the island’s roots. Gaela would have to bide her time, wait for the king to name her his heir, and then give the island her blood and spit on the longest night of the year. As was right.
To do it by any other method would invite Connley to challenge her—curse him, his ancestors, and his perfect stars, and curse Regan for marrying into that line and giving the dog a stronger claim. Though Gaela wanted war, wanted a chance to release all the fury and aggression inside her heart more than most anything, she did not want a war with her sister on the opposite side.
So here Gaela Lear stood, amidst her personal army, performing for the folk on Connley’s border, sending a brutal message without quite making a firm challenge.
The soldiers had formed up for the melee. With a ferocious smile, Gaela abandoned her perch and ran to join them. Her movement served as signal, and the two sides slammed together, all yelling and chaos, with some few laughing as Gaela laughed. She drew her sword and aimed for the nearest soldier; he had plenty of time to block with his buckler and sword, but the force of her charge shoved him back. She bared her teeth and twisted, shoving at him with all her might. He spun, and Gaela dove farther into the battle.