Page 95 of A Land So Wide
What differences lay in who she’d been and who she was now? She amended her thoughts. Who she’d always been.
“I wouldn’t know how,” she said softly, wanting to wipe away his hurt but feeling she was only making a bigger mess of it.
“You’d have me.”
“As an adviser?”
She didn’t know why she asked it. Nothing he could say would make a difference to her. She only wanted to get to the mines, find Ellis, and run. Run from these monsters, run from this alarming legacy she didn’t know how to accept.
I’m still me.
Mostly.
“As your consort.” His admission was soft and hushed. The hope held within it was too painful for her to bear.
They stared at each other, and the seconds between them seemed to stretch, growing into an interminably loud silence with every breath that went by. Abruptly, he pitched his stick into the fire and stalked away from the circle, away from Greer. “I’m going to get more wood.”
Before Greer could stop him, before she could say anything, he was gone in a flicker of shadows and suffering.
1740
The beginning ofthe end began with a pattering of hooves, echoing their way from the wide sea, impossible to ignore.
The queen was aging.
She could feel the end’s approach in every corner of her body. In her bones, growing thin and brittle. In her blood, circulating slow and sluggish. In her heart, beating softer and less steady.
The queen had years and years ahead of her, so many decades a mortal mind might think her invincible, impermeable to time and decay, but she could hear death’s steed, riding closer, closer, ever closer.
Every day the queen heard his approach, and every day she studied her small court, fearing for them. They would need a leader. Someone strong and fierce, someone clever and ruled by logic. None were up to such a task.
Least of all Elowen.
Impulsive, brash Elowen.
It had been a mistake to change her. The queen knew that now, all too well.
So, without a suitable replacement, the queen began to plan.
She would go into the world and allow a mortal man to claim her as his bride. She would have a child with this man, a child stronger than any of her Gathered, blessed with the wild blood of a sovereign and a mortal’s temperance.
Most of the Gathered wept and begged her to not go, but Elowen watched on with flames of wounded anger burning in her eyes. Still, the queen could not be persuaded. She promised she would return with a daughter. She promised she would bring home their new queen.
Her mission did not sit well with the queen’s guard. He had watched over her since joining the court, when Elowen had foolishly made him, and had become the queen’s protector and friend. The aging queen was fond of the young guard. Before she left, she promised he’d one day win her daughter’s heart, and serve as her consort for generations to come.
The queen set out for a little village on the edge of a vast body of water. She pulled off her magic skin, worked it into a beautiful cape, and took her mortal form, young and luminous and lovely, with a scattering of stars across one cheek. When she looked just right, she hid herself in a hollowed trunk and waited for a young man to come and claim her.
While she waited, she drew patterns on the inside of the tree, crying tears of sadness and discomfort. She missed her kin. She could feel the bite of the Warding Stones trying to repel her. But she would not be moved. She needed her daughter to be born here, in this world of pushings and pulls. She needed her to stand firm, without bending or breaking.
When a hand finally reached in, she took it and allowed a young man to pull her out of the tree and into the center of his world. It didn’t matter who he was, only that she’d fooled him. She fooled the town, too. They believed that she was one of them, that she’d always been there, part of their community, part of their life.
They were wed that night, and only a few weeks after, the queen felt his seed take root. She felt her womb quicken, heard a second heart beat inside her, and knew, without a doubt, it was a girl.
And the queen was pleased.
She was pleased when the girl was born and came into the world looking just like her, pale and dark and covered in stars.
She was pleased as the girl grew, full of joy and smiles but also depth and stillness. It made the queen proud, seeing the woman she would become, knowing she would make a fine sovereign.
