There is a rhythm to the world—a pattern you begin to understand, and a step your feet will yearn to dance if you have lived long near its heart. When you wake as a child on an island at the edge of everything, clinging to a memory or dream of whirling robes and flashing eyes where every step's a deeper meaning, even a laugh's a note in the song – when you are pierced by the absence of what could have been—when you are nursemaid to an old man with centuries of those memories behind his eyes, whispered words following the course of the stars above you, greeting lost friends as they pass him by overhead—you can't help learning. You see hints of that rhythm in the motion of the surf and the spiral inside a flower. You greet the ripple of the dance in the wind which catches your hair and the shore-grass, and chills the wayfarers' feast on the table. And you feel a shock – the thrill of a sudden sharp chord, or the wince of a perfect tune played out of key—when you meet someone who does not fit the pattern at all.
The first time Istra – the one they came to call the Star-Queen — felt this, she met the off-notes at her own table, ringing with harmony from a different tune. She called them Travelers, and smiled – she knew before they said "in our world" how far they must have come. They came to her with a green-gilt ship and great purple sails, and beside them was the admiring, painfully earnest face of the man who would be her king.
The second time, it was a jangling noise – a Wrongness standing in front of her. And it smiled.
"They say the queen has stars' blood in her veins," the off-note said, half-laughing, shining gold and green like a rare cloudless evening in the marsh in spring. "Why do you not correct them?"
"…Because it's true?" Istra asked faintly, wondering where her retinue could be – they were in the North for a royal tour, meeting her new subjects—where could everyone have gone?
"Or half-true. Mm, my dear," the jangling cord's smile grew wider – sweetness and light – but perhaps her teeth were a touch too pointed when she spoke. "I see you as well as you see me. Why aren't you in the sky, Star-child? Didn't they want you there?"
She felt as if she had been struck. In a flash she saw the crowd in the sky and the light and the raw longing, the ache she'd felt sometimes when she was small and the dream was new—
"I am needed here. I am the queen." Her voice was calm, unlike her mind. The green lady giggled.
"What sins may stars commit? Poor little cast-off dancer, forged out of season. Little girl, my lady told me watch on the winter's day when your godfather fell."
"Leave, witch."
"So soon?" Her eyes widened in mock surprise. Then her eyes lingered on Istra's belly. "I'll do as you say then, lady queen. Perhaps…" She quickly melted into a shimmer of green, and a swish in the grass.
"My queen, are you well?"—
"Are you ill?"—
"Istra!"—
"Of course some ill had to come to a day like this, I shouldn't wonder if"—
Suddenly there were voices around her again, a large warm hand and a cold signet ring at her back, mossy hair falling around a concerned face at her elbow, a lanky somebody in a peaked cap mumbling. She felt dazed, tingling like a sudden change of temperature, noise rushing up as if she'd just come out of water.
"I—where"—
She breathed deeply, gripped the nearest twiggy hand offered her.
"She's gone. There was someone there and she's gone."
"Rest, milady." The air still seemed faintly green. She thought she heard a parting promise from a quiet, smiling voice.
"…You shall know me better hereafter."