Chapter 24
Aeldryc
“Try to make it interesting,” I said, looking down at Pip as I led him through the east wing corridor toward the Queen’s private sitting room.
Our footsteps were out of sync because his legs were much shorter than mine and he compensated by taking twice as many steps, which gave him the appearance of a small, determined terrier trotting alongside a wolfhound.
Pip stuck his tongue out at me. “Or, we could just tell the Queen there’s nothing to report and go back to your apartment to fuck more?”
“She will be unhappy that we still have intelligence about how twinks are being transported to Qoksmere. It’s best to distract her with interesting gossip.”
“Could just be because it’s named cock smear.” Pip snickered. “I mean, any twink would want to stop and check that out.”
“Focus. And enunciate the Q.”
Pip made a face at me. “Aeldryc the Ironstorm, Ruiner of fun.”
“Not what you were saying last night,” I muttered under my breath.
He laughed. “You have me there. You were exceptionally fun last night. But why do I have to be in this meeting? I was in the middle of something impressive in the sewing room.”
“The Queen requested your presence, which most likely means she is expecting to be entertained. If we bore her, she will find ways to entertain herself, and the Queen’s idea of self-entertainment typically involves decisions that generate significant paperwork for me.”
“So my job is to be fun. But how? I’m not sure I can dance more without being executed.”
“I don’t know. Tell her a story.”
Pip processed this. “I’ll tell her about the turnips.”
“Don’t tell her about the turnips. No one even knows what a butt plug is.”
“Which is what makes it funny. Besides, I’ve been talking to one of the metalsmiths about crafting me one so you can see.”
“If you tell the Queen of Qoksmere about how much I enjoy stuffing things into your hole, I will send you straight to Far End.”
“Is that a real place? Like you really named a place Far End?”
“Of course. It’s on the far end of Qoksmere. In Faraway County, past Hard Pass.”
Pip did the coughing thing he did when he was trying to hide a laugh. “Hard Pass? What’s it like there?”
“It is extraordinarily cold and the primary social activity is watching snow accumulate.”
“That does sound like a Hard Pass. Couldn’t wear shorts.”
“So you will be motivated to be entertaining. And do not mention turnips. Or my cock.”
As we paused in front of the door, Pip straightened his shoulders with the solemn gravity of someone accepting a sacred mission. “I will try my best to entertain the immortal monarch of this realm without referencing root vegetables or sex.”
“That is all I ask.” As the Queen’s footman slipped into the sitting room to announce us, I couldn’t resist a small kiss on the top of his head.
Pip beamed up at me just as the doors flung open, and we turned to face the Queen.
I wanted to give his hand a little squeeze, but that would likely draw the wrong sort of attention.
Queen Delsynarea was already seated when we arrived, a cup of something steaming in her hand and a stack of correspondence on the cushion beside her.
She wore a simple dark red gown with no crown, her auburn hair pinned loosely at her neck.
Her gold-amber eyes tracked us as we entered, and the firelight caught in them, shifting them briefly toward red.
“Commander,” she said. “Pip. Sit.”
We sat on the opposite settee. Pip folded his legs beneath him, perching as if the furniture might bite. The Queen’s mouth twitched.
“Report,” she said.
I gave it to her clean. We’d spent four days in the field, questioning citizens and traveling to different cities.
There had been no confirmed sighting of a second twink in Stonedeep County or Clovermere.
The Queen listened, her chin resting on her hand.
I recognized the focus she reserved for piecing together a puzzle in her stillness and the slight narrowing of her eyes.
“Anything else?”
“Thyren the Darkwater met a fae trader at the Bogs Bridge garrison who had spent several years in Liminia. An academic. He’d been studying their dimensional theory.”
The Queen straightened, a subtle shift in her posture that told me I had her full attention. “Liminia?”
“This scholar told Thyren something that may be relevant. The Liminians have a portal that can move people to other realms.”
“Other realms?”
“The theory proposed, based on geographical similarities, was that there were many versions of our world. It’s not known why.”
Pip sat up straight. “The multiverse!”
“The what, now?” The Queen asked.
He blinked. “Oh, um. It’s a popular theory in like superhero movies, where I’m from.
Distinct universes coexisting on parallel, where some crucial event happened differently, splitting the timeline.
For example, if Superman’s spaceship never made it to Earth, or if there was never a mass-extinction event with the dinosaurs. Oh! Do you have dinosaurs?”
I stared at him. As usual, when he spoke of his home, only about half of what he said made sense.
“Do you think they have access to the same realm Pip comes from?” the Queen asked.
Pip, beside me, went completely still.
“I have never encountered the concept, Your Majesty, so I’m not sure. The Liminians have a ruling order—the Liminal Order—that has created objects to try and channel magic into transportation between worlds.”
“Objects like mirrors?” Pip asked.
“He wasn’t sure. They have a stable passage to a planet quite like our own, but uninhabited by any of the intelligent or magical species we know.”
“Pip, the mirror you entered Qoksmere through, was it in a public place?” The Queen turned to him.
Pip uncrossed his legs and sat forward. “It was in a nightclub where I work. A… it’s kind of like a tavern, with music, dancing, and drinks.”
“And no one else has disappeared?” I asked, frowning.
“Well, the club was a brand new business in an older building. They’d renovated the space, but there was this mirror that was original to the building. Old, like it had been there forever. Well, I mean, at least since the seventies when the building was built, so practically forever.”
“Pip, focus.”
“The owner told me they’d tried to remove it, but then figured it was fine to just leave it in the bathroom since people like mirrors in the bathroom, you know.”
“What was the club before it was a club?” I asked, my focus narrowing.
“I’m not sure. It’s a basement, so maybe just storage for the restaurant above? But who would put a super fancy mirror in a basement?”
“Your Majesty,” I said, “if Liminia has this technology, is it possible that Pip’s mirror is one of theirs?”
The Queen set down her cup. She pressed her fingertips together and regarded us both with an expression I had seen perhaps a dozen times in my decades of service: genuine fascination.
“We have had trade relations with Liminia for longer than you have been alive, Commander. We have exchanged ambassadors and commodities and the occasional scholarly paper. Not once, in all that time, has anyone mentioned portals.” She paused.
“Which means either this is new, or they have been keeping it from us for a long time.”
“The scholar Thyren spoke with suggested the latter, Your Majesty.”
“Then we are intrigued,” she said. “And we are going to find out.” She reached for the stack of correspondence beside her, already calculating.
“A diplomatic envoy. Not a military one—we are not making accusations. A formal visit, with scholarly credentials. We want someone who can sit in a Liminian library and ask the right questions without alarming anyone.”
“Caelyndris the Mistwalker, perhaps. She has the temperament for diplomacy.”
“Caelyndris is a spy, Commander. We mean someone diplomatic, not someone who is good at pretending.”
I conceded the point with a nod. The Queen would select her envoy; she had always been better at this than I was. My strength was in identifying threats. Hers was in navigating the spaces between them.
“This is promising,” she said, and there was a warmth in her voice that had nothing to do with diplomacy. “This merits the guard’s full attention.”
Then the Queen leaned forward, set aside her correspondence, and folded her hands in her lap. The weight of the crown lifted from the room, replaced by the far more dangerous intimacy of the woman who had known me since I was a boy. A familiar dread tightened in my gut.
“Now,” she said. “Personal matters.”
“Your Majesty, with respect, our personal matters are not—”
“Not our business?” She tilted her head.
The firelight caught her auburn hair and turned it to flame.
“Commander. Every single one of our subjects is our business. Their wellbeing, their happiness, their futures. We have ruled this kingdom for longer than the trees in that garden have been alive, and we have done so by knowing our people. All of them.”
I said nothing, because there was nothing to say. She was right and we both knew it.
“And when one of our most favorite subjects—”
My jaw tightened before I could stop it. She had said it deliberately. She had said “most favorite” knowing exactly what it would do to me, because the Queen had known me since I was young and she had always known how to find the cracks in my composure.
“—has formed a resonant bond with a twink from another land,” she continued, as though she had not set me on fire with five syllables, “we most certainly will make it our business.”
Pip was quiet beside me. I could feel the stillness of him, the way he’d gone motionless the way he did when something landed close to a nerve.
I should have spoken. I should have said something measured and diplomatic, something about how we were still sorting things out, that the bond was new and the circumstances complicated and that I was handling it with the care it deserved.
I had the words. They were right there, lined up and ready, and I should have deployed them.
I missed the moment. It passed like a gap in a battle line and the Queen filled the silence with the decisive authority of someone who had been filling silences for millennia.
“You must marry him,” she said. “At once.”
My lungs forgot their function, my heart missed a beat and then another, and my hands, resting on my knees, went absolutely still.
Marry him.
I could not move. I could not speak. I was frozen in the Queen’s sitting room with her words ringing in my ears and the only thought in my head was a single, blinding, catastrophic: Yes.
The settee shifted beside me. A sharp intake of breath that wasn’t mine. I forced my head to turn, the muscles in my neck feeling like stone, and met his eyes.
He was pale. Not the flushed, bright pale of embarrassment or surprise. White. The blood had drained from his face so completely that his freckles stood out like scattered ink. His eyes were fixed on me with an expression I had never seen on him before.
“Pip—” I said.
He stood. The motion was abrupt enough that the settee rocked backward. His eyes moved between the Queen and me. His mouth opened and nothing came out and he turned and walked out of the room.
His gait was fast, his posture rigid, his shoulders locked and his hands balled at his sides, and the door closed behind him with a careful, controlled click that was somehow worse than a slam.
I stared at the door.
“Well,” the Queen said. “That was not the reaction we anticipated.”
“Your Highness could have used more care,” I said.
She huffed. “Why pretend there is no resonant bond between you? It is obvious. I did not know the boy would run.”
The way Pip’s face had paled—the horror in his eyes before he fled. The thought arrived with the blunt simplicity of a blade: he did not want me the way I wanted him.
“Commander,” the Queen said, her voice gentler now. The monarch was gone; this was Delsynarea, the woman who had known me for my entire life. “Go after him.”