21. Elara
Elara
What the actual fuck is this woman talking about?
Also, how old is she? Because I’m getting two answers.
The rest of her says older than math, hair drifting around on a breeze this room does not have, hands like paper over twigs.
But her eyes are young. Not young for her age, actually young, and it bothers me, and I can’t figure out why it bothers me, and now she’s looking at me with them and I’d like to be excused.
Every eye in this chamber is on me. All of them. The circle, the guards, the wind that has no business existing. I’ve never been a fan of group attention and this is group attention from things that were alive before forks, probably, and not one of them is blinking.
“Excuse me?” I say, because apparently under pressure I default to customer service.
Ezra grins.
That’s worse. I want the other face back.
And then she steps down. Off the — dais, throne shelf, whatever the raised part is called — one small foot at a time, coming toward me, and Erik moves.
Fully in front of me. Between us. His back fills up my whole view, and his shoulders are doing something I’ve never seen them do.
“Move,” Ezra says.
“No.”
The chamber gasps. Actually gasps, all around the circle, and it occurs to me that I don’t know what happens to people who tell this woman no, and every muscle I own would like him to stop finding out. My hand is halfway to the back of his shirt before I get it back down.
Ezra comes closer. I can hear her feet on the stone, and somehow it’s the most threatening sound in the room.
“Perhaps your time away has let you forget what it means to be ásp Móra.”
“I haven’t forgotten.” Erik’s voice is flat. It’s the voice he uses when he’s decided something and the deciding is done.
“Then know your place.”
Nothing happens for a moment. Long enough that I stop breathing.
Then Erik moves to my side. Slowly, like it’s the most painful thing he’s ever had to do, and his arm settles against mine, solid and warm and absolutely furious.
“My dear.” Ezra’s attention lands back on me and warms up like nothing happened. “It’s been far too long. Your mother always knew you’d come home one day.”
“My mother?” There are too many wrong things in that sentence and that’s the wrongest one. “What are you talking about?”
“Your mother, dear, was born so very long ago. And it appears Earth has kept you…” She looks at me. Takes her time with it, top to bottom, like she’s reading a label. “…unnaturally young.”
My mother has a garden. My mother calls me to ask if I’m eating and to remind me she never liked Chicago.
My mother was not born so very long ago, she was born in San Diego, twenty-five years before me, and I’d say so, except the old woman is smiling at me now and I genuinely cannot tell if it’s sincere.
It sits on her face like a smile. It has all the smile parts.
Something underneath it isn’t participating.
Also — unnaturally young? I’m twenty-nine. I use sunscreen. It’s not witchcraft, it’s SPF 50.
“We must celebrate,” Ezra says, and turns back to the circle, and her voice opens up to fill the whole chamber. “A ball. In her honor. Let all of the realm know that our queen has finally come home.”
Queen.
Our queen.
Okay. So. The oldest being in existence has a few marbles loose.
That’s fine. That’s — honestly, at her age, whatever her age is, she’s earned some loose marbles, and everyone’s clearly too polite to mention it, and someone should gently take the realm keys away from her.
And it should not be me, because I write listicles for a website called Dopamine and my biggest problem used to be a deadline and fictional men.
Nobody laughs. Nobody corrects her.
A dozen ancient faces look at me like she said something true.
Three women come in through a side door I didn’t know was there. Gray dresses, folded hands, eyes down, and they arrange themselves in a little arrow pointed at me.
“Go,” Ezra says to me, pleasant again. “They will take you to where you’ll be staying. Preparations are already underway.”
Staying. Preparations. Sure. I take a step toward the women. Another one.
The men don’t move.
I stop. I’m not going to examine why my feet did that, but they did it before I had an opinion, and now I’m standing in the middle of the floor between the gray women and all of that ancient mess, and the men still haven’t moved, and that answers that.
“What seems to be the problem?” There’s an edge coming into Ezra’s voice. Patience with a bottom to it.
“I’m not going anywhere without them.”
Ezra laughs. It’s light and silver and grandmotherly and I hate it.
“Nonsense, dear. You are a queen. They are nothing to you.”
They are nothing to you.
I look over at them. None of them are looking back at me and hurt flares through me before I can stop it. I stare at them because they’d just let me go and…
No. Gunnar’s hands are still shaking at his sides. Erik is strung so tight he’s ready to snap. And then I see it. Leif’s mouth tips up just a fraction.
I don’t know why that matters, but it does.
Because they matter.
They’re everything.
The word is still hanging there in her kind old voice and my blood has gone somewhere hot and quiet, and when I speak it doesn’t sound like me. It sounds like somebody older.
“I said I’m not going without them.”
The room goes very still.
Ezra raises one brow. Looks at me for a long moment with those young eyes.
Then she sighs, the way you sigh at a toddler who insists on wearing her costume to the grocery store.
“Very well.”
The men move at once, all five, closing in around me, and the gray women turn to lead us out, and I catch Vick shifting to follow at the back of the group.
“Not you.”
I turn away and feel Gerald shift at my nape, curled into my hair, still hiding.
I’ll take that as agreement.
The doors slam behind us.
If I’m ever in that room again, it will be too soon.