22. Elara
Elara
Their names are Anya, Neve, and Colette.
I don’t know what I was expecting. Something ancient. Something with apostrophes in it. Three women in gray leading me away from that chamber and all of its ancient staring mess, and they have the names of my high school cheerleading team.
“This way, my queen,” Anya says.
That. That’s the other thing.
“You really don’t have to call me that.”
All three of them look at me like I offered to tip them at a funeral. Neve actually puts a hand over her heart.
“It’s an honor, my queen,” she says. “We volunteered. Nearly every single female in the city volunteered. This is history we never thought we’d see in our lives.”
History. Me. I’m wearing the leggings I’ve been living in since I fell out of the sky into this realm. There’s a houseplant hiding in my hair. I am nobody’s history.
Except my own. Embarrassing, sordid, all of it.
The corridor keeps going and the farther we get from that chamber, the more the guys relax behind me.
I can feel it happening without turning around, which is a thing I’ll be thinking about never.
Gunnar’s boots start dragging a little. Rayner’s breathing goes slow again.
The wall of them spreads back out into five separate people, and my shoulders come down with them.
“Where are we going?”
“To your chambers, my queen.” Anya again. She’s the talker. “We’ve prepared a meal for you. And…” her eyes flick back, over my shoulder, “…them. A bath as well.”
Them. She says it the way you’d say the luggage.
These women watched Erik tell the oldest being in existence no to her face, and to them he’s nothing. It’s disgusting.
But there’s a time and a place and this isn’t either of those.
“Where exactly?”
“In the castle.”
“Castle?”
What the fuck!
“You can’t be serious,” Leif says behind me, and there he is, suddenly at my shoulder, and he’s using the flat voice, the commander one.
“Oh, of course we’re serious,” Neve says, delighted, completely missing that the flat voice is not a voice you’re supposed to be delighted at.
“The castle hasn’t been used in—”
“And two weeks ago the orders came from the Vestry themselves to begin preparations,” Anya says, proud, like she’s delivering good news.
Leif grunts.
Two weeks. The number does something to Muffin. I’ve never heard him grunt before and for the first time since I’ve met him he looks unsure… or scared… or something nontraditional Muffin.
Anya pushes open the doors at the end of the corridor and we step outside. The air is warm and smells like the garden surrounding us. Neve points ahead, and my brain short circuits.
There’s a fucking castle.
An actual castle, on a rise in the distance, pale stone going gold in the light, towers, like real ones, and I blink a few times just to make sure it stays.
“Oh, it’s so beautiful now,” Colette says. It’s the first thing she’s said. “You’re going to love it there.”
“They’ve been working day and night,” Neve says. “The gardens alone — oh, and the dresses! My queen, the dresses. They’re so beautiful. You’re going to look amazing.”
She’s gushing. Full on gushing, hands and everything, and Anya joins in, fabric and colors and something about sleeves, and I’m nodding along like a woman who has opinions about sleeves, and behind me I can hear Erik not laughing as hard as he can.
I’m going to kill him later. Quietly. As a queen.
“They’ll have to be altered, of course,” Colette says.
She’s looking at me when she says it. Up, then down, then up again, slow, the whole inventory, and she doesn’t say anything else. Just the look, and I feel insulted. I think I should be.
Sure, the dresses were presumably made for a hypothetical queen, and hypothetical queens are apparently built narrower than actual ones, and that’s fine, that’s a fabric problem, not a me problem, and I’ve decided not to care, and I’m deciding it again right now, harder.
Erik makes the not-laughing sound again. Different pitch this time. I don’t look at him either.
The walk is long enough that my feet stop being polite about it, and none of it gets less real. The castle keeps being there. It gets bigger.
And then the sky moves.
That’s what it looks like at first — a piece of the dark peeling off the ridge above the castle, too big to be a bird, too alive to be anything else, and then the wings go out.
Wings.
I stop dead.
It banks over the towers, slow, enormous, and the gold light off the windows catches it from underneath — scales, a body the size of a house hanging up there like the air weighs nothing — and the sound reaches me a second late, a deep whump of wingbeats I feel in my sternum before my ears get any of it.
My knees dip and I’m halfway to the ground before I know I’m going there, and Rayner’s hand is under my elbow like it was already waiting.
That’s a dragon.
Dragons aren’t real. I have read a thousand books about them and they are not real, they’re a genre, they’re a shelf at the bookstore, they’re— and it turns, and the whole sky changes, and okay. Okay. They’re real.
They’re real, and everyone keeps saying that I’m—
Nope. One impossible thing at a time. That’s the policy, effective immediately.
“My queen?” Anya has stopped too. All three of them are looking at me with polite confusion.
“It’s only a patrol, my queen,” Neve offers, helpful, baffled. “They fly every evening.”
Only. Like it’s no big deal.
“She’s fine,” Brock says, and then he’s at my ear, low, just for me, under whatever the gray women can hear.
“Breathe, Pretty. That’s the Legion. He’s a long way up, and nothing in this sky would ever hurt you.
” His hand comes to rest at my back, warm, easy, and settles something in me.
“You’re his queen. He’ll bow to you just like we all will.
Just look. That’s all you have to worry about right now. ”
Just look. That I can do. I’m already doing it. I couldn’t stop doing it if the castle caught fire.
It crosses the last of the light and slides behind the towers, and my heart is pounding so hard I can hear it.
Brock starts to say something else. But he stops himself. His hand leaves my back and I’m walking again, somehow, one foot and then the other. Rayner stays close enough that I could fall in any direction and it would be fine.
I look back at Brock. “You and I are going to talk about that later. Once I can form sentences again.”
He grins, the fucker.
Gates. A courtyard. Torches burning in the open. Doors twice my height, already swinging inward, and then we’re inside and I stop walking.
Stone and candlelight everywhere. Chandeliers hang the whole length of the hall, iron rings crowded with little flames, and at the far end a staircase wide enough to march an army up climbs and splits toward two separate wings.
People hurry across the floor with linens and flowers and trays, dozens of them, and every single one slows down to look at me.
This is all for me.
No, this isn’t real. It can’t be.
I grew up on a cul-de-sac. I have a couch from an outlet sale and a car payment. People are carrying flowers through a castle because I’m in it, and my brain has stopped working and just stands there with the rest of me.
Somewhere to my left, Gunnar breaks.
A snort, then all of it, and Brock goes down with him, and now two enormous ancient warriors are wheezing in the doorway while the staff pretends very hard not to notice.
“Your castle, my queen,” Gunnar manages.
“I will have you executed,” I say. “I know people now.”
That finishes Brock entirely.
Leif isn’t laughing. He stands inside the doors and goes over the hall piece by piece, the staircase, the people, the flames, and doesn’t like what he finds. At least I’m not the only one who thinks this is insane.
“Your chambers are this way, my queen.” Anya starts up the staircase, left side, and there’s nothing to do but follow her, past faces that dip as I pass, up steps worn smooth in the middle, down a corridor with carpets far older than me. Maybe older than them.
Gerald’s head slides out of my hair somewhere along the way. I feel him moving, looking, and he makes a noise I’ve never heard him make.
I don’t speak pangolin, but that didn’t sound like a compliment.
The doors at the end of the corridor are carved, floor to ceiling, and Anya pushes them open on a room bigger than my entire apartment. A fire already burning. A table laid with more food than six people could finish. Another door standing open on candlelight and steam.
“Your meal, as promised,” Anya says. “The bath is through there. We’ll come for you in the morning, my queen.”
All three of them curtsy, deep and sincere, and file out. I watch the doors close and then it’s just us. Six people and a houseplant standing in the middle of a royal apartment, nobody saying anything.
Gunnar drops onto a couch that probably predates his father and stretches his arms across the back of it.
“So does the executioner live here too, or do we send out?”
His face drops, he leans forward with his elbows on his knees. He sits there for a moment until his face turns smug.
“You do that, you’re never getting round two and we both know you want it.”
Erik groans. My face heats and I have never wanted that executioner more in my life.
Or at all.