26. Elara
Elara
The dress has opinions, and all of them are wrong.
I’m standing on a little velvet stool in front of the mirror wearing what I can only describe as a wedding cake that lost a fight with a curtain shop. Ruffles. Tiers of them. Sleeves that puff. A skirt so wide I’ll need to enter rooms strategically, and somewhere under all of it, allegedly, me.
“Are you sure this is—”
“The latest fashion,” Anya says, glowing. “Of course. Only the best for the queen.”
“It’s the silhouette everyone will be wearing by spring,” Neve says, both hands pressed to her chest like the dress is a sunset.
I look at the mirror. Squinting. Trying to make it look how they describe. Somewhere in Chicago I own a black dress that has never once betrayed me, and now it’s a realm away so I’m forced to attend my first ball dressed as a pastry.
“It’s very…” I search for the right word, nothing comes. “Structural.”
“Isn’t it,” Neve breathes.
They put me in a chair after that, facing the mirror, and the fussing begins in earnest. Neve on makeup, tiny pots of things that smell like flowers.
Colette behind me with my hair, working through it in sections with her quiet fingers, and Anya orbiting all of us, adjusting, approving, narrating the evening like a tour guide.
The receiving line. The presentation. The first dance.
My face is being painted onto me one layer at a time and I can’t even fidget, because every time I move, three sets of hands pause like I’ve interrupted surgery.
“Where are the guys?” I ask, while Neve tilts my chin up toward the light. “I haven’t seen them all day. Can I see them? Just for a minute, before all of this.”
The pause is small. But I notice it.
“They didn’t want to bother you, my queen,” Anya says, warm, smooth, not missing a step of her orbit. “They asked us to tell you they’d see you tonight.”
Oh.
Okay. That’s fine. That’s completely fine.
They’ve been stuck to me around the clock since they came back from the hardware store, all five of them, and everyone needs a day off from — whatever I am to babysit.
A break makes sense. Gunnar probably found something to argue with.
It’s fine, and it’s normal, and it doesn’t sting, and I’m not thinking about last night.
When every time I moved in my sleep someone had their body, or arm or leg pressed against mine. Or the way Rayner—
Didn’t want to bother me.
I feel the pit start in my stomach like angry diving swans but it can’t be helped. Sometimes things aren’t always what you see. Sometimes you make yourself see things that aren’t really there.
So I straighten my back and focus on making the travesty staring back at me in the mirror something I can live with. They’re busy. It’s a big night. Queens, it turns out, are a lot of work.
I don’t say anything. Old customs, proper, no seeing the queen before the ball — they explain it all like it’s perfectly reasonable.
It probably is.
Gerald has been hiding under the couch since dawn like he knows something is wrong. I would give one entire puffy sleeve of this monstrosity to hear Gunnar complain about literally anything right now.
“You must be excited,” Neve says, dusting something across my cheekbone. “The whole realm is coming to see you.”
“Thrilled,” I say. “Genuinely can’t wait to be perceived by a realm.”
She laughs like I’ve said something charming instead of true. And then, still smiling, still dusting, she says, “Can I ask you something, my queen? About your males?”
Your males. Like they’re a set of luggage again.
“You really chose them? All of them?”
“Yes.” It comes out faster than I mean it to.
“All five.” Not a question this time. Something closer to marveling. “They’re certainly… unusual.”
“They’re mine.”
It comes out low, and it comes out with something underneath it, a sound from somewhere lower than my own voice. All three women go still at once, the way birds do. In the mirror, Neve’s eyes flick to Anya’s.
I watch them hesitate, looking at each other like they don’t know how this is going to go.
Then Anya laughs, light as anything. “Oh, of course, Your Majesty. We didn’t mean anything by it. It’s actually rather sweet.”
Sweet.
I’d rather they’d insulted them. I know what to do with an insult. Sweet sits there on the vanity like a gift I can’t refuse, and Colette keeps working through my hair, and I unclench my hands in my lap and apologize for a stomach I don’t remember growling.
“It’s only,” Neve says, delicate, blending, “you could have anyone, you understand. Anyone in the realm. There are so many more of our men than you’ve seen — great houses, decorated Legion officers, males from families that have served the crown since before the crown was a story.
Males who have trained their whole lives on the chance a female would come.
” She smiles at me in the mirror, warm as a bath. “And you’ve met, what. Five?”
“Six, technically,” I say. “One of them betrayed us to the Vestry, so I’m aware the realm has range.”
Anya’s smile flickers, just at the corner. The light in here does things to faces. Probably that.
“We only mean you deserve a choice,” Anya says smoothly. “A real one. You chose from the men who happened to be standing there.”
The men who happened to be standing there.
And I don’t have anything ready to say back, which is annoying, because it’s not — it wasn’t like that.
Except I didn’t hold auditions. There was no realm-wide search.
There was a hallway, and a broken door, and five men who were already there when the world tipped over, and I looked around at the wreckage and they were the only ones I could see.
The only ones I wanted to.
Did I choose them, or did the circumstances choose for me?
No. Wrong question. Bad question. I’m not taking questions from that part of my brain at this time.
“How did you meet them, anyway?” Neve asks, bright, like she’s asking about a recipe.
“I don’t really think—”
“Oh, please. We’ve been dying to know. Everyone has.”
And because I’m basically strapped into a chair with my head held in place by another woman’s hands, I tell it. Abridged. Sanitized. Erik lived across the hall from me. His friends came looking for him. Things happened. Here we are, hooray, look how structural my dress is.
Except it sounds different out loud.
I hear it happening while I’m saying it, the way the story rearranges itself in the open air.
They came looking for him and found me. They knew what I was before I did.
They took me through to their cabin, and then to the Vestry, and then here, and every single door I’ve walked through since the sky, one of them was holding open.
That’s not — that’s not what it was. That’s just the same facts standing in a different order.
“Three years,” Colette says. Her first word in an hour. Her fingers don’t stop moving. “Across the hall. And he never said a word?”
“He couldn’t.” I’ve got this one. I have receipts for this one. “His crossing died. He was stranded. He walked out to a dead door every night for three years trying to get home — I heard him tell the Vestry himself.”
“Mm,” Colette says, and keeps braiding.
Mm. I’m learning to hate that sound.
“Of course,” Anya says, soothing, and pins a curl, and then, so lightly it barely lands, “and the rest of his unit arrived when?”
“Right before—” I stop.
Right before everything. Days before everything.
“And the orders to prepare the castle came two weeks ago,” Anya continues, pleasant, conversational, tucking a flower into place above my ear. “The whole city has known a queen was coming since before the leaves turned. Isn’t it wonderful how it all worked out?”
Two weeks.
The number I couldn’t think about, because I can count.
They found me — the sky, the cabin, the clearing, all of it — barely a week ago.
I could count it on my actual fingers if my hands weren’t trapped under my thighs at the moment.
The castle started dressing itself for me before any of them outside of Erik had ever laid eyes on me.
Which means this is nonsense. Nobody could have told the Vestry about me two weeks ago, because two weeks ago there was nothing to tell. I was in Chicago arguing with a deadline and a houseplant that now moves. Case closed.
Except.
Except then what was the Vestry preparing for?
“That doesn’t work,” I say, out loud, to the mirror, to the room, to the hole opening up under my own argument. “Two weeks ago nobody here knew me. The Vestry sent them to find Erik. That’s all it ever was.”
Silence. Not disagreement. Worse than disagreement. Neve suddenly very interested in a pot of powder. Colette’s fingers moving. Anya’s face doing sympathy, and I watch it happen in the mirror and something in me starts pacing.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing,” Anya says.
“What?”
“I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“You keep saying nothing when you mean something.”
Colette’s hands stop in my hair.
“I was only surprised, my queen,” Anya says, gentle as a nurse. “That’s all.”
“By what?”
She exchanges a look with Colette in the mirror, quick, and my stomach drops before I know why.
“That you believe it was ever about Erik,” she says.
“The Vestry doesn’t raise a castle on a maybe, my queen.
They knew you were coming before your males ever crossed.
I was under the impression the unit spoke with the Vestry weeks ago — before the mission.
Before any of it. But I’m sure I misunderstood.
” She smiles and smooths my sleeve. “I’m sure they’re very loyal to you. ”
Before the mission.
If that’s true — and it isn’t, it can’t be — then finding Erik was never the assignment. It was the cover. I was the assignment, and every kind, patient, careful thing they’ve done since the day the sky opened was a man completing his orders.
Stop it. Stop thinking it.
“They are.”
“Of course.”
Something about the way she says it makes me look at her in the mirror, really look.
“What?”
“Nothing.” A pin slides in above my ear. “I only wonder whether loyalty means quite the same thing when someone was ordered to find you.”
The room keeps being warm and gold and full of flowers. Neve dusts something across my collarbone. Colette lays the last braid down like she’s closing a book. And I sit in the chair with my painted face and my structural dress while that sentence goes off in me quietly.
Ordered to find you.
No. I know these men. Gunnar fought this so hard he announced his own surrender for the record — his words, out loud, to my face.
Erik walked to a dead door for three years.
Rayner guarded my dreams before he’d ever met me awake, and none of that is what being ordered looks like, none of it, and I don’t believe a word of this, I don’t.
But I can’t explain the two weeks. Either the Vestry knew I was coming all on their own, which nobody has explained and nobody will, or somebody who crossed that sky knew about me long before they pretended to find me.
One of those has to be true. I can’t prove which.
I turn it over and over looking for the version where it’s fine, and every version has a hole in it but I don’t know where this one is.
“There,” Anya says, stepping back, and all three of them look at me in the mirror with their hands clasped like I’m finished. Like I’m done being made.
The woman in the glass has soft curls and gold on her eyelids and flowers in her hair, and she looks beautiful, and she looks terrified, and she looks like a stranger wearing my face to a party.
“The realm is waiting, my queen.”
They open the doors. Music comes up the staircase from far below, strings and voices and a whole world I’ve never met, and I gather up three tiers of dress and follow them out into the corridor, down toward all of it, one question walking every step beside me like it’s been assigned.
Did they know?