32. Gunnar
Gunnar
Brock’s voice hits the room and I’m moving before the second word.
Northwest corner. Through the wall. I put my shoulder through three lords and a waiter and I don’t apologize to any of them, and the panel is right where he said, a seam of dark in all that gold with a strip of white dress hanging off it like a surrendered flag.
Erik is already through. Dammit. Leif hits the gap two steps ahead of me, Rayner right behind.
I catch a glimpse of Brock dropping off the fountain at a run, and then we’re inside, all five of us in a stone tunnel going down, down, and her scent is everywhere in here, fear-sharp, and my dragon and I stop having separate opinions.
We run.
We don’t make it far before I hear it behind us.
Not guards. Guards would be fine. Guards have orders and bones that break in expected ways.
What’s pouring into the tunnel behind us is the ballroom — hundreds of them, the same drunk-eyed males who were tearing at her dress.
They’re now following her scent down into the dark with their best shoes slapping stone.
They’re not going to stop, and they are not going to slow, and if we turn to fight them… it won’t end well.
So we don’t turn. We run faster, and the sound behind us grows — boots, breath, and somewhere back there an honest-to-god lord barking like a dog.
Somebody owes me for tonight. Every second of it.
The tunnel bends. My hand drags the wall on the turn, and the wall isn’t smooth.
Grooves. Vertical, deep, cut on purpose — and my feet are slowing before my head knows why, and then my head knows why, because I know what vertical grooves in a tunnel wall are. Anyone who’s held a fortress knows. That’s a channel. Channels hold gates.
“Keep going!” I shout at the others, and I stop.
There. Above the groove, bolted into the rock, black with rust — a counterweight on a chain, and a stone slab tucked up into the ceiling, waiting, the way it’s been waiting since somebody built this tunnel and made sure it could be closed. Somebody after my own heart.
The mechanism is rusted to hell. The release lever might as well be welded.
Fine.
I grab the chain with both hands, brace a boot on the wall, and I ask my dragon for exactly one thing, and for once in his contrary life he agrees with me completely, and the strength comes up my back like a tide, and I tear the whole release assembly out of the rock.
The chain screams through the broken mechanism. And the slab comes down out of the ceiling like the end of an argument — a boom that punches my ears shut, dust rolling over me, and the tunnel behind it goes from a hundred voices to nothing.
It won’t hold forever. Rusted seat, cracked frame, and enough dragons on the far side to dig through a mountain if they stay interested.
It doesn’t need forever. It needs for now.
I run. Alone now, in the footprints of my unit, lungs burning, and the floor tilts up and the air goes cool, and ahead of me the dark opens into a mouth of moonlight, and I come up and out onto flat pale rock and stop dead next to the others, and everything in me goes very, very quiet.
Because there she is.
Fifty feet away, in the middle of a stone plain, one slipper, ruined dress, arms wrapped around herself.
Alive. Whole. Shaking. Beautiful, and I have never hated a view more.
She’s standing in front of a half circle of gray robes with Ezra at the center, and behind them a stone arch full of dead dark, and a rock face going up forever, and nobody in gray even turns around.
Leif’s hand moves. Slow. Wide flank, close quiet.
We spread and move, and Ezra watches us come like we’re part of the program, and does not stop talking.
“—came through that door, dear. All of us. Long, long ago, from a realm you cannot imagine, into this one.” Her voice carries over the rock like she owns it. “And then your kind sealed it behind us. What female power closed, only female power opens. It has never opened again.”
We reach her. Finally. Finally. Erik on one side, me on the other, her cold hand finding mine and gripping like a drowning woman, Rayner and Brock and Leif closing the ring, and the Vestry lets it happen, all of it, without one flicker of concern, and that’s when I get it.
We haven’t rescued anything. We’ve just joined her inside the fence.
“Your escorts,” Ezra says, warm. “Good. She’ll want you here for this.”
“For what?” Leif. Flat. Commander-flat.
“For the truth, commander. It’s a family occasion.” Her eyes come back to Elara and go soft, and I have seen a lot of frightening things and the softness is the worst one yet. “We searched, dear. Longer than your books have words for. We needed the females. We needed them desperately.”
Her hands fold.
“And by the time we understood exactly how much… there were so few left.”
Cold goes through me that has nothing to do with the night.
There were so few left. Said like a harvest that came up short. Like weather ruined it. Like it happened to them, the vanishing, the whole realm’s oldest sad story, females gone, mates gone, whole generations of us raised on the mystery — and she’s standing there calling it an inconvenience.
They didn’t vanish.
They got used up.
“One remained.” Ezra’s voice goes fond. Fond.
“We protected her. Preserved her. Kept her safe from a realm that would have torn itself apart over her — you saw tonight, dear, what a realm of males becomes around one of you.” A small, forgiving sigh.
“And she repaid that mercy by escaping. Through a lesser door, into a lesser world, where she buried her line so deep this realm stopped believing it had ever existed.” The young eyes settle on Elara, kind as a knife going in. “Your mother hid you very well.”
Elara’s hand crushes mine.
“My mother—” Her voice comes out in pieces. “My mother is from San Diego. My mother has a garden. You don’t— you don’t know anything about—”
“We have spent generations searching for what she took from us,” Ezra says, gently, over her, through her. “And now, at last, you have come home.”
“This isn’t my home.”
It comes out of Elara low and shaking and certain, and my dragon and I have never been prouder of anyone.
Ezra smiles. And then she stops pretending, and it’s like a lamp going out.
“No, dear. It isn’t ours either.”
She turns, one small hand rising toward the arch and its circle of dead ground, toward the door that has been shut longer than anyone on this rock has been alive. Anyone except the gray ones.
“And you are going to take us home. You’re going to open it.”