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“Is it? How can you love them if you don’t love you first?” She clicks her tongue. “So what is it you want most?”
“To be helpful.”
“Weak answer,” she says. “This is about you. Not anyone else.”
I feel like she peels away the masks that took me years of people pleasing to perfect. “To be wanted,” I whisper. “To be loved for who I really am. Whoever that is.” After so long of molding myself to meet everyone else’s expectations, I’m not even sure.
“A strong woman with a good heart who’s meant for more than what you have at home.”
“How do you know?”
She scowls at me. “You’ve no job, no school prospects, and no place to stay. Is there something in your realm that’s calling you back?”
“Family,” I say. “I have family who will miss me.”
“As queen, you can arrange to see your family whenever you like. They only seem to notice you for a few minutes anyway. Unless you count doing things for them.”
The brownie doesn’t play. Worse, she’s right. “My friends,” I argue. “The three friends who went with me to the house before the demon handed me over.”
“They’re no longer there.”
“How do you know?” I skip to the more important question. “What has happened to them?”
“They’re queens of their own realms in their own ways. Or they will be.” She holds up a hand. “All I can say is that I’m sure you’ll be able to visit them after you take your own throne. What other excuse do you have for wanting to return to a realm that doesn’t respect you as it should?”
Ouch. Nothing like being reminded I have no real home to go back to. Grief for losing Lala hits me all over again. Except now, knowing what Lala might have said about my path or in the end? It seems less important in the face of the literal life and death battles of this realm.
Rona seems like a magical substitute for Lala in her wisdom, but I’m not dumb enough to believe the brownie doesn’t have her own agenda. “Other than the twins, why should I stay here?”
“Here, you will be queen,” she snaps. “Here, you will restore the order to a realm. Here, you can do the work you wanted to do in your home world without all the… red tape, I believe you humans call it. You can rebuild this keep into whatever works for your future as queen.”
Well, damn. That’s hard to argue with. Except doubt creeps into my mind. “What if I’m not enough to be queen?”
“How will you ever know if you don’t bother to try?”
“Why does this matter so much to you?”
“It’s not just about the dark magic that killed Dyphena, the wyvern crossing from the After Worlds, or the Bridge crumbling. The Borderlands have been falling apart since long before the twins came along. The prophecy about them brought hope for a few years, but Dyphena’s death ended all that.”
“What prophecy?”
“The one that foretold of them being future kings alongside the greatest queen this realm has ever known.”
“Pfft, I’m not the stuff of prophecies.” I toss back the rest of my spiked tea. “I’m competing to win the trials for the twins. Why would I want to rule a bunch of gargoyles who’ll turn on someone like they did tonight?”
“I can change your mind. Will you trust me to show you?”
I stare at her. Maybe I shouldn’t when we still don’t know who worked the dark magic over Dyphena, but I do. “Yes.”
“Then take my hand.” She reaches toward me, and I zero in on the unraveling yarn poking out of a hole in her mitten.
Why not? It’s not as if this could be any weirder than the presentation that Atticus assured me would be easy. Easy, ha. I put my hand in hers, letting the soft wool wrap around my fingers.
In the next instant, we’re no longer sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by the scents of baked goods and spices. Instead, we stand in a long, narrow cell crowded with phantoms. One sweeps past us, and my breath puffs out in a fog. Fear slithers along my spine, and emotions press against me like a mood ring gone horribly wrong.
“What is this?” I ask, even though I have a suspicion.
“They’re the dead, the languishing souls.” Rona’s mouth tips down at the corners. “They’re trapped here. Unable to return to your realm. Unable to cross to the After Worlds.”
