“He wasn’t sure. They have a stable passage to a planet quite like our own, but uninhabited by any of the intelligent or magical species we know.”
“Pip, the mirror you entered Qoksmere through, was it in a public place?” The Queen turned to him.
Pip uncrossed his legs and sat forward. “It was in a nightclub where I work. A… it’s kind of like a tavern, with music, dancing, and drinks.”
“And no one else has disappeared?” I asked, frowning.
“Well, the club was a brand new business in an older building. They’d renovated the space, but there was this mirror that was original to the building. Old, like it had been there forever. Well, I mean, at least since the seventies when the building was built, so practically forever.”
“Pip, focus.”
“The owner told me they’d tried to remove it, but then figured it was fine to just leave it in the bathroom since people like mirrors in the bathroom, you know.”
“What was the club before it was a club?” I asked, my focus narrowing.
“I’m not sure. It’s a basement, so maybe just storage for the restaurant above? But who would put a super fancy mirror in a basement?”
“Your Majesty,” I said, “if Liminia has this technology, is it possible that Pip’s mirror is one of theirs?”
The Queen set down her cup. She pressed her fingertips together and regarded us both with an expression I had seen perhaps a dozen times in my decades of service: genuine fascination.
“We have had trade relations with Liminia for longer than you have been alive, Commander. We have exchanged ambassadors and commodities and the occasional scholarly paper. Not once, in all that time, has anyone mentioned portals.” She paused. “Which means either this is new, or they have been keeping it from us for a long time.”
“The scholar Thyren spoke with suggested the latter, Your Majesty.”
“Then we are intrigued,” she said. “And we are going to find out.” She reached for the stack of correspondence beside her, already calculating. “A diplomatic envoy. Not a military one—we are not making accusations. A formal visit, with scholarly credentials. We want someone who can sit in a Liminian library and ask the right questions without alarming anyone.”
“Caelyndris the Mistwalker, perhaps. She has the temperament for diplomacy.”
“Caelyndris is a spy, Commander. We mean someone diplomatic, not someone who is good at pretending.”
I conceded the point with a nod. The Queen would select her envoy; she had always been better at this than I was. My strength was in identifying threats. Hers was in navigating the spaces between them.
“This is promising,” she said, and there was a warmth in her voice that had nothing to do with diplomacy. “This merits the guard’s full attention.”
Then the Queen leaned forward, set aside her correspondence, and folded her hands in her lap. The weight of the crown lifted from the room, replaced by the far more dangerous intimacy of the woman who had known me since I was a boy. A familiar dread tightened in my gut.
“Now,” she said. “Personal matters.”
“Your Majesty, with respect, our personal matters are not—”
“Not our business?” She tilted her head. The firelight caught her auburn hair and turned it to flame. “Commander. Every single one of our subjects is our business. Their wellbeing, their happiness, their futures. We have ruled this kingdom for longer than the trees in that garden have been alive, and we have done so by knowing our people. All of them.”
I said nothing, because there was nothing to say. She was right and we both knew it.
“And when one of our most favorite subjects—”
My jaw tightened before I could stop it. She had said it deliberately. She had said “most favorite” knowing exactly what it would do to me, because the Queen had known me since I was young and she had always known how to find the cracks in my composure.
“—has formed a resonant bond with a twink from another land,” she continued, as though she had not set me on fire with five syllables, “we most certainly will make it our business.”
Pip was quiet beside me. I could feel the stillness of him, the way he’d gone motionless the way he did when something landed close to a nerve.
I should have spoken. I should have said something measured and diplomatic, something about how we were still sorting things out, that the bond was new and the circumstances complicated and that I was handling it with the care it deserved.I had the words. They were right there, lined up and ready, and I should have deployed them.
I missed the moment. It passed like a gap in a battle line and the Queen filled the silence with the decisive authority of someone who had been filling silences for millennia.
“You must marry him,” she said. “At once.”
