Page 54 of Into Ember

“Ah, Victor.” Her voice is unhurried. “You found them. Just as you said you would.”

Just as he said he would.

I don’t look at Vick. I look at Gunnar, but there’s nothing on his face. I’d never even know that he’d heard the words.

The why doesn’t change the impact.

Vick inclines his head to Ezra, precise, untroubled, a man who followed the correct procedure. He doesn’t look at any of us. I’d know what to do with shame. He isn’t wearing any.

“Commander.” Ezra’s attention moves to Leif, and the pleasantness comes with it, seamless. “Ásp Móra has our gratitude. You were sent to find one of ours, and you have brought him home. The Vestry congratulates you on your success.”

Leif says something correct. I hear maybe half of it, because I’m counting the eyes in the circle again and getting the same number I got the first time — every gaze in this chamber on Elara while their eldest hands out compliments like this is a ceremony, like the woman in the middle of us is a detail. My heart has picked up hard enough that every man in this wall can hear it. Let them. It’s cheaper than letting it reach my face.

They knew she was there and couldn’t name what she was. I said that in the kitchen, on the record, and I have never wanted to be wrong about something so badly.

Except this is the wrong kind of wrong. The kind that I didn’t see coming and somehow that’s worse.

“Erik.” Ezra turns, and her voice does something I haven’t heard it do yet. It warms. “My dear boy. Three years.” She lets the number sit in the open. “Why did you not come back to us, all this time?”

“I couldn’t, Ezra.” Erik’s voice is even. Flat, careful, a report. “I crossed on the task I was given. When I went back to the crossing, it was dead. The ground around it had died and the door wouldn’t open. I walked out to it every night for three years.” His jaw moves once. “It never opened for me.”

“Every night,” Ezra says softly. “Such devotion.”

She asks him the questions you’d expect — the disturbance, the ground, what he found, what he didn’t — and he answers them the way we agreed on nothing and all understood anyway, truth after truth after truth, each one trimmed at exactly the right place. The word for what Elara is never touches his lips. Erik hands her the full report and keeps the only thing that matters.

I stand here listening and I can’t shake the feeling that his words are falling on deaf ears.

Then Ezra’s eyes leave him.

They cross the chamber without hurrying, and they come to rest on Elara, and the room — the whole room, the circle, the guards at the exits, the wind that isn’t there — goes still around the attention.

Elara’s shoulder comes the last inch over and touches mine.

Ezra opens her mouth to speak and I listen for it, because she doesn’t choose words by accident.

“Oh, my dear,” Ezra says, and her voice is the kindest thing I have ever been afraid of.

“We have been waiting so very long for your return.”

Chapter 21

Elara

What the actual fuck is this woman talking about?

Also, how old is she? Because I’m getting two answers. The rest of her says older than math, hair drifting around on a breeze this room does not have, hands like paper over twigs. But her eyes are young. Not young for her age, actually young, and it bothers me, and I can’t figure out why it bothers me, and now she’s looking at me with them and I’d like to be excused.

Every eye in this chamber is on me. All of them. The circle, the guards, the wind that has no business existing. I’ve never been a fan of group attention and this is group attention from things that were alive before forks, probably, and not one of them is blinking.

“Excuse me?” I say, because apparently under pressure I default to customer service.

Ezra grins.

That’s worse. I want the other face back.

And then she steps down. Off the — dais, throne shelf, whatever the raised part is called — one small foot at a time, coming toward me, and Erik moves.

Fully in front of me. Between us. His back fills up my whole view, and his shoulders are doing something I’ve never seen them do.