Page 55 of Into Ember

“Move,” Ezra says.

“No.”

The chamber gasps. Actually gasps, all around the circle, and it occurs to me that I don’t know what happens to people who tell this woman no, and every muscle I own would like him to stop finding out. My hand is halfway to the back of his shirt before I get it back down.

Ezra comes closer. I can hear her feet on the stone, and somehow it’s the most threatening sound in the room.

“Perhaps your time away has let you forget what it means to be Ásp Móra.”

“I haven’t forgotten.” Erik’s voice is flat. It’s the voice he uses when he’s decided something and the deciding is done.

“Then know your place.”

Nothing happens for a moment. Long enough that I stop breathing.

Then Erik moves to my side. Slowly, like it’s the most painful thing he’s ever had to do, and his arm settles against mine, solid and warm and absolutely furious.

“My dear.” Ezra’s attention lands back on me and warms up like nothing happened. “It’s been far too long. Your mother always knew you’d come home one day.”

“My mother?” There are too many wrong things in that sentence and that’s the wrongest one. “What are you talking about?”

“Your mother, dear, was born so very long ago. And it appears Earth has kept you…” She looks at me. Takes her time with it, top to bottom, like she’s reading a label. “…unnaturally young.”

My mother has a garden. My mother calls me to ask if I’m eating and to remind me she never liked Chicago. My mother was not born so very long ago, she was born in San Diego, twenty-five years before me, and I’d say so, except the old woman is smiling at me now and I genuinely cannot tell if it’s sincere. It sits on her face like a smile. It has all the smile parts. Something underneath it isn’t participating.

Also — unnaturally young? I’m twenty-nine. I use sunscreen. It’s not witchcraft, it’s SPF 50.

“We must celebrate,” Ezra says, and turns back to the circle, and her voice opens up to fill the whole chamber. “A ball. In her honor. Let all of the realm know that our queen has finally come home.”

Queen.

Our queen.

Okay. So. The oldest being in existence has a few marbles loose. That’s fine. That’s — honestly, at her age, whatever her age is, she’s earned some loose marbles, and everyone’s clearly too polite to mention it, and someone should gently take the realm keys away from her. And it should not be me, because I write listicles for a website called Dopamine and my biggest problem used to be a deadline and fictional men.

Nobody laughs. Nobody corrects her.

A dozen ancient faces look at me like she said something true.

Three women come in through a side door I didn’t know was there. Gray dresses, folded hands, eyes down, and they arrange themselves in a little arrow pointed at me.

“Go,” Ezra says to me, pleasant again. “They will take you to where you’ll be staying. Preparations are already underway.”

Staying. Preparations. Sure. I take a step toward the women. Another one.

The men don’t move.

I stop. I’m not going to examine why my feet did that, but they did it before I had an opinion, and now I’m standing in the middle of the floor between the gray women and all of that ancient mess, and the men still haven’t moved, and that answers that.

“What seems to be the problem?” There’s an edge coming into Ezra’s voice. Patience with a bottom to it.

“I’m not going anywhere without them.”

Ezra laughs. It’s light and silver and grandmotherly and I hate it.

“Nonsense, dear. You are a queen. They are nothing to you.”

They are nothing to you.