Page 57 of Into Ember

“To your chambers, my queen.” Anya again. She’s the talker. “We’ve prepared a meal for you. And…” her eyes flick back, over my shoulder, “…them. A bath as well.”

Them. She says it the way you’d say the luggage.

These women watched Erik tell the oldest being in existence no to her face, and to them he’s nothing. It’s disgusting.

But there’s a time and a place and this isn’t either of those.

“Where exactly?”

“In the castle.”

“Castle?”

What the fuck!

“You can’t be serious,” Leif says behind me, and there he is, suddenly at my shoulder, and he’s using the flat voice, the commander one.

“Oh, of course we’re serious,” Neve says, delighted, completely missing that the flat voice is not a voice you’re supposed to be delighted at.

“The castle hasn’t been used in—”

“And two weeks ago the orders came from the Vestry themselves to begin preparations,” Anya says, proud, like she’s delivering good news.

Leif grunts.

Two weeks. The number does something to Muffin. I’ve never heard him grunt before and for the first time since I’ve met him he looks unsure… or scared… or something nontraditional Muffin.

Anya pushes open the doors at the end of the corridor and we step outside. The air is warm and smells like the garden surrounding us. Neve points ahead, and my brain short circuits.

There’s a fucking castle.

An actual castle, on a rise in the distance, pale stone going gold in the light, towers, like real ones, and I blink a few times just to make sure it stays.

“Oh, it’s so beautiful now,” Colette says. It’s the first thing she’s said. “You’re going to love it there.”

“They’ve been working day and night,” Neve says. “The gardens alone — oh, and the dresses! My queen, the dresses. They’re so beautiful. You’re going to look amazing.”

She’s gushing. Full on gushing, hands and everything, and Anya joins in, fabric and colors and something about sleeves, and I’m nodding along like a woman who has opinions about sleeves, and behind me I can hear Erik not laughing as hard as he can.

I’m going to kill him later. Quietly. As a queen.

“They’ll have to be altered, of course,” Colette says.

She’s looking at me when she says it. Up, then down, then up again, slow, the whole inventory, and she doesn’t say anything else. Just the look, and I feel insulted. I think I should be.

Sure, the dresses were presumably made for a hypothetical queen, and hypothetical queens are apparently built narrower than actual ones, and that’s fine, that’s a fabric problem, not a me problem, and I’ve decided not to care, and I’m deciding it again right now, harder.

Erik makes the not-laughing sound again. Different pitch this time. I don’t look at him either.

The walk is long enough that my feet stop being polite about it, and none of it gets less real. The castle keeps being there. It gets bigger.

And then the sky moves.

That’s what it looks like at first — a piece of the dark peeling off the ridge above the castle, too big to be a bird, too alive to be anything else, and then the wings go out.

Wings.

I stop dead.