Page 71 of Into Ember

Your males. Like they’re a set of luggage again.

“You really chose them? All of them?”

“Yes.” It comes out faster than I mean it to.

“All five.” Not a question this time. Something closer to marveling. “They’re certainly… unusual.”

“They’re mine.”

It comes out low, and it comes out with something underneath it, a sound from somewhere lower than my own voice. All three women go still at once, the way birds do. In the mirror, Neve’s eyes flick to Anya’s.

I watch them hesitate, looking at each other like they don’t know how this is going to go.

Then Anya laughs, light as anything. “Oh, of course, Your Majesty. We didn’t mean anything by it. It’s actually rather sweet.”

Sweet.

I’d rather they’d insulted them. I know what to do with an insult. Sweet sits there on the vanity like a gift I can’t refuse, and Colette keeps working through my hair, and I unclench my hands in my lap and apologize for a stomach I don’t remember growling.

“It’s only,” Neve says, delicate, blending, “you could have anyone, you understand. Anyone in the realm. There are so many more of our men than you’ve seen — great houses, decorated Legion officers, males from families that have served the crown since before the crown was a story. Males who have trained their whole lives on the chance a female would come.” She smiles at me in the mirror, warm as a bath. “And you’ve met, what. Five?”

“Six, technically,” I say. “One of them betrayed us to the Vestry, so I’m aware the realm has range.”

Anya’s smile flickers, just at the corner. The light in here does things to faces. Probably that.

“We only mean you deserve a choice,” Anya says smoothly. “A real one. You chose from the men who happened to be standing there.”

The men who happened to be standing there.

And I don’t have anything ready to say back, which is annoying, because it’s not — it wasn’t like that. Except I didn’t hold auditions. There was no realm-wide search. There was a hallway, and a broken door, and five men who were already there when the world tipped over, and I looked around at the wreckage and they were the only ones I could see.

The only ones I wanted to.

Did I choose them, or did the circumstances choose for me?

No. Wrong question. Bad question. I’m not taking questions from that part of my brain at this time.

“How did you meet them, anyway?” Neve asks, bright, like she’s asking about a recipe.

“I don’t really think—”

“Oh, please. We’ve been dying to know. Everyone has.”

And because I’m basically strapped into a chair with my head held in place by another woman’s hands, I tell it. Abridged. Sanitized. Erik lived across the hall from me. His friends came looking for him. Things happened. Here we are, hooray, look how structural my dress is.

Except it sounds different out loud.

I hear it happening while I’m saying it, the way the story rearranges itself in the open air. They came looking for him and found me. They knew what I was before I did. They took me through to their cabin, and then to the Vestry, and then here, and every single door I’ve walked through since the sky, one of them was holding open.

That’s not — that’s not what it was. That’s just the same facts standing in a different order.

“Three years,” Colette says. Her first word in an hour. Her fingers don’t stop moving. “Across the hall. And he never said a word?”

“He couldn’t.” I’ve got this one. I have receipts for this one. “His crossing died. He was stranded. He walked out to a dead door every night for three years trying to get home — I heard him tell the Vestry himself.”

“Mm,” Colette says, and keeps braiding.

Mm. I’m learning to hate that sound.