Page 73 of Into Ember

Ordered to find you.

No. I know these men. Gunnar fought this so hard he announced his own surrender for the record — his words, out loud, to my face. Erik walked to a dead door for three years. Rayner guarded my dreams before he’d ever met me awake, and none of that is what being ordered looks like, none of it, and I don’t believe a word of this, I don’t.

But I can’t explain the two weeks. Either the Vestry knew I was coming all on their own, which nobody has explained and nobody will, or somebody who crossed that sky knew about me long before they pretended to find me. One of those has to be true. I can’t prove which. I turn it over and over looking for the version where it’s fine, and every version has a hole in it but I don’t know where this one is.

“There,” Anya says, stepping back, and all three of them look at me in the mirror with their hands clasped like I’m finished. Like I’m done being made.

The woman in the glass has soft curls and gold on her eyelids and flowers in her hair, and she looks beautiful, and she looks terrified, and she looks like a stranger wearing my face to a party.

“The realm is waiting, my queen.”

They open the doors. Music comes up the staircase from far below, strings and voices and a whole world I’ve never met, and I gather up three tiers of dress and follow them out into the corridor, down toward all of it, one question walking every step beside me like it’s been assigned.

Did they know?

Chapter 27

Leif

They’ve built a lock out of people and dressed it as a party.

I’m standing where they put me, a pace to the right of an empty throne, and I’ve gone over the pieces twice. Twice is procedure. The count doesn’t improve.

Two men at the main doors dressed as stewards, standing the way no steward stands. Weight even. Hands free. Backs to the wood. A woman at the west windows who hasn’t once looked through them. Aides spaced along the route from the grand stair to this dais, one every few paces, each turned a quarter away from the spectacle every other guest in this room crossed the realm to see. A gray robe at the musicians’ alcove. Another at the servants’ passage. Another at the garden doors.

Doorways. Windows. Choke points. The route. I know the formation because I’ve built it. I have stood soldiers exactly there, and there, and there, and called it securing a location. Every way in covered, which is the same thing, always, as every way out.

Once she walks into this room, there is no path back out of it that doesn’t pass through hands loyal to the Vestry. She will stand in the middle of a thousand guests and be more contained than a prisoner, and she won’t see it, because it’s wrapped in flowers, and everyone smiling at her is part of the door.

I’ve known something was coming since dawn. For the last hour, I’ve known what.

This morning, Gunnar talked for three minutes without making a single joke. Brock didn’t correct him once. I believed every word before he was half finished. He gave it the way we were trained to give it — field signs, and a whisper shallower than breath, under the noise of four tailors arguing about hemlines in the next room. Morty’s voice. Sam’s orders. Get her away from them. The place we agreed. They’ll be waiting. Tonight.

Erik stopped breathing beside me. Rayner’s hands closed and opened twice, which is Rayner shouting.

We know Morty gave the order. The order is the Vestry’s. The chamber that called her queen last night means to take her tonight, and wherever that is, they’ve already chosen the location. Gunnar and Brock would know Sam’s voice anywhere now that they’ve heard it. But nobody knows his face. And the women took us from her at dawn, politely, properly, and we haven’t seen her since.

We know. They don’t know we know. That’s all we have, and it has to be enough.

Attendants collected us at dusk and walked us down corridors lit like a festival, and I ran the route as we went — collect her at her doors, walk her down, five of us around her the way we came down the Vestry steps. We passed the staircase to her wing and kept going.

“Her doors are behind us,” I said.

“The queen will be presented, commander. You’ll be positioned.”

Positioned.

They walked us the full length of this gold room and arranged us around her empty chair like furniture, and Gunnar threw his arms out at full volume — “What the fuck is this? I thought we were escorting her.” — because at full volume nobody suspects you of anything.

“The queen must make her first entrance alone,” the attendant said, serene. “The realm must see her before it sees those she has chosen.”

It sounds like an honor. It is engineered to sound like an honor. What it does is put the entire length of this room between her and us, alone, in front of everyone.

Their excuses don’t even make sense at this point.

We’re already standing here. On display.

Which brings me back to the real thing circling us.