Page 53 of Into Ember

The crossing lets us out into spear points.

They’re held at rest, twenty of the Legion’s own arranged down both sides of the steps in parade order, every point angled at the sky, and every one of them was standing in place before we arrived, which means they knew we were coming.

The steps of the Vestry. Broad, black, worn smooth in the middle by every set of boots that was ever summoned down them. I’ve stood on these steps before, always at Leif’s shoulder, and we have never once been met. You come down alone and you stand at the doors until they decide you’ve stood long enough. That’s how it has always worked, and I never had to be told why, because making a man wait tells him exactly what he’s worth.

Now there’s an honor guard, I would give a great deal to know what makes us worthy now.

“Ásp Móra.” The officer at the top inclines his head the exact degree protocol requires and not a fraction more. “The Vestry is expecting you.”

Of course they are.

Leif’s eyes find mine. One look, nothing in his face, and I give him nothing back, and between the two nothings we agree on everything. He drifts half a step left. I take the right. Erik is already at her back and Rayner and Gunnar close the front without being told, and by the time we start down the steps Elara is walking inside a wall of us that assembled itself so smoothly she may not have noticed it happen.

She noticed. Her shoulder is almost touching mine. She hasn’t said a word since the switch crossing, and a quiet Elara worries me more than any spear on these steps.

The Legion men hold their lines and keep their eyes forward, because they’re good, because someone drilled them.

And every single one of them fails.

The man third from the bottom takes a breath deeper than a man at attention needs, and his eyes come off the middle distance, land on her for half a second, and get dragged back by force. The one across from him does the same thing eight steps later, and then another, and then another, the same small failure repeating all the way down the staircase.

They don’t know what she is. I’d stake my life on that — there’s no recognition in it, no name behind their eyes.

But they know what she isn’t.

Every dragon on these steps just caught her scent, and not one of them understands what it means.

Vick walks ahead of us like a man on his own land. Pressed, precise, hands loose at his sides, and I watch the guards make room for him without being ordered to. Something about that sits wrong. There’s never been another to walk ahead of the Ásp Móra. Each time we’ve stood before the Vestry, we’ve walked alone. I mark it and keep walking, because the doors are coming into view and there’s a limit to how many wrong things a man can hold at once.

The doors of the Embers stand open.

They were open last time too — the night they sent us — and I remember what it did to Leif, because he told me on the walk out that in every summons before that one, in all his centuries of standing on this ground, the doors had never once been open when he reached them. You waited. They decided. Then one night they skipped the waiting, and everything that came after it led us to her.

That’s twice now. Whatever the old pattern meant, it’s finished, and nobody has told me what the new one costs.

The cost is going to be high, that I’m sure of.

But it won’t be hers to pay.

We walk in.

The circle is closed. Every seat filled, same as the last, which was unprecedented then and is apparently ordinary now. And at the center, in the seat I spent my childhood believing was a story — Ezra. Small and gray and still, her hair lifting on a wind that isn’t in the room.

I take the chamber in the way I take in every room, exits first, faces second.

The exits are guarded.

That’s not protocol.

The faces are all pointed at Elara, and they stay pointed, a dozen of the oldest powers in existence seated in a circle with every line of attention running through the woman standing in the middle of us. They let me see them do it. Beings that old don’t bother hiding.

All but one.

Ezra is looking at Vick, pleasantly, like she’s pleased with him.

Interesting.

Her eyes never move off of Vick and that’s how I know she wants to look more than all of them put together. I’ve played this game my whole life against the best there is. She’s better.