Page 70 of Into Ember

All of it bullshit.

The future depends on it.

The women turn and start walking, certain we’ll follow, and we do, because a scene right now is only going to make everything worse. I need them to believe we don’t know, that we’re compliant.

That we don’t suspect a thing.

Sweetheart, I think, at a door I can’t see from here. Don’t let them take you anywhere I’m not.

Chapter 26

Elara

The dress has opinions, and all of them are wrong.

I’m standing on a little velvet stool in front of the mirror wearing what I can only describe as a wedding cake that lost a fight with a curtain shop. Ruffles. Tiers of them. Sleeves that puff. A skirt so wide I’ll need to enter rooms strategically, and somewhere under all of it, allegedly, me.

“Are you sure this is—”

“The latest fashion,” Anya says, glowing. “Of course. Only the best for the queen.”

“It’s the silhouette everyone will be wearing by spring,” Neve says, both hands pressed to her chest like the dress is a sunset.

I look at the mirror. Squinting. Trying to make it look how they describe. Somewhere in Chicago I own a black dress that has never once betrayed me, and now it’s a realm away so I’m forced to attend my first ball dressed as a pastry.

“It’s very…” I search for the right word, nothing comes. “Structural.”

“Isn’t it,” Neve breathes.

They put me in a chair after that, facing the mirror, and the fussing begins in earnest. Neve on makeup, tiny pots of things that smell like flowers. Colette behind me with my hair, working through it in sections with her quiet fingers, and Anya orbiting all of us, adjusting, approving, narrating the evening like a tour guide. The receiving line. The presentation. The first dance. My face is being painted onto me one layer at a time and I can’t even fidget, because every time I move, three sets of hands pause like I’ve interrupted surgery.

“Where are the guys?” I ask, while Neve tilts my chin up toward the light. “I haven’t seen them all day. Can I see them? Just for a minute, before all of this.”

The pause is small. But I notice it.

“They didn’t want to bother you, my queen,” Anya says, warm, smooth, not missing a step of her orbit. “They asked us to tell you they’d see you tonight.”

Oh.

Okay. That’s fine. That’s completely fine. They’ve been stuck to me around the clock since they came back from the hardware store, all five of them, and everyone needs a day off from — whatever I am to babysit. A break makes sense. Gunnar probably found something to argue with. It’s fine, and it’s normal, and it doesn’t sting, and I’m not thinking about last night. When every time I moved in my sleep someone had their body, or arm or leg pressed against mine. Or the way Rayner—

Didn’t want to bother me.

I feel the pit start in my stomach like angry diving swans but it can’t be helped. Sometimes things aren’t always what you see. Sometimes you make yourself see things that aren’t really there.

So I straighten my back and focus on making the travesty staring back at me in the mirror something I can live with. They’re busy. It’s a big night. Queens, it turns out, are a lot of work.

I don’t say anything. Old customs, proper, no seeing the queen before the ball — they explain it all like it’s perfectly reasonable.

It probably is.

Gerald has been hiding under the couch since dawn like he knows something is wrong. I would give one entire puffy sleeve of this monstrosity to hear Gunnar complain about literally anything right now.

“You must be excited,” Neve says, dusting something across my cheekbone. “The whole realm is coming to see you.”

“Thrilled,” I say. “Genuinely can’t wait to be perceived by a realm.”

She laughs like I’ve said something charming instead of true. And then, still smiling, still dusting, she says, “Can I ask you something, my queen? About your males?”