We came to anchor a good stone’s throw off the bank, in water gone glassy and dark with the lake’s depth, and there it was on the green: the distortion, a smear of wrongness in the clean afternoon air, the place where an obelisk used to be before I’d put my hand on it and made it mine.
It bent the surrounding light like heat off a road, except there was no heat, only that patient, waiting shimmer that had been sitting there for three months with my name on it.
In the past, this place was the heart of the player city and considered one of the best places to start in Rimelion.
Now it could be ours.
I’d been staring at it long enough that I didn’t hear Lucy come up beside me, and when she spoke, it came at an ordinary human volume, the ring on her hand gone quiet.
She’d retired the shouting somewhere around the second mountain, and I hadn’t said a word about it, because a Lucy you could hear without your skull ringing was a gift I wasn’t about to question.
“Before ye go marchin’ off into yer magic puddle,” she said, “there’s a small matter wants settlin’.”
“Is there?” I didn’t look away from the shimmer. “There’s always a small matter with you. The small matters are how I end up owing somebody a tavern.”
“Aye, well. This one’s already paid for.” She had her hands clasped behind her back and her chin up, a woman setting up to enjoy herself enormously. “Ye recall on the dock, when ye told the whole deck ye’d talked Lola round? Concessions, ye said. A few of ‘em, ye said, I agreed to—” She did an unkind impression of me biting my own sentence in half. “An’ then ye went all interested in yer boots an’ changed the subject.”
The afternoon took on a faint chill that had nothing to do with my magic.
“...I recall the general situation, yet,” I said, very interested in my amazing heels. She didn’t need to know about my missed brunch date nor the bubble-gum ice cream.
“Course ye do.” Lucy put two fingers in her mouth and produced a whistle that needed no ring at all, and the hatch amidships banged open, and the sailors came up.
Except they weren’t sailors.
I’d watched these people the entire voyage and filed them, without thinking, under Lucy’s crew, quiet, broad-shouldered, kept to themselves below, and now they came up into the light in canvas and leather with their sleeves already rolled, and there were many more of them than a ship that size had any business holding, and not one of them moved like someone who’d ever hauled a sail in their life.
At the front of them was an elf.
He came to the rail and gave me a bow, correct and not one inch deeper than the office required; the man plainly had a schedule and meant to keep it. He was tall and lean and unhurried, dark hair tied back, a face that on a human would have read as forty.
“Your Majesty.” His voice came level, pitched to carry across a worksite without ever once rising. “Qomén. Master builder.” He proudly nodded. “One hundred and two. Young, but the guild doesn’t hand the title to children, whatever my elders enjoy implying. Lady Lola retained me.”
“Did she?”
“To assess this ground.” He nodded past me at the shore, the lake, the tree-line, pricing the whole of it by the acre with one flat sweep of his eyes. “Find where a capital wants to stand, not where it would look well, where it would hold. And to put a dock under your feet, so the next ship in doesn’t have to argue with a ramp of ice.” He almost gave me a smile. “I’m told there was a ramp of ice.”
I took that as an opportunity to be an amazing queen. “There was a very good ramp of ice.”
“Mm.” He let that go, and I saw in his eyes that shift. He’d probably built things that outlasted their builders, and seen what magic did to a site once the mage got bored. “I’ve crew enough to fell timber and set foundations without troubling your party. We’ll draw on the ship’s stores and raise our own shelter. You needn’t spare us a thought, Majesty. Go and do whatever it is”—a glance at the shimmer on the bank—"that takes a queen up a river this far. You’ll have a dock when you come back."
And there it was.
The whole shape of the thing I’d waved a hand a few days ago and not finished out loud: I’ll go, but the city starts the day I arrive. I’ll go, but I won’t go alone into the wanting of it. Lola couldn’t keep me on the dock, so she’d done the next thing, the Lola thing, the thing she handled before I knew I needed it handled, she’d packed the first stone of the capital into the hold and sent it south with me.
I waited to be annoyed.
I genuinely waited for it, the way you wait for a sneeze that’s been promised and then withheld.
Being managed usually pulled the trigger somewhere behind my sternum, that old reflex of I can do it, I’m fine, I don’t need handling. The reflex didn’t fire. What came up instead, quiet and a little unwelcome, was that it was a good call; the call I’d have made myself if I were any good at thinking past the next fight, and I wasn’t, and Lola was, and she’d made it for me without making me ask.
“It’s a good idea,” I said.
Lucy’s eyebrows climbed her forehead. “...It’s a—” She squinted at me as though I’d been swapped out for a convincing forgery. “I had an entire speech ready, ye know. For when ye threw somethin’ at me.”
“I’m fresh out of pencils.”
“That’s never stopped ye before.” But she was grinning now, the real one, pleased and faintly off-balance. “Right. Well. Qomén’s yours till the dock’s done, an’ he’s no fun whatsoever, ye’ll love him.” She clapped the builder on the shoulder; he absorbed it like a man used to weather. “Go on, then. We’ve a town to start, an’ you’ve a shimmer to go bother.”
“We need you there too,” I said.
Lucy blinked and glanced around her ship. “Me too?”
“Yes, this is very important and you’ve been my friend since forever. Of course I’d want you there.”
She grinned back at me and nodded. “I’m your knight after all!”
I groaned and turned around for another ice bridge.
I was outvoted on the bridge; apparently; it was slippery. I glanced down at my heels and grinned to myself, which didn’t escape Yuki, who said Queen was happy with their slipping.
It wasn’t true!
Mostly.
We took the boat in, the proper small one, oars and all, because I’d had my fill of building infrastructure for one afternoon, not because others said so, and there’s a limit to how many ice ramps a queen can be smug about in a single day. Qomén’s people were already swarming the bank as we pushed off, sighting lines along the tree-edge, somebody pacing out distances heel to toe, and at our backs the slow industrious sounds of a town deciding to exist.
Ahead of us was the shimmer.
It did not get less strange as we came up on it. If anything, it got worse, more insistent, the air folded over on itself in a column twice my height, the green of the meadow showing through it bent and swimming, like the world seen through a flawed pane.
There was no door. No frame, no arch, no helpful glowing rune to lay a hand against.
There was only the place where the world had been creased, and the silent, very patient sense that it had been creased for me.
Yuki got to it first, because when there was something looking historic she couldn’t sit still.
“I’ve never—” She circled it, ears flat with concentration, tails throwing agitated shapes behind her. “Queen, I have never read about this. Anywhere. I’ve read about claimed city stones, and I’ve read about distortions, and I have never once read a single line on what those looks like before you go in, because nobody who goes in seems to come back out and write it down, which is—” she heard herself, “—fine. That’s fine. That is a completely normal thing to be realizing out loud.”
She found a stick.
I don’t know where she found it. Yuki, presented with any mystery in the known universe, will produce a stick from somewhere on her person and prod the mystery with it, and this was no exception; she leaned in, tongue caught between her teeth, and extended the stick toward the column of folded air as though it might go off.
“Mon cœur.” Phèdre’s hand closed over Yuki’s wrist before the stick made it halfway. “Non.”
“I’m being careful—”
“You are being a historian, which is the opposite of careful, and you are about to poke the queen’s destiny with a twig you found on the ground.” Phèdre eased the stick down with two fingers. “If it must be poked, chérie, we shall let her poke it. It’s hers. Étiquette. You can poke my cheek.”
Yuki surrendered the stick, radiating the injustice of it, then realized what Phèdre said and her face heated up.
The rest of them had drawn in close while she fussed.
Lumi at my shoulder, Llama a half-step ahead of her with his shield already off his back. And on my other side, where there had been empty air a second before, NightSwallow, out in the open, in the flat afternoon light, no shadow to fold into and not hunting for one. She said nothing. She didn’t have to. She simply stood there with the rest of them and let herself be seen, which from her was the loudest thing in the meadow.
“Right,” I said. “Here’s the part you’ll all hate. I'll go in first. Alone.”
Three objections drew breath at once. Llama got there before any of them had finished.
“That is not possible,” he said flatly. He had decided the matter and was informing reality as a courtesy. “I lead. I take the unknown first. You follow once it’s clear.” And he stepped forward, shield up, planting himself between me and the shimmer and walking straight into it to prove the point—
—and walked straight out the other side.
Nothing happened.
The shimmer didn’t part for him, didn’t resist him, didn’t so much as flicker. He passed through the whole column of folded air like it was a patch of slightly humid afternoon and came out on the far side, on the meadow, exactly as solid and exactly as un-transported as he’d gone in, shield still braced against an enemy that had declined to acknowledge he existed.
He stood there. He looked at the shimmer. He looked back at me through it, his face a man recalculating from the studs up.
The silence held for about a second and a half.
Then NightSwallow giggled.
It got out of her before she could stop it, a small, helpless, traitorous sound, one hand flying up too late to catch it, and that was the dam.
Phèdre, serene as a cathedral, murmured, “Magnifique. The wall holds the line against the wall,” and Lumi, who loved that man with her whole composed and legendary heart, pressed her lips flat and stared very hard at the sky and lost. Just lost. A laugh escaped Lady Luminaria sideways, entirely undignified; she clapped a hand over her own mouth, and her shoulders shook, and she could not look at him.
Lucy was already rolling on the ground, her hammer making large dents.
Llama, stranded on the wrong side of my destiny, bore all of it without moving. He would have words with the universe later.
“It’s keyed to me,” I said, as gently as I could manage with my own face threatening mutiny. “You can all come through. After. It just wants me first.” I caught his eye through the swimming air. “Good instinct, though. Ten out of ten. Beautifully led.”
“...Noted,” said Llama from inside the meadow, holding his shield.
And then there was nothing left to do but the thing I’d come a river’s length to do.
I let myself feel the whole weight of it for exactly one pull of air inside my lungs, felt it sitting there, waiting to be picked up, and then I slowly exhaled, and steeled my nerves, because one breath was all it was getting, and I looked at them instead.
My fox with her confiscated stick.
My gentle healer who flirts with everything.
My composed, legendary lightning-mage still hiccuping into her hand.
My shadow standing in the sun for me.
My tank marooned on the far shore of the obvious.
My pirate captain, trying not to comment on anything.
Ridiculous, all of them, but my friends.
I smiled.
Then I stepped into the crease in the world, and the world let me in.