The world spat me out the way it had let me in, without ceremony, and the meadow came back all at once: light, grass, the bright shock of the lake past the tree-line, the warm green smell of a place that had no idea about anything strange had just happened in the air above it.
I was standing where I’d stepped in.
Same trodden patch, same half-step forward, like the crease had kept my place in line and handed it back unbothered. Yuki had her confiscated stick halfway raised again. Phèdre’s hand rested light at the small of her back, she’d been a breath from coming in after me, étiquette be damned.
Then I was there, and six faces caught up to it at once.
“Oh thank—” Yuki dropped the stick. “You were gone two minutes, and I had already written your eulogy. It was very moving. I cited sources.”
“I told her it’s okay,” Phèdre countered.
I rolled my shoulders, and they came loose easily. I’d half expected to come out wrong somehow and hadn’t, and I let that be enough. “I’m fine. It’s fine. It was—” I cast around for the size of it and came up short. “Weird. Mostly weird. A lot of nothing and a voice being smug in the middle of it. I’ve had worse meetings.”
Behind them, Llama walked back through my destiny.
He came through the column of folded air from the wrong side, shield still on his arm, and the shimmer let him out into the meadow as indifferently as it had let him in. The thing that wouldn’t take him wouldn’t keep him out either. He resumed his place at my shoulder as if he’d chosen the scenic route on purpose.
“Welcome back, Majesty,” he said.
“Good to be back, Sir Walked-Right-Through.”
“...Noted.”
Lucy wasn’t listening to any of it. “That puddle,” she said. “It’s drawin’ on somethin’ deep. The big well. Same one the entire world sips from, if I had to wager, an’ I generally do.” She tipped her hat to me. “Am I warm?”
“It’s complicated,” I said. “I’ll tell you later.”
“Aye, ye will.” The grin came back, and the captain with it. “We’ve a drinkin’ night in the clock tower with yer name carved in it, Majesty. Long memory, longer thirst. Ye’ll spill the lot an’ I’ll forget the lot, an’ we’ll call it square.”
I rolled my eyes and got on with it. “Fine. Short version.” I turned and pointed across the water at the mountain. “We cross the lake. Some magic goes pop. And then there are temples. Up there.”
I described the temples, but the mountain, for the record, was bare. Gray stone, tree-line, a couple of idle clouds. No pale columns. No snowflake catching the light off five hundred meters of marble. Nothing but an ordinary mountain, declining to cooperate.
“I see them.” NightSwallow, flat as a closed door, still planted out in the open sun she loathed. “Magnificent.”
“They’re not visible yet—”
“The big one’s exquisite,” Phèdre said. “Such columns.”
“I bet it’s the snowflake one!” Yuki, shading her eyes at the empty slope in total earnest. “I can almost—no. No, that’s a cloud. Never mind.”
“I hate every one of you.” I pointed lower, down to where the mountain’s foot met the waterline. “Forget the temples. Look at the base. There.”
Lumi had been laughing the hardest, but she stopped first. “...There’s something,” she said. “At the waterline. Dark, standing up out of the ground. That’s not a tree.”
“That’s the stele. That’s where the magic goes pop.”
Lucy clapped once, loud as a deck-gun. “Right! Enough squintin’ at rocks. A crossin’s water, an’ water’s mine. Into the boat, the lot of ye—captain’s got the helm.”
“Water is not your element, mon cœur.” Phèdre was at Lucy’s side without appearing to have crossed to it, scarf grazing the paladin’s shoulder, a fingertip coming to rest at her jaw. “Your element is exploit. You swore your oath to her”—a glance at me—"so it only lights because she does. Water is just where you park the boat."
Most people, with that finger at their jaw, forgot their own names. Lucy looked at it, looked at Phèdre, and grinned like a shark sighting something slow.
“Aye—an’ what a thing to be tied to.” She caught the hand, kissed the knuckles, and handed the whole performance back unopened. “Careful flirtin’ with a captain in her own waters, chérie. Ye’ll wake up crew.” She turned toward the boat, undamaged. “Exploit’s a fine element, besides.”
Phèdre watched her go, smiling, pleased, for once.
The boat sat low, two of Lucy’s broad-shouldered crew at the oars and the rest of us packed in around them, and we pushed off the meadow shore into water so still it looked solid enough to walk on.
Behind us the new town went on inventing itself; the chops of axes, somebody calling a line, the slow argument of a place deciding where its streets would go.
Ahead lay the mountain.
The mountain played the trick mountains always played on me from the water; it held still while I watched it and seemed to double every time I looked away. The stele came up out of the haze at its foot a little at a time, a dark upright nick against all that gray, and the closer we drew the more certain I was that it had been put there to be walked toward.
Lucy stood in the bow with one boot up on the gunwale, a fine way to go swimming in a rowboat, and she did it anyway, because the helm was hers and the helm would be respected.
“Steady on the larboard oar! We’re quarterin’ a current!”
There was no current. The lake was still as Lola when I called her sweetie. The two rowers, who plainly knew this, traded the briefest look and went on rowing exactly as before, and Lucy took their obedience as a proof of her command.
“That’s it. That’s seamanship. Ye feel the water, ye don’t fight it.” She breathed the dead-calm air like brine off a gale. “Gods, I’ve missed open water.”
“It’s a lake,” Yuki said, and tried to hide behind Phèdre when Lucy glanced at her. “Big one, but still a lake.”
Lucy grinned and shrugged. “It’s a crossin’, an’ a crossin’s the sea if ye’ve the soul for it.”
Beside me, Llama wasn’t watching the mountain or the captain or any of it. He had his chin down and his eyes on the lake, tracking the dark water past the hull as if it were a treeline that might move.
“There’s nothing under there,” I told him.
“There’s always something under there.” He didn’t look up. “Calm water is a lid, Majesty. Lids have undersides.”
I decided not to argue with him, and instead turned to the other side, where was NightSwallow.
She sat very straight and tiny with her hands folded in her lap, out in the flat white afternoon with the entire sky looking at her and not one scrap of shadow anywhere to fold into.
The water gave her nothing.
There was nowhere on a rowboat to not be seen, and she knew it, and she was bearing it with the rigid, suffering dignity of a cat being driven to the vet.
I didn’t say anything about it; I just shifted a little, so my shoulder laid a thin bar of shade across her hands. Her fingers eased. She didn’t look at me, but she smiled a bit. Then she went back to hating the lake, and I let her, and the stele kept coming.
We grounded the boat on a shelf of pale shingle, and Yuki was over the side before the hull had finished its long scrape to a stop, soaking twin tails and one boot to the shin, already gone up the bank at a dead historian’s sprint.
“Don’t touch it,” I called.
“I’m not touching it, I’m reading it—” She wasn’t reading it. Nobody could read it. She had her face about four inches from the dark stone and her tails fanned out rigid behind her, vibrating, three banners of dawn-light all snapping with the same enormous feeling. “Queen. Queen! I know this script.”
“You know it?” I asked, now confused. “Really?”
“No. Yes! No. Kind of yes?” She paced the foot of the stele, hands sketching the air.
“I’ve seen it once. Underground, in the empire, in a ruin three days past anywhere, I had a quest to help them dig a relic and we couldn’t find, but this was carved on a door that didn’t open, and nobody could read it then either, the whole expedition had a linguist who cried, and now it’s here, on your mountain, which means—” Her ears pivoted. “Okay. Theory one. It’s a dead administrative language, and these are property deeds, which would be devastating. Imagine claiming a kingdom and the first document is a receipt. Theory two—” the tails reorganized themselves “—it’s not a language at all, it’s pre-linguistic and it means nothing, in which case I am going to cry because it can’t be read. Theory three, and I want it on record that I hate theory three, it’s for a specific person—”
She stopped. Looked at me. Looked at the stele. “...It’s for you, isn’t it?” she said. “I just talked myself into it being for you.”
“Probably,” I said, because lying to Yuki was cruelty, and she’d only find out faster than anyone. “Want to find out?”
“Obviously, I want to find out. I just need a minute to grieve being the one person here who can’t make it talk.” She crouched, hovering a reverent hand a careful inch off the carving, not touching, suffering beautifully. “It’s beautiful, though. Look at the strokes.”
“Right.” I straightened up and clapped the lake off my hands. “Gather in. Time to be Lola and do briefing.”
Yuki peeled off the stele as if it cost her blood, walking backward so she didn’t have to stop looking at it.
I laid it out the way it had been laid out for me, minus the smug.
“This thing”—I tipped my head at the stele—"is the front door. I touch it, and it opens a road up the mountain to a temple. There are three. Each one’s a challenge, and the challenge doesn’t get decided until somebody walks through the door, so I can’t tell you what’s waiting, because the temple doesn’t know yet either. It picks when it sees who’s standing in it."
“That’s deeply unfair,” Yuki said, thrilled.
“It gets better. We go up one by one. I'll go with you, but I can’t help you. Two of you per temple, three temples, three pairs. You go in, you face whatever it decides to be, and I stand right there and watch.” I let my tone show what I thought of this uselessness. “No pencils. The temple isn’t grading me. So try not to make me look bad.”
“You’ll just... stand there,” Lumi said, as if she wanted it confirmed in writing.
“I’ll just stand there. The worst seat in the house. All the watching, none of the doing.” Which was its own particular hell.
Then I pointed up the bare gray slope, at the temples that flatly were not there.
“Road opens there. And there. And there. Temple at the head of each.”
They looked the way I pointed. Wind. An extremely empty mountain.
“They’re stunning,” NightSwallow said.
I ignored her. “Clear all three, then we all go up the big one together for the last one. Falling’s allowed; there’s a second way through if the first one won’t have us.” I didn’t mention I would be only the administrator of the world fragment if we failed, not the owner, but Lola said there were need to know things and this wasn’t one of them.
“What second way?” said Phèdre, who missed nothing.
“The one I’ll explain if we ever need it.” I gave her the sweetest smile in my arsenal. “Don’t poke the queen’s destiny, chérie. It’s mine to poke.”
Phèdre gave me back her sweetest smile back.
“Now, who wants to go first?” I asked them.