I put my palm to the stele a second time, and the second road lit.
It came awake from the foot of the stone and ran up the slope in the same long shallow switchbacks as the first, pale as bone, bending inward as it climbed toward a temple that flatly was not there.
Behind me, Yuki made a small noise. She had not stopped looking at the carvings since we came back down, and she was not going to, and I had stopped pretending she would.
“Second one’s yours,” I said.
Llama was already walking.
He went up that road as if he expected it to be taken from him, shield on his arm, chin down, boots landing in the same place with every step.
Lumi went beside him. She had come up the shingle from the boat with her robes dry to the ankle and her braid over one shoulder and not one hair loose, and she climbed a mountain the same way, and I trailed the pair of them thinking about how much work that must be.
Nobody talked. The lake shrank to a coin again. The ships sat on it in their smug little crescent, and I could see one small dark shape moving on the deck of the nearest, counting things.
The temple came up over the last bend and hit me exactly as hard as the first one had.
Three hundred meters of white. Columns the width of towers, the pediment carved with figures the eye gave up on before it reached them, all of it throwing back the light off the water below.
Llama stopped. He looked at it, foot to crown, and his jaw worked once.
“Symmetry,” he said.
“What?”
“They got it right.” He sounded almost annoyed about it. “Nine columns a side. Nine. Odd number, so the eye lands on the middle.” He rolled his shoulder under the shield strap. “Whoever built this could have built a wall.”
“It’s a temple.”
“It’s a wall that lets you in.” He started up the steps.
Lumi caught my eye and let herself smile and followed him.
We stood at the mouth where the columns made a hall of shade, and past them was the door, and past the door was black.
I stopped them there because there was one thing I wanted said in daylight.
“Listen.” I turned, so they both had my face. “Whatever’s on the other side of that dark, it isn’t real. It’s a scenario. The temple builds it, and everything in it is a copy. It will bleed, and it will scream, and it may beg, and it will feel completely, perfectly real. It isn’t. Don’t spend a second of your life protecting a set piece.”
Llama took that with a small nod, filing it somewhere behind his eyes.
Lumi laughed.
“We’re inside the capsule,” she said. She lifted one immaculate hand and gestured at the black door as if presenting it to an audience. “Isn’t it the same?”
“Right,” I said. “Yes. Obviously.”
And I watched it arrive.
Her smile stayed exactly where it was for about a second and a half, and then something behind it turned over, and the smile came apart from the inside without moving a muscle.
“Oh,” she said.
“Lumi—”
“You’re—“ she stopped. Started again, whispering. “You move between worlds. You don’t log out.”
“No.”
“You’re really here.” Her hand was still up. She lowered it. “Majesty, I’m so sorry, that was—that was thoughtlessly said, I didn’t—”
“Lumi.”
“—it isn’t a capsule for you, and I stood here and said—”
“Luminaria.” I got hold of her wrist, and she stopped like a cut wire. “It’s fine. It’s genuinely fine. And I’d rather have you in there thinking it’s a capsule with a respawn than in there thinking it’s my funeral.” I let go. “Also, if you apologize to me one more time before we go through that door, I’m going to be extremely undignified about it, and I haven’t got any pencils.”
Her mouth twitched. “Understood.”
“Good.”
Llama, who had watched the entire exchange without contributing to it, adjusted his shield.
“Behind or beside,” he said to me. “Not in front. That still holds in there.”
I nodded.
“Then let’s go.”
He walked into the blackness, and it took him. Lumi went after him, and I followed.
The light died behind us with no fuss at all.
One step there was a bright rectangle full of columns and mountain air, and the next step there was nothing where the rectangle had been. I put a hand back and found more dark.
“Everyone still here?”
“Here.” Llama, off my left, a wall of a voice.
“Present.” Lumi, off to my right, absolutely level, and I would have believed it if I hadn’t just held her wrist.
Then the dark spoke, and it spoke without direction. “Two of you,” it said. “The shield and the storm. A queen brings her wall and her weather to a mountain and expects to be given a country for it. Sir TechiLlama.”
“Aye.”
“You have never taken a step backward. You have stood in front of men you did not know, for causes you did not check, and let them break themselves on you, and you have never once needed to be told to.” The dark seemed to lean. “Why do you kneel to her?”
Llama took his time.
“She’s worth it,” he said.
The dark waited for more.
It waited a long while. Llama had said his piece, and he stood there in the black with his shield on his arm and let the silence be the silence’s problem.
“...I see,” the voice said, and moved on. “Lady Luminaria.”
“Yes.”
“You walk into slaughter looking like a portrait. Not a drop on the hem. Not a hair out of the braid. You held a cracking line at Altandai, and you smiled through it, and nobody saw.” Something in it warmed, which I didn’t like. “Why do you serve her?”
“Because she is going to build something worth having,” Lumi said, “and I intend to be useful to it.”
It was a beautiful sentence. It was a sentence for a balcony and a crowd and a banner snapping overhead. It was also nothing, and all three of us knew it.
“How polished,” it said.
“Thank you.”
“So be it. Don’t forget—you chose it.”
And the world came back, and it was warm, and it smelled like bread.
The light came up gold and low and I was standing on flagstones with flour on them.
…a kitchen.
A vast one, a working bakery the size of a barn, ceiling lost in beams above us, the whole far wall taken up by ovens.
Stone hearth ovens, three of them, mouths black and open, and a fire already banked and glowing in the middle one with a heat I could feel across the room. Next to the ovens, a rack of split wood.
Long scarred worktables. Copper bowls stacked in nesting rows. Whisks, spoons, a rolling pin worn concave in the middle by somebody’s hands. A hand quern squatting on its own low bench with the crank sticking out sideways. A butter churn beside it, tall as my hip, staff standing up out of the lid. A water pump over a stone trough. A brass scale with a row of little weights in units I didn’t recognize. Sieves. A proving shelf, empty. A long-handled peel leaning by the oven mouth.
And on a table by itself, set out on a folded cloth as if it had been waiting all morning: a cake mold.
Shaped like a snowflake.
Subtle, I thought.
In the center of the room, on a pedestal, stood a book.
It was enormous. Over a meter tall, open flat, thick cream pages the size of a door, and it stood there being calm and completely obscene.
And around the walls, spaced between the ovens and the tables, were doors. Six of them. Plain wood, ordinary latches, and above each one, cut into the stone, a symbol. A wheat ear. A horn. A little cellar with a lid. An egg. A comb, dripping. And one door with nothing over it at all.
Aprons hung on hooks by the pump.
Nobody said anything for a while.
Lumi turned once, slowly, all the way around, taking the room in. Her hands had gone very still at her sides.
“Majesty,” she said, with the enormous care of a woman not screaming. “Why don’t we have our baker king with us?”
“Poundcake?” I shrugged. “Mr. Pancake wouldn’t get something so easy.”
She closed her eyes.
She tipped her head back and addressed the ceiling, and the poise came off her like a coat. “Whyyyy?!!!“
Llama had walked to the ovens. He put the back of his hand near the mouth of the burning one, judged it, and grunted. Then he looked at the wood rack, and I watched him count it.
“We talked about this,” he said. “Baking.”
Lumi’s eyes snapped open. “We talked about baking a loaf. On a Sunday. In a kitchen, at my flat, with a recipe from a website and a fire extinguisher on the counter.” Her voice did not rise. It got rigid, which was worse. “I said I wanted to try. I did not say I wanted an entire kingdom’s foundation to hinge on whether I can achieve a crumb.”
“You said you’d be good at it.”
“I said I would be interested in it.”
“You said,” Llama said, “and I remember, because it was the only time you have ever been wrong in front of witnesses, that it was ‘just chemistry with a nice smell.’”
Lumi stared at him.
Llama did not smile. He came very close.
“Well,” she said. “Yes. Fine. It is.“
“Then it’s chemistry.” He reached for an apron off the hook and put it on over the shield. Over it. The strap went across the boss and the shield sat under the cloth like a lump in a bed, and I had to look at the floor for a second. “We’re in it. Nothing outside this room is going to come and be in it for us. So we bake.”
She looked at him for a moment.
“...Fine,” she said, and took an apron, and tied it with two sharp movements. “Fine. We bake.”
She walked to the book.
The book had a title page, and the title page said:
THE ALL-AROUND BOOSTER CAKE for a queen.
And under that, in a smaller hand, as if written later by somebody with a grievance:
Serve warm. She will know.
Then the notification found us.
[Attention! You are in a scenario!]
[Scenario: The Queen’s Table]
Sir TechiLlama and Lady Luminaria will bake an All-Around Booster Cake and serve it to the God-Queen.
Goals: The Cake must confer a positive effect upon the God-Queen. A negative effect is a failure. There is no third outcome.
The quality of the Cake is the quality of what goes into it. Combined ingredient quality must exceed 50%, and the bake itself must be sound. A perfect method cannot save poor ingredients, and excellent ingredients will not survive a poor method.
Above 75%, there is a reward.
The God-Queen may not act. Any physical action nullifies the scenario. The God-Queen may speak. The God-Queen will appraise.
[No time limit is imposed. The fire is not eternal.]
I read the last line twice, and then I looked at the wood rack, and then I stopped looking at the wood rack, because there was something in my hand.
It hadn’t been there.
It was there now, a slim rod of the same pale stone as the temple, a little longer than my forearm, with a hollow socket at the head where a stone should have been and wasn’t.
A scepter.
“Oh, you petty thing,” I said out loud.
Lumi looked up from the book. “Majesty?”
“Nothing.” I turned it over. There was no weight to it. It didn’t hum. It sat in my hand like an invoice. “It gave me a job. I’m the Queen, right? Bring me things,” I told them. “That’s what it’s for. Every ingredient, when you’ve got it, you bring it here, and you put it in front of me and I’ll tell you what it is. Ugh.”
Lumi turned the great page.
And there it was, and I came around the pedestal to read it over her shoulder with a cold feeling starting somewhere low.
I. Ground flour — [wheat ear] Take the bucket. Cut by hand; use the sickle. Fill it. Mill what you cut.
II. Butter — [horn] Take the pail. Milk that will not be milked. Churn it here.
III. Salt — [cellar] Take it.
IV. Egg — [egg] One egg.
V. Honey — [comb] A comb, uncrushed.
VI. —
The sixth line was blank. Lumi put her fingertips on it.
Nothing happened.
“Six,” she said.
Llama came and looked at it over the top of us both, and read it all the way down, and stopped where I’d stopped. “It says, cut by hand,” he said. Lumi nodded. “Then use the sickle.”
“Yes, Llama.”
He turned his head and looked at Luminaria.
“Don’t,” she said.
“I said nothing.”
“You said volumes.“
He picked up the bucket from beside the door with the wheat ear over it and held it out to her, and she looked at it for exactly as long as her dignity required, and took it.
There was a sickle hanging on a nail by the door. She took that too. She held it the way you’d hold a dead animal.
I placed my palm flat on the door.
“Remember,” I said. “Not real. None of it. And I’ll be right there with you, and I can’t do a single thing, so don’t look at me for it.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Majesty,” Lumi said, and pulled the door open onto the sun.
The wheat went on forever.
That was the first thing, and it took my breath a little: a field with no far side, gold to the horizon in every direction, heavy heads standing dead still in a heat with no wind in it. The sky was a flat, enormous blue.
And behind us, standing on nothing in the middle of the field, was the door. Just the door. A rectangle of wood in a frame, with the kitchen visible through it, and nothing holding it up, and wheat growing right to its foot.
“That’s going to bother me,” Llama said.
“Get used to it,” I told him.
The wheat came up to Lumi’s waist. She waded three steps into it with the bucket in one hand and the sickle in the other and stopped and looked down at the crop and then out at the horizon.
“Fill the bucket,” she said.
“Fill the bucket.”
“With this.” She lifted one head of wheat in her palm and looked at the pitiful few grains in it. “Majesty, do you have any idea how many—”
“HOI!”
He came out of the wheat about forty meters off, and he came fast.
A man. Old, or old-ish, weathered down to leather, a shapeless hat, a shirt gone grey with a hundred washes. He’d been standing out there in the middle of his crop with his hands in his pockets, doing nothing, taking it in. Then he saw the sickle in her hand, and his body changed.
“HOI! YOU!“ He came at us through his own wheat, careful even now to step where the stalks were thin. “What in the name of every god are you doing in my field with that?”
Lumi turned to him and became instantly magnificent.
I watched it happen. The shoulders came back. The chin came level. The hand with the sickle in it went behind her hip where it wouldn’t lead, and she produced a smile of such warmth and such absolute calm that I would have signed anything she put in front of me.
“Sir,” she said. “Forgive us. We’ve come into your field without asking, and I know how that must look.”
The farmer stopped six feet away, breathing hard.
“We need wheat,” Lumi said. “A bucket. One bucket, no more—and I will cut it myself, by hand, and I will take nothing else and trample nothing I don’t have to.” She inclined her head a bit. “I’m aware I have no right to it. I’m asking anyway. Name what it’s worth and it will be paid, on my word.”
It was, honestly, a superb piece of work. Smooth, straight, no lie in it anywhere. Half the courts on the continent would have folded.
“For what?“ the farmer said.
Lumi opened her mouth, thought for a second, and answered. “To bake a cake.” The farmer stared at her. “For my Queen,” she added, and it did not help.
“A cake.“
“Yes.”
He looked at his wheat. He looked at her. He looked at the enormous armored man standing behind her with a shield and an apron on, and at the door hanging in the air, and back at his wheat, which stood around him in the windless heat.
Something in his face came apart.
“Twenty years,” he hissed. “Twenty years I’ve worked this. Twenty years, and it’s never come in like this, not once. It’s the best it’s ever—and you’ll cut it.”
“One bucket—”
“GUARDS!“ It tore out of him at a pitch I hadn’t thought he had. “GUARDS! THIEVES IN THE WHEAT! THIEVES IN THE WHEAT!“
I turned my head.
Two men were already coming; they’d been close, they’d been placed close, a hundred meters off on some track I couldn’t see, and they came through the crop at a run with their shields up.
And with the Empire flag on their coats. I would have said something about the temple’s imagination if I’d had the time.
“Lumi,” Llama said. “Cut.”
He was already moving. He went past her and he put himself down in the wheat about fifteen meters ahead of her with his shield coming off his back and his feet setting into the dirt.
The first guard hit him.
I have watched Llama take a siege-tier spell on that shield and turn it into weather. A man at a dead run was nothing. There was a sound like a cart hitting a wall, and the guard’s feet went out from under him, and he landed on his back in the wheat with all the air gone out of him, and Llama had not moved.
The second one came in wide, trying to get around, and Llama turned a few degrees and the shield’s edge caught him under the arm and folded him.
“Cut!” Llama said again, and did not look back.
Lumi crouched and set the sickle to the base of a stand of wheat and pulled.
The stalks bent and dragged and tore, and about half of them came, and she nearly took her own thumb off.
“It’s not—” She stopped, reset her grip, and pulled again. “It doesn’t—why does it not cut—“
“Angle,” I said. “Lower. Take less at once.”
“I know the angle—”
“Then take less.”
She took less. It cut. She dropped the fistful in the bucket and it covered the bottom of it in a thin gold layer and no more, and she looked at the bucket, and then she looked at the horizon full of wheat.
Behind her, six more guards came over the rise.