* * *
That night we slipped off into an easy sleep, side by side, docile and complete, and were awoken in the morning by an elated Altair. Elated, and rambunctious. Nell didn’t even stir, save to sigh sleepily and turn from the source of the sound. It was I who grumbled and nestled deeper into Nell’s dark hair, glaring up at him from the warm nest of blankets.
“Let’s go!” Altair cheered, bounding into the room. “Do I have to rip the blankets off of you?”
“No,” I growled, glowering. “How early in the morning is it? It can’t be that late.”
“It’s going to be ‘afternoon’ shortly,” Altair replied with a smirk. “The two of you slept for almost fourteen hours. But I suppose you needed it.”
I turned back to Nell, on the verge of shaking her shoulder and calling down to her, but she was already peering up at me, blinking sleepily. “Morning,” she cooed, still warm and foggy with slumber, “King Theon.”
The coronation traditionally occurred in the garden, but it was still too damn frigid—and apparently it would be for the next several weeks. We opted instead to adorn the throne room with garlands and banners and hold the event there. It was open to the general public of The Hearthlands and we stood before Einhen, the court priest, to hear our reign blessed and to kneel for my mother to grace our heads with the royal crowns. It was a brief ceremony, but it seemed to me to be never-ending. I had prepared for this my entire life, and Nell, straight and elegant in her robes, looked as if she had been born for it… regardless of the gods.
When we turned, our congregation of remnants—roughly twenty percent of whom were born from ice dragon lineage—bowed and clapped and called out for our long and healthy lives. Although the windows remained frosted, crusted in snow, it seemed to be spring all of a sudden, and I took Nell’s hand and led her down the aisle, bowing to the citizens as we passed.
Nell
You never know which visit to your hometown will be the last, so to speak. I was only nineteen still, and yet I felt as if I’d crossed some boundary which could never be uncrossed. Whether that line led into queendom or just womanhood, I wasn’t sure.
Theon and I stayed in The Hearthlands' castle for another week or so, during which time a concerted effort toward reconstruction and infrastructure had been launched. There was also much talk of ratification to the law of the land, although Theon thought, naturally, that the laws were very fair and always had been. “Maybe it would help,” Merulina had suggested starchily, “if we looked over them with fresh eyes when you return from your voyage to Earth?”
We packed lightly, for the visit would be a short one, perhaps of one day. Altair and Merulina had already begun to prepare for their own wedding day in the coming week, and I’d been drafted into her bridal court. After the fall of The Hearthlands—and the brief rise of Everwinter—there was a silent consensus throughout the castle that some new life was awaiting, and we all dove into it as if from off a springboard. There was no one untouched by the tragedy, no one who had not experienced some loss, except maybe me. Unlike humans, the dragons had no desire to discuss the horrors of war, to hold vigils or to form support groups or to even erect monuments to their fallen. They were singularly, almost superstitiously focused on their future, and the sentiment was contagious: there was just so much still to be done.
But I couldn’t just leave my parents again without saying a proper goodbye. It was part of the barrier I had crossed into this new place. I needed to return home and bow to them one final time. There was a part of me—the girl in me, a tiny sliver, almost a ghost—which wrung her hands together and sweated at the notion of bringing Theon to this meeting with my parents. As if I had something to fear from them, whether it was disapproval or misunderstanding or something else an adult could lord over a child. But I knew that he needed to be there, and so did he. We weren’t just saying goodbye to them as adults, as king and queen. We were saying goodbye to them, with all due respect, as man and wife.
And so, on the front steps of the palace, we bade farewell and good luck to the court which remained behind to continue to work during our departure: the former Queen Aena, Altair, Merulina, and Lethe, among others loyal and sworn to the kingdom, such as Einhen and Charis. We received our bows, and kisses to our hands, and Theon shifted, the black scales coursing over his skin, the talons sprouting from his fingertips and toes, and nudged both his satchel and myself onto his back. I no longer ever feared that I might fall, but was beginning at last to be elated by the fingers of the wind running through my hair—and I was no longer surprised by the casual way with which dragons viewed nudity before and after a transformation.
We tore off into the sky, the crust of The Hearthlands’ snow below us, the bright blue sky above, and when we dove for the portal which would link us to the rock island, and from there to Beggar’s Hole, I pressed myself low to Theon’s shoulder blades and grinned with anticipation.
* * *
It was at the cave of Thundercliff—now so familiar to us both, just about three months after the site of our first introduction, fated or not—that Theon deflated and his scales receded over his skin, allowing him the form of a man again. He dressed himself in clothes from the leather satchel, a woolen tunic and pants of some rigid, thick quality, similar to corduroy. I smiled at him. He made such a gorgeous human being.
“You don’t think the oracle will come approach us while we’re here, do you?” I asked with a hint of amusement to my voice. “Maybe remind you one last time of all the riches you’re sidestepping by rejecting Michelle Ballinger?”
“Oh, but she has approached us, darling,” Theon said, sidling up to me and grazing my cheek with a light kiss. “She’s been in my head from the moment we crossed that portal, doing exactly as you said. Moaning about how destiny has been skewed by my insolent harpoon, and luck will never walk the path of my heart again, and blah, blah, blah. Maybe you should be an oracle. You’re pretty good at divination too.” He winked and his warm palm braced my hand in his.
“Really?” I asked as he tugged me from the dry shelving of stone, onto the sand and through the rocks, toward the beach. “What is she saying to you, exactly?”
“Oh, bah,” Theon replied, smirking. “It’s really not worth repeating, my love.”
I hesitated just long enough to let the sweetness of my love for him spread through me, and then we set off across the chill stretch of beach, toward my father’s beach house. To know that he had silently withstood the oracle’s telepathic ramblings imbued me with strength in facing my parents, and we ascended the wooden staircase. We knocked at the front door. Three times. I took a deep breath and braced my fist to knock again, but it flew open and Mom was just standing there, gaping at me, her short black hair fretting in the breeze.
“Hi, Mom.” I broke the tension.
“Oh, my God!” she cried, throwing herself into my arms. I couldn’t remember a time I had seen her more emotional, even shortly before and during the divorce. That wasn’t the only surprise I was experiencing, either. Like… what was she doing still here? Didn’t she have her own practice to maintain—in DC? Wasn’t Zada going to eventually drive her insane? “Nell! You’re back!” she breathed into my neck. I felt my skin dampen where her tears fell. “What the hell happened? Are you all right?” She extracted me from her iron grip and beheld me at arm’s length, her scrutiny shrewd and maternal. “And what are you wearing?”
A blush crept into my cheeks and I cleared my throat. “It’s called a pelisse,” I explained, head nonetheless held high. “May we come in?”
Mom’s eyes panned to Theon for the first time since she’d opened the door. Her eyes were icy. She could’ve been a dragon for all the severity with which she gazed at Theon. “The man who kidnapped you,” she deduced coldly.
I shook my head and smiled, even though there was no real warmth to the expression. “He did not kidnap me,” I told her, and she hesitated, but moved for our passage.
Inside the beach house
the living room was lit, and pictures of me adorned every table, every surface, as if I had died. I supposed that they had had no way of knowing whether or not I had. The decorations which were expected of Zada and Sage’s presence—posters of fairies and tie-dyed tapestries and pictures of celebrities beneath words—had disappeared from the beach house. I frowned and opened my mouth to ask Mom about this as we descended onto the couch, hardly warmer than outside, but she probably had more pressing questions on her mind.
“So,” Mom began, “where did he…” She glanced at Theon and cleared her throat, revising her question. “Where have you been? Was it the same place that Michelle went off to?”
At this, my brow furrowed. “Michelle is… talking about it?” That wasn’t like her. To tell the truth, in her mind, would be seen as weak.
“Michelle is not talking about anything yet. She refuses to conduct interviews on her disappearance, but she did hire a public relations agent who has been telling the papers that she’s writing a book about it this year.”
I rolled my eyes. Of course she was. If there was anyone who could make her gutless displays of self-service, her betrayal and subsequent rejection, into some harrowing tale of personal triumph over victimhood, it was her. Michelle Ballinger was victim and victor in one.
Theon squeezed my hand, and I glanced over at him. “Let’s not get distracted by her,” he whispered to me. “Michelle and whatever books she writes have nothing to do with us.”
“I somehow doubt that,” I whispered back. “But I see your point.” I turned my attention back to Mom, who had watched this display of intimacy and partnership between us as if Theon had tried to eat my face and exposed an alien life form living beneath.
“I returned to The Hearthlands,” I gently explained to her. “I don’t know what Michelle will say, one day, when she does begin speaking… likely for a high sum, and in front of many, many cameras—” Theon touched my hand again and I glared at him. He was right, though. Our rivalry had been a petty, girlish thing, and it was time to put it away. We had a city to rebuild, and Michelle was here, desperately scrabbling for her own followers, because she knew just how little her own kingdom was worth. “We were in the midst of war… and I couldn’t delay.”
Mom smiled mirthlessly and refused to look at Theon again. “You sound like some kind of—I don’t know—old queen.”
I grinned. “A new queen, actually,” I informed her.
Now she looked at Theon. A glare. “What madness has he been filling your head with?”
“Mom!” I snapped. “Someday when it’s ready, we’ll take you—and Dad—to see our island. And yes, it is in another dimension. Yes, you can only get to it through this mystical portal. And maybe at first, you’ll think that we’re crazy, or that you’re crazy, or anything at all, as long as it means that what we’re showing you isn’t real. Until then, I guess you can think whatever you’d like, though it does sadden me that my madness is the first conclusion to which you jump.”
Theon was grinning at me.
“What?” I asked, somewhat snappish.
“I love how you never, ever end a sentence with a preposition,” he replied.
And suddenly the stress evaporated. It wasn’t being a queen that made me secure in this volatile exchange with my mother, and God, eventually my father. It wasn’t being an adult or being a woman or anything quite so abstract which made everything okay. It was Theon. Having Theon’s unwavering love made everything okay. No matter what.
I turned back to Mom, who still appeared disturbed by our closeness.
“It will probably not be this year,” I went on. “There’s just so much going on at the palace.”
Mom sighed and rolled her eyes, massaging one temple. “So this boy, who claims to be a prince on some other island, not on Earth…”
“A king now, actually,” Theon interjected. I glanced at him and shook my head.
That wasn’t going to help.
“His land was in the throes of war,” I went on. She would listen to me… maybe. All hope of her listening to him was lost. “That was why I disappeared… both times. The second time, I went back willingly. And now power has changed hands. The coronation was held yesterday. We’ve come here to pay our respects as a married couple—”
“You’re married?” Mom gasped, her eyes the size of quarters. “You got married?”
“Yes,” I said, as firmly as I could manage. I did realize she’d probably wanted to be at the ceremony.
“You’re nineteen!”
“The common age of a bride, in The Hearthlands,” Theon informed her proudly. “And how old is common here on Earth?”
“Twenty-two, twenty-five, somewhere around there,” I informed him, feeling a spot of blush on my cheeks as I stared into Mom’s eyes. “It’s a negligible difference. She’s just making a mountain out of a molehill.”
“But you just started college,” Mom whined. “You don’t know what you want yet. These are pivotal years—”
Just then, to make matters all the better, the back door blew open and closed, and familiar footsteps thudded.
Crap.
“Hey, babe, did you remember to—” Keys clattered onto the counter in the kitchen and then Dad’s shadow slashed across the living room floor. I twisted to face him in the doorway, unsure of exactly what would happen next. The color drained away from his face. The musculature of his expression broke and sagged away like melted sculpture. “Nell!”
“Did you just call Mom ‘babe’?” I gaped.
Dad strode forward and yanked me into his arms, embracing me so hard it seemed as if my spine was going to be pressed into a powder. “I can’t believe you’re home,” he said, his voice crackling into my hair, “and it doesn’t matter why you left… just as long as you stay.”
I extricated myself from his hug. “I can’t stay,” I told him as gently as I could. “I’ve… It’s a long story. You called Mom ‘babe’?”
Dad swallowed. “It’s a long story,” he reiterated, and then his eyes drifted to Theon. His jaw clenched. “What the hell is he doing here? Patty, get the police on the phone!”
“He’s her husband,” Mom muttered. I didn’t need to look at her to know that she was massaging her temple again.
“Husband?” Dad choked.
“You called Mom ‘babe’!” I cried again. “What is she even doing here? Where are Zada and Sage?”
Dad cast his eyes to the side… caught. “Zada left. Your mom stayed.”
My eyes shot over to Mom, and she looked like stone, like a statue of a deer. It was exactly how she looked any time she’d been caught doing something she wasn’t “supposed” to—which, in her mind, meant following her heart.
“You two are back together, aren’t you?” I demanded. I didn’t mean for it to sound as accusatory as it did, but I suddenly felt like a furious, embittered eight-year-old all over again. They’d dragged my innocent little heart through the wringer with their divorce, and part of me surged protectively around my inner child, buffering her from the likelihood of their inevitable second divorce. “After eleven years,” I said, glaring between both of them, “you just… get back together like high schoolers?”
“Hey!” Mom snapped, shooting to her feet. Theon was, for all intents and purposes, invisible to me now. “Losing a child is hard! You disappeared, Penelope. You disappeared for weeks, came back, and then disappeared again. We—bonded over that. We thought we’d lost you forever, and that we didn’t have anything left, but then we realized that we had each other.”
Theon and I shared a significant look around my mother.
Still, I had to exhale.
“But Mom,” I said, casting a look at my dad. She must’ve known what I was about to say. Dad was confident and exciting and spontaneous, but he was also unreliable, and emotionally inconsistent, and so, so selfish. “We’ve talked about this a million times,” I said to her in a low voice. “It just wasn’t meant to be.”
“Just what is
that supposed to mean? Patty? What is she talking about?” Dad asked, glaring between the two of us.
“Maybe it wasn’t meant to be at that time,” Mom answered me, not acknowledging Dad’s question. “Or maybe ‘meant to be’ is just something we, as a species, invented.”
“That’s not it,” Theon added quietly.
“I’ve never been much of a believer in ‘fate,’” Mom went on.
“Really?” Dad asked. Typical Dad. Could be married to a woman for almost ten years, co-parent with her for almost twenty, and still not know if she believes in destiny or self-determination. But he could go on and on about himself. “I’ve always believed in it,” he added.
“I know,” Mom grumbled. “I let that slide.”
“Anyway, young lady, the topic of debate is not your mother and I,” Dad noted sternly, remembering that Theon was here, and we were married, and I’d been missing for weeks and dragged them both through hell. “The topic of debate is where exactly you’ve been since January first, and that this random guy is your husband now! And what are you wearing? Did you join a cult?”
“It’s called a pelisse,” I repeated for Dad’s benefit. “And no, I did not join a cult. I moved. Because Theon is royalty, I moved into a castle.”
“A castle,” Dad reiterated. “Have you talked to Michelle about all this?”
For a moment, I saw red. Dad always deferred to my old friends: the spoiled country club brats who reaffirmed to him that his lifestyle was normal. Theon stood from the couch and sidled over to us. “No,” I answered. “I don’t need to talk to Michelle. Trust me; when she comes out with her tell-all, you’ll get it.” Theon took my hand again. I looked up at him, and something silent passed between us. An understanding. It was going to be okay. This was just our chrysalis. I looked back to Dad and Mom, who had come to stand with Dad when Theon had stood. “I know it’s a lot to absorb.” I tried to be compassionate. I was, after all, their “little girl.” I “always would be". But I wasn’t. I was a woman. A wife. A queen.