“You can’t just expect the wine to obey you on a whim, can you?” I let out a quiet, uneasy chuckle.
The wine stirs.
Ace drops the glass. Crystal shatters across the floor.
“That… that wasn’t me,” he says shakily. “Dropping it, yes, okay, that was me, but—it moved. You moved it,” he says to me, astonished more than anything.
They all move to clean up the mess, but I am frozen in place.
The flowers. The fire. The wine.
Too much. Too much is changing.
I run. Down the halls and into our chambers. I throw myself onto the bed, unable to cope.
Vale finds me there weeping. My breath fractures and breaks, tears soaking into the pillow I bury my face in. Vale rubs my back. I shake my head and claw at the tightness in my chest.
“It took everything in me. Court, the wedding, becoming queen. I didn’t know if I had it in me.” I struggle to inhale, completely overwhelmed and so close to losing myself. “I don’t have anything left, Vale. I don’t… I can’t…”
“You are.”
Two words. Zero doubt. The powerful king whose voice carries all the weight in the world.
“Mira, you say you can’t, but you are. You are doing it all. You are staying strong, even when you falter. You are a queen not in title, but in how you carry yourself. In the way you already love this land and its people as your own. You are the fiercest, most loving woman I have ever known. And you are capable of far more than you give yourself credit for.”
He sits on the bed and pulls me into his arms. In his embrace, I allow myself to be small. Delicate. Held.
The tears slow as he brushes them from my cheeks. His own rests against the top of my head. Thunder grows more distant, though the rain still comes down in sheets.
He rocks me gently, a subtle rhythm that my breathing slowly learns to follow.
“I didn’t understand Ace’s words at first, but I do now. Isaw it, and I felt it. I don’t know if I did it. That doesn’t seem right. It’s more like I called—and it answered.” My shoulders drop suddenly, along with everything I’ve been holding so tightly. “Like your mother’s song,” the words catch in my throat. “Vale, I think I hear it all. I think it hears me. I don’t know that I am the one doing it, but I feel woven into it somehow.”
He holds me through the next wave of tears. For each realization I face, my body fights to reconcile it. Before it can fully ease, another truth rises.
“I think I always felt it. It’s why I was more at ease in the forest than with people. But Vale, this is so different. Any connection I had before was a single drop compared to the vast sea I’m in now.” I shiver at the magnitude of it.
“Mira, you’re shaking.” He pulls a blanket over me and steps toward the hearth in our room. With the staff dismissed for the evening, none of our usual comforts have been readied.
“Wait.” He stops at the word and at my hand outstretched in his direction.
I take a deep breath. Once more I let instinct outrun reason. “I want to try.”
I close my eyes, breathing slowly and intentionally. I match my breaths to the rise and fall I imagine in a flame as it comes to life. The energy from the storm thrums outside the manor, and I feel it too. I feel all of it—ancient and insistent, surrounding me.
Mine.
The word crashes into my thoughts, and I feel my grip on it slipping.
I push the word away and return to the sensation. The awareness of everything around me and within me. I sense the glow long before I open my eyes. Holding on, I refuse to let the connection break. I breathe with it. I answer it.
When I open my eyes, the hearth roars at full strength and the room shimmers. Every lantern and candle in the space burns bright.
Where tears once flowed, joy rises. Overwhelming, consuming joy. Vale stands, expressionless, waiting for my reaction to settle before he moves. As my smile steadies, he steps toward me.
“You are a miracle,” he says, taking my face in both his hands. He kisses me.
A knock comes at the door.
