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“I live here. I don't need to be asked.”

Four months. Four months of this. Four months since Barney had shown up at my coffee shop door reeking of soot and terror with a bag of tacos and a brand-new-to-us journal, four months since the words She knows your name had turned my entire life into one long, muddy, exhausting training montage nobody had bothered to set to inspirational music.

Here was how it worked. Kai handled the getting-my-face-shoved-in-a-swamp portion of the program, on account of some idiot — Barney — deciding that whatever lived Below might be able to interfere with a Dragon Queen's Magic, which meant I needed to know how to throw a punch that didn't involve fire, scales, or wings. Barney himself had planted his bony behind on a tree stump every day for four months, nose buried in that journal, muttering about prophecy and history and noticing how the ink shifted when the moon wasn't full. Then he would say, “Martha, that's significant,” like I had the first clue what he meant.

And Zelda — bless her, and I did mean that, mostly — had wrapped me, our training camp, and anywhere I regularly went in so many layers of concealment Magic that even I sometimes couldn't find my own house. Yes, she was only trying to help. Yes, I loved her for it. Yes, I was being cranky.

The working theory was that all of it meant the One Below couldn't find me. The more accurate theory, the one nobody said out loud, but everybody was thinking, was that we hoped She couldn't.

That distinction mattered. A whole heck of a lot… to me.

Four months of training. Four months of Barney squinting at pages that mostly just sat there being blank and unhelpful. Four months of Zelda's Spell humming around my life like a low, protective heartbeat.

And in all that time? Nothing.

No earthquakes. No whispers. No spooky messages scrawled in journals that used to be perfectly normal. No messages from the One Below.

No attacks.

Nothing.

Which was starting to make me think one very specific thing, and I said it out loud mostly to see Barney's face do the thing it did.

Sue me, I’m a brat sometimes.

"Y'all," I announced, wringing out my braid one more vicious time, "I'm just saying, maybe the bitch went back to sleep."

Barney did not find that funny.

Not one bit. His head snapped up from the journal so fast I heard something in his neck pop, and he leveled me with a look that had absolutely no business being that intense on a man wearing socks with sandals. "Martha, do not joke about…"

"I'm not joking, I'm hoping. There's a difference." I slogged toward the bank, boots squelching with every step, mud sucking at my heels like the swamp itself was trying to keep a souvenir. "Four months, Barney. Four months of ankle-deep swamp water and hand-to-hand combat and you reading that book as if it owes you money, and you know what I've gotten for all of it?"

"Stronger?" Kai offered, entirely unhelpfully, falling into step beside me.

"A rash." I held up one finger. "Blisters." Two fingers. "A wedding that got shoved all the way back to October 2027." Three fingers, and my voice cracked right on the word 2027 in a way I hadn't meant for it to.

Kai's teasing dropped away like somebody'd flipped a switch. "We'll get married, Martha."

"I know that." My tone was too sharp. I heard it come out with way too much snark and didn't stop it in time.

He didn't flinch. He never did anymore, which somehow made it worse, because it meant he actually understood.

Quieter, I added, "I just don't know why everybody else gets to decide when."

The words sat there in the swampy air between us for a second, a lot heavier than a year’s worth of Hail Marys would've made them feel.

Because wasn't that the whole entire truth of it? Fate decided I'd be born a Dragon Queen before I'd so much as taken my first breath. Prophecy decided what I was supposed to do about it. Barney's journal decided when I got to know anything. The Queen Below, wherever she was, whatever she was doing, had apparently decided she got a say in my wedding date without even the courtesy of showing up to explain herself.

Everybody had an opinion on Martha Dellencourt's life except Martha Dellencourt.

I opened my mouth to say something else — something that probably would've come out a lot more feral than I meant it to — when I smelled it.

Tacos.

I went very, very still.

Slowly, I turned.