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Two words. Permission, plain as anything, to break a pattern everybody seemed determined to treat as inevitable.

Margaret turned toward Zelda next, something almost gentle in the way she looked at her. "You carry the mantle."

"So, I'm told."

"My sister couldn't be killed by then. Below had become part of her. I closed the Door. My Witch bound her to it." Margaret's expression darkened. "That is why your Magic worked against the thing in your swamp. It recognizes the mantle, same as it always has."

"So, I'm Magical duct tape," Zelda said.

"Welcome to the club," I told her. "I'm apparently the cork."

But Margaret wasn't finished. "When the time comes, you must bind her. Not the Door." She held Zelda's gaze until Zelda nodded, slowly and seriously. "My Witch bound the Door instead. That is why it did not hold forever."

I looked at the crown, sitting right there between us on the table, close enough to touch.

"So, I just pick it up?"

"No."

"Of course not." I tried to act like I'd known the answer before she said it. I hadn't. She noticed.

Margaret almost smiled at that. "It only becomes real once you choose it. Freely. Not because Fate demands it. Not because prophecy does. Not because Kai stands in danger, or the whole world needs saving, or anybody but you decides what kind of Queen you're going to be."

I looked at the crown. Really looked at it, gold and quiet and unassuming, like it hadn't been the center of four months of my entire life.

"I don't choose this instead of Kai."

Nothing happened. The crown sat there, patient.

"I don't choose it instead of my sisters."

A faint glow, so small I almost thought I'd imagined it.

"Or Zelda. Or my boys. Or Mona. Or my shop. Or my wedding. Or coffee."

"Coffee?" Margaret said again.

"Don't interrupt."

I took a breath, and said the rest of it plainly, because it was true, and from my heart, and I'd finally found the shape of it after four months of swamp water and mud and everybody telling me what being Queen was supposed to cost.

"I choose the crown because those are the things I'm protecting."

Gold light rolled across the table, warm and sudden. Aideen roared inside my psyche, loud and fierce and entirely, gloriously herself again.

I reached out and picked it up. I did not put it on.

"Do not wear it," Margaret said immediately.

"Wasn't planning to!"

Aideen supplied what came next immediately. "Claiming it and being crowned were two very different things," she explained. "The real coronation– the one with people, with a proper ceremony, with your family standing there watching– that has to happen Above."

Properly.

The second my fingers closed around it, the whole Between changed.

The mist went dark, all at once, curdling from pale twilight into something heavier. Out in the distance, the doors that had been flickering in and out of existence began slamming shut, one after another.