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I set my mug down harder than I meant to, coffee sloshing dangerously close to the rim. "Nobody asked me if I wanted protecting. Nobody asked me what I could handle. Y'all just decided, quietly, behind my back, the exact same way everybody in my whole life has always decided things for me, and you didn't even have the decency to tell me you were doing it."

Fate's expression didn't change, but something in the way she held herself did. It was like she was actually letting the words land instead of just waiting for me to finish.

"And here's the part that really gets me," I went on, because once it started coming out, I wasn't in the mood to stop it halfway. "Every single one of those choices helped the One Below convince me that being Queen meant losing everything I loved. You spent four months proving her right without meaning to. If I'd broken the way she wanted me to– If I'd refused this crown the way Margaret's sister refused hers– y'all would've handed her exactly what she needed, gift-wrapped, with a bow on it. Because you were so busy protecting me from the danger, nobody stopped to ask if the protecting was the danger."

Fate didn't argue. "We were trying to protect you."

"I know. That's the problem."

She waited, and I gave her the rest of it, quiet and sharp instead of loud, because I'd already said the loud part.

"Protection without choice is still somebody else running my life. Doesn't matter if it's Fate…” I pointed at her. “… or prophecy, or my own sisters, or a dead woman's crown. Somebody deciding what's best for me and just doing it, without asking, is the same shape no matter whose hands are doing the deciding."

I watched that land somewhere real. Fate– actual, literal, rainbow-haired Fate, Omnipotent Being, architect of I didn't even want to know how much of my life– looked, for just a second, like a woman who'd been called out by somebody with every right to do it and didn't have a clever comeback loaded up for once.

"You're right," she said.

I actually deflated a little. "Well, hell. I had a whole speech prepared."

"I'm sure you'll give it anyway."

"Obviously." I took a breath and let some of the heat drain back out of my shoulders, because she hadn't fought me on it, and that mattered more than I expected it to. "I'm not saying you're evil, or that everybody who lied to me or hid things from me was doing it out of malice. I know Barney thought he was protecting me. I know Zelda thought the same thing about that whisper at Hoopingarner House. I get it. I even forgive most of it." I looked her dead in the eye. "But I need you to actually hear this part, not just nod along and go back to doing exactly the same thing with the next Queen who comes along, Great-Goddess-only-knows-how-many years from now. Ask. Every single time. Even when it's scary. Even when you're sure you know better."

"I hear you," Fate said, and for once there wasn't a single ounce of cosmic mischief in it.

“Wow,” I breathed, rolling my shoulders to relieve a little more tension.

She almost smiled at that, though, a second later, it got serious again, which for Fate meant standing very still and looking at me like I was something she was genuinely trying to get right. "The Powers That Be were terrified of repeating Margaret's history. So terrified, we created the exact conditions the One Below needed to try it again. We treated history as something to prevent." She paused, and I watched her carefully choosing the next words. "Instead of something you could change."

I let that sit there for a second, because it was, annoyingly, a pretty solid summary of everything I'd just lived through.

Then her gaze slid past me, to the table.

To the crown.

"You know what happens next."

"Coffee refill?"

"Coronation."

"Damn."

She almost laughed. I decided to count it as a win. Then Fate got down to the actual business of explaining it, because apparently even she understood that I'd earned a few straight answers.

I'd claimed the crown. That part was done, finished, sealed shut right along with the Door itself. I was, unquestionably, whether I'd been formally crowned or not, the Dragon Queen.

But claiming and crowning were two very different things, and the coronation wasn't about handing me power I didn't already have.

As if Fate had been listening to my internal monologue, she said, "A coronation is an acknowledgment. Not authority. You already chose. The coronation is your people recognizing the choice you made."

I liked that a whole lot better than anything else anybody had told me about being Queen in the last four months.

"Who picks the date?" I asked.

Fate paused, and I watched a wrong answer visibly load up behind her teeth.

"Traditionally…"