The Assembly Room grows quiet as all eyes focus on me. Their expectant gazes draw me back to the present. My mind had been aloft, far from this room and out in the early summer sunshine, feeling the waves gently lapping at my feet. That is how I wanted to spend my birthday, at the sea, as I always have before.
I straighten my shoulders and regard the room. Every face holds a tension it never has held before. And it is all my fault.
“All here are agreed?” My voice is low. I speak out loud, as has been the custom during Assembly for the past half a millennia. I will not give in to the paranoia of so many of my cousins gathered here, afraid of eavesdroppers.
We are agreed, murmur many Songs against my consciousness.
“Today is the first day of my twenty-first summer. I am the youngest Third. Vaaryn, you are two hundred years my elder. Your leadership has been unblemished. I am untested. Is this really wise?”
When Father, the last Second and the youngest son of the Founders, passed into the World After, Vaaryn assumed his responsibilities in the Assembly. The idea of leadership passing to me was unfathomable.
“Yes, dear cousin,” Vaaryn says. “I am not much longer for this world. It is best that the youngest should lead us.”
Most Thirds lived only a few years past their two-hundredth birthday. Fourths less than that, and Fifths barely made one hundred. The Silent were old at seventy.
“But it is because of me that we face war with the Silent. It is because of me—” I choke on the words as a sob rises to my throat. Yllis is there with an arm around me, steady and stable, my rock in the storm.
Yllis’s mother, Deela, rises. “So it must be you to lead us through. We have lived in peace for hundreds of years with the guidance left by the Founders, but perhaps it has been too easy for us. We have never been challenged in this way before.”
“Eero and those who follow him have poked at a sore that has been dormant for a long time,” Yllis says. “The Silent have no voice in the Assembly. Their parentage is not claimed. If it was not Eero now, it would have been someone else in the future. It is not all because of us.”
He wants to take more of the burden of Eero’s fate away from me, absolve me of some guilt, but it is mine to hold. Yllis developed the complex spell that allowed me to share my Song with my twin, but I was the one who used it. Who kept using it and ignored the truth for too long—giving Song to the Silent would cause them to go mad. The Silent were so for a reason.
“Very well,” I say. “I accept. So be it. See to it.”
It is as if the Assembly takes a collective breath. “Be it so.”
And with three little words, I have been made Queen.