The Forge House

At 5:58 a.m. you're standing in the Kwik Trip parking lot with a duffel bag, a laptop, a bag of Margery's frozen pasties wrapped in newspaper, and absolutely no idea what you're doing.

A black pickup idles by the air pump. Not a limousine. Not an SUV with tinted windows. A three-year-old Ford with a cracked taillight and Minnesota plates.

The man leaning against it is not the King. He's shorter, maybe forty, with a shaved head, laugh lines and a gray Iron Guard coat. He's eating a gas station donut.

"Ma'am," he says. "Ilmari Koski. Commander of the Iron Guard. He's inside buying coffee because he doesn't trust me to get it right." He nods at your duffel. "Can I take that?"

"I'll keep it, thanks."

"Smart." He seems pleased. "He said you'd say that."

The door of the Kwik Trip swings open and Wolfram Brandt ducks out under the bell with three coffees in a cardboard tray. In daylight he's somehow worse: the sun finds the gray in his eyes and the black in his hair and every clean line of his face, and the woman pumping gas at the next island forgets to stop and overflows her tank.

He stops when he sees you. He doesn't smile. Something in his whole body just goes still and quiet, like a held breath let out.

"You came," he says.

"I'm a guest," you say. "With a key."

"With a key." He holds out a coffee. "Two creams. You told the waitress at the diner on Tuesday. I was at the counter."

You stare at him.

"I listen," he says, a little defensive, and opens the passenger door for you.

The drive north takes four hours. Koski follows in a second truck. Wolfram drives himself, one big hand on the wheel, the other wrapped around his coffee, and says almost nothing for the first hour, which turns out to be exactly what you need.

The Northwoods slide past, birch and tamarack going gold. Then the land starts rising and the trees get darker, and somewhere past Superior you crest a hill and the lake opens up in front of you like the edge of the world.

You've seen Lake Superior before, on a school trip. You'd forgotten. It's not a lake. It's an ocean that decided to be fresh water out of pure stubbornness, steel-blue and endless, white caps running all the way to the horizon.

"Oh," you say.

"Yeah." His voice is softer. "I was born on it. On an ore boat, technically. My mother was the cook." He glances at you, then back at the road, as if he said more than he meant to. "Never got tired of it."

Ironmere sits on the north shore where the hills come down hard to the water. A harbor town: a grain elevator, a breakwater, steep streets of brick storefronts, a pasty shop with a line out the door. Above it on the bluff stands the Forge House.

It was built by an iron baron a hundred and thirty years ago and it looks it: red sandstone, black iron trim, towers, a great slate roof, a hundred windows burning gold in the afternoon sun. Below it, running out into the lake for half a mile, is an enormous old ore dock, concrete and timber, rust-red against the blue.

"You live here," you say.

"I rule from here. I live in about three rooms of it." He turns up the long drive. "The rest belongs to people who'd like me to know my place."

You find out what he means at the gates.

The court has come out to see. Lycans, mostly, tall and expensive, in wool and cashmere and good boots, standing on the front steps in loose clusters as the truck pulls up. They aren't here to greet him. They're here to look at you.

You get out of the truck with your duffel bag and your newspaper-wrapped pasties and feel every eye in the place land on you and add you up.

A woman on the top step laughs. She's stunning, dark hair in a sleek knot, gray-green eyes, a camel coat that fits like it was poured on. She leans toward the silver-haired man beside her and says, clearly enough to carry, "Did His Majesty bring back livestock from dairy country?"

A few people titter.

Wolfram comes around the front of the truck. He doesn't hurry. He climbs the steps until he's standing directly in front of her, and the titter dies so fast it's like someone pulled a plug.

"Lady Tolle," he says. "Say it again."

She lifts her chin. "I was making a joke, Your Majesty."

"I know. Say it again. To my face. I want to be sure I heard it right."

The silence goes on and on. The silver-haired man beside her clears his throat. "Viveca meant nothing by it, sire. Country humor."

"Then she can repeat it, Chancellor." Wolfram doesn't look away from her. "Lady Tolle?"

Viveca Tolle's face goes pink, then white. "No, Your Majesty."

"Then this is my guest. She has a name. You'll use it." He turns, comes back down the steps and stops beside you, not touching, just there. "This is Ava. Anyone who wants to make jokes can make them to me."

Nobody does.

Your rooms are on the second floor in the west wing: a sitting room with a fireplace, a bedroom with a window seat that looks straight out over the lake, a bathroom bigger than Margery's kitchen. A woman with tattooed forearms and pins in her mouth is fluffing pillows when you walk in.

"Aino Kallio," she says around the pins. "Court seamstress. Also apparently the welcome committee, because nobody else volunteered." She takes the pins out and grins. "I saw Viveca's face from the window, Ava. I'm going to think about it every day for the rest of my life."

You like her immediately.

On the nightstand, on a little brass ring, sits a single heavy iron key.

You pick it up. You try it in the door. It works.

You sit on the window seat that night with Margery's pasty, watching the lights of an ore boat creep along the horizon, and you think about Easton on your porch, and the gouges in the railing, and you don't know what you are to me.

At midnight your phone buzzes against the cushion.

Unknown number.

You already know who it is.