That much, Chantel had known. “And you were the heir. And you were there.”
“Someone had to be.”
“This isn’t what you wanted,” she said.
Franklin looked around the room, which, despite Chantel’s best efforts, had begun to acquire a certain air of royalty. “Not what you wanted either, is it?”
Chantel thought about this. “It’s all right. For me. But for you—”
Franklin shrugged. “It was the best way to save lives.”
To save lives. Yes.
“It was a good shot,” said Chantel.
A shadow passed over Franklin’s face. “They’re never good shots.”
“I . . . I was going to do it,” said Chantel. “When he told the people to start fighting again. I . . . I was working up to it. I was telling Lightning.”
But she hadn’t had to.
“Yes. And Karl the Bloody died when the wall came down,” said Franklin.
So he hadn’t had to.
Neither of them was going to thank the other. You couldn’t, really. And neither of them was where they wanted to be, exactly. But they were where their people needed them.
Chantel swallowed. “Some day . . . we’ll go to High Roundpot. And the Stormy Isles.”
And if this were a story, and someone else were writing clever things for Franklin to say, he would have replied, “To the ends of the earth, Your Majesty.”
But instead he looked startled and said, “Sure.”
For now, though, they both had work to do.
High Roundpot would just have to wait.
Chantel and the dragon flew through the sky. They soared over the city, and over the camps where the Sunbiters were packing up, heading back to their mountain homes.
They flew over a harbor thronged with ships—ships from High Roundpot and the Stormy Isles, and from everywhere else in the world. Every berth was full. White sails dotted the sea all the way to the far horizon. The city gates were thrown wide. The sailors were eager to see the no-longer-closed city, and the city people poured freely into the harbor neighborhood. Teams of workers were clearing the rubble from the ruins of the other six buttons, and people were walking out into the Roughlands, and marveling at the vast open spaces. With any luck, Chantel thought, they would all meet people different from themselves.
As for Chantel, she asked Lightning to put her down on a rock in the ocean. And he did, and went off to gambol between the waves and the sky. Chantel watched him.
He would come when she called him. But right now, after so many royal audiences, she just needed some time alone. She wasn’t afraid of the rock anymore. The waves only crashed on one side of it, and not all the time. And if the tide rose, well, she knew how to swim.
The rock had been here a long time, unafraid to let the tides of change wash over it. And the city, Chantel thought, would learn.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I first started writing Miss Ellicott’s School for the Magically Minded, I had the ocean all wrong. Thanks to the hospitality of the Blasdell family, I was able to spend many hours during the fall and spring of 2014–2015 sitting on a rock like Chantel, with the waves crashing all around. I am tremendously grateful to the Blasdells for this chance to fix the ocean.
Many thanks to the people who read things and told me how to make them better: Joel Ross, Lee Nichols, Caitlin Blasdell, Nancy Horgan, Jon Schwabach, Aaron Schwabach, and Deborah Schwabach.
Thanks to the folks at Katherine Tegen Books for all their hard work on this book: Katie Bignell, Melissa Miller, Kelsey Horton, Katherine Tegen, and everyone.