Those of her nieces and nephews old enough to remember her greeted her with an enthusiasm that would have made the entire trip worth it, were it not for the lurking dread that now underpinned every interaction that Elaine had with children: their fragile futures, once of little concern to her as the responsibility of someone else, seeming suspended uncomfortably in her inadequate hands.

Still, it was a comfort to be greeted with an almost feral joy, and when hugs and hair rufflings had been distributed to a shrieking multitude, she waded through knee-deep chattering children into the living room to throw herself into her mother’s arms, too, and then into her sister’s.

There was gossip and good food - cheap food, solid food; the food she had grown up on - and updates and exclamations on how much the babies had grown. When the kids were asleep there was a long quiet on the backyard swings, looking out over a bank of trees in the dark that had grown so much as to be almost unrecognizable - soon, she was told, to be brought down entirely to make way for more plots of land on which people would erect their little houses and park their double-wides. She looked on the scene of her teenage years, soon to be tumbled down to be the scene of some strangers’, and the nostalgia did not come with grief to sour it. This was not home to her anymore. But she did not find herself, either, homesick for her little apartment in Destiny City.

The morning brought her a saunter through the haunts of her small-town teenage life: into the same old gas station to buy Diet Coke dispensed into the same old styrofoam cups that were probably coming out of the same stockpile that had been started two decades ago; leaning over the antique store counter (thinking, as she did, of Myth) and chatting with the ancient proprietress, who remembered her by the name Misty Lynn and was full of questions about the antiquing in Destiny City, full of little tidbits about her chickens and her goats and what her grandchildren were up to nowadays. She listened with a guilty detachment. Did you know the world almost ended? Did you know that I helped to save it? Did you know that I was pissed about doing it, the entire time it was happening, and wished it had been anyone else?

There hadn’t been a lot to love here, growing up, which made the indulgence of those few things that were lovable more precious: little sanctuaries in the shape of people who had been neither intimidated nor amused by a homely goth teenager, too confident to be anything but awkward and too self-assured to care. She had been a Good Girl, a Smart Girl - well-behaved, academic, keeping her head down without being cowed into shyness. In another town, she supposed - walking down the sidewalkless streets - everyone would have expected her to go to college and make something of herself. But people from this town did not go to school and make things of themselves, not even people like her. It was enough that she had left the gravitational suction of the hills.

She drove to the next town, and while she finally, after years of delay, received her long-anticipated second thigh tattoo, she also indulged in a conversation that was more intimate and more free than she could have at home. There had been something more than superficial in her fishnet sleeves and dog collars: there had been a sense of ease among people who could speak freely about things that other people considered taboo, and she relaxed now into the conversational arms of people who would not be taken aback by her career, and with whom she could talk about Drag Race without having to bumble into well-meaning statements of “ain’t that something!” She wished beyond anything that she could tell them the rest: the magic, the creatures prowling the DC streets, the distant pocket world of crumbling keeps and a forlorn ghost. As he bent over her leg and the other staff filtered in and out of the room between clients to catch up, the talk ranged from drag to hair bleach, from the vulnerability of existential fears and political terror and back to the safety of latex and leather.

She felt a lump in her throat that it was easy to chalk up to the stinging pain of hours on the table. Did you know the world almost ended? Did you know that I helped save it? Do you know that sometimes I’m not sure if it was worth saving, beyond how much I enjoy living in it sometimes?

A day at the Renaissance Faire in the next state - a trip embarked on early with a carful of rowdy children - left her wiped out and even more quietly grateful for her childless state. There had been a little less shine in flirting with literal knights in armor this year, leaning over the jousting lists after the show in a strategic kind of shamelessness, asking questions and laughing at jokes that they’d probably handed out to a few dozen women with niche interests in the last year. She accepted an offer to pet one Clydesdale’s soft nose, nervous next to it and unwilling to look as scared as she was (she, still scared of horses, after what she had been through, seemed ridiculous) but declined a mock-gallant offer to kiss her hand. Did you know that the world almost ended? Did you know that I helped save it? Did you know that I have my hand kissed by a knight a thousand years old who really did do everything you pretend to do, every time I see him - or that I would, if he could?

Brandi was accommodating, pretending that she didn’t know that Elaine was skipping a magic show for the sake of making out with some sweaty middle-aged stranger in shoddy armor in an even shoddier stable, someone’s discarded popcorn crunching under their feet. Her newly inked thigh burned and stung when he pressed too close. She returned to watch the falconry, to join in a country dance at least two hundred years anachronistic but joyfully fun anyway, spinning her niece in her arms as she followed the steps and laughed at her mistakes. It was crowded - a press of laughing women, crying children, shouting vendors, flirting men: life in its exhausting, chaotic variety.

The exhaustion served to get them into bed early, which in turn served them well when they left the children in their mother’s care and embarked across state lines again before sunrise, this time in the other direction, into the waiting trees of a family friend’s land. This was a gift for her sister. Elaine had never been much of an outdoorsman. They sat behind the hunting blind and from thermoses they drank cold sweet tea, so thick that a spoon might have stood up in it. Brandi bagged her single seasonal turkey; Elaine - Misty - missed hers by such a slim margin that a few feathers broke in the wake of the shot, swirling up in the chaos of the flock dispersing. They talked in the hushed whisper of the field, desultory, mostly of the past, and there was a stubbornness in the way Brandi clung to it that suggested that she, too, was growing increasingly unwilling to look into the future, into which she had brought entirely too many children. Did you know that the world almost ended? Did you know that I helped save it? Did you know that I was thinking of you and of them, when I wasn’t thinking of me, and that I resented you for making it so I couldn’t just lay down and wait for it to be over?

The stink of blood and wet feathers and innards always seemed to cling to you until you had a shower, no matter how thoroughly you washed your hands. The smell of a life you’d ended, loaded up into the basement freezer to feed another few for a week to come. Turkey for dinner tomorrow, of course.

She drove around aimlessly the next day, through hollers and over hills, past single-street towns where she knew that she’d probably hate every resident if she could have known them, and was glad that she didn't have to. Pausing to let a herd of deer with their gangly babies cross in front of her, she considered absently a clump of buildings marring the side of a distant green slope, the pinprick shape of a person toiling at some unknown labor in their steep yard, fighting that ongoing battle to turn the trees into lawns and the tracks between trees into tidy, paved roads.

It was beautiful, of course. She had always said that she had grown up in the most beautiful place in the world. Descending into a holler was like submerging yourself beneath a sea of green trees, impossibly lush and making the glimpses of sky seem impossibly blue, the steep banks of hills rising to either side blocking out the view of any civilization at all: a sharp reminder that it was not so long ago that all this was an untouched country so primeval that the first Europeans to step into it expected to find wooly mammoths in the trees.

But for all the beauty it was not until she pulled over onto a narrow shoulder to look down into a particularly lovely cove, gazing down at the broad silver river that struck through it between the trees, dotted with slick black stones, that something close to homesickness came at last - where she felt nauseated at the realization that it was because the trees hanging over the placid water and casting blue shadows looked so similar to the ones that she had gone swimming beneath at the Garde.

Did you know that the world almost ended? Did you know that I helped to save it? Did you know that there’s another world, and I don’t know how to save it at all? Did you know how much I didn’t want it, and still don’t?

Maybe that was the way of things: maybe there was something innate in her, the same thing that made her move with a confidence that she was better than the things she was born to - something that made her unable to consider anything a home that was not her dominion as surely as any kingdom of legend belonged to its king. She could never love anything as much as she loved herself, and now her name - with increasing insistence - was the same as that green place, with its swath of tangled forest and its blue-shadowed riverbanks. That dead place, she reminded herself, as she reached down to pick a beer bottle cap out of the pebbles, tucking it into her pocket to throw away later. In all those stories the kingdom was the manifestation of the king’s power and his worthiness: a thriving green Camelot yielding untold Broceliandes during a time of peace and plenty, decaying into a grim swamp where Mordred and Gawain poured poison into the ruler’s ear and the rivers seemed to run with bloodied muck: the sacrifice of lives to an uncaring soil, which fed no one.

She was no queen, much as she thought of herself as one. And she still could not be sure that it was her own self that had brought flowers and spiders back to the desolate Garde. Certainly her soul, of late, did not seem to be an especially green and generous place. And there was standing at the head of all of it that palpable mockery of whatever her unconscious powers were: one dead man, who still, each time she saw him, seemed instinctively to reach for things he could not touch - including herself - as if in the silent belief that one day he, too, would return to enjoyment of the Garde as surely as the first crickets had.

The Joyeuse Garde is dead, he’d said, almost as if pleading with her. It had seemed at the time a reproach only to her childish efforts to make it a place that she could live in. She wondered, numbly, looking out over the living river - with its cacophony of birds and cicadas, its constant movement in the trees and the water, its squirrels and its trout, that nonetheless seemed a pale imitation of what these raucous forests had been in her childhood - if it had not been a reproach to her at all, but rather some plea for a mercy that she could not give: the mercy of ceasing to sharpen the juxtaposition between a ghost and the place that he haunted. Maybe it was easier to haunt a place if the place was empty of things to regret. Maybe it was easier not to live with unasked-for hope that you, too, might one day draw in a breath of clean river-air and feel that air moving against your neck.

She did not know how to give him that mercy. She was not even sure that she would have given him that mercy, if she could.

One day, maybe, the gulls would return to the Garde. He had asked her for them, in something that was almost playfulness, and she had promised him without knowing how to deliver on that promise. If the Garde was the kingdom that reflected its queen, the gulls would come. But maybe, when they came, they would only be a cruelty to the one that so obviously missed their noise.

But she hoped they would come anyway. Her inward stamping of feet and banging of fists and desperate shouting could not, for all she wished they would, deliver her from having some ineffable obligation to keep trying to save whatever world she could.

It was good, at last and at least, to come back - if not home, then at least back, scooping an ecstatic Petitcru into her arms and sorting through her mail as she stood at the bar. She had built this life on purpose, wrestling herself out of Kentucky soil and beer bottle poverty. She missed, in a way, work - all of it - and she missed the lively city noise. She sat with the dog in her lap on the little slab of concrete that pretended to the name of a patio, watching the red and white lines of lights on the roads.

As always, she could not help considering how many of those cars were being driven by men and women who casually yanked lives from innocent chests at nightfall, and how many were driven by those who tried to stop it, and how many simply did not know or care.

Kentucky moved away from its green quiet and towards its greyish progress; Destiny City marched forward on its tide of unseen magic. It did not matter how hard she worked to craft her own life: she lived in a world that would not be beaten into a shape simply because she willed it.

And so, when morning came - after she had walked the dog and tended to her tattoo and found herself arranging her hair with unusual and almost ritualistic care - she turned her thoughts towards that other world: the one that, although she could not save it, she could truthfully assert belonged to no one - not even him - but herself. It was a silly thought - to be the queen of a world, and yet poking through clearance bins for ways to make it comfortable. But what other word was there for a world that seemed at all times to be yearning steadily towards becoming what she wanted it to be?

She had fought against the idea even before Gouvernail's pleading attempts to make her reject it. But to lie to herself was unfathomable, once the lie had been detected. It was not quite that going to the Garde was like going home. But the thought of opening her eyes beneath its grey-blue skies - feeling herself the queen of this forsaken and fallen place but a queen nonetheless - felt more like going home than anything else ever did.