The waterfall rumbled as though from a great distance. That was the only noise except for our breathing, which I could suddenly hear as clearly as I'd heard Queen Amani's voice a moment ago.

I blinked. My eyelids came down slow and heavy. The world seemed to have slowed down to accommodate the vast weight of her words.

"Me," I repeated. The word felt tinny and weird in my mouth, like it wasn't a real word at all. "You want me to be your heir."

I waited for someone to jump out from behind a hosta and shout "Just kidding!" or for her to laugh and tell me the real reason I'd come here. But she looked at me as intently and nervously as I'd been looking at her a moment ago. It was as if, for a moment, I wasn't looking at the Faerie Queen at all, but into a mirror where I could see myself: An uncertain girl, too young and clueless for the gravity of what was going on around us but hopeful that it wouldn't all come crashing down just yet.

"You want me to be your heir," I said. The words took on shape this time, solid and thick like wood. I let them come together in my mind, forming from disjointed sounds into concepts that meant unbelievable things. "You're going to have to back up a little."

"I figured," she said. "I thought I'd just get the punchline out there first."

"Interesting tactic," I said.

We stared at one another for a long minute. My mouth was dry as summer dust. I licked my lips. It didn't help.

Suddenly, Amani was all movement. She reached out for a jug and poured me a glass of something sweet-smelling and orange. "Mango juice," she said, handing it to me. I took a tiny sip. The cold sweetness was better than rain on my tongue.

"Okay," Amani said. "We got past the worst part. That's good, right?"

"Worst part for you, too?" I said.

"Oh, yeah," she said. "Nothing against you. You're going to be amazing. I'm just getting really clear vibes off you that you do not want to be any part of this."

She'd checked in with my feelings faster than I had. I took a moment to be silent and figure out what I was feeling.

She was right. I didn't want any part of this. A substantial part of myself, in fact, was panicking.

"Again, nothing's going to happen unless you want it to," she said. "That's the first rule. If you're going to do this, you have to take it on yourself."

That wasn't how the stories went. The stories said being the Faerie Queen was a sacred calling, and that if you were chosen to be the Queen's heir, that was it. I set the juice down and folded my arms across my chest, wishing I knew how to rein in my emotions as easily. But she'd read me already.

"I know that's not how it sounds," she said. "From where you're sitting, it's probably all pomp and circumstance and ancient legends. I remember how it was when I was chosen. I thought I was going to have to commit a human sacrifice or something."

The laugh that followed reassured me a little. I'd heard that story too.

"What about stealing a human to be your lover and keeping him for seventy years?" I said.

She made a face. "Nasty. I want more from my relationships than Stockholm Syndrome. And I don't capture people in faerie rings unless I really need to get in touch with them and they won't answer my calls, and then you've got to do what you've got to do. And I don't replace people's babies with changelings, because I'm not a douche, and I don't make everyone's milk go sour. I don't even know what the point of that is supposed to be."

"I thought house sprites made milk go sour," I said.

She raised her eyebrows and shrugged. "Who knows," she said. "Glad that rumor's moved on. They're all rumors. Well, maybe not everything. But most of it, it's rumor. Especially any part that says you don't get a choice right now. This is completely up to you."

She stood up and walked over to the window. Water poured down in front of her, steely blue-gray in the fading evening light. She waved me over. I stood, careful not to knock anything over, and crossed the room. She tapped a finger on the window, pointing down. "Couple's getting engaged down there," she said.

I tilted my head to see through a gap in the waterfall. A man on one knee held something out to a woman, who had her hands over her mouth. The few leftover tourists around them clapped as she nodded yes and flung her arms around him.

"It's lucky to get engaged there," Queen Amani said. "Lots of good magic. Also I'm sentimental." She cupped her hands together and I peeked over my glasses to see what was going on. A single tiny sparkle between her palms grew into a glowing blue light. She brought her hands to her mouth and blew. The light flew through the window and the waterfall like they weren't even there, then drifted like a bubble down to the couple. The spark grew and enveloped them in a pale blue glow before it faded. They posed for pictures and Amani turned back to face me. "You heard about the bridge being closed a while ago because a boulder crashed through it?" she said. "Totally my fault. I was practicing some heavy-duty combat spells on one of the top floors and all the magic flying around knocked a rock loose." She raised her shoulders, looking guilty. "Oops."

She went back to the couch and sat down. I watched the couple for a moment. They looked cold but happy. Of course they were happy. They were normal and in love. We couldn't all be that lucky.

The panic of a few moments earlier had subsided. Now, as I sat back down on the blue couch, I was just tired. I leaned back and watched Amani carefully. She didn't act like a Faerie Queen. She reminded me of one of Imogen's older sisters, Nicole, the one who was busy with her master's degree. Nicole had always been more laid back than the others, and nicer Imogen and I when we were young and annoying.

Queen Amani tucked her legs up on the couch next to her and leaned her elbow against the back of it. "I'll bet you have a million questions," she said.

"To be honest," I said, "I don't even know what to ask."

"That's okay," she said. "Why don't I just explain how it all works?"

I nodded.

"Okay," she said. "First thing you need to know is that each Faerie Queen has to pick her heir before she retires. The Queen before me was old and had been doing the job forever, and she was pretty eager to hand it off."

"Wait," I said. "Faerie Queens retire? I thought they had the job till they died." I bit my lip. It didn't feel right calling it a "job." It was so much more important than that.

Amani's serious face softened into a smile. "Oh, yeah," she said. "We retire, usually young enough to go RV around the country or open a vineyard or whatever we've been daydreaming about for the past few decades. And thank God. This job is too intense to do forever. Past queens have tried to stay kind of anonymous, though, because going out in public as a Faerie Queen gets… You start to want your privacy pretty quickly."

"I'll bet," I said. I tried to remember what I'd heard about the last queen. I could come up with nothing but rumors—that she'd died of old age, that she'd disappeared in a mysterious incident in Egypt, that she'd turned into a bubble and floated away on the evening breeze. No one knew. I'd always assumed she'd just died, like anyone else.

"The last Queen chose me when I was fifteen," she said. "That was over twenty years ago now. I've only been doing the job on my own since my early twenties."

"Where's Queen Phoebe now?" I asked. Queen Phoebe had been the monarch when I was born, but I didn't remember her. Amani had become queen when I was four years old.

She shrugged. "I have no idea," she said. "She checks in sometimes. Last I heard she was climbing mountains in Japan, but she's in a different country every time I talk to her. She's always been obsessed with languages and she's been studying slang in cultures around the world with a team of Humdrum anthropologists."

That was a side of the old Queen I'd never heard before. I bit the inside of my cheek, torn between a strange sense that none of this was really happening and an uncomfortable awareness that yes, it absolutely was. The reality and unreality of the moment tugged at each other, making the room seem fuzzy one moment and too clear the next.

"Anyway, I've been under pressure to choose an heir for a while," Amani said. Her eyes, staring at me, were almost too green. I felt a weird sense of relief coming off her, like she'd been holding this in for way too long. "It's customary to choose the heir when the current Queen is still young. Phoebe didn't really go with the program on that—Phoebe didn't really go with the program on anything, which is why I love her—but the Council's been reminding me in no uncertain terms that I should not follow in her footsteps there. They don't like loose ends," she added, which matched perfectly with what I knew of my dad. "They want the security of knowing another Queen is in the wings in case something happens to me."

She sat forward, picked a strawberry off the cheesecake, and then, after a moment of contemplation, set it back down on her plate. "The truth is they'd be fine if something did," she said. "Our community is full of resourceful, brilliant people. They'd get by just fine without me. But you try telling a room full of Glimmers that." She rolled her eyes. "The one time I tried I almost gave the Minister of Magicians a heart attack and the High Witch gasped so hard she swallowed a cream puff whole."

"But we can't survive without a Queen," I said. "The Queen gives our community its power. You protect us. You make the trees grow."

She sighed, a long, tired whisper that matched the emotions coming from her. "That's how the stories go," she said. "You want to know the truth?"

I nodded, though privately I thought I'd already heard about as much truth as I could deal with for one day.

"The truth is, the Glimmering community gives me my power, not the other way around. They help me protect them. We all make the trees grow. I'm just a figurehead. A symbol."

"Symbols have power," I said. This was one of the first lessons of magic. I'd heard it from my cradle.

"They do," she said. "But only the power people give them, do you understand?"

I shook my head, sending a loose strand of hair onto my forehead. I brushed it back. "You're the Faerie Queen," I said, as though she didn't already know this. "You lead us."

"I can only lead those who are willing to be led," she said. "You'll understand that someday if you decide to take me up on this offer." She opened her mouth, closed it again, and then said, "But anyway, the Council has been pressuring me to make a choice."

"So you landed on me, because I'm Reginald's daughter," I finished.

Amani looked startled, then shook her head quickly and laughed. I got a fleeting impression that the idea made her nervous. "God, no," she said. "Don't take this the wrong way, but you being Reginald's daughter almost made me second guess myself."

Finally, something she said made sense.

"I landed on you because you because when I saw you, I recognized you. Do you know much about divination?"

"No," I said. My grandma had been good at it a long time ago, or at least she claimed, but I'd never learned. "I don't know a lot of magic, to be honest," I added. "I've never been all that interested, to tell you the truth."

She laughed, though I didn't see what was funny. I would have expected her to be horrified that her supposed heir had no interest in the field of magic, let alone the one job that required it twenty-four-seven. "Maybe that's why you're the one. Maybe we're headed for a big cultural shift," she said. "I'm good at divination. I'm good at a lot of things, but I've always been good at that. I've been scrying in the pool a lot lately." She waved toward the window, which I took to mean one of the two pools Multnomah Falls plunged into. "I've been seeing you for months. I look into the water and the pictures change but you're the one constant in all of them. And then I saw you at your brother's performance and I just couldn't stop staring."

"I noticed," I said.

"I can't even explain how exciting it was to actually see you across a room," she said. "I try to have faith in my abilities, because without trust in the process there's really no point to working magic, but I was starting to wonder if you were just wishful thinking. It's impossible with divination to tell what's real and what's just me projecting things, and of course every tiny choice we make changes the picture a little. I could change the picture tomorrow by naming someone else. Trust me, there are plenty of people lining up for the job. Like I said, I've been under a lot of pressure lately. I was almost ready to just pick someone so the Council would get off my back and let me go focus on the magic I actually need to be focusing on."

Her voice spiked on the last few words. "And what's that?" I said.

Her eyes glinted. "Magic that keeps us safe," she said. "I meant it when I said everyone could probably survive without me, if that was their choice. But it's not their choice yet. They still think they need me, which means there are a few enemies to our world that could cause a lot of trouble. A lot of my time and energy goes to keeping them locked down. That's a lot of what my job is. Our world exists in a fine balance. I try to keep it there while pushing us toward a better future."

This, at last, sounded interesting. Not like something I wanted to do, of course, but something I wouldn't mind hearing more about. But prying into the Faerie Queen's enemies probably wasn't the wisest course of action right now. It might show enthusiasm for the job. "Sounds exhausting," I said.

Again, she smiled, though I couldn't see why anything I'd said would make her smile. "It is," she said. "Unbelievably. It'll drive you crazy and break your heart all in the same day. I wouldn't trade it for anything."

There was another old legend about the Faerie Queen, that she'd gone mad with all the power of her position. Maybe, I thought, I should consider believing it.

"I know that sounds nuts," she said. She read me before I'd thought anything out fully. It was like being around Imogen but worse. "It's great, though. There's nothing quite like pushing yourself to your limits and then realizing you're still standing. I do that every day."

She watched me for a long, quiet moment. I didn't know what to say. Nothing she'd said made me think that I wanted her job. It sounded like a lot of work, and a lot of politics, and a lot of stress—and in the end, she didn't even think we really needed her. What was the point of that?

"What if I say no?" I said.

"Then you say no," she said. Her voice stayed calm, like, despite her words, it didn't matter to her whether I went along with this crazy scheme or not. "I keep looking for someone else I think can handle it. The offer stays open until then. Either you change your mind, or I find someone else and start to train them."

"And will you?" I said.

"Not yet," she said. "I hope you'll change your mind. Like I told you before, I only hold this role because our people believe in me. I think you're strong enough to encourage those same levels of belief."

"You make us sound like Santa Claus," I said.

She laughed again, a surprised sound that made me nervous. "I'd never thought of it that way," she said. "I guess we are. We're not that different from the Humdrums, you know? We need people to believe in us before we can really become anything." She shrugged. "It's best if you can believe in yourself, of course, but it's much easier when you have a group of people to carry you through. And so much of my magic comes from them. They send me their energy every day just by thinking I'm important. And I guess I don't want to let them down, so I become important." She let her head drop onto the back of the couch. "That will make a lot more sense when you've been doing this a while. If you do this for a while," she corrected, looking over at me.

I looked down at my plate of untouched food, then at the window. The sun had set, and hundreds of gallons rushed by in darkness behind the reflection of our room's lamps. "I don't think I want to," I said.

I took a deep breath. I was talking to the Faerie Queen, I reminded myself, and she was talking to me like an equal. I didn't need to act like a nervous kid who did whatever she was told. I wasn't that kid. I didn't want to be.

"I have plans for my life," I said. My voice came out clear and loud, perhaps for the first time since I'd set foot in the palace. "I want to go to college and study plants. I'm already too much in the public eye because of my dad's job, and I don't like it. The only reason I'm working as a godmother right now is so I can save up enough money to get myself into the normal world and build a life of my own. Being your heir is an honor—it really is—but it's not for me."

Amani watched me, listening closely and keeping her eyes trained on my face. When I was done, she nodded once, just barely.

"Okay," she said, and she sounded like she meant it. "I'm not going to pretend I'm not disappointed, but I'm glad you know what you want. Thanks for being honest with me."

"You too," I said. "I really am grateful for the chance, it's just—"

"Not right," she finished. "Not what you want."

"Yeah," I said.

"I can respect that," she said. She let out a deep sigh. "Well, at least we survived this. Trying to tell someone they're in line for the throne is terrifying."

"No kidding," I said dryly. Whatever she'd been going through was nothing compared to the experience from this side. Again, she read me and laughed.

"Hey, listen," she said, almost as if she was trying to be casual but couldn't quite manage it. "Did you tell your parents you were coming here?"

"No," I said.

To my surprise, she said, "Good. Do you mind if we maybe don't tell them? Nothing against your dad, but I really don't want to have to fend him off at every Council meeting."

Finally, it was my turn to laugh. Dad had always talked about his seasonal Council meetings with the Faerie Queen as though they were respected colleagues engaged in a worshipful mutual appreciation society. Instead, I realized, she read his personality about like I did. "That would be fantastic," I said. "I'm already having to fight to not end up at his school in Austria. Trying to explain to him that I turned down the job of Faerie Queen…" I shuddered. I couldn't even begin to think about it.

"And Olivia?" she said.

"Yeah?"

"Just remember one thing: The door is open until it's closed."

"It's not going to close because of me," I said.

She needed to understand that. I wasn't going to be the Faerie Queen, and I didn't want to leave her with some half-formed hope that it was going to happen. I was going to be a nice boring botanist living out a nice boring life, far away from the world of faeries and magicians and white moths that guided the way through hidden castles. Wishing for anything else was one wish I couldn't grant.

"Okay," she said. "If that's what you want."

"That's what I want."