I have run three prior claimings in six centuries. All of them correct. All of them operational. The dependency built, the bond ran, the omegas were comfortable and provided for and entirely mine, and none of them were anything like this because I have not, in six centuries, spent three months looking at a photograph of any of them.
The mission requires I bring the operative fully into the claiming. The man running the mission has been watching her for three days in a room full of eight courts and finding he cannot look at anything else for long. I am aware of the distinction. I have been aware of it since late spring. It does not change the mission.
It changes everything about everything else.
Not long,I think.
I have known what I'm going to do since late spring. The plan is sound. The outcome is already in motion. And yet I am sitting here with both shafts recently satisfied and still not satisfied, reading three lines of a report and setting it down, looking at a photograph of a twenty-one-year-old intelligence operative who puts the pen to the callus on her forefinger when she is thinkingand has never let anyone see the moment she stops knowing something.
I want to be what she's looking at when that happens.
I set the photograph down. I pick up the report.
I read three lines.
I set it down.
I look at the photograph.
5
CLAIRE
Iask for the lessons on day fourteen.
I've been thinking about it for six days—I know because I wrotedirect observation of ability usein the margin of my notes on day eight and crossed it out, wrote it again on day ten and crossed it out again, and then spent day twelve arguing with myself about it until the page looked like a crime scene. The intelligence value is real. That part isn't invented. Understanding what he can do, how the magic operates, whether there are limits, what it costs him: all of that belongs in the report. All of that is the job.
I write the request on a clean page:Miss Merris respectfully enquires whether Lord Nebulon might be amenable to demonstrating Mist Court abilities for the purposes of the ongoing trade delegation briefings. A practical understanding of court magic would significantly assist in the accurate representation of Mist Court interests to the Webb trading house.
Clara's voice. Professional. The kind of thing a merchant's assistant would ask.
I fold it and give it to a steward and walk back to my room and sit on the edge of the bed and think about what I've just done.
My thighs are wet.
They have been wet, on and off, for two weeks. I have been managing it with the same focused attention I apply to all field problems, which means I have been failing to manage it with increasing frequency and a mounting awareness thatfocused attentionmight not be the right tool for this particular problem. The warmth that started at the boundary has settled into my body like a low fever that won't break. I know what pre-heat is. I have been briefed on it, theoretically—the way you get briefed on things you're told you won't have to handle in the field.
I am handling it in the field.
He agrees within the hour. A note, his handwriting: angular, spare, not a word more than necessary.Tomorrow. Ten o'clock. My study.
I write in my notebook:Request approved. Lesson begins tomorrow.
Intelligence value: high.
I do not write the other thing.
That was day fourteen.Today is day twenty-three and this is lesson five and I am on the wrong side of this decision entirely.
"Again," he says.
I put my hand back on the sphere.
It'sa brass sphere the size of an orange, sitting on a velvet cloth on his desk. The lesson is this: find what's already present in a thing and make it larger. He demonstrated once—held the sphere in both hands and the light inside it shifted, warmed, like something waking up inside the metal.Not conjuring. Just showing the thing what it already is.
I have been trying to do this for nine days. I have been failing for nine days. What I have not been failing at—or rather, what I have been failing at with increasing spectacular consistency—is keeping my eyes on the sphere instead of on him.
He's standing just behind my left shoulder, not touching, close enough that the cold comes off him in a steady wave. I concentrate on the sphere. I think:brass, weight, the slight give of velvet under my palm, this is a lesson, I am here for the lesson.My eyes drift to the front of his breeches—the upper cock pressing visibly against the cloth, thick and curved even at rest—and I drag them back. The lower one isn't visible at all, but I know it's there, and that is the specific problem with Mist Court males: there is simply too much, and no clothing quite accounts for it, and I have been thinking about this fact for approximately five days now at inopportune moments.