"Yes." Clara's voice, steady, professional. "Thank you, my lord."
I'm looking at his throat when I say it—the line of it, the silver threading through his braided hair catching the lamp. I make myself look at his face instead, which is worse, so I look at themiddle distance and smile Clara's mild professional smile and gather my notes.
He inclines his head. I leave.
I walk backthrough the east corridor with my notes under my arm and my thighs pressed together and the cold of him still sitting along my left side like a hand that isn't there.
Lena's message arrived four days ago. I burned it two paragraphs in because I knew what the third paragraph was going to say and I didn't need to read it to my face.Get out if you need to.I know Lena. That's what it said.
I have eleven more days on the mission.
I've been waking at two in the morning for three nights. Not nightmares—just heat, and the cold of him somehow present in a room he's never been in, and my own body a problem I can't solve in the dark. I lie there cataloguing it:slick pooling, core temperature elevated, specific awareness of his study as a direction, his name rising in throat without prompting.Useful intelligence. All of it.
I know what I'm doing.
Back in myroom I open the notebook.
I write:Day 23. Lesson five. Sphere responded to pervasive?—
I cross it out.
I write:going to be in serious trouble.
I look at that for a long time. Then I lie back on the bed and press my hand to my own cheek, where the cold of him almostreached when he leaned in. My hand is warm. It's nothing like his.
I lie there until four in the morning. The low fever of the pre-heat sits in my body and doesn't break. My mind keeps going back to the outline of him through his breeches, to both of them, the weight and the cold and the vibration from the inside—and then past that, to the thing sitting underneath all of it, the thing I can't stop circling back to no matter how many times I catalog it and set it aside: I want him to not ask. I want to walk into his study on Thursday and have him simply decide. Some part of me that I don't recognise has been waiting for that every single lesson and leaving each time hollowed out by how much it didn't happen.
I have been trained to know who I am in every room I walk into.
I don't know who this is.
Eleven days.
I know what I'm doing.
I'm going to be in serious trouble.
6
VAELIS
She's been looking at my breeches for twenty minutes and pretending she hasn't.
Not continuously—she's too good for that. A glance, dragged back, then the careful neutrality of the professional face, then three minutes of genuine focus on the sphere before it happens again. I have watched people lie for six centuries. Most of them are terrible at it. She is not terrible at it, which is the only reason this is interesting.
I'm hard against the cloth—both of them—and have been since she walked in, and she knows, and the knowing is sitting in every line of her body: the pressed thighs, the set of the jaw, the very deliberate way she's been holding her shoulders too high for the better part of an hour. It takes more effort than most people realise, that kind of sustained performance. Most people can hold a cover for ten minutes before something leaks. She is at forty and the leak is just a glance. I am keeping a record.
I don't flatter myself that the interest is personal. It is biological and inconvenient and she resents it deeply. Sixcenturies gives one a certain eye for the distinction. What interests me—what has made these lessons something I find myself looking forward to with an attention I'd rather not examine too closely—is what she does with it. The precise, focused effort to remain a professional in a situation that is making professionalism increasingly untenable. She came in here to learn about Mist Court magic. She is learning something. It isn't what she came in for.
"Again," I say.
She puts her hand back on the sphere and says nothing. I note the control in the gesture—no frustration, no resignation, just the steady attention of someone doing a difficult job—and stay where I am, just behind her left shoulder. The cold of me reaches her from here, not enough to touch, just enough to register. I've been doing this for five lessons and she's never stopped reacting to it. She's stoppedshowingthat she reacts to it, which is different.
I leanin slightly to observe the sphere.
Her breath catches. One small inhale, there and gone, and she corrects it in under a second with the ease of someone who has been practicing this correction all morning. Her scent sharpens as I lean in—want and slick and the warm particular argument her biology has been making since day one—and both shafts pulse with it, a slow throb against the cloth I don't direct and don't bother to conceal. I straighten without comment. I have been here before, or something like it, and the etiquette has never changed: you don't remark on the obvious. You just let it sit in the room between you and watch what the other person does with it.
What she does with it is admirable. Genuinely. I don't say so because it would be condescending, and also because I am not ready to give her the satisfaction.