My voice comes out rough. "How long total."
"Five days."
Five days. I sit with that. Five days the spy was gone and someone else was there in her place—someone who saidyoursand meant it, someone who saidpleaseandmorewith every professional instinct stripped out. I can still hear myself. I can still feel what I meant when I said it. I don't know what to do with that yet so I am putting it in a drawer for later, next to the begging, next to the crying, next to the memory of his mouth on my clit at two in the morning and the sound I made that I will never tell anyone about.
The drawer is getting full.
He gets up. Goes to the side table and sets a cup of tea at the far edge, nearest to me, and returns to his chair without coming close. The distance is deliberate. I keep noting it.
I pick up the tea. It's the right temperature. I don't examine how he knew that.
Something is off—something underneath my professional instincts, which should be firing on all cylinders right now, pulling threads, asking questions. The instinct is there, I can feel it starting, and then it settles back, like a wave that doesn't quite break. As though a door swings shut before I can get through it.
I note this carefully. I hold onto it. I don't know what it is yet.
"The marks," I say. "What do they do."
"Permanent. The patterns respond to proximity—more active in the first months, then they settle."
"The bond."
"Emotional transmission. What I feel reaches you and vice versa. Not thoughts. The quality of a state."
"Does it change over time."
"It becomes more specific. In the first months it runs warmer. You'll learn to distinguish it."
I look at him. "The warmth right now. Is that the bond or something else."
A short pause. "Both."
"What's the something else."
"The magic. It runs through the court. It's been running since before you arrived."
He is not going to tell me more than I ask. He never has. I have a specific question and I am going to ask it directly.
"Has the magic been manipulating my feelings," I say.
"It amplifies what's already present." His voice is completely even. "It doesn't create what isn't there."
I sit with this. Amplifies what's already present. I know exactly how his magic works—I spent nine days at a brass sphere being taught the principle:find what's already present in a thing and make it larger.I know what it would mean if that principle applied to every feeling I've had in this court for six weeks. I know what it would mean and I am putting that in the drawer too because the drawer is the only reason I am currently functional.
"Your intelligence archive," I say. "I want to work."
Something moves in his face. Small and gone. That was not what he expected.
Good.
And also—I notice, and hate that I notice—I want him to put his mouth on me again. Right now. While I'm sitting here trying to conduct a professional conversation and assemble my sense of self from the pieces, some part of me that did not get the briefing is thinking about the specific way he settled between my thighs like he had all the time in the world, and the sound he made against me that I felt in my spine. I locate this want, label it, and put it in the drawer. The drawer is now structurally unsound but it is holding.
I drink my tea.
He takesme to the workroom and doesn't follow me in.
My notebook is on the desk exactly where I left it. The pen where I put it. The cipher I was working on five days ago is folded at the corner exactly as I left it. He knew where everything was and left it all untouched.
I sit down. Open the file I'd been working through—the eastern intelligence networks, the communication chains between his court and three others, the coded correspondence I'd been mapping. The work I was actually here to do, before the heat took everything else. Beforeyoursandpleaseand the memory of his braids falling forward over his shoulder while he?—