She believed me. She touched my face.
I have been good at this for six centuries.
Her hand is in my shirt. Her heartbeat is against my ribs. The bond between us runs warm and new—already more specific than anything I had a reference point for.
I hold her.
I wait for morning.
18
CLAIRE
He put me on a train two days after the analysis.
Not framed as a reward—he is careful about framing, careful enough that I notice when it shifts—just:Rosalind. I can arrange a pass to Thorn Court. Three days, no handlers in the sitting room.He said it the way he says the things he actually means: flat, nothing running underneath. I said yes before he finished the sentence.
Three hours of steam train. The bond pulling from the direction of Mist Court before I've even cleared the Thorn Court platform. I press my fingers to the mist-marks at my throat and watch the fields go backward out the window.
Rosalind meetsme in the rose-climbing sitting room and she is enormously, unmistakably pregnant.
Eight months. I calculate it without meaning to—eight months since the claiming, which means this is what eightmonths of Fae pregnancy looks like, which means the child is close, and my sister is sitting in the chair with both hands resting on the curve of her stomach and she looks up when I come in and her face does the thing I have been waiting eight months to see: it just does what it does. Nothing managed.
"You look terrible," she says.
I sit down. My eyes keep going to her stomach. "You're?—"
"Very pregnant, yes. You can look at it. It's quite visible." She says this with the specific cheerfulness of a person who has been watching people try not to look at something for several months. "Sit down properly. You're hovering."
I sit.
She looks real. That's the word I keep arriving at. Not performing happiness. Not arranged. The claiming marks at her throat are different from mine—Thorn Court patterns, vine-like, shifting faintly green—and her weight has redistributed itself around the pregnancy, and she is holding her tea with both hands below the bump like a shelf, and she looks like a person who is not thinking about looking like anything.
"The claiming marks," she says, nodding at my throat, where the mist-patterns shift. "That explains the appearance."
"Does it."
"You have the look of someone who hasn't slept properly in weeks and is refusing to admit it." She settles back slightly in the chair, the adjustment of someone learning a new centre of gravity. "How is he."
"Complicated," I say.
She makes a sound that is entirely the Rosalind from before the letters. "They're all complicated. That's not a useful answer."
I spent eight months reading letters that were in her handwriting and not her voice. The woman across from me has her voice and her handwriting and the particular way she holds her tea cup—thumb through the handle, forefinger bracedagainst the rim—that is entirely her and entirely unchanged. I came here believing she had been taken apart and reconstructed into something cheerful and wrong. I don't know yet what I'm looking at. I know that it has Kaelen's child in it, which is a thing I am going to sit with at some point, but not this moment.
"You came to save me," she says. Not an accusation. Just a statement.
"I came to find out if you needed saving."
"And?"
I look at her. At the marks and the pregnancy and her face doing what her face does. "Do you."
She looks back. Her expression does something that would have been exasperation from the old Rosalind but runs warmer than that—actually amused. "No," she says. "Sit back properly. You're perched."
I hadn't noticed I was perched. I sit back.
"Tell me why the letters sounded wrong," I say. "I read them so many times the paper went soft. They were in your handwriting and they weren't you."