She is quiet for a moment. Outside the sitting room windows the Thorn Court grounds are overcast and October-grey, the rose vines stripped back to their winter canes. "Because I was trying to write to you as the new version of myself," she says, "and I didn't know how yet. I didn't know what I sounded like. The performance was the wall, Claire—I spent twenty-six years performing someone and I didn't know it was a performance until it was gone. The letters sounded wrong because I was writing the new version trying to sound like the old one and getting neither."
"The walls come down," I say. "That's what the women said. When they came back."
"The walls come down. But they weren't protecting anything real. They were just walls. I built them when I was ten and ourfather stopped knowing how to look at us, and I've been standing inside them ever since." She sets down her tea and puts both hands back on her stomach, automatic, the habit of the last several months. "What's underneath is entirely mine. That's not nothing."
I look at her hands on the curve of the pregnancy. I look at the marks at my own throat. "Did you feel managed," I say. "Early on. Before you trusted it. The warmth—the specific easing of things that should have been louder."
She looks at me steadily. "You have more of a vocabulary for it than I did."
"I was briefed on omegaverse biology before I arrived," I say. "I know what approval dependency is. I know what the illusion magic does." A pause. "Knowing and stopping are different problems."
"Yes," she says. "They are."
I look at her stomach again. I can't stop looking at it. It is very present in the room.
"Are you afraid?" I say.
She considers this. "No," she says. "Which I know sounds wrong from the outside. But no. I'm not afraid." She tilts her head, watching me. "Are you?"
I don't answer immediately. She waits. She has always been very good at waiting—better than me, who runs toward things. She learned to wait from somewhere and I never did.
"I don't know yet what I am," I say.
She nods. Like this is an acceptable answer. Like she said something similar, once, and found her way through it. "You will," she says. "Give it time."
We sit for two hours. She asks about the work and I tell her, and she asks about him and I give her less, and she asks about Lena and I give her nothing because I can't yet. She doesn't push. What I take from her instead: she is happy in the specific way ofsomeone who found out what they are without the performance and is living inside it. The bond didn't take her apart. The bond took the performance away.
Before I go she stands to embrace me—carefully, the pregnancy between us, both of us adjusting—and she holds on for longer than she would have before, which is to say she holds on at all. The old Rosalind did not hold on.
"I'm glad you came," she says, into my hair. "I'm glad it was you."
"I came to rescue you," I say.
"I know." She pulls back enough to look at my face. Her expression is exactly Rosalind: the slightly-pleased look of a person who is right about something and would prefer not to have to say so. "How's that going?"
I thinkabout this on the train home—three hours of flat November countryside, the bond pulling from the direction of Mist Court before I've even left the Thorn Court platform. I press my fingers to the mist-marks at my throat and watch the fields go backward out the window and think: I have been performing since I was sixteen. I have been whoever the mission required. I don't know what's left when the room doesn't need anything.
The heat showed me something. Five days not performing anything, and what came out was someone who saidyoursand meant it completely and kept her eyes open through all of it. I don't know if that person is me or if that's what six weeks of magic and heat and claiming does to a person. But Rosalind was sitting in that chair with her hands on her stomach looking like someone who found out what they were—and she looked more like herself than she has since our mother left.
I can't find the line. I've been trying for weeks and I can't find it.
The city appears. I pick up my bag.
Back at MistCourt I bring him the Thorn Court analysis—I absorbed the whole visit without meaning to, the spy running underneath even when I was just sitting across from my sister—and he reads it across his desk and through the bond his satisfaction arrives before I've finished speaking.
I glow at it. I feel myself glow. I watch the glowing happen and I add it to the list and the glowing keeps going anyway, because knowing what it is and making it stop are still different problems.
I turn away before he can see it.
He sees it.
That night I go to him with the visit still running through my head and the claiming marks warm at my throat and the Lena thought sitting in my chest like a stone. His cold hands moving across my skin in the dark, the bond warming with his proximity. I let him. I have been letting him every night for weeks and I am going to keep letting him because the wanting is real—I've established this. I no longer know which of the things I feel in this bed are mine and which have been made larger than their natural size. Tonight is not the night I figure that out.
Some nights the looking has to stop.
His mouth on the claiming marks, that third thing going through me, and I say his name quietly—just his name, the specific note of someone who knows what they're doing and is doing it. He groans in his throat and pulls me closer.
"Rosalind said the walls come down," I say, after a while.