I stop in the doorway without turning around.
"The three seconds," I say. "In the gallery. Day twenty-six. That thing on your face before you arranged it away." I breathe. "I've been keeping it for months. I need to find out if it was real." A pause. "I'm going to find out."
I walk out.
The corridor is cold. His magic in every particle of the air, the same magic I have been breathing for two months. I breathe it and I walk and I don't stop walking.
I said all of it. Every word, to his face, with nothing running underneath. I told him he used my work and lied to my face and shaped my feelings for months. I told him I can't find the line. I told him the wanting is real.
He didn't answer fast enough.
That is the thing I have been keeping somewhere. Twenty-nine entries, the grief for Lena that is going to be there for the rest of my life, the specific knowledge of what he did—and underneath all of it: the fraction of a second. The moment on the gallery platform when something moved in his face before he arranged it away. The not-answering-fast-enough when I asked if any of it was real.
I have been collecting that fraction for two months. I don't know what it is yet. I need to find out from the inside.
That's all I know.
I don't know if what I feel is love. I don't know if it could survive what he did. I don't know if there is a version of what we built that exists outside the manipulation, or if the manipulation is so threaded through it that you can't pull one out without unravelling the other.
I know three things. I wanted him before any magic. He was a fraction of a second too slow. And the three seconds in the gallery—that thing on his face before he arranged it away—I have been keeping that for two months without knowing why, and I need to know why.
That's why I'm going to find out.
Not because I've forgiven him. Not because the grief for Lena isn't going to be there tomorrow and the year after. Not because twenty-nine entries in a notebook and a dead friend and a trapbuilt around exactly what I am can be set aside because I want something.
Because I'm a spy. Because a case with contradictory evidence is not a closed case. Because I have been going on incomplete information and I cannot make the decision I need to make without the rest of the picture.
The front door. The grounds. The court's mist, moving slow and deliberate, his magic in every particle.
I walk through it.
I go through the gate.
23
VAELIS
She said:was any of it real.
She said:you, not the magic, you.
And I was a fraction of a second too slow.
I stand at the study window and I watch her cross the grounds. I know all her walks by now—the workroom walk with her pen still in her hand, the deliberate walk of someone going somewhere she's decided to go, the particular walk of a woman who named the deflection while it was happening and came down the corridor anyway. This is different from all of those. This is the walk of someone who has said everything and is leaving the place she said it, and I recognise what that looks like from a study window because I have been watching things end for six centuries.
The mist parts around her. My magic in every particle of the grounds, every room of the manor, the same magic that has been in her lungs since she crossed the boundary. She walks through it without looking at it.
She reaches the gate.
She goes through.
Aldric appears behind me.He has been in this court for forty years and reads a room as well as any operative I've worked with. He takes in my position at the window, the empty grounds, says nothing for a moment.
"My lord," he says finally.
"Leave it."
"The afternoon schedule?—"