"Three hours."
"Business or family?"
"Family," I say. Which is true in the specific narrow way that most true things are true.
She nods, the nod of someone who has learned that family covers a range of things that don't need elaborating, and turns back to her children, who have moved on from the window seat dispute to something involving a button that one of them has and the other wants.
I lookout the window and I think.
Here is what is true.
The wanting was there before the magic. Lesson three at the brass sphere, my eyes going to the front of his breeches regardless of instruction. That was mine. He hadn't done anything except stand too close and be what he is. Before any working, before any shaping, before any of what I now know the plan contained.
The marks are mine. They shift under my fingers when I touch the one at my throat and they're not going anywhere and I don't hate them the way I thought I would.
The child is mine. I am keeping this at the edge of the page still, but it is there and it is a fact.
The grief for Lena is mine. The full size of it, which I felt this morning with the magic down, which is large and is going to be mine for the rest of my life. Lena at seventeen teaching me to wear a cover from the inside instead of the outside. Lena at twenty-three sending me somewhere dangerous and tracking my check-ins with her specific careful attention. Lena's laugh. The letter I burned two paragraphs in. The third paragraph I already knew:I have the route. I have the safe house. Send word.
She was coming for me.
She was building the extraction and keeping the route open and waiting for word, and I assembled the picture in his workroom and handed it to him and glowed at his approval and she is dead and fourteen people are dead and the route is gone and I am still in his court with his marks on my throat.
I handed him the map to find her.
I sit with this. I have been sitting with it for four hours now, in the workroom and in my room and in his study and now on this train, and it does not get smaller. It is not going to get smaller. The grief for Lena is going to be the size it is for the rest of my life, and part of that size is the specific knowledge that Ibuilt the picture that found her, that I used my own hands for it, that I didn't know and he did and he let me do it anyway.
Outside: a farmhouse set back from the track. A woman in the yard hanging washing in the November cold—sheets going grey and stiff in the damp air. She doesn't look up as the train passes.
The older child appears at my elbow, having climbed down from her seat. Perhaps six, very serious. "Are you sad?" she says.
I look at her. "A bit," I say.
She considers this with the gravity of someone receiving important information. Then: "My gran says sad is just love with nowhere to go." She says it with the authority of a person passing down received wisdom. "She says give it somewhere to go and it becomes something else."
I look at her. "Your gran sounds wise."
"She is," she says, and climbs back up to report to her mother.
The woman across the aisle mouthssorryat me. I shake my head.
I look backout the window and I think about what the child's grandmother said.
I have been using the wordwanting.The bond. The claiming. The pre-heat biology. The approval dependency. The magic running through every room of a court I entered as a spy. I have been precise and clinical—every word except the one that applies, because using it means acknowledging something about what the last two months have been.
He ran the magic on my feelings for months. He shaped what I was able to feel sharply. He made the wanting larger than it would have been on its own.
And also: the wanting was mine. It was there on day three, my eyes going where they kept going regardless of instruction. Before any working, before any shaping.
I have been a spy since I was sixteen. I know the difference between a compromised source and a person who is actually choosing something. My father runs me. Vaelis ran me. Neither of them could have run me on feelings that weren't there to run.
Lena is dead. The grief for Lena is large and it is going to be there for the rest of my life. Somewhere to go. I built her a path to find her, and now I have to carry the size of that. I can put that somewhere—not away, not small, but into something real. Into not looking away from it. Into what I decide to do next.
The wanting is also mine. Even inside the cage. Even knowing every plank the cage is made from.
The train runs south-west. Mist Court is behind me, the bond pulling steady and insistent. I know the physiology. I am going to stay in my seat.
I need to hear it in my own voice first. Say it out loud to someone outside the court with no magic in the air, and then I'll know what I think.