I keep my hands flat on the desk.
She said: no magic on me. Ever.
I have one thing left that belongs to me and it is keeping that word.
The court is wrong tonight.
I have been in this court for six centuries. I know its rhythms the way I know my own pulse—the mist off the lake, the specific temperature of the eastern corridor at midnight, the sound the manor makes in the cold, the quality of the magic as it runs through every room without anyone directing it. My court. My magic in the air and the walls and the grounds. It has been mine for six hundred years and it knows my state the way a living thing knows the weather, and tonight it is running in the particular way of something that has registered a loss and doesn't understand the loss.
The mist is thicker than it should be. Not because I am controlling it. Because I'm not.
Both cocks ache. I have been hard since she walked out—not arousal, just the rut's low insistent signal, the biology of a fresh claiming running without modulation, and the court's magic has nowhere to go because the thing it belongs to is on the other side of the city wall. I stand at my window and I breathe through it and I do not go to the bond.
I think about Lena Riley's cell.
I have been thinking about it since the workroom—since she saidyou used my hands to close the door,since I felt the sentence land through the raw-running bond with nothing between it and me. I have been thinking about it the way I think about everything I've done clearly: directly, with full attention, naming it exactly.
I would do it again.
That is the truth I am sitting with tonight. I would sign the order again. Lena Riley's cell was building an extraction route for Claire, and I knew it, and I had the means to stop it, and I chose the means that was permanent. I chose permanent because an arrested cell can be released or can send word through other channels. I chose permanent because I looked at the photograph in my coat pocket and I made the calculation and the calculation was: no one will ever take her from me.
I would do it again.
I do not regret it. What I feel about it is not regret. What I feel about it is the cold absolute certainty of something that is simply true about what I am—what I have always been, what six centuries of restraint and management has been running on top of, the ancient thing underneath the courtier. The predatory biology of a Fae lord with a claimed mate and a threat to that mate, stripped to its simplest form. Lena Riley's cell was the threat. I removed it.
That is what I am.
She said:you killed my oldest friend.She said it to my face with her jaw set and her blue eyes on me and nothing softened between us, and I felt it arrive through the bond at its actual size, and I did not argue. I could not have argued. She was right and she knew she was right and we were both standing in the full knowledge of it.
What I could not have said—what I am sitting with tonight in the wrong-feeling court—is:I know. I know what I am. I know what I did. And I am six hundred and eighty-nine years old, and I have never once in six hundred and eighty-nine years wished I were something other than what I am, and I am wishing it now, and I don't know what to do with that.
She is twenty-one. She has been a spy for three years. She has been alive for less time than some of the trees on the eastern edge of my grounds. She walks through the world in the wayof someone young enough to believe that love and the doing of harm are separate categories—that wanting someone and using them are contradictory impulses that can't live in the same hand.
I have been old enough to know they can for four centuries.
The gulf between those two ways of understanding the world is not something I can argue across. It exists. She is on one side of it and I am on the other and I built a plan around a woman who was standing on the young side and I did it with both eyes open. I knew what the gulf was. I knew she would find out. I planned for her to find out and still trusted that she would—what? Return anyway. Choose anyway. Stand on the edge of the gulf and decide to stay.
I am not certain that was a reasonable thing to trust.
At midnightI try to write the letter.
Not encoded intelligence. Not orders. Not any category of writing I have been producing for six centuries. Something true.
I write:What you felt was real.
I look at it. It is also the first line of an argument I want her to reach. I burn it.
I write:I would do it again and I would still rather not have to.
Both halves of that sentence are true and they do not resolve each other and she would hear the first half and put the letter down. I burn it.
I write:You asked if any of it was real. You. Not the magic. You.
I was a fraction of a second too slow.
That fraction is this: I have been good at what I do for six centuries. I have been managing courts and operations andclaimings and I have been good at all of it and I have not, in all of that time, wanted to be known. I have wanted things—the mission, the outcome, the operative in my bed—and I have not wanted to be seen past the wanting. You looked at me across the intelligence problem for two months and I found myself wanting to be worthy of what you were looking for. That is not a category I had. I didn't know what to do with it. I was still deciding what to do with it when you asked and I was a fraction of a second too slow.
I fold it. I put it in my coat pocket.