I do not burn it.
The bond pulls.The distance fixed. I hold it lightly and I do not push anything through it, and the court runs wrong around me—mist too thick, rooms too quiet, the magic running pervasive through every particle and the pervasive running wrong because the person it belongs to is somewhere on the other side of the city with her bag and her notebook and her twenty-nine entries.
I am the Lord of Mist Court. I have been the Lord of Mist Court since before her city had its current name. I have run intelligence operations in every political configuration this territory has moved through. I have seen twenty generations of human families, watched them be born and grow and age and end. I know the gulf between what I am and what she is—I have known it her entire life and for four hundred years before she existed.
I built the trap for a twenty-one-year-old spy with dark hair and blue eyes and a callus on her right forefinger, and I did it with my eyes open, and I am sitting in my ancient court tonight with both hands flat on the desk and both cocks aching andthe mist running wrong, and I cannot compress what I feel to a word.
I have tried eight words. None of them are large enough.
I keep the eleven.
On the morningof the third day I go to Aldric and tell him I'm going to the city. He looks at me with forty years of opinions and selects, correctly, not to share them.
"Yes, my lord," he says.
I take the morning train.
The bond sharpens as the distance closes—not the ache easing, but the quality of the signal changing from distant to near. She is stopped. She has been in one place for three days, thinking with the precision I have been watching for two months. I hold the bond and I do not push anything through it. What I am going to say to her I am going to say in a room with no magic between us, face to face, with nothing running underneath any of it.
The letter in my coat pocket has been there for three days. Eleven words.The wanting came before the plan. The plan was wrong. The wanting wasn't.
It is a beginning, not a statement. She has assembled more evidence than I have ever given anyone. She will see a beginning for what it is. What I need to tell her is everything the eleven words are standing in front of—six centuries of clear naming and the one thing I have not been able to name, the specific size of the thing that does not compress, the gulf between what I am and what I did and the fraction of a second on the gallery platform when something moved in my face before I arranged it away.
I know what was in it.
I fold the letter. I put it back in my pocket.
The city appears through the window, grey and November-cold. The bond goes from near tothere—she is at the station, she is already on the platform—and something happens in my chest that is not the bond and is not the magic and does not have a category in six centuries of careful naming.
I stand up as the train slows.
She is facing the tracks when I come through onto the platform. The set of her shoulders. The claiming marks at her neck, the mist-patterns shifting slightly even here, even at this distance—my magic in them, in her, the marks that are permanent. She has a bag in her hand. She has made a decision. I can read the posture of a decision from forty feet away.
She turns.
She looks at me across the platform.
The gulf is there. It will always be there. I am what I am, and I would do it again, and the cold ancient certainty of that runs alongside everything else I am feeling right now without resolving either of them.
I walk to her.
27
CLAIRE
Iwake before dawn and I'm sick into the basin.
I kneel on the cold floor of the boarding house room with my hands on the rim and my hair in my face and my body conducting its own separate referendum on the last three months, and when it's finished I sit back on my heels and I breathe. The cold of the floor comes through my stockings. The lamp is still burning—I left it on, too tired to think about it when I finally lay down. The mist-marks at my throat shift faintly in the light, the patterns moving the way they move when I'm exhausted and not managing anything.
I am not managing anything.
All right, I think. All right, then.
I get up. I wash my face with the cold water from the jug. I look at myself in the small mirror above the basin and I look, specifically, like a woman who has spent two days crying into a boarding house pillow about something she has been professionally refusing to feel for three years. The dark circles. The marks at my throat and collarbone. The particular quality ofmy own eyes, which I have never found particularly legible but which tonight look like someone who has run out of the specific kind of energy it takes to keep things in separate compartments.
I sit down on the edge of the bed.
I think about Lena.