Neither do I.
The platform continues. A family navigating too much luggage. A porter's trolley. The ordinary business of a November morning, indifferent, continuing.
Her hands are closed around my lapels. She is going back. She made this decision before I found her. She is going to make more conditions and I am going to meet some of them and I will not be able to meet others, because I am what I am, and I signed the order and the order was right, and the cold certainty of that runs alongside everything else I am holding right now without resolving it.
She said:you be real.
Yes. Into her hair.
Yes.
29
VAELIS
The carriage is four hours.
I arranged it before I left the manor this morning. She is my mate and she is carrying my child and she does not travel home in a public second-class carriage on a public train. I don't explain this. There is nothing to explain.
She doesn't argue it. She gets in.
We sit across from each other. The city moves past the window, narrowing to the outskirts, and then November countryside—flat fields, stripped trees, the same roads she would have moved through two days ago going the other direction. She has her notebook open on her knee. She writes things in it that I don't try to read. I look out the window. I hold the bond lightly and I don't push anything through it.
After the first hour she closes the notebook.
"The three seconds," she says. "Day twenty-six. In the gallery. What was that."
I look at her. "The first time I couldn't tell what I was running."
She holds my gaze. She turns this over the way she turns everything over—starting from the edges, working inward.
"The first time," she says.
"Yes."
"Not the last."
"No," I say. "Not the last."
She looks out the window. The countryside moves. After a while she opens the notebook and writes something and closes it.
The second hour passes mostly in silence. She watches the window. I watch her—the specific way she holds a notebook, the way her hands rest when they're not doing anything, the callus on her right forefinger. I have been noting these since Thursday in March and I have not stopped noting them.
Mist Court appears on the horizon. Then the gates. The carriage slows.
She watches the manor come into view through the window. The mist off the lake. The walls. She has been inside those walls for over two months and she left and she is returning and her face is doing the careful neutral of someone who has not yet decided what to make of what they're feeling.
I take her bag when she gets out.
She lets me.
She walks through the gates without stopping.
I watch her walk through.
She comesto my rooms after dinner.
Not the workroom. My rooms. She walks down the corridor and opens the door and comes in. I am at the window. I turn.