I look at it.
I write underneath:Gallery sightline—impossible. Review.
I look at both lines and think: this is the most useful sentence I've written all day and also somehow the least reassuring, which is a combination I don't have a lot of experience with.
There's a warmth in my chest that started when his fingers closed around mine and hasn't entirely left. I am three years in the field and I know what a physical response to alpha proximity feels like—I've been briefed on it, I've experienced the low pervasive version before, this is that, that is all this is. The cold of his hand and the court magic running through the air and the boundary crossing earlier, all of it compounding. A physical response to ambient magic. Filed.
I close the notebook.
I change my underthings. I get into bed and lie in the dark of a Mist Court manor and listen to the mist moving outside my window, purposeful and slow, and I think about the sightline that doesn't work and the callus he found without looking for it and the dozens of silver braids shifting against his back as he walked away. The specific quiet way he saidI hope it won't be your last—not an invitation, not quite a statement, something in between, the tone of a man naming something he has already decided is true.
My pulse ticks along a beat too fast.
I do not sleep for a long time.
4
VAELIS
Day three of the Gathering. She's working a Frost Court trade secretary she's never spoken to before and she has him in four minutes.
I watch from the gallery. I've been here an hour. Six reports on my desk untouched. The secretary is visibly pleased to be talking to her—that pleasant lean, the animated hands—and she is doing the thing I've been watching her do for three days: giving her attention completely, making whoever she's talking to feel like the most interesting thing in the room. Dark hair, tanned skin, blue eyes that are doing their job beautifully right now because the secretary doesn't know he's being worked and I can see exactly that he's being worked and I still can't find the seam. Truth-sight says it isn't real. The seam is so fine I have to look hard to find it.
I keep looking hard.
The pre-heat has been building since she crossed the boundary. From up here I catch the faint shift in her scent every evening when she enters the hall—the magic feeding it, the courtworking on her the way this court works on everyone, except her body's particular response to it has been visible to me since the first hour and she has been managing it with a precision that I find more interesting than I should. She files it. Every time. Whatever she's feeling, she looks at it the way she looks at troop movement intelligence and she files it.
I turned the magic to sixty the first night. It has been sitting there since. I told myself I would lower it.
I have not lowered it.
I come down from the gallery.
She clocksme at twelve feet. I see the moment it happens—the slight realignment, the performance adjusting, Clara settling into place over whatever her actual reaction was. By the time I'm beside her she's already mid-sentence with the Frost Court male, and she turns to include me with the smooth ease of someone who was never startled.
"Lord Nebulon." Clara's tone. Mild, professionally pleased.
"Miss Merris." I look at the Frost Court male. He reads it correctly and finds somewhere else to be within thirty seconds. We're alone in the way you can be alone in a crowded room—a small pocket of still air, voices around us, no one close enough to hear.
She doesn't fill the silence. That's new. The first night she gave me the cover name before I could ask, controlling the information flow, which is the correct move and she executed it well. Tonight she waits, glass in hand, and watches me with those eyes, and says nothing. She is learning the shape of me. It is taking her longer than it would take her with anyone else and she knows it.
"How are you finding the Gathering?" I say.
"Very useful." A beat. "The Frost Court secretary has strong opinions about northern harbour access."
"He does."
"You knew that."
"I know most things about most people in this room."
She considers that. Takes a small sip from her glass. Up close the blue of her eyes is very specific—not the flat pale blue that's common, something darker, the colour of deep water—and she uses them the way she uses everything: with complete control. The particular stillness of someone choosing their words carefully. "And yet you asked how I was finding it."
"I wanted to hear your answer."
Something shifts behind the professional face. A slight recalibration. She wasn't expecting that to be the honest answer. She was expecting manoeuvring, because that's what I do, and I gave her something true and she doesn't know what to do with it yet.
Her scent sharpens slightly. The pre-heat rising at proximity, the magic doing its quiet work. She feels it—I watch her feel it, watch the small internal adjustment as she files it and keeps her face perfectly neutral. She's been doing this for three days with increasing effort and I have been watching the effort increase and finding it difficult to look away from.