"He will." She is certain about this. "He did for the others."
"Yes."
She looks at me. She looks at the mirror. She looks back at me.
"Our daughter," she says, "is going to be extraordinary."
Not comfort. Not hope. A conclusion from available evidence, delivered the way she delivers everything she is certain of: flat, direct, no dressing on it.
"Yes," I say. "She is."
She settles back against my chest. The knot has released. The bond runs open between us—nothing pushed through it, nothing amplified, just what it is. Her hand is still curled against my chest.
The mist moves through the court grounds.
Neither of us speaks for a long time.
That is enough.
30
CLAIRE
Iwake up and I'm still here.
That's the first thing I notice. I'm still here and it's morning. The light at the edge of the curtains is grey and early and the bond is running between us warm in a way that is different from every morning before the separation—something settled in it, something that didn't break when I tested it and knows now that it didn't break.
His hand is in my hair. I don't know when it got there. He does it without waking, has done it since the first night. I have been collecting this information for weeks and keeping it somewhere, and now it has a file of its own and I'm not pretending it doesn't.
I lie still for a while and let him think I'm sleeping.
I am still angry. I made a decision with clear eyes two days ago in a cold boarding house room and I know exactly what I decided and why, and the anger is not at odds with the decision. They are both just true. I am going to grieve Lena for the rest of my life. I am going to be in this bed in the morning. Both things.
My stomach is doing something low and unsettled, the particular nausea I have been waking to for two weeks—the pregnancy asserting itself before I am fully awake, before I have a choice about receiving it. I swallow it down. I breathe through my nose. I have learned the technique: still, slow, wait for it to pass.
It passes.
I get up.
He doesn't stop me. Doesn't pretend he was asleep.
I find my things in the dark and go out onto the balcony.
The mist runsthrough the court grounds below.
Slow and deliberate, the way it always moves at this hour. The amber lanterns over the lake are the only fixed points—three of them, steady in the shifting grey. The grounds go on and on, the tree line at the far edge, the gate I walked through eight weeks ago and left through three days ago and came back through yesterday.
The gate. Mine to use. That's new. That is genuinely new.
I put my hand on my stomach.
The child is there. Has been there since the claiming, or near enough. Our daughter, Oberon said last night, and I saidwith parents like us she'll need to know the differenceand I meant it and I was glad I said it—it was the truest thing I'd said in weeks, maybe months. My daughter. His. The two of us, the least likely combination of people to be doing this together, and here we are.
Rosalind's baby will be here any day. She was eight months when I visited. I will be an aunt within the month, probably sooner. Two daughters of a cold man with a cold house, both of us tangled up with Fae lords, both carrying things that can't beput down. I wonder if she woke up some morning in Thorn Court and thought:how did I get here.I wonder if she had an answer.
I wonder if I'll have one by the time my daughter is old enough to ask.
Lena would have had something to say about all of this. Something that started withClaire, no,which was the sound she made whenever I was about to walk into something she'd already seen the shape of. She saw the shape of this one and tried to hand me a door and I burned the message and handed him the map instead. I will carry that for the rest of my life. I think I am supposed to carry it. I think putting it down would be the wrong kind of letting go.