I hear him behind me.
He stops in the doorway, giving me the balcony—giving me the space, which is the kind of thing he does now, the kind of thing I have been noticing and not knowing what to do with. I turn and look at him in the grey morning light.
Dark brown skin and silver-white braids, dozens of them, loose at the shoulders, and those silver-to-violet eyes that I watched running calculations on me for eight weeks before I knew that's what they were doing. He has the patience of something very old. He stands in doorways the way stone stands—not still exactly, but certain. Like it is not bothered by the question of whether it belongs there.
He looks at me across the balcony.
I look back.
I have been reading his face since the Gathering and I can read it now without the warmth running underneath distorting my read. The wanting is real. The patience is real. The fraction of a second on the gallery platform when I askedwas any of it realand his face did something before he could arrange it—that was real too. I've been keeping that since October and I know what it was.
I don't know yet who he is without the plan. We're at the beginning of that.
I reached toward that beginning every time I walked back through his doors. I am standing here in the morning mist with the gate visible from the railing and the amber lanterns holding steady over the lake, and I am still angry, and I am still here.
"I'm still angry," I say.
"I know."
"I'm going to be angry for a long time."
"Yes," he says. Just yes. No argument, no structure around it, no attempt to make the anger smaller.
I look at the grounds. The mist moves through the lantern light.
"What did Oberon mean," I say. "Not the claiming. The remaking."
He comes to stand beside me at the railing. The court-cold of him reaches me in the grey air, and the bond goes from warm-at-a-distance to warm-and-present, a different quality. My body notices the difference before I decide to.
"The other bonds were made through the claiming and held through the magic," he says. "Ours broke. You took it apart. You came back." He looks at the grounds. "That's different. That's what Mist Court contributes—not intelligence gathered. Truth held onto after everything that makes letting go easier."
I look at him.
He looks at the grounds.
"She saidwith parents like us," he says. "I liked that."
"So did I," I say.
We stand there for a moment. The mist moves. The lanterns hold.
I turn and put my back to the railing and I look at him in the grey light—the braids, the patience, the face I have been reading since October and am still learning. He is six hundredand eighty-nine years old and I am twenty-one and our daughter is going to need to know the difference between what is real and what has been made to feel real, and she will, because she will grow up in a court that teaches it.
I want that for her. I want her to be sharp and clear-eyed and difficult in exactly the way I was supposed to be and wasn't, all those months, until I was.
I want a lot of things this morning.
I reach for him.
He comes to me fast.His hands at my waist—the cold of them, the shock of it, still a shock every time no matter how well I know it's coming—and his mouth on mine and I push my hands into his hair and kiss him back and the bond opens between us and there is nothing underneath it except us. No warmth that wasn't already there. No management.
Just this.
He turns me to face the railing.
I put my hands on it. My skirts go up—his hands shoving the fabric out of the way—and then there is cold iron and his cold hands and the court grounds below us, the amber lanterns still burning through the mist. The grounds below. The paths beginning to show in the thinning grey.
Anyone could look up.