We are a family of women who stayed in hard places and made something of it, or tried to, or are trying. My mother didn't. My father watches from a safe distance. But Rosalind stayed when it was hard, and I came back when it was hard, and I am standing here with the gate visible and both his arms around me and the cold morning air on my face.
I don't know yet if coming back was the worst thing I've ever done or the only true thing I've chosen.
Probably both. With Vaelis it's always both, and I am twenty-one years old and learning to hold two true things at once without needing them to resolve.
The mist moves through the court grounds. Slow and deliberate. The gate stands open in the grey morning. I can see it from here.
I am not leaving.
That's enough.
That's where we start.
EPILOGUE
CLAIRE
Seven months after.
Spring comes to Mist Court slowly. Not a single day when the air changes but a long incremental shift—the mist going from grey to silver in the mornings, the grounds brightening by degrees. I have been watching it from the east wing balcony since February. I know this balcony the way I know useful things: the exact temperature of the iron at different hours, the spot where the view opens over the lake toward the gate, the precise angle of morning light that reaches my desk through the doors behind me.
My balcony. My desk. My rooms, my workroom, my gate to use as I choose.
These distinctions matter. I was clear about them when I came back. In seven months they have not been challenged once.
I stand at the railing with both hands on the cold iron. My daughter kicks once, hard, just under my ribs—the specific, deliberate kick of someone who has opinions. At seven months she has made her position very clear on stillness, on cold rooms,and on the particular frequency Vaelis runs the vibration at when he thinks I might be sleeping.
She is, as far as I can tell, her father's daughter.
"I know," I say. "Give me a moment."
She disagrees. This is consistent with everything I know about her.
Rosalind's sonis six months old.
I have been an aunt since January. It still feels like something I am learning the weight of—not the fact of it but theshapeof it, what it means to have this small new person exist in the world who is Rosalind's child and my nephew and whose father is a Thorn Court alpha I have only met twice. He has the Thorn Court claiming marks already starting at his throat, thin and vine-like, green-silver. He looks at things with an attention that is entirely Rosalind's.
Rosalind sent a photograph. I have it on my desk.
I look at it sometimes and think: we are both here. Both daughters of a cold house who were supposed to do other things with their lives, both of us standing in Fae courts with children who are going to be something neither of us has words for yet. I wonder if she lies awake and thinks about what we've done. I wonder if she is at peace with it. Her letters sound like peace. The specific, considered peace of someone who came through something hard and chose it on the other side with full knowledge.
I know that peace. I am learning to live inside it alongside the things that don't resolve.
Lena would have opinions about all of this. She would have said something about the photograph, something that startedwithClaireand ended withyou know that's not the whole story,and she would have been right. She always was. I carry that. I carry her. I have learned by now that carrying someone is not the same as being stopped by them.
My daughter kicks again. Agreement, maybe, or impatience. Hard to tell.
He comesaround the corner of the manor at half past seven.
He does this every morning—the lower path, along the lake, passing below the east wing balcony. I don't know when it became his route. He doesn't look up every morning. This morning he does.
We look at each other across the court grounds, the mist running low and silver between us.
"She's at it again," he says.
"She has been since five."
He comes to stand below the balcony. The court-cold of him reaches me even here. I have measured this, as I measure things: approximately twelve feet, in spring. Less in winter when the cold runs deeper. The specific cold that is nothing like a room without a fire—his court, in the air and the walls and the mist off the lake and me, running through the marks at my throat that are fully settled now, permanent, silver-quiet and no longer restless.