Margot #2
Tuesday morning the council was in session behind closed doors for joint-custody deliberations. The deputy walked me down to the library at nine without commenting on the date.
The books I had been poring over were waiting on the table. I opened the dissertation to the page I had been re-reading. A folded square of paper sat tucked into the back endpaper. Yuki’s hand. Three words: Morag at ten.
The door opened without a knock at exactly ten.
I knew the woman who entered from the seating charts Yuki had given the U.S.
delegation before the first formal session.
Morag Vale. Ashenmere elder, council voting member, former keeper of external accords.
She was four centuries old give or take the margin of error that came with dragons who disliked exact birthdays.
She walked with a cane she didn’t need. The cane was punctuation, and likely a weapon.
She crossed the room, sat across from me, and placed both hands on the table. “Catalina Cordero.”
“Elder Vale.”
“Morag.” That wasn’t intimacy. It was an instruction.
“Morag.”
She studied me with pale gray eyes and no performance of warmth. The silence had a weight she let ride until she decided to put words on top of it. “You have been quiet.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“What would I say?”
“Many people enjoy the sound of themselves resisting.”
“I prefer useful resistance.”
Her gaze moved to the books on the table and stayed there. “You have been reading about Troms?.”
“I have been reading about rival-clan bonds,” I said. “Or the lack thereof.”
She watched me a moment longer. Whatever assessment she was running, she took her time with it. Then her mouth set. “Margot Lunde was my friend,” she said.
For half a second, the room narrowed to a point. Margot had been ink until then. A paragraph. A footnote. A woman flattened into treaty language and commercial stabilization.
Then Morag said friend, and the paper became a person.
My heart rate spiked. I made myself breathe through it. I am not Margot. I have training. I have a handler.
No.
I had a handler who couldn’t reach me unless Yuki allowed it. I had no extraction team, no phone of my own, no door I could open from the inside.
I had a bond under my ribs and a dead woman’s name on the table between us.
I looked at the book.
The woman in the photograph had been officially dead for eleven years when someone took the picture.
“Your friend,” I said.
“Yes.”
I waited.
Morag’s expression didn’t change, but the air around her did. Older grief had weight. It didn’t announce itself. It simply sat down and expected the room to make space.
“She was human,” Morag said. “Very clever. Too clever for men who thought cleverness was charming until it became inconvenient. She spoke six languages, laughed at inappropriate times, had a terrible singing voice but sang anyway.”
Nobody remembered a singing voice for political reasons.
“She was claimed by one dragon and then again by an influential political rival,” Morag said. “Two clans decided that made her a legal question. Then a diplomatic question. Then a territorial question. By the time anyone remembered she was a woman, she had become precedent.”
My chest pulled tight.
For one second, I thought it was Dominic.
Then I realized it was me.
“She was torn apart by the bond?” I asked.
Morag looked directly at me. “She was torn apart by everyone who found the bond useful.”
She leaned in enough to make sure I understood that this was the part she had come to say.
“She listened to the politics,” she said.
“We all told her she had to. We told her to be careful. Patient. Strategic. We told her peace depended on her restraint. We told her the wrong choice would start a war.”
Her hand stilled on the cane. “We weren’t entirely wrong.”
I said nothing.
“Politics will always make itself sound like survival,” Morag continued.
“It’ll tell you to wait. To endure. To use him.
To refuse him. To choose the option that gives one side leverage and the other side enough dignity not to retaliate.
It’ll give every cage a necessary name.” Her gaze dropped once to the mark at the left of my throat.
“Protective confinement. Joint custody. Bond consultation. Claimed party.”
I felt each term land.
One by one.
Small locks clicking shut.
“You’re here to tell me not to make Dominic useful,” I said.
“No. I’m here to tell you not to mistake usefulness for peace.”
I leaned back.
Morag’s mouth twisted in a grimace. “Dominic Graves will make himself useful to you. So will Rhain Solberg. So will Yuki. So will your handler. So will every person who wants a piece of what you have become. Some of them may even love you. That won’t make them harmless.”
“You think I should run,” I said.
“I think you should know what freedom feels like before everyone teaches you to call a negotiated cage a home.”
I looked toward the sealed door. “Freedom is currently behind three checkpoints and a dragon enforcer.”
“Freedom is rarely conveniently located.”
The laugh nearly got out. It caught in my throat and arrived as a small, undignified panic gurgle. “Naturally.”
Nothing in Morag’s face softened. “You’re going to be told to choose,” she said. “Ashenmere or Solberg. Dominic or Rhain. Agency or council. Duty or desire. Peace or war. Every version of the question will be shaped to benefit the person asking it.”
“And your version?”
“My version is simpler.”
Everything in the room came down to her. “What lets you sleep?”
The question wasn’t easy.
“Not what gives you leverage,” Morag said.
“Not what keeps the council stable. Not what prevents Oslo from filing a formal grievance or Washington from pretending it didn’t lose an operative inside a clan compound.
What lets you breathe? What lets you look in the mirror?
What lets you wake without feeling a cage before your feet touch the floor? ”
My throat closed. I disliked her. Very much.
“You make peace sound selfish,” I said.
“Not selfish,” Morag said. “Expensive.”
Silence stretched between us.
The bond stayed banked and watchful.
I thought of Dominic outside my door. Of Rhain in the dining hall, held in place by his own delegation. Of Davis in D.C., probably already writing a strategy memo that used my name three times and my personhood not at all.
I thought of Margot Lunde singing badly because she wanted to and a footnote where a woman should’ve been.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
Morag’s hand tightened on the cane. The gold ring on her index finger clicked once against the carved head, a small sound in the quiet room.
“She stopped sleeping,” Morag said. “Then she stopped eating. Then she stopped speaking unless spoken to. Both clans called it bond strain. The physicians called it systemic collapse. The diplomats called it an unfortunate accelerant to an already unstable negotiation.”
Her jaw worked, then stilled. “I called it murder.”
“Did you say that then?” I asked.
Morag held my gaze. “No.”
She let the word settle, then continued, “I was young.”
“You were already centuries old.”
“I was young,” she repeated.
Dragon math.
“What would you have said?” I asked.
Morag glanced at the books, then back to me. “I would’ve told her to stop making everyone else’s fear into her duty.”
Morag rose. She walked to the door, paused with her hand on the handle, and turned back.
“Make the choice when it’s time,” Morag said. “But make it for peace. Yours. Not theirs.”
I stayed at the table, staring at the place where she had been.
I had been lying to myself about the cage.
Not the room. The room was obvious. Locked door, no exit.
I could work with obvious.
The problem was the people.
The council wanted me contained and cooperative. The agency would want me useful and obedient. Dominic wanted me safe, which sounded better until safe started looking a lot like kept. Rhain wanted access, and I didn’t yet know whether that meant help, claim, strategy, or all three.
Everyone had a preferred version of me.
The day passed without producing any of the rulings everyone was pretending not to wait for. No decision on Solberg’s access request. No decision on joint custody. No decision on what, exactly, the council intended to call me when it finally stopped calling me protected.
Just the same update, delivered twice with different deputies and the same careful lack of information.
Deliberations ongoing.