MIsted (Dark Faeverse #5)

Chapter 1

CLAIRE

Rosalind's letters are spread across the table.

I've read them so many times the paper has gone soft at the folds—that particular worn softness of a document handled too often, the kind of softness I usually associate with intercepted correspondence from people who are very worried about something.

The thought is not comforting. I put it away and pick up the letter from March.

Dearest Claire, I hope this letter finds you well.

Life here at Thorn Court continues to be everything I could have hoped for.

The gardens are especially beautiful this time of year—Prince Kaelen had the east terrace replanted with climbing roses last autumn, and they've come in wonderfully.

I find myself walking there most mornings before breakfast. It is a peaceful way to begin the day.

Rosalind did not find things peaceful. Rosalind found things interesting, or irritating, or worth arguing about at length.

She once spent forty-five minutes explaining to our father why the word peaceful was the refuge of people who had given up on being right about anything.

She was twenty-two. He didn't speak to her for three days and then came around to her position, which was typical of both of them, and which meant I spent those three days in a house containing two people who were pointedly not talking and one person who had caused it and found it funny.

I set the March letter down and pick up the one from June.

The court has been hosting musical evenings this season. I find I enjoy them more than I expected to. There is something in the Fae approach to composition that is hard to explain. I think you would like it, though I expect you would spend the first half picking it apart.

That's the closest she gets. I expect you would.

Rosalind in there, knowing me well enough to predict me.

But she would have written you would spend the first half being insufferable about it and the second half pretending you hadn't been, and it would have been accurate, and she would have been pleased with herself for the precision.

These letters know me. They don't sound like the person who knows me.

I know what claiming does. I've read every document the service has on the subject, sat through two classified briefings, and spoken at length with three women who came back from Fae courts before the Treaties made coming back a matter of negotiation rather than personal choice.

The walls come down, they all said, in different words.

The self you were before becomes—optional.

Like a coat you set down somewhere and forgot you were wearing.

What I don't know, and what I cannot sit with, is whether that's what happened to Rosalind, or whether she's in there underneath the contentment—choosing words carefully, knowing exactly how the letters sound—and the part that knows me is still fully present and very carefully saying nothing more than it's safe to say.

I don't know which of those possibilities is worse. This is why I've been reading the same eight letters for four days.

The mission brief arrived through a channel I monitor but don't advertise.

I cracked the cipher in four hours. It should have taken eight.

I am good at my job—I've been good at my job since I was sixteen and the service decided my particular set of skills was worth cultivating—and I know the difference between a cipher that is genuinely difficult and one built to appear difficult while remaining solvable in half the expected time.

A cipher that takes four hours instead of eight is not a security measure. It's an invitation.

Someone wanted me to find this quickly.

The cover documentation was already complete when I accessed the drop.

Not assembled in rough form, not flagged for my input—finished.

A full mission package built around the Clara Merris identity: a merchant's assistant with legitimate ties to three Fae courts, four years of documented history, travel papers, letters of introduction, a credit note, six weeks of itinerary.

The sort of package my handler puts together when I request a mission, or when a mission comes down through proper channels with my name attached.

I didn't request this one. It didn't come through proper channels.

Someone reached into the service's files, pulled my Clara identity, and built a mission around her without telling me. Then they left it in a drop behind a cipher designed to fall in exactly four hours.

The mission itself is straightforward: attend the Autumn Gathering at Mist Court under the Clara cover, gather intelligence on Lord Vaelis Nebulon's connections to the eastern human resistance networks, return in six weeks.

I've done harder in worse circumstances.

The part that isn't straightforward is everything surrounding it.

My handler's name is Lena Riley. We have worked together for six years, which is long enough that she has strong opinions about my methodology and I have strong opinions about her habit of sending coded messages that begin with three paragraphs of weather observations before getting to the point.

We are, despite this, fond of each other.

What she would say about a mission assembled without her knowledge, using my cover documentation, behind a cipher designed to get me moving before I could fully think it through: she would say it calmly, without raising her voice, in approximately two sentences.

The sentences would be accurate and final and they would not change my decision, which she would also know.

This is why we have worked together for six years.

What she would say specifically about the Clara cover walking into Mist Court, an omega alone in a Fae lord's territory with no oversight and no extraction protocol: Claire. No.

Two words. And then she would look at me with the expression she reserves for the moments when she's already decided the argument is lost and is simply registering the loss for the record.

I have not told her about this mission. I found the drop four days ago and I have been sitting with Rosalind's letters and thinking, and I have not yet sent Lena a word.

There are two explanations for that.

The first is that the mission package was built by someone within the service with both the access and the motive to keep Lena out of it, and informing Lena would compromise whatever I'm meant to be walking into.

The second is that I already know what she'd say and I am professionally capable of compartmentalizing the part of me that agrees with her.

I am going to Mist Court either way. The only question is whether I tell Lena first.

I will tell her after.

The photograph of Rosalind ran in three papers after the midsummer celebration at Thorn Court. I cut it out of all three.

She's standing beside Prince Kaelen in a garden—climbing roses on stone walls behind them, good summer light, everything arranged. She's smiling. Her posture is perfect. She looks like a woman who has found exactly what she was looking for and is at peace with it.

She hated having her photograph taken. She used to make a very slight face at the camera—barely visible, just a faint pursing of the mouth, enough that every formal portrait we sat for left her looking mildly dissatisfied with the proceedings.

She said it was the honest response to being asked to perform contentment on command.

She said it with the particular satisfaction of someone who has found a way to tell the truth while technically complying.

In this photograph she is not making the face.

She volunteered for the exchange program.

That is the part I keep returning to. The government's cultural exchanges—which everyone in the service understands as a polite name for delivering eligible omegas to Fae courts in exchange for favorable treaty terms—were technically voluntary, and Rosalind signed her name with full knowledge of what she was signing.

She told me over dinner three weeks before she left, poured us both more wine, and said it the way she said everything that was already decided: flatly, as information.

"I've put my name in," she said. "For the Thorn Court exchange."

I put my glass down. "You've done what."

"Someone needs to go in and report back accurately. The women who come back aren't reliable sources—the claiming changes them, and they don't know it changed them, which makes them worse than useless for intelligence purposes. Someone who knows how to observe needs to go in before they're claimed."

"You're describing a mission you can't come back from."

"I'll write letters."

"Rosalind."

"The alternative is that omegas keep disappearing into Fae courts and nobody learns anything." She met my eyes across the table. "You would do it if they asked you."

She was right. That's what stopped the argument.

I would have done exactly what she was describing, without a second thought, if the service had pointed me at it, and she knew that, and she was pointing herself at it voluntarily, and I had no ground to stand on.

I still don't. I've been standing on no ground for eight months and reading letters that don't sound like her and looking at a photograph of a face that isn't making the face, and this is what going to Mist Court means: I cannot sit here doing nothing.

She said I'll be fine.

She is fine now, possibly, in a way that has nothing to do with who she was. I don't know which is worse—the Rosalind who was changed and doesn't know it, or the Rosalind who is still there, watching herself write careful letters about roses, knowing exactly how they sound.

I pack light. Three years in the field have cured me entirely of attachment to things that don't fit in one bag.