Chapter 1 #2
I have also, over three years, developed a thorough professional understanding of what I am and what I'm not.
I am an intelligence operative who has successfully run three deep-cover operations, two of them in Fae-adjacent territories where the magic runs through the air like weather.
I know what illusion magic feels like from the outside—the warmth that arrives slightly before a reassurance, the way a suspicion softens around its edges before it can fully form.
I have documented it in field notes. I have built a working taxonomy of it.
I have an internal catalogue of my own emotional responses, professionally maintained, which I consult the way another person might consult a map.
What happened to the women who came back changed—what happened to Rosalind, possibly—is what happens to people who don't know what they're feeling and why. Who can't read the instrument while they're sitting inside it.
I can read the instrument. I have been reading it since I was sixteen.
I am not going to end up writing cheerful letters about roses.
The Clara cover goes in last: the papers, the ledger with six weeks of fictional business transactions in her rounder handwriting, the letters of introduction that will get me through the Gathering's guest verification.
I pack the photograph of Rosalind and then take it out and leave it on the table face-up, because I don't need the reminder and I want it to be the last thing I see before I go.
I write Lena a note. Three sentences: the drop location, the mission brief summary, and the words I'll be in contact within a fortnight.
I seal it and leave it with the concierge downstairs for the late post, which means she'll have it tomorrow morning, which means she will have had approximately twelve hours to formulate her response before I'm past the point where a response changes anything.
This is professional courtesy. It is also, I recognise, the kind of timing that keeps a person from having to hear Lena's voice on the other end of a telephone saying Claire in the tone she uses when she's already lost the argument and knows it.
I am going to Mist Court to find out what happened to my sister.
I am going to collect the intelligence the mission brief requires, because I am a professional and I was already going to be there anyway.
I am going to come back in six weeks with both things accomplished, and Lena is going to say I knew you were going to do that and I am going to say and? and we are going to proceed from there.
The carriage comes at half past five. I'm downstairs at twenty past.
The driver takes my bag with the efficiency of someone who has done this since before I was born and finds nothing remarkable about any of it. He's a small man, somewhere between fifty and seventy, with the weathered look of a person who has spent most of his life in weather.
"Miss Merris," he says. Clara's name already. Good.
"Thank you." I climb in.
He settles the bag, checks the rigging, and we pull away from the safe house at half past five exactly. The streets are grey and nearly empty—a milk cart, a woman with a basket, the particular stillness of a city that hasn't decided to be awake yet.
Around the first hour he says, without turning: "Roads east are good this time of year. Dry."
"That's useful."
"Mud's the enemy," he says. "Mud and the weather coming off the hills past Carren. Can add two hours to a journey that ought to be five."
"Has it been dry past Carren?"
"Three weeks now. Unusual. Usually rains through to the end of the month."
I look out at the fields opening up past the city's edge.
The sky is going gold at the horizon. It is a fine morning to walk into an obvious trap.
The obvious trap is the point—you walk in with your eyes open and your taxonomy in order and your instrument calibrated, and you see what they're running, and then you turn it toward your own ends. That's the whole job.
I think: I know what this is. I think: I'm going anyway. These are not contradictory positions, and if Lena were here she'd tell me they are, and we'd have the argument, and I'd lose it technically and then go anyway, which is the usual pattern and which she expects.
What I'm not going to do—what none of the women before me seem to have understood how to do—is get confused about what I feel and why I feel it.
The claiming bond runs on something already present; I've read the briefings.
It amplifies existing feeling, finds the wanting that's there and makes it larger than its natural size.
The key, clearly, is not to want anything to begin with.
Keep the inventory clean. Don't let anything accumulate that you haven't authorized.
I have been managing my inventory for three years. I am very good at this.
There's a warmth in my chest around the second hour, sitting quiet under my breastbone.
I notice it, note it, and file it under carriage travel in autumn, physical sensation, ambient.
Three years in the field and I know every flavor of my own anxiety.
This doesn't feel like anxiety. It feels almost like direction—a low pull from somewhere ahead of me on the road, steady and even, undemanding.
I pull the lap blanket tighter.
The road runs east. I watch it go and I think about Rosalind walking in the gardens every morning before breakfast, peaceful, and I think about Lena opening my note tomorrow and going very still in the way she goes still when something has already happened that she was trying to prevent.
I'll be fine, I think.
I mean it. That's the part that will eventually be funny.