Chapter 5
CLAIRE
Iask for the lessons on day fourteen.
I've been thinking about it for six days—I know because I wrote direct observation of ability use in the margin of my notes on day eight and crossed it out, wrote it again on day ten and crossed it out again, and then spent day twelve arguing with myself about it until the page looked like a crime scene.
The intelligence value is real. That part isn't invented.
Understanding what he can do, how the magic operates, whether there are limits, what it costs him: all of that belongs in the report. All of that is the job.
I write the request on a clean page: Miss Merris respectfully enquires whether Lord Nebulon might be amenable to demonstrating Mist Court abilities for the purposes of the ongoing trade delegation briefings.
A practical understanding of court magic would significantly assist in the accurate representation of Mist Court interests to the Webb trading house.
Clara's voice. Professional. The kind of thing a merchant's assistant would ask.
I fold it and give it to a steward and walk back to my room and sit on the edge of the bed and think about what I've just done.
My thighs are wet.
They have been wet, on and off, for two weeks.
I have been managing it with the same focused attention I apply to all field problems, which means I have been failing to manage it with increasing frequency and a mounting awareness that focused attention might not be the right tool for this particular problem.
The warmth that started at the boundary has settled into my body like a low fever that won't break.
I know what pre-heat is. I have been briefed on it, theoretically—the way you get briefed on things you're told you won't have to handle in the field.
I am handling it in the field.
He agrees within the hour. A note, his handwriting: angular, spare, not a word more than necessary. Tomorrow. Ten o'clock. My study.
I write in my notebook: Request approved. Lesson begins tomorrow.
Intelligence value: high.
I do not write the other thing.
That was day fourteen. Today is day twenty-three and this is lesson five and I am on the wrong side of this decision entirely.
"Again," he says.
I put my hand back on the sphere.
It's a brass sphere the size of an orange, sitting on a velvet cloth on his desk.
The lesson is this: find what's already present in a thing and make it larger.
He demonstrated once—held the sphere in both hands and the light inside it shifted, warmed, like something waking up inside the metal.
Not conjuring. Just showing the thing what it already is.
I have been trying to do this for nine days. I have been failing for nine days. What I have not been failing at—or rather, what I have been failing at with increasing spectacular consistency—is keeping my eyes on the sphere instead of on him.
He's standing just behind my left shoulder, not touching, close enough that the cold comes off him in a steady wave.
I concentrate on the sphere. I think: brass, weight, the slight give of velvet under my palm, this is a lesson, I am here for the lesson.
My eyes drift to the front of his breeches—the upper cock pressing visibly against the cloth, thick and curved even at rest—and I drag them back.
The lower one isn't visible at all, but I know it's there, and that is the specific problem with Mist Court males: there is simply too much, and no clothing quite accounts for it, and I have been thinking about this fact for approximately five days now at inopportune moments.
I press my thighs together and look at the sphere.
I've had two lovers in three years of field work, both human, both brief.
I've had my own hand more times than I'm counting.
None of it comes close to what my body is currently trying to tell me it needs—the cold of his hands working into me, the vibration from inside, a frequency he'd choose and hold until I stopped being a person who could string a sentence together.
This is my professional assessment. I have assessed it very thoroughly. Several times. At two in the morning.
I look at the sphere.
I wonder, involuntarily, what his precum tastes like. The briefing said silver. Ran cool. My mouth actually waters and I hate myself completely and look at the sphere.
"You're thinking about the outcome again," he says.
"How can you tell?"
"Your jaw."
I unclench my jaw. Three weeks of pre-heat and his court magic running through every room like a low warm current, and I am in his study for the fifth time in nine days close enough to feel the cold radiating off him, and the slick between my thighs has been a constant problem since I walked through his door.
I breathe. I keep my eyes forward. Troop movements near the eastern border.
The Stone Court captain's red face. The intelligence gap I still can't account for—the piece that should be there and isn't—
"Better," he says.
The sphere shimmers. A ripple across the brass, warm, there and gone.
I didn't do that.
I keep my face neutral and wait for him to say something about it.
He doesn't. He leans forward slightly to look at the sphere, close enough that the cold of his face is near my cheek, and my breath catches before I can stop it.
One audible inhale. I feel him register it—not react, just register, the way he registers everything—and then he straightens without comment, and my heart rate is doing something I am absolutely not going to write in the notebook.
His hand is a centimetre from mine on the sphere.
Not touching. I can feel the cold of it from here—the specific cold that is nothing like winter, nothing like a room without a fire, something that my body has apparently decided to interpret as its opposite despite all available evidence to the contrary.
My eyes go to his hands. His hands are—
I look at the sphere.
"When you stop trying to do it," he says quietly, "it happens on its own."
"That's not very useful as instruction."
"No." A pause that goes on slightly too long. "It's more of an observation."
I look up at him. A mistake. He's watching me now, not the sphere, and the expression on his face is not the cool patience from the Gathering halls—it's something quieter and focused, and it goes all the way through me before I manage to look back down at the brass and compose myself back into a person conducting fieldwork.
The sphere shimmers again.
Still not me.
He doesn't push. Three weeks now, every lever available—the magic, the proximity, an omega in pre-heat in his own court—and he hasn't pulled any of them.
Any other alpha would be pressing. Every instinct I have says he should be pressing; it is the logical play, the obvious move, and I have been waiting for it every lesson with my guard up and my professional face on and some part of me that I refuse to look at directly also waiting for it in a completely different way.
Instead he stands at my left shoulder and lets the sphere do whatever it's doing and watches me with that expression and says nothing.
I hate it. I hate it in the specific way of something that's working.
And underneath that—here is the thing I can't write anywhere—I want him to.
I want him to stop being patient and just take the choice away from me.
Push me against the wall of his study and not give me the option of saying no and make it something that's happening to me rather than something I'm choosing, because then at least I'd know who I am.
Operationally compromised, yes, but not this: not a professional intelligence operative standing in an enemy lord's study soaking through her underthings and quietly disappointed that he's being civil.
That's what I can't stand. The disappointment. Every time I leave and he hasn't done anything, some part of me registers it as a loss. I find this completely unbearable. I have found it unbearable every single time and gone back on Thursday anyway.
I don't know who that person is. I've been in the field for three years and I know exactly who I am in every room I walk into.
I do not know who she is—the one who wants a Mist Court lord to take the decision away from her.
I don't recognise her. She frightens me a little, if I'm honest, and I am trying very hard not to be honest.
What are you running. I want to ask him. He'd say: something that was already true. Twenty-three days and I still don't know what to do with that answer, or whether the thing that was already true was always in him or whether some of it was already in me.
"Same time Thursday?" he says.
"Yes." Clara's voice, steady, professional. "Thank you, my lord."
I'm looking at his throat when I say it—the line of it, the silver threading through his braided hair catching the lamp. I make myself look at his face instead, which is worse, so I look at the middle distance and smile Clara's mild professional smile and gather my notes.
He inclines his head. I leave.
I walk back through the east corridor with my notes under my arm and my thighs pressed together and the cold of him still sitting along my left side like a hand that isn't there.
Lena's message arrived four days ago. I burned it two paragraphs in because I knew what the third paragraph was going to say and I didn't need to read it to my face. Get out if you need to. I know Lena. That's what it said.
I have eleven more days on the mission.
I've been waking at two in the morning for three nights.
Not nightmares—just heat, and the cold of him somehow present in a room he's never been in, and my own body a problem I can't solve in the dark.
I lie there cataloguing it: slick pooling, core temperature elevated, specific awareness of his study as a direction, his name rising in throat without prompting. Useful intelligence. All of it.
I know what I'm doing.
Back in my room I open the notebook.
I write: Day 23. Lesson five. Sphere responded to pervasive—
I cross it out.
I write: going to be in serious trouble.
I look at that for a long time. Then I lie back on the bed and press my hand to my own cheek, where the cold of him almost reached when he leaned in. My hand is warm. It's nothing like his.
I lie there until four in the morning. The low fever of the pre-heat sits in my body and doesn't break.
My mind keeps going back to the outline of him through his breeches, to both of them, the weight and the cold and the vibration from the inside—and then past that, to the thing sitting underneath all of it, the thing I can't stop circling back to no matter how many times I catalog it and set it aside: I want him to not ask.
I want to walk into his study on Thursday and have him simply decide.
Some part of me that I don't recognise has been waiting for that every single lesson and leaving each time hollowed out by how much it didn't happen.
I have been trained to know who I am in every room I walk into.
I don't know who this is.
Eleven days.
I know what I'm doing.
I'm going to be in serious trouble.