Chapter 18
CLAIRE
He put me on a train two days after the analysis.
Not framed as a reward—he is careful about framing, careful enough that I notice when it shifts—just: Rosalind.
I can arrange a pass to Thorn Court. Three days, no handlers in the sitting room.
He said it the way he says the things he actually means: flat, nothing running underneath.
I said yes before he finished the sentence.
Three hours of steam train. The bond pulling from the direction of Mist Court before I've even cleared the Thorn Court platform. I press my fingers to the mist-marks at my throat and watch the fields go backward out the window.
Rosalind meets me in the rose-climbing sitting room and she is enormously, unmistakably pregnant.
Eight months. I calculate it without meaning to—eight months since the claiming, which means this is what eight months of Fae pregnancy looks like, which means the child is close, and my sister is sitting in the chair with both hands resting on the curve of her stomach and she looks up when I come in and her face does the thing I have been waiting eight months to see: it just does what it does. Nothing managed.
"You look terrible," she says.
I sit down. My eyes keep going to her stomach. "You're—"
"Very pregnant, yes. You can look at it. It's quite visible." She says this with the specific cheerfulness of a person who has been watching people try not to look at something for several months. "Sit down properly. You're hovering."
I sit.
She looks real. That's the word I keep arriving at.
Not performing happiness. Not arranged. The claiming marks at her throat are different from mine—Thorn Court patterns, vine-like, shifting faintly green—and her weight has redistributed itself around the pregnancy, and she is holding her tea with both hands below the bump like a shelf, and she looks like a person who is not thinking about looking like anything.
"The claiming marks," she says, nodding at my throat, where the mist-patterns shift. "That explains the appearance."
"Does it."
"You have the look of someone who hasn't slept properly in weeks and is refusing to admit it." She settles back slightly in the chair, the adjustment of someone learning a new centre of gravity. "How is he."
"Complicated," I say.
She makes a sound that is entirely the Rosalind from before the letters. "They're all complicated. That's not a useful answer."
I spent eight months reading letters that were in her handwriting and not her voice.
The woman across from me has her voice and her handwriting and the particular way she holds her tea cup—thumb through the handle, forefinger braced against the rim—that is entirely her and entirely unchanged.
I came here believing she had been taken apart and reconstructed into something cheerful and wrong.
I don't know yet what I'm looking at. I know that it has Kaelen's child in it, which is a thing I am going to sit with at some point, but not this moment.
"You came to save me," she says. Not an accusation. Just a statement.
"I came to find out if you needed saving."
"And?"
I look at her. At the marks and the pregnancy and her face doing what her face does. "Do you."
She looks back. Her expression does something that would have been exasperation from the old Rosalind but runs warmer than that—actually amused. "No," she says. "Sit back properly. You're perched."
I hadn't noticed I was perched. I sit back.
"Tell me why the letters sounded wrong," I say. "I read them so many times the paper went soft. They were in your handwriting and they weren't you."
She is quiet for a moment. Outside the sitting room windows the Thorn Court grounds are overcast and October-grey, the rose vines stripped back to their winter canes.
"Because I was trying to write to you as the new version of myself," she says, "and I didn't know how yet.
I didn't know what I sounded like. The performance was the wall, Claire—I spent twenty-six years performing someone and I didn't know it was a performance until it was gone.
The letters sounded wrong because I was writing the new version trying to sound like the old one and getting neither. "
"The walls come down," I say. "That's what the women said. When they came back."
"The walls come down. But they weren't protecting anything real.
They were just walls. I built them when I was ten and our father stopped knowing how to look at us, and I've been standing inside them ever since.
" She sets down her tea and puts both hands back on her stomach, automatic, the habit of the last several months.
"What's underneath is entirely mine. That's not nothing. "
I look at her hands on the curve of the pregnancy. I look at the marks at my own throat. "Did you feel managed," I say. "Early on. Before you trusted it. The warmth—the specific easing of things that should have been louder."
She looks at me steadily. "You have more of a vocabulary for it than I did."
"I was briefed on omegaverse biology before I arrived," I say. "I know what approval dependency is. I know what the illusion magic does." A pause. "Knowing and stopping are different problems."
"Yes," she says. "They are."
I look at her stomach again. I can't stop looking at it. It is very present in the room.
"Are you afraid?" I say.
She considers this. "No," she says. "Which I know sounds wrong from the outside. But no. I'm not afraid." She tilts her head, watching me. "Are you?"
I don't answer immediately. She waits. She has always been very good at waiting—better than me, who runs toward things. She learned to wait from somewhere and I never did.
"I don't know yet what I am," I say.
She nods. Like this is an acceptable answer. Like she said something similar, once, and found her way through it. "You will," she says. "Give it time."
We sit for two hours. She asks about the work and I tell her, and she asks about him and I give her less, and she asks about Lena and I give her nothing because I can't yet.
She doesn't push. What I take from her instead: she is happy in the specific way of someone who found out what they are without the performance and is living inside it.
The bond didn't take her apart. The bond took the performance away.
Before I go she stands to embrace me—carefully, the pregnancy between us, both of us adjusting—and she holds on for longer than she would have before, which is to say she holds on at all. The old Rosalind did not hold on.
"I'm glad you came," she says, into my hair. "I'm glad it was you."
"I came to rescue you," I say.
"I know." She pulls back enough to look at my face. Her expression is exactly Rosalind: the slightly-pleased look of a person who is right about something and would prefer not to have to say so. "How's that going?"
I think about this on the train home—three hours of flat November countryside, the bond pulling from the direction of Mist Court before I've even left the Thorn Court platform.
I press my fingers to the mist-marks at my throat and watch the fields go backward out the window and think: I have been performing since I was sixteen.
I have been whoever the mission required.
I don't know what's left when the room doesn't need anything.
The heat showed me something. Five days not performing anything, and what came out was someone who said yours and meant it completely and kept her eyes open through all of it.
I don't know if that person is me or if that's what six weeks of magic and heat and claiming does to a person.
But Rosalind was sitting in that chair with her hands on her stomach looking like someone who found out what they were—and she looked more like herself than she has since our mother left.
I can't find the line. I've been trying for weeks and I can't find it.
The city appears. I pick up my bag.
Back at Mist Court I bring him the Thorn Court analysis—I absorbed the whole visit without meaning to, the spy running underneath even when I was just sitting across from my sister—and he reads it across his desk and through the bond his satisfaction arrives before I've finished speaking.
I glow at it. I feel myself glow. I watch the glowing happen and I add it to the list and the glowing keeps going anyway, because knowing what it is and making it stop are still different problems.
I turn away before he can see it.
He sees it.
That night I go to him with the visit still running through my head and the claiming marks warm at my throat and the Lena thought sitting in my chest like a stone.
His cold hands moving across my skin in the dark, the bond warming with his proximity.
I let him. I have been letting him every night for weeks and I am going to keep letting him because the wanting is real—I've established this.
I no longer know which of the things I feel in this bed are mine and which have been made larger than their natural size.
Tonight is not the night I figure that out.
Some nights the looking has to stop.
His mouth on the claiming marks, that third thing going through me, and I say his name quietly—just his name, the specific note of someone who knows what they're doing and is doing it. He groans in his throat and pulls me closer.
"Rosalind said the walls come down," I say, after a while.
He stills. "What about it."
"She said it wasn't the bond that took her apart.
It was the performance. The bond just removed the performance.
" I keep my face against his throat. "I'm wondering whether there's a real version of me underneath all the covers.
And whether that person is the one who keeps saying yours into your throat.
Or whether that's just what the magic made larger. "
A long pause.
"I can't answer that for you," he says.
"I know. That's not why I said it."
"Why did you say it?"
"Because Rosalind is happy. Actually, visibly, not-performing happy.
Eight months pregnant and sitting in that chair like someone who has found out exactly what she is.
" I breathe. "And I came here to rescue her and there's nothing to rescue and I'm lying here with your marks on my skin and I have not been able to find the floor under any of this for weeks and I needed to say that out loud to someone. "
He is very still for a moment. Then his arms tighten around me—not the warmth of the magic, not the approval pull working, just the specific cold certainty of arms that know where to be.
"The floor is there," he says. "You've been standing on it since day one."
"I don't feel like I'm standing on it."
"No," he says. "I know."
He runs his mouth down my throat again, the marks responding, and I stop thinking about the floor. Not because I've found it. Because some nights the looking has to stop.
He takes his time. He always takes his time and it always dismantles me and I am aware of this happening and I let it happen.
Both cocks. Both vibrations. The full stretch.
The knot. His court magic in the release and then the seed after.
The bond running wide open. I say yours into his throat and he makes the sound that is not performed and his hands are in my hair.
I lie there after with the Lena thought sitting in my chest, unsmoothed, still the actual size of it.
The magic is not running. I can tell by the absence of easing.
Either he's not running it or I am getting better at feeling through it, and either way the Lena thought is there, large and waiting, and I am not done with it.
I close my eyes.
In the morning I will start the list of what he knows that I don't.
I've been not-building that list for two weeks.
I know why. I know the shape of what I'm going to find when I build it—the grid references, the dates, the relay points—and I know the list is going to end in a conclusion I am not ready to reach.
I have been using the warmth and the bond and the specific pleasure of being seen as a reason to delay the conclusion.
That ends tonight.
Not because I'm not afraid of the conclusion. I'm afraid of what comes after—the choice I'm going to have to make in the morning with the full picture assembled and no magic running and no bond warmth softening the edges. Just me and the arithmetic and what I do with it.
He said: the floor is there. You've been standing on it since day one.
I am going to find out what the floor is made of.
I close my eyes. His hands are in my hair. The Lena thought sits in my chest, unsmoothed. The list assembles itself in the dark behind my eyes, entry by entry, all the things I have been not-looking at directly.
In the morning I'll know what I'm working with.
I hold still. I breathe. I let the grief be the size it is.
I let myself want what I want.
Both things. At the same time.