Chapter 30
CLAIRE
Iwake up and I'm still here.
That's the first thing I notice. I'm still here and it's morning.
The light at the edge of the curtains is grey and early and the bond is running between us warm in a way that is different from every morning before the separation—something settled in it, something that didn't break when I tested it and knows now that it didn't break.
His hand is in my hair. I don't know when it got there. He does it without waking, has done it since the first night. I have been collecting this information for weeks and keeping it somewhere, and now it has a file of its own and I'm not pretending it doesn't.
I lie still for a while and let him think I'm sleeping.
I am still angry. I made a decision with clear eyes two days ago in a cold boarding house room and I know exactly what I decided and why, and the anger is not at odds with the decision.
They are both just true. I am going to grieve Lena for the rest of my life.
I am going to be in this bed in the morning. Both things.
My stomach is doing something low and unsettled, the particular nausea I have been waking to for two weeks—the pregnancy asserting itself before I am fully awake, before I have a choice about receiving it.
I swallow it down. I breathe through my nose.
I have learned the technique: still, slow, wait for it to pass.
It passes.
I get up.
He doesn't stop me. Doesn't pretend he was asleep.
I find my things in the dark and go out onto the balcony.
The mist runs through the court grounds below.
Slow and deliberate, the way it always moves at this hour.
The amber lanterns over the lake are the only fixed points—three of them, steady in the shifting grey.
The grounds go on and on, the tree line at the far edge, the gate I walked through eight weeks ago and left through three days ago and came back through yesterday.
The gate. Mine to use. That's new. That is genuinely new.
I put my hand on my stomach.
The child is there. Has been there since the claiming, or near enough.
Our daughter, Oberon said last night, and I said with parents like us she'll need to know the difference and I meant it and I was glad I said it—it was the truest thing I'd said in weeks, maybe months.
My daughter. His. The two of us, the least likely combination of people to be doing this together, and here we are.
Rosalind's baby will be here any day. She was eight months when I visited.
I will be an aunt within the month, probably sooner.
Two daughters of a cold man with a cold house, both of us tangled up with Fae lords, both carrying things that can't be put down.
I wonder if she woke up some morning in Thorn Court and thought: how did I get here. I wonder if she had an answer.
I wonder if I'll have one by the time my daughter is old enough to ask.
Lena would have had something to say about all of this.
Something that started with Claire, no, which was the sound she made whenever I was about to walk into something she'd already seen the shape of.
She saw the shape of this one and tried to hand me a door and I burned the message and handed him the map instead.
I will carry that for the rest of my life.
I think I am supposed to carry it. I think putting it down would be the wrong kind of letting go.
I hear him behind me.
He stops in the doorway, giving me the balcony—giving me the space, which is the kind of thing he does now, the kind of thing I have been noticing and not knowing what to do with. I turn and look at him in the grey morning light.
Dark brown skin and silver-white braids, dozens of them, loose at the shoulders, and those silver-to-violet eyes that I watched running calculations on me for eight weeks before I knew that's what they were doing.
He has the patience of something very old.
He stands in doorways the way stone stands—not still exactly, but certain.
Like it is not bothered by the question of whether it belongs there.
He looks at me across the balcony.
I look back.
I have been reading his face since the Gathering and I can read it now without the warmth running underneath distorting my read.
The wanting is real. The patience is real.
The fraction of a second on the gallery platform when I asked was any of it real and his face did something before he could arrange it—that was real too.
I've been keeping that since October and I know what it was.
I don't know yet who he is without the plan. We're at the beginning of that.
I reached toward that beginning every time I walked back through his doors. I am standing here in the morning mist with the gate visible from the railing and the amber lanterns holding steady over the lake, and I am still angry, and I am still here.
"I'm still angry," I say.
"I know."
"I'm going to be angry for a long time."
"Yes," he says. Just yes. No argument, no structure around it, no attempt to make the anger smaller.
I look at the grounds. The mist moves through the lantern light.
"What did Oberon mean," I say. "Not the claiming. The remaking."
He comes to stand beside me at the railing. The court-cold of him reaches me in the grey air, and the bond goes from warm-at-a-distance to warm-and-present, a different quality. My body notices the difference before I decide to.
"The other bonds were made through the claiming and held through the magic," he says.
"Ours broke. You took it apart. You came back.
" He looks at the grounds. "That's different.
That's what Mist Court contributes—not intelligence gathered.
Truth held onto after everything that makes letting go easier. "
I look at him.
He looks at the grounds.
"She said with parents like us," he says. "I liked that."
"So did I," I say.
We stand there for a moment. The mist moves. The lanterns hold.
I turn and put my back to the railing and I look at him in the grey light—the braids, the patience, the face I have been reading since October and am still learning.
He is six hundred and eighty-nine years old and I am twenty-one and our daughter is going to need to know the difference between what is real and what has been made to feel real, and she will, because she will grow up in a court that teaches it.
I want that for her. I want her to be sharp and clear-eyed and difficult in exactly the way I was supposed to be and wasn't, all those months, until I was.
I want a lot of things this morning.
I reach for him.
He comes to me fast. His hands at my waist—the cold of them, the shock of it, still a shock every time no matter how well I know it's coming—and his mouth on mine and I push my hands into his hair and kiss him back and the bond opens between us and there is nothing underneath it except us.
No warmth that wasn't already there. No management.
Just this.
He turns me to face the railing.
I put my hands on it. My skirts go up—his hands shoving the fabric out of the way—and then there is cold iron and his cold hands and the court grounds below us, the amber lanterns still burning through the mist. The grounds below. The paths beginning to show in the thinning grey.
Anyone could look up.
"Hands on the railing," he says, against my ear. "Don't let go."
He presses the upper cock to my arse.
Cold and thick and the vibration starts at base frequency, involuntary, his biology before his intention—and I make a sound against the morning air and grip the railing hard.
He works in slowly. He always does this slowly, even now, even here, even with the court waking below us and the sound of my breathing carrying out over the stone.
"More," I say.
He drives deeper. The upper cock seated fully, and the stretch and the vibration running together—and the sound I make goes out over the court and I don't try to stop it. His hands lock on my hips.
"Anyone walking below can hear you," he says, against my ear. Low and certain.
I know.
"Good," he says, and drives in again.
He moves. Long and hard and I grip the railing and I am loud, I am embarrassingly loud, and the sound of it echoes off every stone surface of the manor and carries out over the grounds and I cannot stop it and I find, halfway through trying, that I don't want to.
That something in me wants the court to know.
Wants the whole ancient stone-and-mist-and-amber-lantern court to know what this is.
Mine, I think, and then immediately: his. Both. Both at once.
"The lower," I say. "Please—both—"
"Ask properly."
I hate him. I grip the railing harder. "Please. I need your lower cock, please—"
He presses the lower cock to my cunt.
Cold where I am burning and I am already wet and already desperate and when he presses in the sensation doubles—the upper vibrating in my arse and the lower filling my cunt and the wall between them impossibly thin—and the sound I make is not a word.
"There she is," he says, rough. "Taking both."
He moves with both and I lose sentences.
I lose the court below, the lanterns, the cold morning air, the fact that Rosalind's baby is almost here and I am about to be an aunt and my own daughter is already there in my body, the fact of her, the permanent fact of her.
I lose all of it except his hands on my hips and both cocks driving into me from behind.
The upper cock at its high tight vibrating hum.
The lower cock at its deeper throb. Two different frequencies at once, reaching different parts of me simultaneously, and together they are impossible, they leave nowhere untouched.
"You're soaking," he says. "Running down my balls. All of that is mine."
"Yours—" A thrust. "Yours, yes—"
"The whole court is going to know," he says, against my throat. "What you sound like. What I do to you."
"I don't care—"
"I know you don't," he says. "That's why."