Julia walked Charlotte out, and Erin and Alexandra were alone in the meeting room. The morning sun came through the tall windows and fell in long bright rectangles across the table, catching the steam rising from Erin's untouched coffee. The courtyard outside was quiet. A wood pigeon called from the guttering.
Erin reached across the table and took Alex's hand. The fingers were cold despite the warmth of the room and she could feel the faint tremor running through them, the low-frequency vibration of a body operating under sustained stress. Alex's composure in that meeting had been extraordinary. The steady voice, the folded hands, the quiet authority. But now that the room was empty the effort was showing. The muscles around her jaw were tight. Her shoulders were held a fraction toohigh, drawn up toward her ears in the unconscious posture of someone bracing for a blow.
"You were brilliant in there," Erin said.
Alex didn't answer immediately. She turned her hand over so their palms pressed together and threaded her fingers through Erin's. "I don't feel brilliant. I feel like I'm performing a part and the audience can see the strings."
"They can't. Charlotte couldn't. Julia couldn't."
"You could."
Erin lifted Alex's hand and pressed her lips to her wife's knuckles. The skin was cool and dry and smelled faintly of the hand cream she kept in her dressing table. "That's because I've been reading you for years. Everyone else sees the Queen. I see my wife."
Something in Alex's expression shifted. Not towards comfort, exactly, but towards a kind of recognition. The acknowledgment that being known completely was both a vulnerability and a gift.
"Shall we go outside?" Alexandra said. "I need air."
They walked together through the side door and out onto the castle grounds. The morning was warm and bright, the sky a clear, deep blue that belonged to late summer, and the grass was still damp with dew that darkened the toes of Erin's boots. She could smell cut grass and the sweet, resinous scent of the lime trees along the south wall. Her hand throbbed inside its bandage. The painkillers she'd taken at dawn were wearing off and the split knuckles were making themselves known, a dull, hot pulse that sharpened every time she flexed her fingers. She ignored it. Pain was useful. It kept her anchored in her body when her mind wanted to drift to dark places.
The labradors materialised from somewhere, two golden retrievers and a chocolate lab, and fell into step beside them with wagging tails and cheerful expressions that seemed indecent given the circumstances.
The children were on the main lawn. Frank and Matilda and Hyzenthlay had set up some elaborate game that involved sticks and a ball and rules that appeared to be evolving in real time. Frank was running in circles with his arms outstretched, shouting instructions that nobody was following. Matilda was sitting on the grass with the chocolate lab's head in her lap, patiently waiting for her turn. Hyzenthlay was arranging sticks into a pattern on the ground with the methodical precision of someone designing a runway.
Audrey was in her usual spot, a patch of warm grass near the stone bench, her great fawn body stretched in the sunshine, her jowls resting on her enormous paws. She opened one brown eye when Erin and Alex approached, assessed the situation, and closed it again. Audrey had been with them since before the children. She was aged now, grey around the muzzle, slower on walks, prone to sleeping through entire afternoons. She was the gentlest creature Erin had ever known.
Erin and Alex sat on the stone bench. The warmth of the sun felt strange on Erin's face, pleasant and wrong at the same time, because how could the sun be shining when Florence was missing? How could the sky be blue and the grass be green and the dogs be wagging their tails? The world's indifference to private catastrophe was something Erin had never quite reconciled herself to. She'd seen it during her years in Protection. The normalcy that continued around the edges of crisis. Life going on. People eating breakfast and walking to work and complaining about traffic while somewhere, behind closed doors, someone's world was ending.
Frank spotted them and came running over, the sticks game immediately abandoned. His hair was wild and his shirt had grass stains on both elbows and there was a scratch on his chin that he'd probably acquired from wrestling with one of the dogs.He skidded to a halt in front of the bench and looked up at them with bright, searching eyes.
"Have you found Flo yet?"
The directness of it hit Erin in the chest. No preamble, no tiptoeing. Just the question, plain and fierce, from a boy who wanted his sister back.
"Not yet, mate," Erin said. She kept her voice even, warm, the voice she'd trained herself to use with the children when she needed to be honest without being frightening. "The team is working really hard. They're looking everywhere."
"But it's been a whole day."
"I know. Sometimes these things take time. But there are very clever people helping us and they won't stop until they find her."
Matilda had come over too, the chocolate lab trailing behind her. She stood beside Frank and looked at Erin with those quiet blue eyes that saw too much for an eight-year-old. "Is Florence scared?"
The question slid between Erin's ribs. She wanted to sayno, darling, Florence is fine,but she didn't know that. She didn't know anything about how Florence was feeling or where she was sleeping or whether the people around her were kind or cold or somewhere in between. What she knew was that Matilda needed an answer that would let her sleep tonight.
"Florence is very brave," Erin said. "You know that. She practised that whole speech without blinking. She rides Percy through the woods. She's braver than most of the adults I know. And I think wherever she is right now, she's being brave and knowing that we're coming to get her."
Matilda considered this with the careful analytical attention she gave to everything. Then she nodded. "OK."
Frank was less satisfied. His jaw was set and his small hands were balled into fists and Erin could see the frustration radiatingfrom his body like heat. He wanted to do something. He wanted to fix it. He was eight years old and his sister was gone and nobody would let him help and the injustice of it was written all over his face.
Erin glanced at Alex. Her wife was watching the children with an expression that was barely holding together: the smile fixed, the eyes bright with unshed tears, the hands gripping the edge of the bench so tightly her knuckles were white. She was about to break. Erin could see it, the way she could always see it, the hairline fracture in Alex's composure that preceded the collapse.
"Right," Erin said, standing up. She clapped her hands once, the sharp sound startling the labradors into attention. "Who wants to play a game?"
Frank's head came up. "What game?"
"Capture the flag. Me and Matilda against you and Hyzenthlay. The flags are those two sticks over there." She pointed to two of the sticks Hyzenthlay had been arranging. "Boundaries are the bench to the oak tree. No tackling Audrey. She's Switzerland."
"What about Mummy Alex?" Matilda asked.
