In this photograph she is not making the face.
She volunteered for the exchange program. That is the part I keep returning to. The government's cultural exchanges—which everyone in the service understands as a polite name for delivering eligible omegas to Fae courts in exchange for favorable treaty terms—were technically voluntary, and Rosalind signed her name with full knowledge of what she was signing. She told me over dinner three weeks before sheleft, poured us both more wine, and said it the way she said everything that was already decided: flatly, as information.
"I've put my name in," she said. "For the Thorn Court exchange."
I put my glass down. "You've done what."
"Someone needs to go in and report back accurately. The women who come back aren't reliable sources—the claiming changes them, and they don't know it changed them, which makes them worse than useless for intelligence purposes. Someone who knows how to observe needs to go in before they're claimed."
"You're describing a mission you can't come back from."
"I'll write letters."
"Rosalind."
"The alternative is that omegas keep disappearing into Fae courts and nobody learns anything." She met my eyes across the table. "You would do it if they asked you."
She was right. That's what stopped the argument. I would have done exactly what she was describing, without a second thought, if the service had pointed me at it, and she knew that, and she was pointing herself at it voluntarily, and I had no ground to stand on. I still don't. I've been standing on no ground for eight months and reading letters that don't sound like her and looking at a photograph of a face that isn't making the face, and this is what going to Mist Court means: I cannot sit here doing nothing.
She saidI'll be fine.
She is fine now, possibly, in a way that has nothing to do with who she was. I don't know which is worse—the Rosalind who was changed and doesn't know it, or the Rosalind who is still there, watching herself write careful letters about roses, knowing exactly how they sound.
I pack light.Three years in the field have cured me entirely of attachment to things that don't fit in one bag.
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 wordsI'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 sayingClairein 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 sayI knew you were going to do thatand I am going to sayand?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?"
