This is the methodology. Everything I know he's withheld. Every question that received a deflection. Every moment I was closest to the eastern network thread and was redirected via proximity and the bond. I have twenty-nine entries in the other notebook—the timestamps, the warmth arrivals, the moments when my suspicion eased at exactly the wrong moment. Twenty-nine entries that add up to a shape. Tonight I'm going to look at the centre of the shape.
Entry one:He has access to HV-7 file. Has had it since before I asked. Stalled on October logs for three days—specific delay, not administrative. Why.
Entry two:The magic smooths at moments of highest suspicion. Three documented instances when I was closest to the eastern network thread. Mechanism: proximity, bond warmth, specific touch sequence. All three times: I redirected. All three times: filed it correctly after.
Entry three:He told me she was alive. No magic running when he said it. Why did he drop the magic for the lie specifically.
I look at entry three for a long time.
I know why. I have known why since the moment he said it, in the part of me that runs assessments whether I instruct it to or not. He dropped the magic for the lie because he wanted to know if I'd believe him without the warmth underneath. Whether the bond and the claiming and the months of proximity had built enough that the lie would hold on its own.
It held.
I believed him.
Entry four:The arithmetic about Lena. Grid reference 7-14 on page eight. The date on the eastern summary. The relay point. The farmhouse icon. Three weeks between page eight and the summary. I have been not-finishing this arithmetic and I know why and tonight I'm going to finish it.
I pick up the pen.
I look at the wall. The map is there. The farmhouse icon is there.
I finish the arithmetic.
I sit with what I've finished for a long time.
Then I close the notebook. I don't go to his rooms. I go to my own room in the cold.
The Lena thought sits in my chest at its actual size. No warmth arriving to ease it. No magic running underneath. Just the thought and the size of it and the grief and the list.
She was coming for me.
I let it be the size it is.
20
VAELIS
She didn't come to my rooms last night.
I felt it through the bond—the lamp in the workroom burning past midnight, the quality of her state that I've learned to read as precisely as I read everything: not the focused hum of intelligence analysis but the specific stillness of a person arriving at something they've been moving toward for a long time. I stood in the corridor in the dark and read entry twenty-nine through the wall.
Then I went in and told her to come to bed.
She said not tonight.
I said all right. I went back to my rooms. I lay in my own bed with the bond running between us and her lamp burning through the wall, and I did not sleep. I lay there with both my cocks aching at the low frequency of the bond's pull, and I thought about entry twenty-nine and entries one through twenty-eight and the particular quality of her handwriting when she writes something she's been working toward.
She wrote for another two hours after I left.
Aldric comeswith the morning stack at the usual hour. He lays it out in the exact same order, says "Good morning, my lord" in the exact same register. The consistency of Aldric is a fixed point. I have several.
"Good morning," I say.
He sets out the stack. Court reports. Overnight dispatches. The morning intelligence channel, which contains, at the top, the eastern territories summary.
The eastern territories summary is the outcome of an operation six months in the making. Lena Riley's cell ran extraction routes—safe houses and transit lines for omegas who wanted to leave Fae courts. That was their primary work: finding claimed omegas who'd sent word out, building the routes, getting them through. Her cell had been operating in the eastern territories for four years. By the time I became aware of them they had successfully extracted eleven omegas from three courts. By the time I signed the order they had begun preparations for a twelfth.
The twelfth was Claire.
