Chapter 11: Proximity

The east wing corridor was quiet except for the scratch of graphite on paper. I'd been mapping the same section of wall for the better part of an hour—tracing the faint shimmer of a ley line that ran three feet above the stone, measuring the pulse of it with the compass I'd improvised from one of the Court's silver instruments and sheer stubbornness. It was tedious work. It was also the only thing that felt entirely mine, and I clung to it.

Fourteen days in the Unseelie Court. Fourteen days of learning that my ancestor Mara had signed away her bloodline to a fae king who was still sitting on his throne, still collecting on a debt written in blood and bargain.

Permanent residence. The words had taken up permanent residence in my skull too, eating away at the inside of my head like rust.

I was not thinking about Cael. I was thinking about ley lines. I was thinking about the east wing's architecture, the way stone had been laid centuries ago in patterns that made no sense until you understood they were following the threads of power beneath the ground. I was thinking about anything that required the full attention of someone who desperately needed something to do with her hands that wasn't thinking about Cael.

The map spread across the high table was three quarters done. I'd divided the Court into sections, plotted every ley line I could sense or trace, marked the convergence points in careful notation. It was a work of cartography and desperation in equal measure. As long as I was mapping, I was not contemplating the permanence of my situation. As long as I was mapping, I was not noticing things I had no business noticing.

The Mark on my wrist grew warm.

Not the gentle pulse I'd learned to recognize—the light warmth that meant Cael was somewhere in the building, three rooms away or further. This was different. This was heat that climbed from my wrist toward my elbow in a slow burn, the kind of warmth that had a direction to it, a vector pointing at a very specific proximity.

I did not look up from the map.

I kept my eyes on the lines I was drawing, the neat notations in the margins, the scale I'd marked at the corner. If I kept my attention on the paper in front of me with sufficient force, perhaps the warmth would level out and retreat to whatever distance Cael usually maintained. He was good at maintaining distance. He was excellent at it. He stood in rooms looking at me as though I were a problem he was taking his time solving, and he did it from a properly removed location.

The warmth got hotter.

I set down the graphite pencil. It took me several seconds of staring at my own hand on the table to realize I was stalling. I turned around.

Cael stood about six feet away, watching me work.

It was not unusual for him to appear in the spaces I occupied. He did it often enough that I'd learned to sense him without the Mark's helpful burning warning system. He would materialize in doorways or around corners with the kind of casual disregard for normal movement that a being who existed partly outside the physics of this world could manage. But he did not usually stand as close as this. He did not usually close the gap to six feet and then simply remain there, watching.

He was dressed in the same high-collared black he seemed to prefer—a choice that made his silver hair look like a blade, and his eyes look like the light that caught it. He was motionless in the way only immortal things could be motionless: not poised to move, just fundamentally still in his center, the way a tree is still. He looked at the map, then at my hand, then at my face.

I did not move away from the table.

He did not retreat to the doorway or the far wall or any of the distances he typically maintained. He remained precisely where he was, and the Mark burned hotter, and I realized with a clarity that was entirely unwelcome that something had shifted in the parameters of this particular situation.

"I am finding your methodology interesting," he said. His voice carried no inflection. It was simply a statement of fact from a being who dealt in facts and fae-contracts and apparently standing very still while looking at cartographers.

"I'm mapping ley lines," I said. My voice sounded normal. I was extraordinarily proud of this. "It's not complicated."

"I did not suggest it was complicated. I suggested I was finding it interesting."

He was still standing six feet away. The Mark was still burning. I looked back at the map because looking at him in this particular moment felt like a security risk of the highest order, like standing near the edge of a high place and getting the sudden urge to lean.

I heard him move—not much, just a single step closer. The Mark turned from warm to hot. I could see the silver of it at my wrist now, faint but visible against my skin. The candlelight in the east wing caught it. Or perhaps it was generating its own light. I was not entirely certain how the Mark worked, despite having worn it for two weeks.

"Do not approach the ley line convergences without assistance," he said.

I looked up. "Excuse me?"

"The convergence points. They are unstable at this particular point in the turn of the year. If you attempt to map them alone and miscalculate the resonance, the backlash could harm you."

It took me a moment to process this, which was perhaps a moment too long, because while I was processing he closed the distance between us from six feet to something much shorter. Not touching distance. Just the distance where the air between two people becomes a shared thing instead of separate territories.

The Mark went liquid and silver-bright.

"You could have sent a note," I said. It was ridiculous. It was also the only thing I could think to say that did not involve looking at how close he was or acknowledging that the magic visible at my wrist was matched by something visible in the air itself—a silver current, thin as thread but vivid, running from the Mark to something in him that had no name in any language I spoke.

"A note seemed less likely to be ignored," he said.

He was looking at the map. He was also looking at the place where my hand rested on the table, three inches from the edge. He was doing neither of these things with particular intensity, just with the attention of someone who had been thinking about looking at these things for a very long time and had decided to do it now.

The silence that followed was the kind of silence that had weight. It was not awkward. It was purposeful. It was the silence of two people standing very close together in a corridor in a fae court, neither of whom was moving away, and both of whom was aware that this had become a choice rather than something circumstantial.

I could feel the warmth from my wrist spiraling up my arm. I could feel the exact point where his presence began—the threshold where the air temperature changed, where the fae-cold of him met the human-warm of me, and that meeting point was marked in silver and amber at the edge of my vision when I looked down.

"You should continue mapping," he said. It was not an instruction. It was something closer to an observation about what was true in this moment.

"I cannot map when you are standing there," I said. It was also true. It was also the worst possible thing to have said because it acknowledged that his proximity was a factor in my ability to function, and I had spent fourteen days trying very hard to pretend that nothing about this was a factor in anything.

"I am not preventing you from reaching the table."

"No," I said. "You were just standing there and that was the problem."

He did not move. The current between us did not diminish. I could see it clearly now—not because it had grown brighter but because I had stopped pretending not to look at it. Silver from wherever in him that corresponded to the Mark. Amber from the Mark itself, responding to something in him that was ancient and cold and had apparently been waiting for approximately two hundred years to have this particular conversation in this particular corridor while I stood very still and tried to remember how to breathe in a manner that seemed natural.

"You're telling me my ancestor sold her descendants into living here forever," I had said, what felt like years ago but was perhaps only hours.

I had not asked what I was supposed to do with that information. I had not asked what happened to people who lived in the Unseelie Court forever. I had certainly not asked why the Unseelie King was standing this close to me in the east wing corridor, looking at my map and my wrist and my face with the expression of someone who knew exactly what he was doing and had no intention of stopping.

"Do not approach the convergences alone," he said again. His voice had not changed. He had not moved. We had perhaps one fewer inch between us than before, but this might have been my imagination. The Mark was bright enough now that I could see the silver clearly. I could see how it ran through the amber of my own warmth like thread through cloth.

"I won't," I said.

He waited as though I might continue. I did not continue. I had said what needed to be said, and any words that followed would only make this worse, or better, or significantly more complicated in a direction I could not afford to go.

He turned away. I watched him retreat to the doorway with the kind of preternatural grace that no human body could manage. He paused in the frame.

"Your methodology is sound," he said. "The rest will follow."

And then he was gone, and the Mark faded from silver-bright back to warm, and I was left alone with a map I could not look at and the distinct awareness that proximity was going to be a problem that proximity alone could not solve.