I pulled what I could from the library’s other indexes.
A treaty-law digest from 1970 managed not to mention rival-clan bonds directly while spending twenty pages discussing the Norwegian-American war that had apparently followed Margot’s case. An 1898 study on cross-clan diplomacy cataloged nineteen pair-bonds across three centuries, all handled through formal allegiance transfer: one mate legally joined the other’s clan, and the bond stopped being a conflict between rival houses. And a 1962 footnote referred to Margot’s case sideways, asthe matter of forty-seven.
The pattern was the absence.
Margot Lunde was the first recorded human caught in a rival-clan bond.
The first.
And, until me, the only.
I closed the dissertation and sat with what it meant. The library held three centuries of careful absence. Margot had walked into it. She hadn’t walked out.
* * *
Tuesday morning the council was in session behind closed doors for joint-custody deliberations. The deputy walked me down to the library at nine without commenting on the date.
The books I had been poring over were waiting on the table. I opened the dissertation to the page I had been re-reading. A folded square of paper sat tucked into the back endpaper. Yuki’s hand. Three words:Morag at ten.
The door opened without a knock at exactly ten.
I knew the woman who entered from the seating charts Yuki had given the U.S. delegation before the first formal session. Morag Vale. Ashenmere elder, council voting member, former keeper of external accords. She was four centuries old give or take the margin of error that came with dragons who disliked exact birthdays.
She walked with a cane she didn’t need. The cane was punctuation, and likely a weapon.
She crossed the room, sat across from me, and placed both hands on the table. “Catalina Cordero.”
“Elder Vale.”
“Morag.” That wasn’t intimacy. It was an instruction.
“Morag.”
She studied me with pale gray eyes and no performance of warmth. The silence had a weight she let ride until she decided to put words on top of it. “You have been quiet.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“What would I say?”
“Many people enjoy the sound of themselves resisting.”
“I prefer useful resistance.”
Her gaze moved to the books on the table and stayed there. “You have been reading about Tromsø.”
“I have been reading about rival-clan bonds,” I said. “Or the lack thereof.”
She watched me a moment longer. Whatever assessment she was running, she took her time with it. Then her mouth set. “Margot Lunde was my friend,” she said.
For half a second, the room narrowed to a point. Margot had beenink until then. A paragraph. A footnote. A woman flattened into treaty language and commercial stabilization.
Then Morag saidfriend, and the paper became a person.
My heart rate spiked. I made myself breathe through it.I am not Margot. I have training. I have a handler.
No.
