Chapter 69

Sebastien finds her on Arthurs Seat at six in the morning on the third of March, which is not a coincidence, because she told him where she would be and he understood that the telling was the invitation.

She is on the bench. The one the grey-haired man sat on for three years while she ran past him two hundred times without knowing whose eyes were on her back.

He sits down without asking.

"Roman called you," she says.

"Roman called me at four to say you'd been walking since two and that he'd overstepped." He looks out at the city coming up out of the dark, the Firth going from black to iron. "For what it's worth, I don't think he did."

"He told me to offer myself for division on the floor of an Assembly."

"He told you that you had a third option and you'd been treating it as a binary." Sebastien lets that sit. "Those aren't the same thing and you know they aren't, which is why you've been out here for four hours instead of sleeping."

She doesn't answer immediately.

Below them Edinburgh does its winter morning: a runner on the low path, a delivery van on Queen's Drive, the lights coming on in Duddingston. Ordinary and continuous and entirely unaware that a chamber in Geneva will convene in twenty-eight hours to determine whether the woman on the bench can be legally taken apart.

"I keep trying to find the version where I'm being noble," she says. "I can't get it to hold. Every time I run it I find the same thing underneath, which is that I'm frightened of what I'll be afterwards."

"That's not the same as being a coward."

"No. But it's not nobility either, and I'd rather know which one I'm working with." She pulls her hands into her sleeves. "Adaeze asked me in February whether I knew what I'd be without this. I said no. I've had a month and the answer hasn't improved."

Sebastien is quiet for a while.

"Can I tell you something that I've been sitting on since Iceland," he says. "It's not comfortable and it's not an argument, and if you want the argument version I can do that instead."

"Tell me the uncomfortable one."

"When the pack bond came back in Fiona's garden, I stood with my forehead against a wall and I felt thirty-one people come back into focus, and it was the best moment of my adult life." He says it plainly. "And about four seconds after it I had a thought I've never said out loud, which is: she can do this again in either direction, whenever she wants, and I will never have any say in it."

Veira turns to look at him.

"Croft's right," Sebastien says. "That's the thing I've been trying not to say since February. Not about the rite. About the position. I love you and I am fully aware that my pack's continued existence sits with you, and those two facts live in the same chest and I have not worked out how to hold them, and I have been pretending in every meeting for a month that I have."

She doesn't move.

"You've never said that first part before," she says.

"I know. I picked a spectacular moment." A short, bad laugh, quickly gone. "I'd have preferred somewhere warmer."

"Sebastien."

"I'm not saying it to move you. That's the point I need you to believe." He turns to face her properly. "If I wanted to move you I'd have said it in February when you were deciding things. I've said it now because I've spent a month watching you take a decision apart from every angle except the one where somebody who loves you tells you the truth about their own conflict of interest, and you deserve that in the room before Wednesday."

Veira looks at the city.

"You want me to keep it," she says.

"Every part of me that has a pack wants you to keep it."

"And the rest."

He is silent for long enough that she turns again.

"The rest of me watched you lose eleven per cent in five weeks," he says, "and does the arithmetic every night, and would rather have forty years of a woman who cannot feel the Vein than twenty of one who can."

She looks at him.

"That's not a small thing to say to a conduit the day before an Assembly."

"No," he says. "It's the largest thing I've got."

She takes his hand. It is the first time she has initiated it, in five months, and they both know it, and neither of them remarks on it.

They sit on the bench where her father watched her for three years, and the sun comes up over the Firth, and she says, eventually:

"I need you to do something and you're going to hate it."

"Go on."

"On Wednesday, whatever I do in that chamber you don't intervene. You don't speak on my behalf. You don't move the Wolf Council." She keeps hold of his hand. "You sit there and you let it be mine."

His jaw works once.

"Ask me for anything else," he says.

"No."

A long pause.

"All right," he says.