What Clara Knows

Clara has known something was wrong since September, and she doesn't say this immediately. She says it three weeks after the restoration, on a Friday evening in her Marchmont kitchen, over the bottle of wine that's now at the level that facilitates honesty.

"September," she says. "You came for dinner and you were different. Not sad different. Careful different. Like you'd been thinking about something very large for a long time and had decided what to do about it but hadn't done it yet."

"You didn't say anything."

"You weren't ready."

Clara is thirty-one and has been Veira's best friend for nine years, since a coffee shop on Broughton Street where Clara was working on her PhD thesis and having, more pressingly, a quiet crisis about whether she'd chosen the right field. Veira had sat at the adjacent table, overheard forty seconds of Clara's internal monologue externalising itself under her breath, and asked: what's the structural argument you're most afraid of.

Clara had looked at her. I don't know you.

Veira had said: no, but I have ninety minutes before my next meeting and you're clearly going to keep thinking out loud, so we might as well do it usefully.

They had been friends since immediately.

Clara knows about the Folklore now. Veira told her on the phone from the cottage, three weeks after leaving, in the way she tells important things completely, once, without decorative language. Clara had listened in full and said, at the end: okay, is that everything? Veira had said: that's everything. Clara had said: and Variable is definitely not supernatural. Veira had said: that remains unclear. Clara had said: excellent. When are you coming home.

Home. She'd said it without thinking, and Veira hadn't corrected it, and this is the thing Clara has not said yet the thing she's working toward through the wine and the Friday evening and the specific comfortable mess of her kitchen.

"You're coming back," Clara says.

"I've never left."

"You know what I mean. The cottage."

"I'm keeping the cottage. For when I need it."

"But Edinburgh."

"Yes." Veira looks at her wine. "I think Edinburgh."

"Your flat."

"I need a bigger one." A pause. "Variable needs a garden."

"Variable does not care about gardens. Variable cares about proximity to heat sources and the availability of food."

"Variable turned toward a sixth Folklore bloodline from a garden last month. I'm no longer confident I know what Variable cares about."

Clara stares at her.

"I'll explain later," Veira says.

"You're going to explain the sixth bloodline."

"The sixth bloodline is a problem for January. December has Geneva."

"You're going to a Folklore Elder Assembly."

"In a dress I'm buying tomorrow."

"I'm coming with you tomorrow."

"For the dress."

"For the dress, obviously, but also because the last time you bought something for a significant professional occasion you bought a grey blazer, which is the wardrobe equivalent of deciding not to show up."

"I liked that blazer."

"I know. That's why I'm coming."

She refills both glasses. "The mountain man. Sebastien."

"What about him."

"You texted me that he walked from the station in the rain to the cottage."

"He has strong feelings about air freshener."

"Veira."

"He said something. When I told him I wasn't done with him. He said he was going to spend a long time earning the right to stand close to me without the situation requiring it."

Clara goes very still.

"Don't make a face."

"I'm not making a face."

"You're making the face."

"I'm making a face that acknowledges that what you just described is"

"Don't say it."

"actually quite exceptional."

"I told you not to say it."

"I'm saying it anyway because it is, and you need to hear it said by someone who doesn't have a complicated history with you and isn't trying to manage your response."

Veira looks at her. "You literally just defined the difference between everyone else in my life and you."

"Yes. That's why you keep me."

They drink. Outside Clara's window, Edinburgh does its winter-sky thing, amber-grey, the lights on the Meadows, the sounds of a city that's never fully quiet, and Veira looks at it and feels the Vein running underneath it the pack bond a broad warm presence to the southeast, the blood-sense faint on the west wind, the Kin's probability field a shifting harmonic she can feel now that she knows what to listen for.

She's been the foundation of all of it since she was born, and she's twenty-seven, and next Tuesday she's meeting her father for coffee on a Stockbridge terrace for the third time.

"Clara."

"What."

"Thank you for keeping my corner table warm."

"Fiona kept your corner table. I just made sure she knew to."

"I know."

"You're not going to go back to sitting in it alone."

"Probably not."

"Good."

Variable, on the windowsill, turns his head suddenly toward the north, and neither of them knows quite what to do with that.