Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

I do not sleep

FARAH

I don’t ask him what he found.

This is a decision I make consciously, somewhere in the corridor between my room and his study, while my feet are still carrying me toward a door I haven’t knocked on before. I decide: I will not ask. If he wants to tell me, he will tell me. If he doesn’t, that is also information, and I will receive it and work with it and not make him feel the weight of my curiosity as an obligation.

I knock.

He says come in.

And I go in, and I see him at the window, and the room tells me everything it is willing to tell: the closed records on the desk, the untouched cup going cold on the sill, the particular quality of his stillness, which is not the stillness of a man at rest but the stillness of a man who has been very still for a very long time and has learned to make it look the same.

I ask him what he needs.

He says quiet company.

So I sit.

I am, by my own recent accounting, not especially good at sitting still. Five months ago I would have filled this silence with something — questions, observations, the low-grade performance of composure that I used to mistake for the thing itself. I would have made the silence about my discomfort with it and called that consideration.

I know the difference now.

I sit, and I watch the torches, and I let the room be what it is.

At some point past two in the morning he says, without preamble:

“The name I haven’t said yet.”

I look at him.

He is still looking at the window.

“You don’t have to tell me,” I say.

“I know.” A pause. “That’s not why I’m telling you.”

I wait.

“Liss,” he says.

The name lands quietly, the way things land when they confirm what some part of you already suspected without letting itself be called suspicion.

I think about Liss — the way she moves through this compound like someone who has always known exactly where everything is. The particular fluency of her. The ease. The way she has been, from the very beginning, precisely as helpful as the situation required and never more.

I think about the small things I noticed and filed and didn’t know what to do with, because I had no framework then for what I was noticing.

“How long?” I say.

“Months.” He turns from the window, finally, and looks at me. “Possibly from before you arrived.”

I take this in.

“She was kind to me,” I say. Not as a defense of her. Not as a contradiction. Just as a fact that needs to exist somewhere in the accounting.

“I know,” he says. “That’s part of what makes it what it is.”

Yes. That is exactly it. The kindness was real — I believe that, I think I will always believe that — and it was also operational, and those two things are not as incompatible as I used to think they were, and that is the part of it I am going to need a little time to find a place for.

“Does she know you know?” I ask.

“No. I need to confirm the second contact before I move.”

“The second door,” I say.

He looks at me.

“Marcus,” I say. “Earlier. I heard enough.”

He doesn’t seem surprised. He has, I think, stopped being surprised by what I hear.

“Yes,” he says. “I believe there’s a contingency. Someone she passes to if she’s discovered.” He pauses. “I don’t know who yet.”

I think about this.

I think about the briefing this afternoon — Soren presenting the intelligence, the two senior warriors, the particular attention with which everyone in that room handled information. I think about who was in it. Who wasn’t. Who has access to patrol schedules. Who would know exactly which rerouting on which date would read as weather rather than design.

Something shifts at the edge of my thinking.

“Caspian,” I say.

He waits.

“At the briefing. The senior warriors — Aldric was absent.”

“He had a patrol assignment.”

“I know.” I pause, working through it. “But he usually attends when northern intelligence is on the table. Soren mentioned it to Marcus before they came in — I heard them in the corridor. He said Aldric had specifically requested the assignment this week.”

Caspian looks at me.

“Specifically requested,” he repeats.

“Those were Soren’s words.”

The silence between us changes in quality — it becomes the particular kind that surrounds a piece of information neither of us is certain what to do with yet but both of us recognize as significant.

“That’s not confirmation,” I say carefully. “I know it isn’t. I just—”

“No.” He shakes his head. “You’re right to give it to me.”

He looks back at the window.

I look at his profile — the specific tiredness of it, not physical, not something sleep would address — and I think about seven lifetimes and what it costs to have people in your life long enough to trust them the particular way you trust people who have been there through the things that shaped you, and then to find out that the trust was a surface under which something else entirely was operating.

I think about how lonely that revision is.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

He looks at me.

“About Liss,” I say. “Not as an apology. Just — I’m sorry it’s her.”

He is quiet for a moment.

“So am I,” he says.

We stay like that for a while, the window going incrementally lighter between us, the torches below burning down to their last hour, and I think about how strange it is to be sitting here — in this room, in this compound, in this life I arrived at sideways and frightened and entirely unprepared — and to feel, not despite the difficulty of what is coming but alongside it, the particular steadiness of someone who knows where she is.

I am here.

I chose to be here.

And if the thing ahead is going to be hard — if it is going to require everything, as he said it would — then I find, checking carefully to see if this is true:

I am not afraid of that.

I am afraid of a great many things, and I am learning to be honest about them, but the prospect of being asked to be capable is not among them.

At some point the grey outside becomes something closer to light.

He stands — not abruptly, not with decision, just the movement of a man who has been still long enough and has somewhere to be.

He doesn’t say: thank you for staying.

He doesn’t say: this helped.

He picks up the cold cup from the sill and he looks at it for a moment and he sets it back down and he says:

“Get some sleep before training.”

“You too,” I say.

The edge of something crosses his face — not quite a smile, not quite not one.

“Unlikely,” he says.

He goes.

I sit in the chair for a moment after he leaves. I look at the place where he was standing, the faint impression of the night in it still, and I think about what he told me and what it means and what comes next.

Then I get up.

I go back to my room.

I do not sleep.