Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

In different lifetimes

CASPIAN

The study is the only room in the castle that still feels like mine.

Everything else has been reclaimed by time — the great hall with its long silences, the corridors that remember too many footsteps, the bedchambers I have rotated through across centuries like a man who cannot commit to sleeping in the same place twice. But this room I have kept. Exactly as it was. The same desk scarred by ink and use, the same books stacked in the particular disorder that looks chaotic and isn’t, the same chair pulled too close to the fire, angled toward the door the way it always is, the way it has always been, because old habits in men like me stop being habits and start being architecture.

I am not reading the book open in my lap.

I have been staring at the same page for — I check the angle of the fire’s burn — approximately forty minutes, which is longer than usual. Normally I can manufacture the performance of distraction well enough to fool even myself. Tonight the words refuse to arrange themselves into meaning, and I have given up pretending otherwise.

The episode was worse than the last one.

I keep returning to this fact with the dogged, unwilling focus of someone probing a wound to assess its depth. Worse than the last one, and the last one had been bad enough that I’d stood outside her door for twenty minutes afterward convincing myself not to go back in. The physical toll alone — the way she’d gone completely still, barely breathing, color draining from her face in a matter of seconds — had triggered something in me that I would prefer not to examine directly.

I examined it anyway, in the way you cannot stop yourself from examining things when you are sitting alone at midnight with nothing to protect you from your own mind.

It had been fear.

Not the abstract, managed awareness of threat that I have cultivated over seven lifetimes into something almost comfortable, something I can hold at arm’s length and assess with detachment. This was the older kind. The kind that lives in the body rather than the mind and does not consult you before it arrives.

I had been afraid she was going to die in front of me before I could do anything about it.

The fire pops. I turn the page I haven’t read and stare at the next one.

The fifth lifetime keeps surfacing tonight, which is not unusual when things become complicated — my mind has a tendency to return there the way a tongue finds a sore tooth, reflexive and punishing and utterly without my permission. Mireille had sat in the window seat across the hall with her feet tucked up under her and talked to me about everything and nothing for hours at a time, and I had let her, which had been my first mistake and possibly my most significant one. You cannot let them talk to you like that. Like you are a person they are curious about rather than a problem they are solving. It makes the other thing harder to remember — that this ends the same way every time regardless of what happens between the beginning and the ending, and that the space in between is not a life, it is a waiting room, and I have made my peace with the waiting room and I do not need anyone coming in and redecorating it.

I had not made my peace.

I had simply decided to call it peace because the alternative was something I couldn’t survive seven times over.

The knock at the door is quiet, almost hesitant, which is unusual because the people in this castle who feel comfortable knocking on my study door at midnight are exactly two in number and neither of them knocks hesitantly. Elara raps three times in quick succession, businesslike. Aldric, my steward, does a single solemn knock that sounds like a formal announcement.

This is two soft knocks with a pause between them, like whoever is on the other side isn’t entirely certain they’re doing the right thing and hasn’t fully committed to it yet.

I already know.

I don’t know how I know, but I know, and for a moment I simply sit with the knowledge and the fire and the book I haven’t been reading, and I consider not answering, and I recognize that for the cowardice it is with something that might be self-disgust if I were feeling generous toward myself tonight.

“Come in,” I say.

The door opens slowly. She’s wearing something of Elara’s, a loose grey shirt that’s too long for her, and her feet are in thin socks, and she is holding the doorframe with one hand in a way that suggests the walk here cost her more than she intends to show. Her face is still too pale. There are shadows under her eyes that weren’t there three days ago.

She looks, comprehensively, like someone who should be in bed.

She also looks like she has absolutely no intention of being in bed.

“You should be resting,” I say, because it is true, because it is safe, because it is the kind of thing that requires nothing of me and might conceivably end this before it becomes something I can’t manage.

“Probably,” she says, and steps inside.

I watch her cross the room with the careful, deliberate gait of someone overriding discomfort through sheer insistence, and I do not get up to help her because helping her would require getting close to her and I am making a studied effort not to do that tonight of all nights. She reaches the chair across from mine — the one no one sits in, the one that has not been sat in for a very long time — and lowers herself into it with a slow exhale that tells me exactly how much the episode has taken out of her and exactly how much she would hate me for noticing.

I noticed.

I say nothing.

For a moment we simply sit on opposite sides of the fire, and the silence has a different quality to it than the silences I am accustomed to in this room. Those are empty silences, or I have trained myself to experience them as empty, which amounts to the same thing. This one has weight. This one is full of something she hasn’t said yet, and I find myself in the distinctly uncomfortable position of not knowing whether I want her to say it or not.

“You were there,” she says finally. “During the episode. I felt you there, not just — not just watching. You were doing something. The cold, the anchor of it. That was you.”

I keep my eyes on the fire. “You needed to be pulled back.”

“You’ve done it before.”

“When necessary.”

“Caspian.” She waits until I look at her, which takes longer than it should. Her eyes are steady on mine, too perceptive, carrying the remnants of every lifetime she’s just been dragged through, and I am acutely aware of how dangerous she is when she looks at me like that. Not because of the curse. Not because of what she represents in the Goddess’s design. But because she is looking at me the way Mireille looked at me, like I am a puzzle she finds genuinely interesting rather than a threat she is trying to navigate, and I have very little defense against that specific quality of attention. “What did she do to you? In the time between. After each one.”

The question lands somewhere unguarded and I feel it, the faint structural shift of something I have kept sealed for a very long time suddenly being asked to hold weight.

“That,” I say carefully, “is not a conversation I intend to have.”

“I know.” She doesn’t look away. “I’m asking anyway.”

The fire moves between us. Outside the study window, the grounds are dark, the tree line a black edge against a sky full of cold stars, and somewhere beyond all of it the Moon Goddess is presumably watching this with whatever passes for satisfaction in something that has arranged the same tragedy seven times and apparently intends to arrange it an eighth.

I think about what Elara must have told her. I think about the fifth lifetime, about Mireille, about laughter that I had almost forgotten I was capable of before she reminded me, about what the Goddess had done when it had become clear that the reminder might actually matter. I think about the six versions of loneliness I have accumulated like stones, each one denser than the last, the particular weight of a specific kind of grief that doesn’t diminish across lifetimes, it just becomes more familiar, which is not the same thing as becoming easier.

I think about what it cost me to walk away from her room tonight when everything in me said don’t.

“The Goddess doesn’t only act through the Serapha,” I say at last, because she is going to dig at this until she finds something and a managed disclosure is better than an excavation. “She has — ways of ensuring the lesson lands. Of ensuring I don’t become too comfortable with the pattern. Don’t begin to hold it too lightly.” I pause. “The time between cycles is long. She uses it.”

Farah’s expression doesn’t change, but something in her eyes does — a quieting, an attention that intensifies without showing it on her face. “She hurts you.”

“She reminds me of the terms.”

“That’s the same thing.”

I don’t answer, because she’s right and disagreeing would be dishonest and I find, inconveniently, that I don’t want to be dishonest with her. Another thing I have very little defense against, the way she makes honesty feel like the easier option rather than the more dangerous one.

“I’m not her,” she says quietly. “I know you know that. I know you’ve told yourself every version of the speech about why it doesn’t matter, why the knowing doesn’t change anything, why whatever I am to you in this room on this particular night is already written and has already ended.” She leans forward slightly, her forearms resting on her knees, and the firelight catches the side of her face and the set of her jaw, and she is so completely and specifically herself that it does something to my chest I would prefer it didn’t. “I’m asking you to let me try anyway. Not to protect you. Not because the Goddess designed me to stand close enough to wear you down. Because I have spent the last several hours living inside seven lifetimes of the worst ending imaginable and I have decided I am not interested in it.”

The silence that follows is very full.

“You don’t know what you’re asking,” I say.

“I know exactly what I’m asking.” She holds my gaze. “I’m asking you to stop performing indifference and talk to me.”

For a long, still moment I say nothing, sitting with the particular ache of someone being offered something they have told themselves for a very long time they do not want, discovering with unpleasant clarity that the telling and the not-wanting are two entirely separate things.

The fire burns down another inch.

“Close the door,” I say finally. “You let the cold in.”

She blinks, just once. Then, slowly, the corner of her mouth moves — not quite a smile, too careful for that, too aware of the cost of things to spend a smile carelessly. But something.

She gets up, slower than she would like me to notice, and pushes the door closed, and comes back to the chair across from mine, and folds her hands in her lap, and waits.

I look at her for a long moment.

Then I set the book aside, the one I haven’t been reading for forty minutes, and I lean back in the chair, and I try to remember the last time I told anyone the truth about something that mattered.

It was a long time ago.

It was a window seat, and a girl with her feet tucked under her, and a version of me that still believed the trying was worth something.

Maybe it was. Maybe that’s why the Goddess had to intervene.

“Her name was Mireille,” I say.

And Farah Collins leans forward slightly, and listens.