Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

All the pressure

FARAH

Nothing is different in the morning.

This is the first thing I notice when I wake — that the palace looks the same, sounds the same, that the frost is still on the window and the bird is still in its box and the world has not rearranged itself to reflect what happened in a doorway last night.

I lie in bed and I look at the ceiling and I think that this is both a relief and its own kind of strange, the way enormous things can happen inside small spaces and leave no visible mark on anything outside them.

I wash my face. I make the bed. I name my five things and her laugh is still the first one and I think that it will probably always be the first one and I think that is alright.

Breakfast.

He is already there and he looks up when I sit down — the morning assessment, the checking — and then he looks back at his report and I pour my coffee and Marcus arrives four minutes later and drops into his chair and looks between us with the bright eyes that miss nothing.

He says nothing. From Marcus this is more eloquent than commentary.

We eat and we drink our coffee and the morning light comes through the window and outside the courtyard fills with the sounds of the pack and the three of us sit in the specific comfortable silence that has developed its own grammar over months of shared mornings and nothing is different and everything is different and I think that this is exactly what it was always going to feel like.

Sera comes to me after breakfast.

She sits across from me and looks at my face with her clinical directness and says:

“The episodes have stopped.”

“I know,” I say.

“Completely,” she says. “Not reduced. Stopped.”

She makes a note in her book.

“Something changed.”

I think about a doorway and lamplight and two hands around one.

“Yes,” I say.

She looks at me for a moment with the expression she wears when she has an opinion she is deciding whether to offer.

She offers it.

“The stabilization will hold as long as whatever changed stays changed,” she says. “Be careful with it.”

I think about careful in this context — not cautious, not slow, but careful in the way of someone who understands the value of what they are holding.

“I know,” I say.

She nods and closes her book and on her way out she pauses in the doorway without turning around.

“For what it’s worth. I’ve been his physician for a very long time.”

A pause.

“I’ve never seen the episodes this infrequent. Not once.”

She leaves before I can respond and I sit with that for a while.

The days settle into a new shape.

Not dramatically — nothing about the way things change between us is dramatic, it is all accumulation, all small things adding up to something larger than any individual thing could account for.

There is a quality to the mornings now that wasn’t there before, something in the way he hands me the relevant section of the report when he is finished with it, something in the way I pour his second coffee without being asked, something in the way Marcus watches both of these things happen and applies himself to his toast with great focused attention and says absolutely nothing.

We train in the afternoons and he pushes me further than before — not harder, further, which is different, as if he has made a decision about what I am capable of and is now operating from that decision rather than testing it.

I meet what he gives me and I feel myself becoming something in the training courtyard that I did not know I was capable of becoming, something with edges and precision and a specific kind of confidence that has nothing to do with performance.

One afternoon he stops the session early and looks at me across the courtyard and says:

“You’re ready for the next sequence.”

“What’s the next sequence,” I say.

“Offensive,” he says. “Not just defense. Not just survival. What you would need if you were protecting something.”

I think about that for the rest of the evening — what I am being given and what it means that he is giving it — and I think about a woman who named five things every morning just to remember who she was and I think that the woman learning offensive sequences in his training courtyard is the same woman and also not, and I think that the not is something I am going to have to sit with before I fully understand it.

Liss finds me in the library that evening.

She sits across from me and says:

“The pack is talking.”

“About what,” I say.

“About you,” she says. “About the two of you. Not badly. Differently than before.”

She pauses.

“Old Cort told Dara yesterday that you reminded him of someone. She asked who. He said he didn’t know exactly. Someone from a long time ago.”

She looks at me steadily.

“I think he meant Serapha. Before everything went wrong.”

I look at my hands on the table and I think about Serapha’s memories and the woman she was before the mission and what it means that an old man in this pack looks at me and sees something that reminds him of before.

“Is that good,” I say.

“I think it means they’re starting to believe it might end differently this time,” Liss says.

I look at the dark window and I think about a pack that has been watching their Alpha carry the weight of seven lifetimes and I think about what it would mean to them for it to end differently and I feel the full weight of being the seventh settle into my chest in a way it hasn’t before.

“No pressure,” Liss says, reading my face.

“All the pressure,” I say.

She reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine briefly.

“You’re already doing it,” she says. “You don’t have to figure out how to start. You already started.”

She squeezes once and takes her hand back.

“The rest is just not stopping.”

I sit with that for a long time after she leaves.

The rest is just not stopping.

I think that is the most useful thing anyone has said to me in months and I think that I am going to remember this evening for a long time.

Not stopping.

That I can do.