Marked By Tide

Chapter 5 - The First Waking

Nerida's POV

I wake up.

The first thing is the surprise of it. I have been asleep — properly asleep, the kind of asleep my body has not allowed itself in years — and the surprise of being unconscious for what must have been hours and *waking* from it instead of being woken from it is so foreign that for a long second I do not know what to do with the fact that I am still alive.

The second thing is that something is *close to me*.

I do not know what. I cannot see yet. My eyes have not opened. But there is a presence in the air to my right, at the height of my hip, the temperature of a body — a *large* body, warm enough that my own skin can feel it through the blanket — and the part of me that has lived for five years in proximity to a man twice my size *knows* the proximity of a man twice my size. The data lands before anything else does. There is a man near me. I cannot move. I do not know where I am. I am injured. I am alone in the dark with a man, and the part of my body that should have started screaming at me four heartbeats ago should be screaming now.

It is not screaming.

That is the third thing. The fear that should have come has not come, and I lie in the dark listening for the scream and the scream is not happening, and the not-happening is more disorienting than the man would have been if my body had reacted normally. My body has reacted normally to every man in proximity to me for five years. My body is not reacting normally tonight. I do not have a frame for that, and I do not have the bandwidth to work it out lying here with my eyes closed, so I do the thing I have been doing since I was thirteen, which is to *gather information*.

I open my eyes.

The ceiling above me is wood. The wood is dark and old and beamed with thicker timbers running across in a pattern I have never seen before, and there is a single small oil lamp somewhere in the room throwing soft moving light across the beams. The light is not the light of my house. The ceiling is not my ceiling. I am not where I was the last time I closed my eyes.

Good.

The next thing I notice is that I hurt. I hurt the way I have hurt before but more. The deep pain is where it should be — my side, the place under my ribs where the blade went in. I can feel the shape of it from the inside. The edges of the pain are dull, which is the kind of pull that means somebody has done something to make the wound stop being a wound and start being a scar. I have been worked on. Stitched, probably. Cleaned. Bandaged. Somebody has had their hands on me while I was not awake and they have done the work that keeps a person from dying of a blade in the side.

I am, as far as I can tell, not dying.

The smell comes next. It is not the smell of the house, where Jareth liked the air to be slightly chemical because he believed it suggested cleanliness. It is not the smell of any hospital I have ever been in. It is — *herbs*. Herbs I do not recognize. Several of them. A green smell and a bitter smell and something underneath both that is like a wet stone on a cold morning. The herb smell is steady and behind it there is a faint salt smell, the smell of the ocean somewhere, the smell of *the place I came to*, and the salt smell is the thing that tells me where I am better than anything I can see.

I am inside the reserve.

I have not died inside the reserve, which is what I expected to do. Someone has taken me from where I fell to a place with a wood ceiling and herbs and the smell of salt, and they have worked on me, and I am alive.

I lie still and try to put the pieces together with what is left of my brain.

And the body beside me — still there, still warm at the level of my hip, still doing a steady patient breathing that is not asleep and is not awake — is breathing in time with me without my permission.

That is the part I am not going to be able to think about tonight, so I do not.

I move my head.

I move it very carefully. My neck has been stiff for what feels like long enough that the motion takes work, and my body protests every fraction of an inch I ask of it. I get my chin to swivel maybe ten degrees to the right. I open my eyes a little more.

There is a man in a chair beside the bed.

He is — *large*. He is sitting forward with his elbows on his knees and his head down, his hair a dark blond color that catches the lamp light strangely, his face turned slightly toward me. He is in a plain shirt and plain trousers. His arms are bare to the elbow. There is dried blood on his right forearm that is not the color it would be if it were his own. His hands are folded between his knees. He is asleep. And he is *not* asleep, because every line of him is angled in my direction — the angle of his face, the angle of his shoulders, the very slight tilt of his folded hands toward the bed — like a man whose body has decided to rest but has not stopped pointing at the thing that matters.

I do not know him.

I have never seen him in my life.

I look at his face for what feels like a long time. I am looking for the thing my body is supposed to do in this situation, which is to be afraid. A man twice my size sitting in a dim room with me at — I do not know what hour, but it is night, and the lamp is low, and we are alone — *should* be the worst thing I have woken up to in the last twelve hours. I have lived for five years in a house with a man twice my size and his proximity has cost me, every day, the function of being able to relax. I am supposed to be afraid of him.

I am not afraid of him.

I am — *interested* in him. Which is a sentence I am not equipped to think about and which I file for later because I do not have the bandwidth tonight for whatever that means.

I move my head the other way.

The motion is slower this time. My neck objects. I get my chin to swivel left, against the pillow, and the room expands in the new direction, and I see —

The second one.

He is across the room. Different chair, smaller, set against the far wall by the window. He is sitting forward too, but his elbows are on his thighs and his hands are pressed against his face and his face is — pointed at me, even through his hands, the angle of him directed at the bed exactly the way the first man's angle is directed at the bed. His hair is darker than the first man's. Almost black. The set of his shoulders is the same as the first man's. The build is the same.

They look almost identical.

I sit with that. I do not have any frame for it. They look almost identical because they *are* almost identical, and the part of my brain that is still able to make connections puts the connection together in a slow blurry way, which is that these are *two of the same person*. Either two-of-the-same-person is a thing now, which would mean I have lost my grip in a way I have been worried about for five years, or there are two men in this room who came out of the same body at roughly the same time and grew into roughly the same size.

The second possibility is what people call brothers.

I have a brother. I know what brothers are. I am also aware that brothers in my experience are not — *this*. The first one is asleep in his chair beside me and pointing at me even in his rest. The second one is across the room with his face in his hands and is also pointing at me. Neither of them looks anything like Jareth. Neither of them is positioned in the way Jareth positions himself when he is paying attention to me, which is the way a man positions himself behind something he is about to herd.

These two are positioned in a way I do not have a word for. They are positioned like — they are *next to* me. They are *with* me. I am not the thing they are herding. I am the thing they are *guarding*, which is a verb I have not been on the receiving end of from a man in a very long time.

The second one — the one with his face in his hands — drops his hands.

He sees that my eyes are open.

His face goes still.

His hands go still in his lap. His shoulders go still. The breath he was about to take goes still, paused in his chest. He has just realized that I am looking at him, and he is doing the thing a person does when they have just realized the thing they have been watching is now watching them back, which is to *freeze* — to give the other thing as little to react to as possible. Like a man trying not to spook a deer.

I look at him.

He looks at me.

His eyes are — I do not have a good word for the color. The lamp is not strong enough for me to see properly and my own vision is doing the thing where the edges are not quite holding still. His eyes are dark — *storm-dark*, my brain hands me, from somewhere I cannot place — and there is something *in* them, some quality I am not equipped to name, which is the quality of a person looking at me the way nobody has looked at me in five years.

Something in my chest does a thing.

Not a big thing. Not even a thing I can identify. It is the *almost* of a recognition — the sensation of a word on the edge of my tongue that will not come, a piece of music I have heard before but cannot place, a face I have seen but cannot match to a name. Something about his eyes is something I have *seen*, and I have not seen it in any of the five years I have been alive that I can remember clearly, but I have seen it *somewhere*, and the somewhere is recent, and the somewhere is —

The almost-memory slides away before I can catch it.

I am too tired. My brain is too tired. Whatever was on the edge of my tongue retreats back into the dark from which it almost surfaced, and I lose it, and I do not have the strength to chase it.

He is looking at me like he is afraid I am going to disappear.

I have seen that look on other people's faces in my life. I have seen it on my mother's face when I had a fever when I was eight. I have not seen it on a stranger's face. I have not seen it on a man's face. I have certainly not seen it on the face of a man I cannot remember ever having met before tonight, and I have no idea what I am supposed to do with it, and I do not have the words to ask him anything about it, and my throat is too dry to ask if I tried.

I think, with the part of my brain that is still doing thinking: *I should be afraid of this*.

I am not afraid.

The not-afraid is the strangest part of waking up. The hurting makes sense — I was stabbed, I am where I am because I was stabbed, the hurt is the part of being alive that is most consistent with the last thing I remember. The herb smell makes sense — somebody worked on me, herbs were involved. The two men make less sense but my brain can run a path for them, which is *somebody found me and these are the somebodies*. But the *not being afraid* part — that does not match any of the data my body has been working from for five years, and I do not know how to file it.

I look at the second man, the one across the room.

He looks back.

He does not move. He does not speak. He has not blinked since I opened my eyes, I think. He is letting me look. He is *giving me* the looking, the way you give a wild animal the room to decide whether it is going to come closer, and I have never been given a room like this by anyone in my life, and the not-fear in my chest does a thing I cannot describe.

It *expands*.

It expands into something almost warm, which is a sensation I do not have a word for in the context of being looked at by a man, and my eyes are getting heavy again, and the parts of me that hurt are starting to hurt more because my body has used too much energy on this brief inventory and is sliding back down toward the place it came from.

The first man stirs in the chair beside me.

He does not wake up. His breathing changes slightly — deeper, slower — but his eyes do not open. His head is still down. His hands are still folded. But something in his body has registered that I have moved, and the registration has shifted him a little closer to the bed, his elbow now resting on the mattress edge with his folded hands almost close enough to touch my hip through the blanket.

I do not pull away from his hand.

That is the thing my body is supposed to do. That is the thing my body has been doing, automatically, for five years — pulling away from any hand that gets within six inches of mine. My body does not do it tonight. My body lets the hand stay where it is, almost-touching me through the blanket. My body, in fact, does the opposite of what it has been doing for five years. My body has the very small, very specific thought, in the half-second before my eyes finish closing: *the hand can stay*.

The hand can stay.

The thought is small. It is hardly a thought. But it sits in my chest where the deep hurt is and the deep hurt is *quieter* with the hand near it, and I do not understand why and I do not have time to understand why because the lamp is going dim or my eyes are going dim, and the second man across the room is still looking at me, and the first man is breathing slow and even at my hip, and the herbs are steady and the salt is steady and the wood ceiling is doing the gentle moving thing the lamp light makes it do.

I close my eyes.

I do not mean to. My eyes close before I decide. The last thing I see is the second man's face — still pointed at me, still doing the not-blinking thing, still letting me look — and the last thing I think is that he has not asked me to do anything.

Nobody has asked me to do anything since I crossed the line in the trees.

I do not have time to think about what that means.

The dark takes me again.

It takes me gentler this time. The dark in the trees was the dark of a body running out of blood. This dark is — *softer*. It is the dark of a body that has been worked on by hands that did not want to hurt it. The dark is letting me back down into it. The dark is keeping me.

My eyes are not closed yet. Not quite. The dark is in my head before it is in my vision, and my eyes are doing the slow heavy thing eyes do when they have not yet decided to give up the room.

The second man, across the room, exhales for what may be the first time since I opened my eyes.

I see it more than I hear it. His shoulders drop. His hands move down from his lap to his knees, slowly, like a man who has been holding very still for a long time and has just been given permission to move.

Then he stands up.

He does it carefully. The chair under him does not make a sound. He crosses the room — I can see him do it, blurry at the edges, my eyes refusing to fully close because some part of me has decided not to lose track of him while he is moving — and he comes around to the other side of my bed, the side away from the first man, the side where the first man cannot see him from his chair.

He crouches down beside the bed.

He is very close to my face now. His face is at the level of my pillow, inches away. He does not touch me. He looks at me from inches away the way a person looks at something he has been told he could not have and has been given anyway, and his eyes are wet in the lamp light, and he is breathing carefully, and his mouth moves around words I do not have the strength to read.

The first man, beside the bed on the other side, makes a small sound. Not a word. A soft breath that comes out somewhere between a sigh and a hum, and it lands in the air near my hip where his hand is almost-touching me through the blanket, and the sound is — *grateful*. I have no other word for it. The sound is grateful.

I do not know what either of them is grateful for.

I do not have time to know.

The second man, the one inches from my face, says something I can almost hear. Two things. He says them very quietly. The first is a single short word — a sound that is not English or any language I have ever heard, the kind of word a name is — and the second is a short phrase that ends in something soft, three syllables maybe, his voice doing the gentle landing thing a person's voice does on a word like *here* or *home* or *safe*.

He repeats them.

The same two things, once, twice. He is not asking me anything. He is — *telling* me something. He has decided I need to hear it before I go back under, even if I will not remember hearing it. He is saying it for the part of me that is going to be inside me later, when I am awake enough to ask about him.

My eyes close.

I sleep with two men I do not know watching over me from opposite sides of a bed I do not recognize, and the part of me that has been wrong for five years is *right* for the first time in five years, and the part of me that should be afraid is the part of me that is, finally, *not*.

I do not know what he said.

I will remember the *shape* of him saying it.

I sleep.