Marked By Tide

Chapter 16 - The Shore Path Part 1

Nerida's POV

Paloma clears me to leave the porch on day sixteen.

She announces it the morning she comes in with the breakfast tray. She does it in the same way she announced the porch — without preamble, the practical tone of a woman who has been running medical clearances for forty-six years and has the work timed.

She says: "You are going down the porch steps today. After breakfast. Slowly. With someone. I am not letting you go alone yet."

I say: "All right."

She says: "Are you going to ask Cassian, or am I going to."

I say, after a beat: "I will."

She does the small smile that is the most expression Paloma's face commits to in a day. She says: "Good. Eat your bread."

I eat the bread.

---

Cassian comes in the afternoon.

He comes in his usual rhythm — the door, the two knocks, the *come in*, the small pause as he reads the room, the crossing to *the chair across the room* and sitting in it with his hands on his knees. He has been doing this for ten days. The rhythm is, by now, the rhythm of my afternoons, and I have stopped being surprised by it.

He sees the breakfast tray is gone.

He sees me sitting up against the pillows.

He says: "Paloma is letting you down the steps."

I say: "Yes."

He says: "Today?"

I say: "Today."

He says, carefully — because everything Cassian says in this room is careful, in the way of a man who has learned the cost of saying something fast: "Do you want company."

I look at him.

I have been thinking about this question since this morning. I have been running it through me the way I run questions through me before I answer them, and the running has produced a complicated answer that I am going to have to say out loud, and the saying-out-loud is going to require its own kind of courage.

I say: "I think — I think I want to try going alone first."

His face does — not a flinch. The very-closest-thing to a flinch that does not actually move on the face of a person who has trained his face for nineteen years to not flinch at things that disappoint him. He absorbs the *alone* and he sits with it for a beat and he does the small careful work of *choosing not to push*, which I see him do, because I have been watching him for ten days and I know what the not-pushing costs him.

He says: "Of course."

He says it the way you say *of course* when you have decided the saying is the only correct thing. He does not add *but I would like to come*. He does not add *will you be careful*. He does not add anything at all. He gives me the *of course* clean, and he leaves it where it is, and I can — for the first time since I have known him — feel him *not pushing* as a deliberate act of love.

I file that.

I say: "I am going to try the shore path. Paloma says I can go down the porch steps and walk a little, and turn around when my side starts to hurt."

He says: "That is the right path. The shore path is — easy. There are tree roots in places. There is a small bench under the third large cedar on the right if you need to sit. You will hear the water before you can see it."

I say: "Thank you."

He says: "I will be here. On the porch. When you come back."

I say: "All right."

He stands up.

He stops at the door. He looks at me. He says, in the small voice he uses for things he has been holding too long to say smoothly: "Take your time."

He goes.

The door closes, quietly, the way Cassian closes doors.

---

I get out of the bed.

I do it slowly. The wound at my side has been *behaving* for a week now, but *behaving* is not the same as *closed*, and I have learned in two weeks of moving around this room that the wound is a thing I am still carrying. I take my time. I put on the robe over the too-big shirt — the robe is mine now, Paloma gave it to me a week ago and said *this is yours, take it home with you when you go* in a tone that did not commit to where *home* would be — and I cross the front room and I push open the porch door.

Paloma is on the porch.

She looks up from her clipboard. She gives me the small nod. She says: "Down the steps. Slowly. Use the railing. Take the shore path. Come back when your side starts complaining. Do not let your side complain twice."

I say: "Yes."

She says: "Nerida."

I say: "Yes."

She says: "You are going to come back."

I say: "Yes."

She nods. She goes back to her clipboard.

I cross the porch. I take the railing in my left hand. I go down the steps.

---

The shore path begins at the bottom of the porch steps and runs east through the canopy toward the cliffs above the cove.

I walk it slowly.

The path is — *beautiful*. I had not been ready for the beauty. I had seen the canopy from the porch and I had registered the porch-version of the territory, and the porch-version had already done something to my chest when I first saw it. The full version is *more*. The old-growth cedars are taller than they looked from the porch. The light through the canopy moves in patterns I have never seen before — gold on green on gold on green, the kind of light that comes through a forest that has been a forest for several hundred years. The smell is *bigger* down here than on the porch — the salt is there but the pine and the wet earth and the small bitter herb-smell I have been getting fragments of inside the room are all stronger, all running together, all the *real* version of the trace I have been smelling through the open window for two weeks.

I walk maybe fifty yards before I have to stop.

I do not stop because my side is hurting. I stop because the path opens onto a clearing where the trees thin and the canopy lifts, and beyond the clearing the path runs out toward the cliffs, and from the clearing — for the first time — I can see the sea.

The sea is not a thing I have known.

I grew up inland. I have seen pictures of the ocean. I have seen films and television. I have read books about it. I have never been to a coast. Jareth was not a coast person and Jareth did not take me anywhere Jareth did not want to be, and the result is that I am twenty steps off Paloma's porch on the shore path and I am looking at the sea for the first time in my life and the sea is — *bigger* than I had been prepared for.

It is — it is gray-blue today, the color of slate where the cloud cover dims it and the color of light steel where the sun gets through. It is *moving* the way I had not been prepared for, which is *constantly*, *all at once*, the surface of it doing a thousand small things in the same second and not any one of them in the same way as the next. The sound of it arrives in two layers — the close layer of waves working on rock somewhere below the cliffs, the far layer of the deep continuous *hum* the ocean makes that I had not known about and which I am going to have to think about later because I do not have a frame for *the ocean has a sound underneath the waves and the sound is the size of the ocean*.

I stand in the clearing for a long time.

I do not move.

The wind moves my hair. The light moves in the trees. The sea moves under everything. I — I do not know what I am doing. I am not crying. I am not panicking. I am not doing any of the things I have been doing for two weeks when I have encountered something larger than my body had been prepared for. I am just — *standing*, the way a person stands when the thing in front of them is bigger than they have a response for, and the standing is the response, and the standing is allowed to be the response.

I think — without meaning to — *this exists*.

The world exists. The world has had a sea in it for the entire five years I have been inside Jareth's house and the sea has been doing this every one of those five years and I did not know and I have lost five years of the sea existing, and the loss is — it is large. It is large enough that I cannot look at the loss head-on this morning. I will come back to it later.

I take a breath. The breath has salt in it.

I keep walking.

---

I make it maybe another two hundred yards before my side starts to complain.

The complaint is not bad. The wound is not opening. The complaint is the way a wound that has been mostly healing complains when you have asked your body to do more than it has been doing for a week, and I recognize the complaint and I do the thing Paloma told me to do, which is to find a place to sit.

There is a bench.

It is, exactly where Cassian said it would be, under the third large cedar on the right. The bench is old — wood worn smooth, the back of it stained dark with weather, the seat low enough that I am going to need help getting up from it. I sit. I let my back lean. I close my eyes.

I sit for what is probably five minutes.

When I open my eyes I see a woman coming up the path the other way.

---

She is tall.

She is the first thing I notice about her. She is tall in a way that is — the kind of tall that has decided to use itself. She is in a long dark green dress that hits her at mid-calf and she is wearing soft leather boots that have clearly been *made* for her, and her hair is the color of late summer wheat, and her hair has been done. I do not mean braided in a hurry the way Tamsin's hair is always braided in a hurry. I mean *done* — twisted and pinned in a way that took twenty minutes and the result of the twenty minutes is *immaculate*, the kind of done that says the person whose hair it is wants you to notice that her hair has been done.

She is — twenty, possibly twenty-one. She is older than me by a year or two.

Her face is — pretty. Conventionally. She has the kind of features that photograph well and the kind of complexion that does the work for itself, and her eyes are blue, and her mouth is small. She is, by any objective measure, beautiful.

I have spent five years reading rooms.

I read this one in a quarter-second.

I read it in a quarter-second because everything about how the woman is *arriving* at me on the path — the unhurried pace, the very-slight smile already on her mouth before she is close enough for the smile to be necessary, the way her eyes are *on me* the way a hunter's eyes are on a thing it has decided to make a meal of — is the configuration of a woman who has, somewhere on the other side of the trees, decided what she is going to do in this conversation before she has had the conversation.

She has decided.

She has decided before we have met.

She has decided I am the obstacle to something she wanted, and she is here to evaluate the obstacle, and the evaluation is the entire purpose of the conversation we are about to have.

I sit on the bench. I do not stand up. I keep my hands folded in my lap. I let her come to me.

She arrives.

She stops three feet from the bench. She tilts her head at the angle a woman tilts her head when she is performing *gentle curiosity*, and she smiles — the smile that has been on her mouth since she came around the bend in the path, the smile that has not changed angle once in the entire approach — and she says:

"You must be Nerida."

Her voice is warm. The warmth is, I can tell already, *deployed* — the warmth is a tool, not a quality. Her voice has been trained to warm in the way it is warming now, the way a parlor radio is *warm* when it is on the right setting, and the warmth is going to be the same warmth she uses on everyone she has decided to deploy it on.

I say: "Yes."

She says: "I'm Lorelei. Welcome to Tidemark."

---

I do not respond immediately.

I let the *welcome* sit in the air between us. The *welcome* is the part of the sentence that is doing the actual work, because *welcome* is the language of someone who *owns* the place she is welcoming you to, and Lorelei has just told me — with one word — that she has decided she has the standing to welcome me, and that the standing matters, and that I am supposed to register it.

I say: "Thank you."

It is the smallest possible response. I have learned, in five years, how to give the smallest possible response to a woman who is trying to make me give her something larger. The small response gives her nothing to work with. The small response is the *non-engagement* version of the conversation. The small response says *I am here, I am not contesting your script, I am also not playing any role in the script that you have prepared*.

She does not blink at the response.

She has been prepared for it. The smile does not change. She says: "I've been hearing about you for two weeks. The whole pack has. I had to come introduce myself."

There is the word again.

*Pack.* The word Paloma used once on day one and let me sit with. The word Tamsin uses casually like it is the same word as *family* or *town* and which I have learned to use back, partially, because Tamsin uses it that way. The word I asked Cassian about explicitly and which Cassian asked me to wait on until I was stronger. Lorelei has now used it twice in three sentences — *Welcome to Tidemark*, *the whole pack has* — and she has used it the way a person uses a word she has decided you should *already know*. She is testing whether I will ask. She is also using the word the way you use a word you are *fluent* in to a person you are *not sure* is fluent, which is one of the small ways a fluent person can make a not-fluent person feel the gap.

I do not ask.

I file the word with the rest of what I am filing. I let her keep using it. I am going to come back to the *pack* question when I am back in the healing room with Cassian or Paloma and the answer can be given to me without Lorelei in the conversation.

She steps a little closer. She does it lightly. She is not crowding me — she is too clever to crowd me — but she is *closing the distance* in the small way that a person closes distance when they want to make the conversation feel more intimate than it is.

She says: "How are you healing."

I say: "Better."

It is the word I gave Soren on day six. It is the word I have learned, in two weeks, gives the *good kind* of person room to come to me on their own terms and gives the *other kind* of person nothing to work with. Soren accepted *better* and gave me a fish story back. Lorelei is going to do something different.

She says: "I'm so glad. We have all been *worried*."

The *worried* has the same trained warmth as the *welcome*. It is also a lie. Lorelei has not been worried. Lorelei has clearly been preparing for this conversation for longer than she should have needed to, and the worry she is performing now is the kind of worry a person performs when she wants you to be grateful for being worried-about.

I do not give her the grateful.

I say: "Thank you."

It is the second *thank you*. The repetition is its own small message. The repetition says *I am giving you the polite minimum, I am not giving you more, you are not going to find more here*.

She does not flinch. She is — *good* at this. I have not encountered someone this good at this in five years. Jareth is a different kind of operator — Jareth uses fear and Jareth is direct, in the brutal way Jareth is direct — and Lorelei is the *other* kind, the smiling kind, the *I have decided what we are going to talk about and I will keep the conversation on script no matter what you give me* kind.

She tilts her head again.

She says: "Is the healing house comfortable. Paloma can be a bit — old-school, I find. Some people prefer the family-quarters guest rooms."

The information has just been *deployed*. She is telling me, with the casualness of a person mentioning the weather, that there are family-quarters guest rooms I have not been offered, which means I have been *kept* in the healing house, which means the *keeping* is information I am supposed to mind. She is also implying she has been in the family-quarters guest rooms in a context that makes her familiar with them. The implication is the work.

I say: "The healing house is fine. Paloma has been very kind to me."

She smiles. Same smile. She says: "Paloma is wonderful. I have known her since I was small."

She has now told me she is old enough to have known Paloma *since she was small*, which positions her as more deeply *of* the pack than I am, which positions me as the *outsider* in the conversation, which is the entire purpose of every sentence she has said since she stopped on the path.

I say: "Lovely."

I say it the way you say *lovely* when the *lovely* is the most you are going to commit. I am running, by now, on the *minimum response* protocol, and I am also — because my body has been remembering how this works — beginning to enjoy myself a little. It has been five years since I have had the energy to read a room like this with curiosity instead of fear. The curiosity is small, but it is there, and I am — *interested* in how Lorelei is going to land the play.

She lands it.

---

She says, in the same warm-deployed voice, with the same small smile: "I should mention — I have known the twins since we were children. Cassian and Soren and I grew up together. The pack is *so happy* for them — for *all of us* — and I just want you to know that if there is ever anything I can do to help you adjust, I am — I am here for that."

There it is.

That is the entire purpose of the conversation. *I have known the twins since we were children.* The sentence is the play. Lorelei has just informed me that she has *priority* on the twins — historical, social, *of-the-pack* priority — and the implication is that I am the *interloper* on a relationship she had a longer claim on first. The *so happy* is the cover. The *if there is ever anything I can do to help* is the offer that establishes her as the *generous* party in the asymmetry she is introducing, which makes the asymmetry itself harder to challenge.

It is good work.

I file it.

I say: "Thank you. I appreciate the offer."

She says, with the smallest possible additional sweetness: "What you have walked into can be — a lot to take on. Especially for someone who hasn't grown up in pack life. There are things you don't have the context for that the rest of us have always known. I just want you to know that if you ever want to talk to someone who can — *explain things*, I am happy to."

The *explain things* is the second play. It is also good work. She is telling me that I am *missing context* and that she is the *available source* of the context, which positions her as the *helpful insider* I should be turning to and not, by implication, the women in the family who are *handling me too carefully* or the twins themselves who are *trying not to overwhelm me*.

I say: "That is very kind."

She says: "Of course."

She waits.

She is waiting for me to ask a follow-up question. She has prepared follow-up answers. She has prepared the gentle leading question that will lead me to the next disclosure of *context* she has decided I should have, and the follow-up answers are loaded the way I have known follow-up answers to be loaded for five years.

I do not ask a follow-up question.

I sit on the bench.

I let the silence land.

The silence is — *large*. I have learned, over five years, that the most effective tool I have against a person who is running a script is *not advancing the script*. Jareth used to call me *uncooperative* when I would not advance his scripts. Lorelei is too smart to call me anything. She just — *waits*, the small smile still in place, the head still slightly tilted, and the waiting becomes its own small failure of the conversation, because she cannot stay here forever and the script she came with has not been completed and she does not have a graceful exit from a script that has not been advanced.

After a beat she does the next thing she has been prepared to do, which is to *exit gracefully herself*.

She says, with the smile still in place: "Well. I won't keep you. You need your rest. It was lovely to meet you, Nerida."

I say: "You too."

She says: "I am sure I will see you around."

I say: "Probably."

She gives me one last warm-deployed smile. She tilts her head one last time. She turns and walks back up the path the way she came, the dark green dress moving cleanly around her boots, the late-summer-wheat hair perfectly in place, the immaculate kind of immaculate that has not had a single hair come loose in the entire ten-minute conversation.

I watch her go until she rounds the bend and is out of sight.