Marked By Tide

Chapter 16 - The Shore Path Part 2

Nerida's POV

The moment she is out of sight I lean forward on the bench and put my head in my hands.

---

I do not cry.

I am, I notice, *shaking*. Not the way I shook for Jareth. A smaller shake. The shake of a body that has just done two weeks of cumulative emotional work in a single ten-minute conversation, and the body is going to have to *catalog* the work before it can move again.

My side is hurting.

The wound is not opening. The wound is *complaining*, the way Paloma told me it would, and the complaint is the second one — the *second complaint* — and Paloma told me to come back before the second complaint, and I have just gotten the second complaint, and I am — six hundred yards from the porch on a path that turns out to have other people on it.

I take three breaths.

I straighten. I push myself up off the bench. I take the first step back along the path. Then the next. Then the next.

I walk back.

I do not stop. I cannot stop. If I stop my side is going to complain in the bigger way that Paloma told me to avoid, and Paloma is going to be cross with me, and I do not want to be the reason Paloma is cross. I walk.

The path is longer back than it was out. The sea is still visible through the trees as I walk west, and the sea is still doing the sea thing, but I do not have the bandwidth to look at the sea this time. The sea is going to be there tomorrow. I will come back.

I walk.

---

I come up out of the trees onto the porch and Cassian sees me.

He is in the porch chair. He has been in the porch chair since I left. He has, I can see from the angle of his shoulders, been waiting in a particular kind of way that I file as *Cassian's-version-of-letting-her-walk-alone*, which is the version where his body has been in a chair on the porch for ninety minutes braced for me to come back.

He sees my face.

He stands up.

He does not move toward me. He does not push. He just *stands*, on the porch, and his face goes the *here* it has been going whenever he has been in the room with me for the last two weeks, and he says — quietly, the way Cassian asks the questions he knows the answer to:

"What happened."

I get up the porch steps slowly. Paloma is at the door. She sees me. She gives me the small nod that means *come in when you are ready, I will check the wound, I will not push*. She goes inside.

I cross to the porch chair beside Cassian's. I sit. I let my back lean. I close my eyes for a beat.

Cassian sits back down.

He does not push.

I open my eyes. I look at him. I say:

"I met Lorelei."

---

His face does — *more than a flinch this time*.

His jaw tightens. The muscle in it does the thing the muscle in Cassian's jaw does when Cassian is holding something hard. His shoulders go still. His hands — his hands, which have been resting easy on his knees in the chair for the entire two weeks I have been watching him sit in chairs — go *very* still on his knees.

There is *something* in his chest. I can — *almost* feel it across the porch. Not really. But Cassian is, I have learned, the loudest member of this family in the small ways he holds things, and right now he is holding something I would have to be blind not to see.

He says, after a long beat: "Where."

I say: "The shore path. The bench under the third cedar. She came up the path the other way. I was sitting."

He says: "How long was the conversation."

I say: "Ten minutes. Maybe twelve."

He says: "What did she say."

I sit with the question.

I am — *tired*. I am tired the way a person is tired who has been in a small fight she did not start and did not finish and which has cost her in ways she is going to need a day to inventory. I do not want to give Cassian the full play-by-play. I do not have the bandwidth to give Cassian the full play-by-play. But Cassian is asking and Cassian deserves the *shape* of what was said, even if not the words.

I say: "She welcomed me to Tidemark. She said she had been worried about me. She mentioned that there are family-quarters guest rooms I have not been offered. She mentioned that she had known you and Soren since you were children. She mentioned that the *pack is so happy* for the two of you — for *all of us*, was her phrasing, *all of us*, sliding herself inside the *us* with you and Soren and me like she had been there the whole time — and she offered to help me adjust to pack life if I ever needed someone to *explain things*."

Cassian's jaw does the next thing the muscle in Cassian's jaw does. It goes *harder*. The kind of hard that says he is choosing not to say what is in his mouth in the moment.

He says, quietly, after a beat: "I should have warned you."

I say: "Yes. You should have."

He says: "I didn't think she'd move that fast."

I say: "How fast were you expecting her to move."

He says: "I was expecting — three weeks. I was expecting her to wait until you had been introduced to the wider pack. I was not expecting her to find you on the shore path on the first day you were allowed off the porch. The timing implies — *information*. She is being told about you by someone who knows when you are walking."

I sit with that.

He continues, in the same quiet voice: "I will find out who is telling her. That will not be your problem. I want you to know that, the next time you are off the porch alone, you will not be ambushed on the shore path. Are we clear."

I say: "We are clear."

A long beat.

I say: "Cassian."

He says: "Yes."

I say: "Who is she."

He looks at me.

I have spent five years reading rooms. I have known, from the moment Lorelei came around the bend in the path with the warmth-deployed smile, what Lorelei was *in relation to Cassian*. I had not asked her to confirm it because I did not want to give her the satisfaction of confirming it. But I am asking Cassian to confirm it now, because the asking is — *mine* to ask. It is my prerogative to ask. And he is going to answer.

He sits with the question for a long beat.

Then he says, in the smallest possible voice: "She is someone I slept with two years ago, briefly. I made the situation explicit. I told her I was not going to be serious about it. She heard a different conversation than the one I was having. She has been operating on the assumption that I was eventually going to come back to her, and she has been building her social position in this pack on that assumption. You are the person who disproved the assumption."

I sit with that.

I say: "And Soren."

Cassian looks at me.

He says: "How did you know to ask."

I say: "She said *the twins*. She said *Cassian and Soren and I*. She put them in the same sentence. I am asking."

Cassian says: "Yes. Also. A year after me. Same — kind of arrangement. He told her the same things I had told her. She heard the same different conversation she had heard from me."

I take a breath.

I say: "Thank you."

He says: "For what."

I say: "For telling me the actual truth. For not — *managing* me. You could have given me a version of that. You did not."

He says: "I was not going to be able to lie to you about it. I did not try."

I close my eyes for a beat.

I open them. I look at him.

I say: "Cassian."

He says: "Yes."

I say: "She used the word *pack* four times. Casually. She used it the way a person uses a word she has decided I should already know."

He says: "She is. She would. She would have done that on purpose. She is — *aware* you have not been told what the word fully means, and she has been counting on the not-knowing being the thing that makes you feel outside."

I say: "I know."

I say: "I am asking — not for the full answer. I know you said you would tell me when I was stronger. I am asking the smaller version. Is *pack* — is the word *more* than what it looks like."

Cassian sits with the question.

He chooses his words. He says, carefully: "Yes. It is. The word has meaning that I am not going to give you the shape of today because the shape needs to be given to you when you are not — when you are not coming off a Lorelei conversation. But yes. The word is more than what it looks like. And when you are ready to hear what it means, I will tell you, or my mother will, and we will tell you the whole thing, and you will get to decide what you do with it."

I say: "All right."

He says: "Are you — are you all right not knowing today."

I say: "I am all right not knowing today. I just wanted to confirm that there *was* something to not-know. I have been treating it as something to not-know already. I wanted to know I was right."

He says, very quietly: "You were right."

I say: "Good."

I close my eyes again.

---

We sit on the porch for a long time.

We do not speak. Cassian does not push. He sits in his chair. I sit in mine. The afternoon light is moving across the porch boards in the slow way it moves at this hour. The shore path is just out of sight beyond the trees and the sea is below the cliffs and Lorelei is somewhere on the other side of the pack heart and Paloma is inside the front room checking her clipboard and the world has, in the last ten minutes, become a *more complicated place* than it had been for the last two weeks, and the complication is — *real* in a way the safety had not been.

It is — fine.

It is — I am surprised by this, but I sit with it and let it settle, and it remains true — *fine*.

I had not expected the safety to be uncomplicated. I had not — at any point in two weeks of being inside Paloma's healing room — assumed the safety extended past the room. I had been hoping. I had not been *expecting*. The Lorelei conversation has clarified the shape of what is outside the room, and the outside is — *what the outside always is*. It has a Lorelei in it. There have been Lorelei-shaped people in my life before. I have *handled* them before. I will handle this one. The handling will cost me, but the cost is — *finite*. It is the kind of cost I have a budget for.

I open my eyes.

I look at Cassian.

I say: "I am going inside. My side has been complaining for an hour and Paloma is going to be cross."

He says: "All right."

I stand up. He stands up with me. He does not offer me his arm. He has learned, in two weeks of watching me, not to offer me his arm until I have asked for it, and I have not asked. I cross the porch. He stays where he is.

At the door I stop.

I turn back.

I say: "Cassian."

He says: "Yes."

I say: "Thank you for being on the porch when I came back."

He says: "I will be on the porch every time you come back. For as long as you keep coming back. Are we clear."

I say: "We are clear."

I go inside.

Paloma is at her chair by the door. She stands up. She does not ask me anything. She just crosses to me and puts her hand under my elbow and walks me to the bed. She helps me sit. She lifts my shirt to check the wound. She makes a small noise that means *you walked too far* and she does not say it out loud and I am grateful.

She says: "Sleep."

I sleep.