Marked By Tide

Chapter 17 - Tamsin's Take

Tamsin's POV

I find out about Lorelei within ten hours.

I find out the way I find out about everything in this pack, which is that one of my school friends tells me. Her name is Hana and she is one of the four people in school I will admit to being friends with, and she finds me at breakfast on day seventeen and slides into the seat across from me and says, with the look of a girl who is about to deliver gossip the size of a small bomb:

"You heard, right?"

I say: "Heard what."

She says: "About Lorelei."

I say: "What about her."

She says: "She *went* to the shore path yesterday afternoon. While the new girl was on her walk."

I do not stop chewing.

I do continue chewing for the half-second it takes my body to absorb the information, because the alternative — stopping chewing — is going to communicate to Hana that I am about to do something, and what I am about to do is not something Hana needs to be present for the planning of. I keep chewing. I keep my face the *bored sixteen-year-old at breakfast* face I have spent four years perfecting. I take my time.

When I have swallowed I say, mildly: "Who told you."

She says: "Margit's mom. Margit's mom passed her on the path coming back. Lorelei was — she said Lorelei was *deeply pleased with herself*. Margit's mom thought you would want to know."

I say: "Margit's mom is correct."

I stand up. I pick up my plate. I take it to the dish station. I leave breakfast unfinished, which Hana clocks but does not comment on, because Hana has known me since we were six and Hana knows what *unfinished breakfast* means in my repertoire of states. She lets me go.

I go.

---

I walk to the healing house at a pace that is just under *running*.

I do this because *running* would be the kind of body-language that gets reported by every pack member I pass, and the pack heart has been *watching* me since the morning of day two, and I am not going to give the watching any more material than it already has. I walk fast. I do not stop to wave at Halvard Roe's youngest, who has decided I am her favorite older girl in the pack and waves at me whenever we cross paths, and who I will apologize to later. I walk through the central path and past the kitchen and past Mirele's office and up the long path that runs east toward Paloma's healing house and I am, by the time I reach the porch steps, *vibrating*.

Mire is in me. Mire is *not* vibrating. Mire is doing what Mire does when I am about to be a problem, which is to *settle* in my chest in the way she settles when she has decided I am going to need her steady underneath my volume. Mire is my counterweight. She has been my counterweight since I was six and she stepped into me for the first time, and she is doing the work she has always done, which is to *not be loud while I am being loud*.

*Tamsin*, she says, in the back of me. *Slow your hands.*

I say: *Mire. She went to the shore path.*

*I know. I heard you the first time. Slow your hands. Walk up the porch steps like a person.*

*Mire — *

*Tamsin. Slow your hands.*

I slow my hands. I walk up the porch steps like a person. Cassian is in the porch chair where Cassian has been in the porch chair for half my life now, and he sees me coming, and his face does the small thing his face does when he has been expecting me and is glad I am here. Soren is in the chair beside him. He gives me the small nod that means *yes, we know, yes, Lorelei, yes, go in*.

I go in.

---

Paloma is at her station. She gives me the look that means *she is awake, she is well, you may go in but I am watching the clock*. I give Paloma the look back that means *I will not exhaust her, I love you, Paloma*. I cross the front room. I knock twice on the inner door — the two-knock Mom taught us — and I do not wait for the *come in* because the rules of the room are that *I do not wait for the come in*, and I push the door open.

Nerida is in the chair beside the bed.

She is in *the chair*. She has been in the chair beside the bed every afternoon for a week now, Paloma cleared her, and the chair is hers now in a way that the rest of the room is not yet hers but is on its way to becoming hers. She is sitting in it with a book in her lap and the too-big robe over her shoulders and the braid I did for her two days ago has been redone — better, more carefully, by her own hands — and she looks up when the door opens and her face does the small upward-corner shift that I have decided is the closest thing she has to a real smile yet, and I am going to take it.

I sit on the bed. I do not ask. I sit on the bed across from her chair and I tuck my legs under me and I look at her.

I say: "Tell me."

She says, mild: "Tell you what."

I say: "Don't."

She almost smiles. She does not.

She says: "How did you find out."

I say: "Margit's mom passed Lorelei on the path coming back. Margit's mom told Hana's mom. Hana told me at breakfast. I have known for thirty-eight minutes. I came as fast as I could without making it obvious I was coming."

Nerida says: "All right."

She tells me.

She tells me the whole thing. Better than she told Cassian, I think — she has had a night to sleep on it and the sleep has sorted the events into the order she wants me to receive them in. She gives me the walk, the sea, the bench, the woman coming up the path the *other way*, the warmth-deployed smile, the *welcome to Tidemark*, the *worried*, the family-quarters guest rooms, the *I have known the twins since we were children*, the *all of us* phrase with Lorelei sliding herself inside the *us*, the offer to *explain things*, the silence Nerida let land, the graceful exit.

I listen. I do not interrupt. I do not let my face do what my face wants to do.

When she is done I sit with it for a beat.

Then I deliver my reaction.

I do not write down what I say. The reaction would be unprintable. It involves three specific epithets I have learned from my father's patrol captains in the eight years I have been allowed to be present when patrol captains use language, two anatomical observations about Lorelei that are not necessary to repeat, one analogy involving a marsh leech that lands very well, and a specific phrase Cassian taught me when I was eleven and Mom did not know that Cassian was teaching me phrases, and which Cassian got in trouble for two months later when I used it in front of Mirele. I deploy the whole vocabulary.

Nerida watches me deliver it.

By the third epithet she is — *laughing*. Not big laughing. Small laughing. The same broken-muscle laugh she did the first time I told her about the dog named *Stupid*. But laughing.

When I have stopped editorializing I sit back and I take a breath.

I say: "All right. Now I'm going to tell you what you need to know about Lorelei, because nobody else is going to lay it out for you straight."

Nerida says: "All right."

---

I lay it out.

I say: "She slept with Cassian when she was eighteen and he was seventeen. She slept with Soren when she was nineteen and he was eighteen. Neither time was anything more than two months. Both of my brothers were honest with her about that going in. She heard a different conversation than the one they were having. She has been operating on the assumption that one of them was going to come back to her eventually and she has built her social position in this pack on that assumption being true. You are the thing that disproved her assumption. She is going to be a problem."

Nerida sits with that.

She has, I can tell, already worked some of it out. Cassian told her the bones yesterday afternoon — she said so. But the bones are different from the *political picture*, and the political picture is what I have come to give her, because Cassian is, with respect, not capable of giving political pictures. Cassian gives emotional truth and he gives it cleanly. He does not give *strategic context*. That is my job. I have been waiting for it to be my job.

Nerida says: "How much of a problem."

I say: "She's not stupid. She won't be obvious. She'll work at the edges. She'll be perfectly nice to your face and find ways to introduce information designed to land badly. She's done it to other girls before. She doesn't do *real* harm — usually — she just plays for position and she's good at it. You're going to want to talk to me before you talk to anyone else about anything she says. Including my mother."

Nerida says: "Including your mother."

I say: "Including my mother. Mom knows what Lorelei is. Mom has known what Lorelei is since Lorelei was twelve and Mom watched her play a school theater part she had been promised and was — *not gracious* about losing. But Mom has a complicated relationship with the social fabric of this pack and sometimes Mom plays the longer game in ways that don't help in the short term. The longer game is going to require Mom to be Lorelei's father's Luna in a way she does not have to be Lorelei's Luna, and the not-being is — Lorelei's father is a council-adjacent man and Mom has reasons to keep the council-adjacent men inside the tent. So if you ask Mom about Lorelei, Mom is going to give you the *Luna* answer, which is the right answer for the long game and the wrong answer for *today*. You ask me. I will give you the *today* answer. The Luna answer you can get from Mom on your own time."

Nerida is — looking at me.

She is looking at me the way a person looks at a piece of furniture that has just turned out to be a different piece of furniture than they had thought it was, and the looking is — I do not have a word for. The looking is *good*. The looking has *respect* in it. The looking is the look of a woman who has just been handed a clear-eyed political briefing by a sixteen-year-old and has decided to absorb the political briefing without flinching at the source.

She says: "Thank you."

I say: "I like you. That's why. Don't make me regret it."

She almost smiles again.

---

She says, after a beat: "Tamsin."

I say: "Yes."

She says: "Tell me about the morning."

I look at her.

I say: "Which morning."

She says: "The morning of day two. Cassian mentioned, yesterday, when he was telling me Lorelei is *not allowed within fifty feet of this house*, that the not-allowed has been the rule because of something that happened in the courtyard on day two. He did not give me the details. He said *Tamsin handled it*. I want the details."

I sit back.

I take a breath.

I think about how I am going to tell this story.

I do not tell stories about myself often. I do not enjoy the genre. The genre is mostly used in this pack by men who have *just done something dumb* and want to *frame it* before someone else gets to frame it for them, and I have never wanted to be the kind of woman who does the framing. But Nerida is asking. Nerida is asking *me*, and Nerida is asking *for the details*, and the asking is the kind of asking that is going to deserve the details, because if Nerida is going to be in this pack — and Nerida is going to be in this pack, the bond is the bond and the bond is the fact and the fact is what we work with — she is going to need to know the *shape* of how the pack handles its own when its own steps out of line.

I tell her.

---

I say:

"Day two. The morning after my brothers brought you in. I had been told you were here by Mom, very early, and Mom told me also that you were in Paloma's healing house and that the family — *we* — had decided you were not going to be a thing the pack got to discuss until we had more information. Mom said *you do not bring this up at school*, and I said *I know*, and Mom said *Tamsin, I am asking you specifically because you are sixteen and you have a mouth*, and I said *Mom, I am sixteen and I have a mouth and I am going to use it correctly*. She trusted me. She trusts me. That part was fine."

Nerida is listening.

I keep going.

"I went to school at the normal time. Lorelei was at the courtyard fountain. The courtyard fountain is the place Lorelei lives, socially — she stations herself there in the mornings because the fountain is where the pack children come and go to school and Lorelei has decided the fountain is her natural habitat. She was *there*, the way she is always there, in one of her dresses, with three of her friends — Esme, Margit, and Saskia. The friends are not bad people individually. The friends are *gravitational* around Lorelei because Lorelei has been the central body of that group for four years and the friends have arranged themselves around her the way you arrange yourself around someone you are afraid of disappointing."

"I tried to walk past."

"I did try. I want you to know that. Mom had asked. I had agreed. I had been *trying*."

"Lorelei stopped me. She said — and I am quoting — *Tamsin, sweetheart, how is your morning going*. The *sweetheart* is the thing she does. The *sweetheart* is a flag. She does not call anyone *sweetheart* unless she is about to do something with it. I had — I had two seconds to decide whether to keep walking or stop. I stopped."

Nerida says, very quietly: "Why did you stop."

I say: "Because she was about to ask me the question I knew she was going to ask me, and if I walked past her she was going to ask the question anyway, *loudly*, in front of the four people who were watching, and I was not going to give her the *loudly*. I was going to make her ask me the question to my face."

Nerida nods.

I continue.

"She asked. She said — *I hear your brothers brought a girl in last night*. The way she said *a girl*. The *a girl* the way you say a piece of furniture. The *a girl* the way you mean *the kind of girl who is going to be a problem*. She said it for the friends. She said it to make the friends do the small group-laugh that group-laughs do when the leader has signaled that the joke is on someone who is not in the room. The friends did the laugh."

I have to pause.

I have to pause because I have been telling the story and have been keeping my voice level and the level is not quite holding, because the *a girl* in Lorelei's voice on the morning of day two is one of the things I am going to remember about Lorelei for the rest of my life. The *a girl*. The dismissal in three syllables, before Lorelei had any *idea* who you were, before any of us did, before you were even properly awake on Paloma's table. *A girl*.

Mire, in the back of me, says: *Tamsin*.

I say back: *I know*.

Mire says: *Tell her the rest. She is asking. Give it to her.*

I tell her the rest.

I say:

"I did the thing I do when I am about to be a problem. I went *quiet*. I stepped one step closer to Lorelei, which is the thing I do that the pack knows means *Tamsin has stopped being playful*, and Esme — Esme is the one who has known me the longest of Lorelei's three friends — Esme made the small sound that means *Lorelei, abort*. Lorelei did not abort. Lorelei *kept the smile on*."

"I said: *her name is going to be told to you when she is ready to be introduced. She is in Paloma's house. She is healing. You are going to leave her alone until my mother says otherwise. Are we clear.*"

"Lorelei said: *Tamsin, I think you've misunderstood, I was just asking.*"

"I said: *Lorelei. I am going to repeat it once. You will leave her alone. You will not come to Paloma's house. You will not come to the family quarters. You will not approach her on a path. You will not introduce yourself. You will not send your friends to introduce themselves on your behalf. If you do, you will be doing it against my explicit instruction. Are we clear.*"

I stop.

I have to.

Nerida is looking at me.

She is looking at me the way a person looks at a sixteen-year-old who has just laid out, almost word for word, the boundary that Lorelei deliberately and specifically violated *yesterday* on the shore path, fifteen days after the boundary was laid. The look is — small and steady and *complicated*. Nerida is filing the story the way she files everything, and the filing this time has — sympathy in it. Sympathy *for me*. Which is the thing about Nerida I am going to keep coming back to. She is *generous* with the sympathy. She has been hurt — I know she has been hurt, the family knows, even Lorelei probably knows — and she still has it left over.

I take a breath. I keep going.

I say: "Lorelei did the thing Lorelei always does, which is to *appeal to the audience*. She turned slightly to her friends. She put on the *I do not understand why this is happening to me* face. She said, loud enough for the entire courtyard to hear — and the courtyard at that hour has thirty people in it, easily — she said: *Tamsin, I have not done anything. I'm sorry your brothers — *"

I stop.

Nerida says: "She finished the sentence."

I say: "She did not finish the sentence. She did not get to finish the sentence."

"I — interrupted her."

"I interrupted her in a way that is going to be one of the three or four things people in this pack tell their grandchildren about. I interrupted her with — with my voice, *loud*, at a level my voice does not usually reach, which carried across the courtyard and through the kitchen window and out into the path that runs east, and which I have been told by reliable witnesses was heard by Halvard Roe at the far edge of the patrol cache."

"I said: *do not bring my brothers' names anywhere near your mouth.*"

"I said it once. I did not say it twice. I did not need to."

"The courtyard went quiet."

"Lorelei went *white*. The white she goes when she has miscalculated. The friends — even Esme — stopped knowing what to do with their faces. Margit started backing away. Saskia did the thing she does where she tries to hide behind Esme, which has never worked because Saskia is taller than Esme. Nobody breathed. The fountain was the only sound. The whole courtyard heard me and the whole courtyard heard *what I said*, and the whole courtyard understood that I had just put Lorelei on the wrong side of something the family had decided about, and the courtyard was going to have *opinions*."

"Lorelei said, in a much smaller voice: *Tamsin.*"

"I said: *We are clear?*"

"She said: *We are clear.*"

"I left."

"I left and I came directly here, to Paloma's healing house, to tell my brothers that I had handled it, and they were on the porch and they laughed because of course they laughed, and I told them what I had said, and Cassian laughed harder, and Soren said *Tamsin, you cannot say that to her in public*, and I said *I just did*, and Soren said *I know, I heard you, I heard you from the porch*, and they were both *delighted* in a way I had not seen them be delighted since they were fourteen."

"And then Lorelei's father came to my father at first light the next morning, and my father told him his daughter is on social probation until further notice, which is the *Tidemark Pack official version* of *do not let your daughter near my pack's interests again*, and that is where we are."

I stop.

Nerida is — *grinning*.

She is not laughing. She is *grinning*, the corner-of-mouth grin she has been working on for two days now and which I have been waiting to see, and the grin is the most expression her face has done since I have known her, and it is *for me*, and I am going to remember the grin for as long as I remember Lorelei's *a girl*.

She says, in a small voice: "Tamsin."

I say: "Yes."

She says: "*Do not bring my brothers' names anywhere near your mouth.*"

I say: "Yes."

She says, quietly, with the grin still on: "Thank you."

I say: "You are welcome."

I sit on the bed for a long beat. I do not move. The story has used me up a little. I had not expected the story to use me up. Mire is in my chest, settled, quiet, the way she is when she is making sure I am still standing inside the work.

I look at Nerida.

I say, with what I hope is casual enough delivery that the question lands as casual: "Which of my brothers do you like more so far?"

She looks at me.

She says, immediately, without thinking: "That's a trap."

I grin.

I say: "*Correct answer.* I'm proud."

She does the small upward-corner shift again. I do mine back. We sit together on the bed and the chair and the room is full of the late-morning light and the herb smell and the wood ceiling, and the chapter of pack history I just narrated is also in the room, and Nerida is going to keep it, and Lorelei is somewhere on the other side of the pack heart not knowing that I have just shared the courtyard story with the only person in the pack Lorelei did not want it shared with, and I —

I am, I notice, *happy*.

I am happy in the small specific way I am happy when I have done a piece of work correctly and the work has been received correctly and the receiving is the kind of receiving I have wanted. I file the happy. I will come back to it.

Mire, in the back of me, says: *good work, Tamsin.*

I say back: *thank you, Mire.*

She says: *don't make her tired. Walk her back to the bed in five minutes.*

I say: *yes, Mire.*

I sit with Nerida for five more minutes. I do not push for more conversation. She is tired and the tiredness is the good tired, the tired of a person who has spent her morning being laughed-with instead of laughed-at, and I let the tired do its work. When her eyes start to do the slow blink Paloma has told me about, I stand up.

I say: "I'm going. Eat the bread Paloma is going to bring you. Cassian is on the porch and he is going to be on the porch all afternoon, so if you want anything when you wake up, send Paloma to send him."

Nerida says: "All right."

She closes her eyes.

I close the door behind me, quietly, the way Mom taught us.

---

Cassian is in the porch chair.

He looks up. He says: "Well?"

I say: "I told her the courtyard story."

Soren, beside him, says: "All of it?"

I say: "All of it."

Cassian says: "Did she laugh."

I say: "She grinned."

Both my brothers go still.

The still is the still of two men whose mate has just done a thing nobody outside the family has seen her do, and they have just been told about the doing of it, and the bond between them is humming in their chests at a frequency that is going to make them both useless for the rest of the afternoon. I let them have the moment. I have done what I came to do. I have given them the *grin* report and they are going to live inside the grin report for the next forty-eight hours.

I say: "I'm going to school. Tell Paloma I will be back at three."

Cassian, in a voice that is not quite steady: "Tamsin."

I say: "Yes."

He says: "Thank you."

I say: "You are welcome, brother."

I go down the porch steps.

I walk through the pack heart.

Halvard Roe's youngest sees me, waves, and I wave back — the proper wave this time — and the kitchen is still warm and the path is still doing the dappled-light thing the path does at this hour and I am thinking, as I walk, about what *grinning* means in the development of a person who two and a half weeks ago was bleeding to death in our trees thinking *good*, and the thinking is making my chest do a thing it does not usually do, which is to *crack* a little, a small crack, the kind of crack a thing makes when a thing is letting a person inside.

Mire says: *yes, Tamsin.*

I say back: *I know.*

I walk to school.