Marked By Tide

Chapter 7 - The First Conversation

Nerida's POV

I wake up the second time differently.

The first thing is the light. The room is full of it. Not the lamp-light of the middle of the night — *real* light, gold at the edges, the kind of light that has been coming up through a window for an hour and is now committed to being morning. The wood ceiling above me is brown-and-honey instead of brown-and-black, and the timbers across the beams look less like a thing I am hallucinating and more like a thing somebody built.

I am still in the strange room.

I am still in pain. The pain is — different than it was. The deep wound in my side is still wide-awake, still pulling when I breathe, but it is a *contained* pain now, the kind of pain that means a body is doing the work of healing instead of the work of bleeding. My right forearm aches under what feels like a bandage. My head is heavy. My mouth is dry to the point of being a problem.

I am, I notice, *less* afraid than I was last night.

I notice it the way you notice a sound you have been listening to for so long you forgot it was there, only it is the *absence* of a sound — the absence of the low constant fear-static that has been the background of my body for five years. The static is gone. Not all the way gone. But quieter than it has been since before my parents died.

I lie still and let myself notice it.

I have not done that in a long time. Noticing how my body feels has been a thing I did not let myself do, because how my body felt was always going to be worse than what I could afford to deal with, and so I trained the noticing out of myself and got good at not knowing. I am noticing this morning because the room is quiet and I have time and there is no one in here to perform for.

There is no one in here to perform for.

I check that. I turn my head slowly to the right.

The chairs are empty.

Both of them.

The chair beside my bed — where the first man was last night, the dark-blond one with the warm hand that did not quite touch me — is empty. The chair across the room — where the second man was, the storm-dark eyes, the one who came over and crouched by my head and said two things I almost heard — is empty.

I sit with the empty chairs for a long moment.

The empty chairs do not feel empty the way the room would have felt empty before last night. They feel — *recently empty*. As if the men have been called away briefly and the chairs are remembering them. The cushion of the chair beside my bed has the indent of a body that has not been gone long. The other chair, across the room, is harder to read from this distance.

A woman's voice says, from somewhere I cannot see: "Good morning."

I startle. I should not startle as hard as I startle — there is nothing about the voice that warrants it — but my body still has five years of programming that has not yet been told it is allowed to retire, and my body does the startle reflex before my brain has time to talk to it about whether the startle is necessary.

The voice waits. The voice does not move toward me. The voice waits until my body settles, which takes a few seconds, and then says — calmly, easily, like a person who has done this before with people whose startles cost them:

"I am sitting in the chair by the door. I will not stand up unless you tell me you would like me to. Take a moment."

I turn my head the other way, slowly.

There is a woman in the chair by the door.

She is short — I can tell that even sitting. She is sitting back in the chair with her legs crossed at the ankle and her hands folded over a book she has set down across her lap. Her hair is silver and long and braided over her shoulder. Her skin is brown. She has the kind of face that has seen a great many things and has decided to be patient with all of them, and her eyes are quiet, and they are on me.

I look at her for a long beat.

She looks back, calmly. She does not smile yet. She does not lean forward. She lets me look.

I do not know what makes me trust her. I think it is the fact that she said *take a moment* and is letting me take the moment. It is also the fact that she is in a chair on the other side of the room with a book across her lap and is not within arm's reach of me. It is also the way she is sitting — settled, the body language of a woman who has not braced for anything in years, the body language of a woman who is *home* in the room and is not asking me to be home in it with her.

I say, finally, in a voice that is hoarse and small and *mine*: "Hi."

It is the first word I have said since the trees.

She does not move toward me. She says: "Hi. My name is Paloma. I am the healer here. You have been in my house for about thirty-six hours. You are safe. Please don't try to sit up — you have stitches in two places and they are doing important work."

I absorb that.

Thirty-six hours.

I have been unconscious for thirty-six hours. I was stabbed on a Tuesday evening — I remember this with the specific clarity of a person who has been counting the days of her life for a long time — and Tuesday evening to right now is more than a day, which means it is Thursday, possibly Thursday morning, and I have been gone for parts of two days that I have no memory of.

I should be terrified by that. I am not terrified by that. The not-terror is the same not-terror that was in the room with me last night, the one I did not have a word for, and I am still not equipped to think about what the not-terror means, so I do the thing I have been good at for five years, which is to ask the next practical question.

I say: "Water."

She is already moving. She has a cup ready — I can tell from the way her hand finds it — and she stands up slowly and crosses the room with the same slow ease she has been doing everything with. She does not loom. She positions herself standing beside the bed, leaves an arm's length of space between us, and offers the cup at the angle that lets me see it before she lets me drink it.

She helps me drink. I have not had water in thirty-six hours. The first sip is so good it hurts. The second sip I would not call easy. By the fourth sip I am crying — quietly, without sound, the way I have learned to cry when crying is not safe — and I am crying because water is *good*, and because somebody is giving it to me without asking anything for it, and because the somebody is letting me drink it at my own pace, and because the bed is soft and the room smells like herbs and somebody has been sitting in a chair by the door reading a book waiting for me to wake up.

Paloma sees the crying.

She does not comment on it. She does not give me a tissue. She does not stop holding the cup. She lets me cry while drinking my fourth sip and my fifth sip, and her face does not do any of the things that people's faces have done to me when I have cried in front of them in the last five years.

Her face does *nothing*. It does not pity me. It does not register the tears at all.

That is the kindest thing anyone has done for me in a very long time.

She finishes giving me the water. She steps back. She says, without sitting down again: "I am going to sit by the bed now, if that's all right. I am close enough this way to keep working on you, and you can ask me to step back at any time and I will. Is that all right."

I say: "Yes."

She sits.

She is in the chair the first man sat in last night. She is doing what he was doing — sitting close enough to me to be present, far enough that I do not feel crowded. The arrangement is the same. The body is different. The effect on my body is, I notice, almost the same — a small warm relief that someone is *here* and not making me work to know it.

I am eighteen years old and I have not had this kind of present-and-not-grabbing person in proximity to me in five years.

I do not say this out loud. I file it.

Paloma settles into the chair. She picks up her book — which is, I see now, not a book she has been reading but a clipboard with notes on it, the kind a healer keeps on a patient — and rests it on her lap. She does not look at it. She looks at me.

She says: "Can you tell me your name."

I open my mouth. I close it. I have a moment of — *should I*. I have spent five years lying about who I am to strangers. I have given a fake name to the doctor at the urgent care once. I have given a wrong age at the pharmacy. I have done it without thinking about it because Jareth has trained me to do it without thinking, and the part of my brain that defaults to lying is still in the chair beside me waiting to be helpful.

I do not lie.

I do not know why. The closest thing to a reason is that the woman in the chair beside me is not a stranger in the way the urgent-care doctor was a stranger. The woman is not someone Jareth could find. The woman is not part of the world Jareth knows about. The woman is — somewhere on the other side of the line in the trees, and Jareth could not cross the line, and so the woman is on the *safe* side of something, and the safe side of something is the first side I have ever been allowed to give my actual name on.

I say: "Nerida."

She does not react. She lets the name land. She says, after a beat: "Nerida. That is a beautiful name."

I say: "Bramwell. Nerida Bramwell."

I add the surname because the surname is the part Jareth cares about, and adding it is a small thing I do to test whether the not-fear is real, whether saying my own full name out loud in a room with a stranger is allowed to be a thing that does not hurt me. The surname comes out and Paloma absorbs it the same way she absorbed the first name — without reaction, without commentary, with the calm of a woman who has heard a lot of names in her life and treats them all the same.

She makes a small mark on her clipboard. She says: "Nerida Bramwell. How old are you."

I say: "Eighteen."

She makes another mark. "Eighteen."

She is quiet for a beat. Then she says: "I am going to ask you a question that you do not have to answer. You can tell me you are not ready to answer it, and that will be the end of it for today. Is that all right."

I say: "All right."

She says: "Do you remember what happened."

I look at her.

I think about lying. I think about *no*. I think about a hundred versions of *no* with shades of detail attached and I run them all in the space of two seconds because I have run them all before, because every doctor and every social worker and every well-meaning teacher who has ever asked me a version of this question for five years has gotten a version of *no* tailored to what they could handle.

But Paloma is not a doctor or a social worker or a teacher. Paloma is the woman who sat in a chair by the door with a book on her lap waiting for me to wake up so she could let me drink water at my own pace and not flinch at me crying.

I say: "Yes."

She says: "Okay. You do not have to tell me what you remember today. I am not going to push you. I am asking only because the next question is — *is the person who hurt you likely to be looking for you*. I am going to need to know that, because the people who live here will need to know it, in order to help you while you heal."

I sit with the question.

I sit with it for a long beat. My heart is doing a thing in my chest that I have not let it do in a long time, which is *answer questions honestly*. The honesty is a foreign country I have not visited in five years and I am — surprised by what it feels like to be inside it again. The honesty is not painful. The honesty is *relieving*, in a way I had forgotten honesty could be.

I say, in a voice that surprises me by how steady it comes out: "Yes."

I say: "He is going to be looking for me. He has been looking for me since I left. He is — *not someone* — I do not know how to say this. He is going to be looking for me with every legal tool he has, because he has documents that say I am his ward. He is going to be looking for me with every illegal tool he has, because the documents are part of a scheme that I am the proof of. He is — he is going to come for me. I cannot tell you when. I can tell you that he will."

Paloma absorbs this.

Her face does not change. Her body does not change. Her hand does not move on the clipboard. But something behind her eyes does a thing — a kind of *settling*, the way a person who has just been given the shape of a problem starts working on the problem in the back of her head while still listening to the front of it. I have seen this look on exactly one face before in my life, which was the face of the social worker who almost figured Jareth out when I was fifteen and was reassigned the next month for reasons Jareth somehow had a hand in arranging.

I say, quickly, because the not-fear in my body is not the same as full trust and I have to test this: "Are you going to send me back to him."

She does not pause to answer. She says: "No."

I say: "Are you allowed to say that."

She says: "I am allowed to say that. You are inside a wildlife reserve. The people who live here have agreed to help you while you heal. You are not going to be returned to anyone you do not want to be returned to. That is not a promise I am making lightly, Nerida. The people here have the authority to make that promise, and I am making it on their behalf because I have been authorized to."

I say: "Why."

She considers me for a long moment.

She says, carefully: "The people who found you have asked us to take care of you. They have asked it the way that means we are not going to refuse the asking. I am not going to explain the rest right now, because the rest is something you need to be at full strength to hear, and you are not at full strength yet. They will explain it themselves when you are ready to be told. Is that all right."

I think about it.

It is not all right. *Not knowing* is not all right. *Not knowing why a stranger has been authorized to promise me safety* is exactly the kind of thing I have been trained, for five years, to find a way to know.

But the woman in the chair is sitting with her hands folded across a clipboard and her eyes are quiet on mine and she has said the words *you are not going to be returned to anyone you do not want to be returned to* in a voice that sounded like she meant them, and I — for the first time in five years — am letting myself try, just a little, the experiment of believing what someone has told me. Not because I trust her yet. I do not trust her yet. Because the not-trust I have been wearing is heavier than I can carry one more morning.

I say: "All right."

She nods.

She makes one more mark on her clipboard.

She says: "I am going to ask one more thing and then I am going to let you sleep, because you are going to be very tired in about two minutes whether you want to be or not. Do you have any medical conditions I should know about. Allergies. Things you take. Things you cannot eat. Anything that might affect how you heal."

I say: "No allergies. I do not take anything. My — my brother — does not let me take anything." The word *brother* comes out the way a splinter comes out. "I have not been to a doctor in three years. Possibly four. I do not know what I might have that a doctor would have found if I had been allowed to go."

She makes another mark.

She says: "I will make a list. We will go through it together when you are stronger. There is no rush. Anything else."

I say, after a beat: "There were two men last night."

She looks up.

She does not pretend she does not know what I am asking. She says: "Yes. There were."

I say: "Who are they."

She says, with the smallest possible adjustment to her voice: "They are the people who found you. They are the people who carried you here. They are the people who asked us to take care of you. They are — important people in the pack, but I am going to let them introduce themselves to you on their own terms. They have asked me to make sure you have time to be ready to meet them, and I have agreed to give you that time. Is that all right."

The word *pack* sits in the room for a second.

I do not know what to do with it. I have heard the word in other contexts. A pack of cards. A pack of cigarettes. A backpack. None of those is what she means. She has used the word the way someone uses a word for a group of people, and I file the strangeness of that for later, because the woman in the chair has just promised me that I get to be ready before I meet the men from last night, and the *getting to be ready* is more important than the strange word.

I say: "All right."

She says, finally: "There is also a girl who came by this morning. She wanted to meet you. I told her she could not, not yet."

I say: "A girl."

Paloma says, with the smallest amount of warmth her face has shown so far: "Her name is Tamsin. She is sixteen. She is going to like you. She is not patient about things she has decided she is going to like, so she will probably come back at some point today and try to see you again, and I will turn her away again, and she will accept that for about two more days, and then I will let her in."

I say: "Why is she going to like me."

Paloma says: "I have no idea. But she does not announce her decisions, and she announced this one. So we will see."

I almost smile. I do not smile. But the corner of my mouth does the smallest possible thing it has done in a long time, and Paloma sees it and does not comment, and the not-commenting is once again the kindest thing she could possibly do.

She stands up.

She says: "Sleep. I will be in the next room. The door will be open. If you need anything, say my name out loud. I will hear you."

She does not say goodbye. She walks to the door of the back room and through it and pulls the door so it sits open by about a foot, and then she sits down somewhere I cannot see and the room is quiet except for the morning birds outside the window I have not yet looked at.

I close my eyes.

I have given my name to a stranger.

I have given my age to a stranger.

I have told her that someone is going to come looking for me, and the stranger has said *no, you are not going to be returned*, and I have decided — not all the way, not with my whole body — to try believing her.

I have learned that the second man last night was someone I am going to meet on my own terms when I am ready, and the first man too.

I have learned that a girl named Tamsin has decided she is going to like me, and I do not know yet what that means but my chest is doing a thing about it that I will need to think about later.

I have learned the word *pack*.

I have learned that I am still alive thirty-six hours after I went down in the trees, and that being alive does not, this morning, hurt as much as I had been told it would.

I open my eyes for one second more and look at the chair beside the bed.

The cushion still has the indent.

I close my eyes and sleep.