Marked By Tide

Chapter 14 - The Pattern Sets In

Nerida's POV

The week happens in a rhythm I did not build and which I had no idea I was settling into until I was already inside it.

It happens like this:

Paloma comes in the morning. She brings a tray with bread and broth and tea and the small porcelain pot of honey that has not run out yet because somebody refills it without telling me they have refilled it. She sits in the chair by the door and lets me eat at my own pace. She does not watch me eat. She has her clipboard. She makes notes I do not see. When I am done she stands, takes the tray, checks the wound at my side, checks the wound on my arm, asks me three medical questions, accepts the answers, and goes.

She comes again in the evening. Same thing in reverse — wound check first, dinner second, the small porcelain pot of honey, the not-watching me eat.

Cassian comes in the afternoon.

He comes most afternoons. Not every afternoon. The afternoons he does not come, I learn later from Tamsin or from Cassian himself, he has been *busy with pack business*, which is a phrase I have started to file in the *things that mean more than they appear to mean* drawer in my head. Pack business is not explained to me. I do not ask. I am still working out the rules of the room and the rules of the room appear to be: you can ask me anything and I will tell you, or I will tell you why I cannot tell you, but it is going to be on your timeline.

I am, slowly, learning what I am willing to ask.

I have not asked much yet.

---

Cassian sits in the chair across the room from the bed — Tamsin's chair, the chair he chose the first day — and he does not sit in the chair beside the bed and we are both aware of it.

The chair beside the bed has become — *the chair*. The chair I have been thinking about as *the chair* in my own head for a week. The chair he sat in the first night. The chair he could sit in if I asked him to. He has not been asked. He sits across the room every afternoon and he talks easily and he answers what I ask and he leaves before I am too tired, and the chair beside the bed sits empty between us the whole time.

I have not yet asked him to sit in it.

I think about it.

I think about it most afternoons after he leaves. I do not have a frame for *asking a man to sit in a chair next to my bed*. I have a frame for *a man taking the chair next to my bed without being asked*, which is the frame Jareth would have used, and the frame is so loud in my history that I cannot use it for Cassian even when I want to. The asking is going to require a new frame. I do not yet have the new frame. I am working on it.

Cassian has, I notice, also not stayed long enough in any one visit to make the chair-question urgent. He stays maybe forty minutes. He leaves before I have used up the energy I had stored for him. He has timed the visits with the precision of a man who has been watching me for cues I do not know I am giving, and the timing is — *generous*. He is giving me the version of him that does not cost me, and he is taking the cost of his own departure on himself, and the doing of it is small enough that I would not notice it if I were not watching him as closely as he is watching me.

We are both watching each other this carefully.

It is a peculiar thing.

---

We talk about safe topics.

He tells me about pack history that does not require explanation of what *pack* means. He tells me about the coastline below the cliffs and the cove where the smaller boats are tied up and the small chapel at the eastern boundary that has been there longer than the pack has been organized. He tells me about Paloma's husband, who died eleven years ago and was — Cassian's words — *the only man I have ever met who could match Paloma in a chess game*. He tells me about Tamsin's school, which is a small one-room schoolhouse run by a woman named Brenna who teaches everyone from age four to age sixteen. He tells me about the kitchen — *the family kitchen* — where his mother has been the cook on Sundays since he was eight, and he tells me about Sunday dinners, which are the meal the whole family eats together if everyone is home, and the *if everyone is home* clause sits in the room for a beat longer than the rest of the sentence because it implies a thing I am not part of yet.

I ask him about his brother.

I ask it on day eight.

I have been waiting to ask. I have been waiting because Soren has not come back since the morning he came in and asked me how I was feeling and answered *I'm not good at it* when I said he did not talk much, and stood up too fast and made the chair scrape and walked out of the room before I could ask him anything else, and I have been thinking about that morning every day since.

I ask Cassian when there is a lull in the conversation that I have, deliberately, allowed to lengthen so the asking has somewhere to land.

I say: "Your brother."

Cassian looks at me. He sets down his cup. He says: "Soren."

I say: "Yes."

He says: "What about him."

I say, carefully, because the asking is harder than I expected it to be: "He came in once. He has not come back. I — I am not asking you to make him come back. I am asking — is he all right."

Cassian sits with the question.

He is, I see, considering his words. He does the small thing his face does when he is choosing words carefully — the slight downward look at his cup, the small movement of his jaw — and he takes his time. I have noticed that Cassian does this. He is not slow but he is *careful*. He chooses words the way a person chooses ingredients when the meal matters.

He says: "Soren feels things harder than he can say them."

I sit with that.

He says: "He is not avoiding you. He is afraid of saying the wrong thing. The morning he came in he said one thing he thought was the wrong thing — it was not the wrong thing, but he thought it was — and he has been afraid since then of coming back and doing it again. He will. Eventually. He is — *working on it*. Be patient with him, if you can. I know you are already patient. I know that asking you to be more patient is not fair. But I do not have a better answer for you."

I sit with that.

I sit with it for a long time. Cassian lets me. He does not push. He drinks his tea. He waits.

I say, eventually: "I think that may be the kindest thing anyone has ever said about a brother."

Cassian laughs.

It is not a loud laugh. It is a small one — surprised, like the laugh he gave me the first day when I called walking to the bathroom *undignified*. The laugh comes out of him before he can stop it, and the laugh has the same quality of surprise the smile I gave him on day six had, and I — I like the laugh more than I expected to. I like that he laughed at my line. I like that he laughed without performing the laugh for my benefit. I like the *sound* of it, which has the warm low quality his voice has at the end of the day.

I file the laugh.

I am, I notice with a small private wryness, filing a great many things about Cassian. I have filed his choice of chair, his choice of words, the way he sets down his cup, the small thing his jaw does before he answers a question, the way he does not push when I go quiet, the way he leaves before I am too tired, the way he comes back the next day at exactly the same time, the way he says *my mother* in conversation but I have heard him say *Mom* through the door once when he was talking to Paloma. I am filing him the way I have been filing everything, but the filing of Cassian has a different *texture* than the filing of Paloma or Tamsin or even Juno.

I do not have a word for the texture.

I am working on it.

---

Tamsin comes most days too.

She comes at unpredictable hours. She comes when she has decided to come and she does not ask permission and she does not knock and she does not announce. The door opens and Tamsin is in it and Tamsin has snacks, and the snacks are different every time — apples once, a small jar of strawberry jam she has clearly stolen from the kitchen, a piece of fresh-baked bread wrapped in a clean cloth, a small bunch of grapes I had not known they had grapes here, a cookie that has too much cinnamon in it that Tamsin made herself and is *very proud of* despite the cinnamon.

Tamsin talks.

She does not require me to talk back. She narrates her week at me. She tells me about the boy in her school who is *insufferable*, the cousin she does not like who tried to come to the family kitchen yesterday and was redirected by Tamsin's mother, the patrol schedule she has been studying because she is going to be a Beta someday and the Beta has to know the schedules, the small dog that has been adopted by the pack's smallest child and is now technically the pack's smallest dog and is named *Stupid* by the child's older brother who has been trying to get the name changed for two weeks. Tamsin tells me about the *Stupid* situation with the focus a war correspondent gives a battlefield report.

I laugh.

It is the first time I have laughed in five years.

I do it without thinking. The laugh comes out of me at *Stupid* and it is small and broken-sounding because the muscle for it has gone slack but it is *real*, and Tamsin's face does the smallest possible upward-corner shift, and she does not comment, and she keeps talking, and the laugh has happened and Tamsin has been part of the room when it happened and the laugh has not killed me and the world has not ended and I do not know what to do with any of that yet but I file it for later.

I file it with the rest of Tamsin.

---

Juno comes once a day.

She is brief. She is always brief. She comes for ten or fifteen minutes, asks if I need anything, sits in the chair by the door while I answer, takes the answer back to wherever she takes things, and leaves. She does not push. She does not bring snacks. She does not narrate her week. She is the *steady presence* of a woman who has decided I am being checked on by the woman who is in charge of this place, and the steadiness is its own kind of weight, and the weight is — *welcome*. I had not known I would welcome the weight of being checked on by a woman who is *in charge of* something. I had spent five years being checked on by a man who was in charge of me, and the difference between those two checks is, it turns out, *everything*.

Juno asks me on day ten if I would like a book or two.

I say yes.

She brings me three books the next day. They are different from each other — a small worn book of poems, a slim novel about a woman who keeps bees, and a thick history of the coastline that I have not started yet but which has good maps in the front. Juno does not stay to discuss the books. She sets them on the table beside the bed. She says: "Tell me which ones you keep. I will bring more if you finish them." She leaves.

I read the poems first.

I read the book about the bees second.

I am halfway through the bee book when Soren comes.

---

He comes on day eleven.

He knocks. The two-knock, the way Cassian knocks. I am sitting up against the pillows with the bee book open in my lap and I startle a little because I was not expecting him and the *startle* is not what it would have been three weeks ago, which is a small useful fact I file in the moment my body does it.

I say: "Come in."

He pushes the door open.

He is — *smaller* than I remember.

Not physically smaller. He is the same size as he was. But he is *holding* himself smaller, in a way I have seen people do when they are trying to apologize without saying the word *sorry*, and the holding is a thing I have done myself for five years and I recognize it the second he does it.

He has a book in his hand.

He crosses to Tamsin's chair — the chair Cassian uses, the chair I have started thinking of as *the chair across the room*, the chair that is the across-the-room chair the way the other one is *the chair* — and he sits. He puts the book on his knees. He does not open it. He looks at me.

He says: "Hi."

I say: "Hi."

He says: "I brought you a book."

I look at the book in his lap.

It is small. It is bound in dark blue cloth that has been worn shiny at the corners by what looks like decades of handling. It is the kind of book you carry in a coat pocket. He is holding it with both hands.

I say: "What is it."

He says: "It's — a book of stories. Short ones. It was mine when I was younger. Cassian mentioned you liked to read."

He says *Cassian mentioned you liked to read* the way a man says a sentence that is also an indictment of himself for not knowing it on his own, and I see him see himself say it that way, and I see his jaw do the small thing his jaw does when he has just said something he is going to replay later, and I — *file* it.

I say: "Thank you."

He stands up. He crosses to the bed. He sets the book on the table beside the books Juno brought me. He does not look at me while he does this. He is not avoiding my face — he is *managing* something internal that requires him not to look at my face while he places the book — and I let him manage it. I do not push. I do not say anything.

He steps back from the table. He says, without quite looking at me: "I am — I am not as easy as my brother."

I say: "I know."

He looks at me then. His eyes are dark. Storm-dark. The same eyes I half-remember from the first night, the eyes I had a flicker of recognition about on day five with no frame for the flicker.

He says: "I am working on it."

I say: "Cassian told me."

He says: "He would."

He sits back down. Across the room. In the across-the-room chair. He does not stay long. He stays maybe ten minutes. He asks me three questions — *how is the wound, is Paloma being too strict, have I been outside yet* — and I answer each one, and he listens, and he does not say *I'm glad you're alive* this time, and he does not stand up too fast, and he does not make the chair scrape.

When he leaves he stops with his hand on the door.

He says: "Thank you for letting me come in."

I say: "You are welcome."

He goes.

The door closes. Quietly. The way it did the first time, the same quiet, the careful quiet of a man who has decided the quiet is the only kindness he can reliably give in the moment.

I sit with the book on the table for a long time.

Then I open it.

The book is good. The stories are short. They are the kind of stories a boy would have read at twelve and held onto, and I read three of them before I fall asleep with the book on my chest, and when I wake up the book is closed on the table beside me and the lamp is off and somebody has tucked the blanket up under my shoulders, and I do not know who did either of those things because I was asleep when they happened, and I have not been tucked in by anyone since I was eight.

I lie still for a long moment after I wake.

I do not move the blanket. I do not move the book. I let both of them be where they are. I close my eyes.

I think: *this place is real*.

The thought sits in my chest. It does not move. It sits the way a thought sits when it has decided to be true.

---

I notice, sometime around day twelve, that I am being *evaluated*.

Not unkindly. Not the kind of evaluation I have been evaluated under for the last five years. The pack — *the pack*, the word, the people I have decided to call *the pack* because the pack is what they call themselves and the word is what I have for now — is being kind to me. Exceptionally kind. The kindness is not in question. But underneath the kindness, every interaction has a *quality* that I have started to recognize, which is the quality of *being looked at* by people who are trying to *figure out* something about me.

I do not know what they are trying to figure out.

I do not have the bandwidth to investigate.

But the evaluation is there. Paloma's eyes do it. Juno's eyes do it. Cassian's eyes do it, the most subtly, in the half-second between when I say something and when he responds. Tamsin's eyes do it less often but they do it when she thinks I am not looking. Even the small woman who brings the laundry once a day does it — the *looking*, the *checking*, the *cataloging*, the *am I correct in my reading of you* energy that I have lived inside for so long I would notice it in my sleep.

The difference, this time, is that the cataloging is not being done to *use against me*.

The cataloging is being done to *understand* me.

I am not sure yet what they are trying to understand. I am observant enough to know it is there. I am also observant enough to know it is not the cataloging of an enemy. The cataloging is the cataloging of a group of people who have, for reasons I do not yet know, decided to *learn me*, and the learning is happening at the edges of every interaction in this room.

I file it.

I am going to come back to it.

---

At the end of the week — day fourteen, two weeks since the trees — Paloma clears me to walk to the porch.

She announces it on the morning of the fourteenth day, the way she announces things, which is by walking into the room with the breakfast tray and saying — without preamble — "You are going outside today. After breakfast. Eat all of it."

I look at her.

I say: "All of it?"

She says: "All of it. You are walking outside today. You will need the bread."

I eat all of it.

She comes back when I am done. She helps me out of the bed. She puts a robe over my shoulders that is too big for me — also borrowed, I do not know whose — and she puts a hand under my elbow and we walk together, slowly, to the door of the room and through it and across the front room and to the porch door.

She opens the porch door.

I step out.

I stop walking.

I stop walking because the porch is not a porch — it is the *outside*. It is the air. It is the smell. It is the light. The light is gold and full and the canopy above the path is high and green and the air is *moving* in a way the air does not move inside, and the salt smell I have been getting the trace of for two weeks is here, *here*, all the way through me, and the trees are *real*, and the place is *real*, and I —

I stop walking. I stand very still. The robe is too big. Paloma's hand is on my elbow.

I do not move for a long moment.

Paloma waits.

She does not say anything. She does not push. She does not ask if I am all right. She lets me stand there for as long as I need to.

I say, quietly: "This place is real."

Paloma says: "Yes."

I say: "I didn't think it would be."

Paloma puts her hand on my shoulder. Not a heavy hand. A small steady hand, the hand of a woman who has been the closest thing to a mother of half this pack for four decades and is doing the thing she has done a great many times in her life, which is to be the steady presence beside a person who has just realized something true.

We stand together for a long time.

The canopy moves above us. The salt smell comes off the water in the cove below the cliffs and rides up through the trees on the air. A bird I do not know the name of calls once from somewhere to the east. Paloma's hand is on my shoulder. The robe is too big. The porch is real.

I am, I notice without trying to, *crying*.

Not loudly. Not the way I cried with the water that first morning. The tears are coming out of me steadily, without sound, the way tears come out of a person whose body has finally been allowed to register a fact that has been waiting two weeks to be registered.

Paloma does not comment.

She stands with me.

After a long while I take a breath. I wipe my face with the sleeve of the robe. Paloma's hand stays on my shoulder until I am ready to walk again, and then it moves to my elbow.

She says: "There's a bench. Just there. Want to sit."

I say: "Yes."

We walk the eight steps to the bench. She helps me sit. She sits beside me. The bench is wood, worn smooth by many years of people sitting on it, and the wood is warm where the sun has been on it. I close my eyes. The sun is on my face for the first time in two weeks.

I let it be on my face.

I sit on the porch with Paloma. We do not speak. We do not need to. The morning sounds of the pack heart are around us — somewhere a door closes, somewhere a child laughs, somewhere the sound of something being chopped in a kitchen — and I let myself listen to all of it the way a person listens when they have not been allowed to listen to a morning in five years.

I sit on the bench for an hour.

Paloma sits with me the whole hour.

When she finally helps me back to the bed I am exhausted in a way I have not been exhausted since I came in, and the exhaustion is the *good* kind, the kind that comes from having spent a body for the first time in a long time, and I lie down and I sleep through the afternoon, and when I wake at dinner Cassian is in the chair across the room reading a book, and he looks up when I open my eyes, and he says, quietly:

"Welcome back."

I do not know what he means.

I do not ask.

I close my eyes and I sleep again.