CHAPTER 3
1074 Words
I heard Ashenmoor before I felt it.
A change in the sound of the road beneath us. Smoother. Then the engine slowing. Then voices, controlled and efficient, the particular clipped exchange of people who operate within clear structure. A gate. Two sets of confirmation words I did not catch fully. Then forward again.
Then we stopped.
Edda helped me out of the vehicle and I stood on new ground for the first time in eighteen years.
The air was different here. Cooler, with something in it I had never smelled in Dunmore. Not cold exactly. Clean. Like the air had more room.
Kallu was already outside the vehicle.
"Welcome to Ashenmoor," he said. Not warmly, the way a performance sounds. Simply. The way a fact sounds.
Someone else appeared beside him. A man's voice, dry and precise. "You might have mentioned you were bringing guests."
"I am mentioning it now," Kallu said.
"The pack is going to have questions."
"The pack can bring them to me in the morning."
A pause. "She is the girl from the festival."
"Yes."
"The blind girl."
"Not for much longer," Kallu said.
I turned my face toward him at that.
He had not said it to me. He had said it to the other man. But the certainty in his voice was the kind that does not perform certainty. The kind that simply knows.
I was taken to a room that was larger than the entire space Edda and I had shared in Dunmore. I could tell by the way the sound moved in it. Edda was given the room beside mine, which she was told through a closed door and which I heard her go very quiet about, the kind of quiet that means a person is not letting themselves react yet.
Someone, a woman with brisk hands and a voice that was efficient without being unkind, helped me to a chair and told me she was the pack healer. Petra. She examined my eyes without touching them, describing what she was doing before she did it, which was more consideration than most people had ever shown me.
"There is no physical damage I can identify," she said. "The structure appears intact."
"It has always appeared intact," I said. "Every healer Edda ever took me to said the same thing."
"Then whatever closed them is not something visible," she said. "Which means whatever opens them also may not be."
She did not say this with the mysticism that people usually wrapped around my eyes. She said it as a working hypothesis. I appreciated that.
She left. Edda appeared in the doorway and crossed the room and sat beside me and took both of my hands and said nothing for several minutes.
"This place is enormous," she finally said.
"I know. I can hear it."
"The room they gave me has a window," she said. Her voice was very careful. "With curtains."
"Edda."
"I am not going to cry about curtains," she said firmly.
"I know you're not," I said.
A pause.
"I might cry a little about the curtains," she said.
I leaned my head against her shoulder and she leaned her head against mine and we sat like that while Ashenmoor moved around us, large and certain and not Dunmore.
Sometime in the night, I woke.
Not from sound. From something else. A warmth in my face that had no source I could name. I pressed my hands against my eyes, which I had done in the dark a thousand times, and this time something was different.
Not darkness behind my hands.
Something else.
I pulled my hands away.
And grey came in.
Not sight. Not yet. But not darkness either. Grey and shifting, like clouds moving over clouds. I sat very still and breathed.
The grey resolved slowly.
Shapes.
Edges of things. The corner where two walls met. The rectangle of a window with the suggestion of light behind it. The bulk of the furniture around me, solid shadows in a lighter dark.
I pressed my hands to my mouth.
I sat in my bed and watched the room appear, piece by piece, the way a photograph develops in a tray of liquid.
By the time the window began to lighten with actual dawn, I could see.
Not clearly. Everything soft and slightly blurred, like a world still deciding how detailed to be. But I could see.
I got up. I walked to the window. I looked out.
Trees. A training ground below. Beyond it, the walls of a packhouse larger than anything I had words for yet, because I had never needed words for seeing before.
And the sky.
Grey and rose and the beginning of gold at the edges where the sun was deciding to arrive.
I pressed my forehead against the glass and I cried for the first time in years. Not sad crying. The kind that happens when something you have held for so long finally has somewhere to go.
I heard the door.
I turned around.
Kallu was standing in the doorway of my room. Not close. Across the room, having knocked and heard nothing because I was at the window. He was looking at me.
And I was looking at him.
For the first time.
He was tall. Dark-skinned, close-cut hair, a face that was built around a jaw that looked like it had been set against something for a long time. Eyes that were, I realized, currently doing something I suspected they did not do often.
They were not sure what to do.
"You can see," he said.
"Yes," I said.
He crossed the room slowly. He stopped a few feet away. He looked at my face with an expression I did not have enough experience of faces to fully read yet, but which felt like something large and careful.
"What do you see?" he asked.
I looked at him.
"You," I said. "For the first time."
And then I sat down on the edge of the bed because my legs had decided they had done enough.
He stayed until Edda came in and took over. He left without saying more than he needed to. But at the door he paused and looked back once.
And I saw that too.
What I did not know was that the message arriving at Ashenmoor's gate before breakfast was not from Grendon.
It was from someone inside Ashenmoor.
Writing to Grendon.
- Writer
