CHAPTER 4
1079 Words
The first morning was overwhelming in a way I had not anticipated.
I had imagined sight for eighteen years. I had built it in my mind from Edda's descriptions and the textures of things under my hands and the warmth and cold of light on skin. I thought I knew what it would be.
I did not know what it would be.
Everything was too much at first. Too bright, too detailed, too many things happening at once in my field of vision when my whole life I had processed information one sense at a time and in sequence. I kept closing my eyes and opening them again, like I needed to confirm each time that it had not been taken back.
Edda sat with me through the morning and talked me through things. She pointed at objects and said their names and I matched the name to the thing I was looking at, and this was something we had done in reverse my whole life, her naming things so I could build them in my mind, and now we were doing it the right way around and she cried twice and each time said she was not crying.
By midmorning I could manage the room without closing my eyes every few seconds.
By afternoon I could manage the corridor.
Petra came to examine me again and asked careful questions about what I could see and how clearly and from what distance. She made notes. She told me the improvement was remarkable and that she had no medical explanation for it and that she was going to document it thoroughly. I told her to document whatever she needed. She was the first person who had ever treated my eyes as something worth understanding rather than something to work around or perform around.
Kallu came in the evening.
He knocked properly this time. I called for him to come in and then realized I had never seen a door open before and I watched it open and watched him walk through it and the experience of watching movement that I had previously only heard was so distracting that I forgot to speak.
He noticed.
"How are your eyes?" he asked.
"Improving," I said. "Everything is still soft at the edges. Petra says that may resolve."
He nodded. He stood near the door, not coming further into the room, which I was beginning to understand was deliberate. He kept distance until the distance was addressed. He did not assume closeness was welcome.
"The pack has questions," he said. "About your presence here."
"What kind of questions?"
"The kind that are actually one question stated many ways," he said. "Who you are and what you mean for Ashenmoor."
I looked at him directly. This was still new, looking at people. Having a face to look at while a voice was speaking. I was learning how much information was in a face and how different it was from the information in a voice alone.
His face gave away less than most.
"What did you tell them?" I asked.
"Nothing yet," he said. "I wanted to speak with you first."
"About what to say."
"About what is true," he corrected. "What is said follows from that."
I thought about that. "What do you believe is true?"
He was quiet for a moment. Not uncomfortable quiet. Deliberate.
"You are my mate," he said. As plainly as he said everything. "The bond is not something I chose. It is something I recognized. What we build from it is choice." He held my gaze. "I wanted you to know the difference."
I sat with that.
In all the years I had spent in Dunmore, in all of Edda's stories and all my own imagining, I had never quite pictured this. A man standing in a doorway and telling me a true thing in a voice that carried no performance.
"What do you want to build?" I asked.
"Something real," he said. "I do not know more than that yet."
"That is enough to start with," I said.
He nodded once.
"Tomorrow I will introduce you to the pack formally," he said. "Renn, my Beta, will walk you through what that involves. If you have questions or things you are not comfortable with, tell me directly."
"I will," I said. "I am not someone who avoids direct conversation."
"I know," he said. "I noticed that in Dunmore."
"What else did you notice?" I asked.
He paused.
"That you were the only person in that hall who was not performing," he said. "Everyone else in the room was managing an impression. You were just standing there."
He left.
I sat in the chair by the window for a long time after, looking at the dark outside and the shapes of things I was still learning to name.
I heard a knock at my connecting door. Edda. She came in with tea that she had obtained from somewhere in Ashenmoor's kitchen system, which told me Edda had already found the kitchen and established a working relationship with whoever ran it, because that was what Edda did in any new space within the first twelve hours.
She set the tea beside me and looked at my face.
"Your eyes are clearer already," she said.
"I know. I can see the trees outside now. Individual branches."
She sat down. She wrapped both hands around her own cup. She looked out the window with me for a moment.
"Cece," she said.
"Yes."
"Is he good?" she asked. Just that. Is he good.
I thought about the doorway. The deliberate distance. The difference between what is true and what is said. The way he had not once, in any of our conversations, treated me as something requiring management.
"I think he is trying to be," I said. "Which might be better."
Edda nodded slowly.
"That is usually the more honest answer," she said.
We drank our tea and looked at the dark and somewhere below us Ashenmoor settled into its nighttime rhythms, this enormous new world that was going to require everything I knew how to do to navigate.
But I had navigated darkness for eighteen years.
This was only light.
I could learn light.
What I did not know yet was that in the morning, a message would arrive at Ashenmoor's gate from Dunmore Pack. From Grendon. And the message would not be the political demand I expected.
It would be something worse.
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