Chapter 12

Freya

   By the third week at Thornfield, my body had decided it was done being subtle.

I woke each morning with a heaviness that felt like someone had poured sand into my bones overnight, and by midday, my limbs dragged. By afternoon, I could barely keep my eyes open, and my sense of smell, goddess help me, had sharpened into something almost violent. I could tell what Helga was cooking from the far side of the settlement, could separate thyme from rosemary from bay leaf without stepping inside the kitchen.

 It would have been impressive if it hadn’t also made me gag when someone walked past wearing too much smoke in their clothes.

Mira monitored me with calm, unshakable efficiency.

“Sit,” she would say each morning, already wrapping the cuff around my arm before I could argue.

“I’m fine,” I muttered one morning as she pumped air into it.

“That isn’t an answer to anything I asked,” she replied evenly.

She checked my blood pressure, my pulse, and my eyes. She asked about my sleep, and always made notes Then she handed me a steaming mug of something greenish brown that smelled like wet bark.

“I hate this,” I told her honestly.

“It helps,” she said.

“It tastes like it’s punishing me.”

“It helps,” she repeated, raising one eyebrow.

I drank it and surprisingly, it did help.

That evening, when the sun lowered itself into its shell, the settlement quieted into softer noises, with distant laughter, clinking dishes, and the thud of someone stacking wood, I carried a blanket beyond the fence and sat on the cool ground facing the tree line.

I wasn’t afraid of the forest.

I liked the way it swallowed sound and the way it made everything feel smaller and simpler. Out there, no one expected anything from me. Nobody asked questions either.

I had been sitting for maybe twenty minutes when I heard footsteps behind me. It wasn't rushed nor did it signify danger. It was steady. 

Caden didn’t say my name, he didn’t ask if he could join me.

He just lowered himself to the ground a few feet away, close enough to speak easily, but far enough that I didn’t feel crowded. He held two cups in his hands, steam curled from both and without thinking, he extended one toward me.

“For the nausea,” he said.

I looked at him, surprised. “Is it the bark one?”

“No,” he replied seriously. “This one tastes like actual leaves instead of regret.”

I huffed a laugh before I could stop myself and took the cup. It was warm against my fingers.

“Thank you.”

He nodded once and looked out at the trees as if that had been the entire purpose of him being there. We sat in silence for a minute, sipping.

“It’s quiet out here,” he said eventually.

“That’s why I like it.”

“You’re not worried?”

“About what?”

He gestured vaguely toward the dark forest.

“No,” I said. “It’s honest.”

He glanced at me, faintly amused. “Honest.”

“It doesn’t pretend to be anything else.”

That seemed to satisfy him. For a while, we talked about nothing important.

“I miss fresh bread,” I said at one point, surprising myself. “The kind with the hard crust that cracks when you tear it. Soft in the middle. We used to make it when I was little.”

“With butter?” he asked.

“With too much butter.”

“Good,” he said. “There’s no point in bread without too much butter.”

I smiled into my cup.

“I used to swim in a river near my old pack,” he said after a moment. “So cold it made your lungs forget how to work.”

“That sounds miserable.”

“It was,” he agreed. “The first thirty seconds, then your whole body went numb and you felt invincible.”

“Why would anyone do that voluntarily?”

He shrugged. “Because everyone else did.”

I looked at him sideways. “Peer pressure?”

“Exactly.”

“And you just admitted that out loud.”

“I have no reputation left to protect,” he said dryly.

The laugh that came out of me startled us both. It was full, uncontrolled and it burst from my chest before I could contain it.

I froze, while Caden blinked at me. “Was that….”

“Yes,” I said, still half-laughing. “Apparently it was.”

I hadn’t heard that sound from myself in weeks, maybe longer, and it felt strange. Rusty,but good. We talked for hours after that, about bread and rivers and the worst meals Helga had ever made.

“There was a stew incident,” he said solemnly, “we don’t speak of it” and about how the fence would need reinforcing before winter.

He never asked about my past, he never asked about the father of my child and he never tried to impress me.

There was no performance in him, no careful shifting of posture and no calculated charm. He just sat there, occasionally bumping his shoulder against the air as he gestured, sipping his tea, listening when I spoke.

And I realized, slowly and almost painfully, that this was the most relaxed I had ever been speaking to a man.

I wasn’t trying to be agreeable, I wasn’t trying to be useful, I wasn’t measuring my tone.

I was just… there, sitting on the ground and talking about bread. At some point, Eliza stirred, not sharply and not with warning either. 

It was a soft shift in the back of my mind, like a cat cracking one eye open to assess a room before settling again.

I waited, braced for instinct, for tension, for warning, for something, but there was none.

I exhaled slowly and Caden noticed.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yes.” I wrapped my fingers tighter around the cup. “I just realized something.”

“What?”

“I’m not bracing.”

He tilted his head slightly. “For what?”

“Anything.”

He considered that, then nodded once as if it made perfect sense.

“That’s good,” he said.

“It is.”

The moon had climbed higher by the time the settlement behind us fully dimmed. The air cooled, my tea ran out, but neither of us moved immediately. Eventually, Caden stood and offered me his hand without comment.

I took it.

He didn’t pull me up too fast and he didn’t linger once I was steady. We walked back toward the fence side by side, not touching.

At the gate, he paused.

“I’ll bring better tea tomorrow,” he said.

“You don’t have to.”

“I know.”

He might have said that,but something told me he was going to bring me some more tea anyway, and it surprisingly made my heart flutter.