Half-Truths

"How did you know?"

That question sat between us longer than it should have, my father's eyes fixed on me with a weight I hadn't felt from him since the morning I refused the proposal. I had maybe three seconds to decide what kind of daughter I was going to be for the rest of this conversation, and none of the options were good.

"I've been having dreams," I said.

It wasn't a lie. It also wasn't close enough to the truth to be dangerous, which was the only reason I let myself say it.

"Dreams." He repeated the words like he was testing its weight. "Since when?"

"Since before the proposal was announced. I didn't think much of them at first." I kept my voice even, the way I'd learned to keep it even across two lifetimes of saying things I needed people to believe. "They're not clear. Fragments, mostly. A feeling more than a vision. I saw riders coming from the east and didn't think about it again until the watch found tracks in exactly that direction."

"That's not a small thing to keep from your own father."

"It didn't feel like something worth mentioning. Dreams aren't evidence. You said so yourself, just now, about my pattern."

"Dreams don't move captains, Selene." His voice had gone quiet, careful, which frightened me more than if he'd shouted. "Dreams don't catch a scouting party three nights before it crosses unto our land. I've spent my whole life in this pack and I have never once seen a hunch turn into three confirmed incursion in a single season."

"Maybe I got lucky."

"Twice?"

"People get lucky twice."

He studied me the way he had in the war room, weighing something he didn't want to weigh. "I need you to understand why I'm asking this the way I am. There is an old blood in this family. Not the kind pack law talks about openly. Your mother used to say her line carried things the rest of us didn't, things she never fully explained to me even after fifteen years of marriage. If whatever you're carrying is connected to that, I need to know. Not because I think less of you for it. Because I don't know how to protect you from something i don't understand."

"There's nothing to protect me from. They are just dreams, father. Overactive ones, probably brought on by stress. I refused a proposal in front of half the Council and started a war with my own nerves in the same season. Is it really so strange that my sleep suffered for it?."

I watched him want to believe. I watched him decide for now, to let himself.

"If it happens again," he said slowly, "you tell me. Immediately. Not after the fact, dressed up as a pattern you noticed in old records."

"I will."

"I mean it, Selene. If this is real, if you're seeing things the rest of us can't, that's not something you carry alone in a house this size. I could send word to one of the old seers the eastern packs still keep on retainer. Someone who'd know how to make sense of it properly, instead of you and me guessing at it in the dark."

Something cold moved through my chest at that. A seer, brought into the household to examine dreams that weren't dreams at all, was exactly the kind of attention I couldn't survive. "That won't be necessary."

"Won't it?"

"I'd rather it stayed between us. For now, until I understand it better myself."

He didn't answer right away, and in the silence, the study door opened at a knock.

Lira stood in the doorway with a tray she'd clearly been sent to deliver, the kind of small errand our father's household staff usually handled, and I understood, watching her face, that she'd chosen to bring it herself.

"I heard voices," she said, setting the tray down slower than necessary, buying herself time to listen. "Is everything alright?"

"Family business," my father said, kindly, but firm enough that she should have taken it as dismissal.

She didn't move. "Family business that involves seers and dreams? That sounds like the kind of family business I'd want to know about too."

"Lira."

"No, I'm curious." She crossed her arms, and I recognized the particular stillness in her, the same one I'd learned to read as effort rather than calm. "You're standing here offering to bring in an eastern seer for Selene, and I'm finding out about it because I happened to bring that tea myself instead of letting Petra do it. How long as this been going on?"

"It isn't going on," I said. "It's nothing. I mentioned some bad sleep to father and he's being overly cautious."

"Bad sleep." Her voice sharpened. "Bad sleep that predicted an incursion. Twice. I was near the hall when you said it out loud in front of half the Council, Selene. Everyone was talking about it for days. And now I find out you've been keeping actual dreams from the rest of us, dreams important enough that Father wants to bring in outside help, and you're calling it nothing."

"It is nothing, compared to what you're making it sound like."

"Then why does father look like that?" She turned to him, something raw slipping through the careful mask she usually wore around me. "Why does he look at you like you're something he doesn't recognize anymore, and look at me the way he's always looked at me, like I'm the daughter who's still exactly where he left her?"

"That isn't fair," I said, though some ugly, honest part of me understood exactly what she meant, because I had felt some version of that same unfairness myself, once, in a different life, watching someone else get the attention I'd wanted.

"Isn't it?" Lira's composure cracked further, temper and hurt tangled together in a way that made it hard to tell where one ended and when the other began. "You refuse a proposal, and Instead of being punished for the insult, you get invited into war councils. You have strange dreams, and instead of being frightened for you, Father wants to fetch a seer to study you like you're precious. I have spent my entire life trying to he useful enough, clever enough, careful enough to be noticed In this house, and you've spent five months breaking every rule and somehow becoming the daughter this family actually listens to."

"That's not what this is."

"Then what is it?" Her voice cracked on the question, and for unguarded second I saw something underneath the anger that looked almost like fear, the same flicker I'd caught in her at the Blood Moon gathering, at the corridor confrontation, in every strange half moment since my rebirth that I hadn't yet found a way to explain. "What is happening to you, Selene? Because I don't believe for one second it's just dreams, and I don't understand why you get to decide the rest of us don't deserve to know that truth.

"Lira, that's enough," my father said, stepping between us with the particular exhaustion of a man refereeing a fight he didn't start and didn't know how to end. "Your sister has told us what she knows. If there's more, she'll tell us when she understands it herself."

"You're taking her side."

"I'm not taking anyone's side. I'm asking you to leave this to me."

Lira looked between the two of us, something final settling over her expression, colder than the anger that had come before it. "Fine. Keep you secrets, both of you. But I hope whatever this is, it's worth what it's costing this family, because I don't think either of you understands yet what you're inviting into this house by keeping it quiet."

She left without waiting for a response, the tray still sitting untouched on the desk, and the door didn't slam, which was somehow worse than if it had.

My father exhaled slowly after she was gone, rubbing a hand over his face in the same gesture he'd used in the map room days before.

"She isn't wrong to be hurt," he said quietly. "I haven't been fair to her. I never have been, if I'm being honest to myself, and this hasn't helped."

"I didn't mean for this to become about her."

"It rarely does, and it always ends up there anyway." He sat back down heavily, the fight gone out of him, replaced by something wearier. "I'll think on the seer. For now, I'll trust you to tell me if the dreams come again. But Selene, I want you to hear me clearly. If I find out you've been keeping more from me than bad sleep, I won't ask gently a second time."

"I understand."

He nodded, dismissing me with the small, tired gesture of a man who had already given more of himself to this conversation than he had left for thr rest of the day, and I left his study with my heart still hammering, replaying Lira's parting words that whole way down the corridor.

I haven't told him the truth. I told myself, walking away, that I'd done the only thing I could have done, given him something instead of nothing, and kept the rest of it exactly where it needed to stay, hidden.

I didn't yet know that Lira had already decided not to let it stay that way.