Chapter 33: The Loud Quiet

Zephyr's POV

I had been cataloguing her routine for eleven days.

Not for the mission, that was the part that would have concerned the Sylvan soul if I had let it examine the distinction too closely, so I didn't, I just kept the information in the part of my mind that belonged to me and not to it and used it the way I had decided to use it, which was to be where she needed someone to be before she had to ask.

She never asked for anything, that was the pattern I had noticed first, she worked around her needs instead of toward them, rerouting and adjusting and managing alone until managing alone wasn't possible anymore and even then she found a third option rather than asking, and the specific shape of that pattern was familiar to me in a way I didn't examine directly because examining it directly would have required me to look at things about my own situation that the Sylvan soul would have used against me.

The courtyard off the servants' wing was small and mostly forgotten, a square of stone with a dead fountain in the center and a bench along the far wall that caught the morning sun until about noon, and there was a corner where the wall jutted out at an angle that created a shallow recess, not quite hidden, just removed enough that someone sitting there couldn't be seen from the main entrance.

She went there on bad days and sat in that corner and waited for the pain to pass without making a sound about it.

I had noticed the pattern on day three and confirmed it by day six and on day nine I had stood at the courtyard entrance for four minutes before deciding not to go in, because the Sylvan soul had been loud that morning and I didn't trust which version of myself would sit down beside her.

Today the Sylvan soul was quiet, that held-breath quality it sometimes had, and the mark on her back had been visible at breakfast through the fabric of her uniform in a way it hadn't been last week, more light, more branching, more pressure looking for somewhere to go.

Today was a bad day.

I got to the courtyard at ten fifty eight and sat in her corner.

The stone was cold through my clothes and the dead fountain had a thin skin of ice on the standing water inside it and the morning light came over the wall at a low angle that would move off the bench before long, and I sat with my back against the jutting wall and my knees up and waited.

She came in at eleven exactly.

Her steps slowed when she saw the courtyard wasn't empty and she stopped inside the entrance, one hand on the doorframe, looking at me with the careful assessment she applied to unexpected things, measuring whether this was a problem before deciding how to respond to it.

I looked at her.

"Sit down," I said.

She looked at the corner I was in, at the specific recessed space she had been using as hers for three weeks, and then back at me.

"That's my spot," she said.

"I know." I moved over by approximately four inches, which was the available space in the recess. "Sit down."

She stood in the entrance for another moment, and I could see her running the calculation, weighing the cold stone of the courtyard against whatever was happening with the mark this morning, and eventually the mark won because it always won on bad days, and she crossed the courtyard and sat down in the corner beside me.

Not close, there was a deliberate few inches between us, but in the same recess, her back against the same wall, her knees mirroring mine.

The courtyard was quiet except for wind moving over the top of the wall and a distant sound of kitchen activity from somewhere behind us.

I didn't speak, she didn't speak, and the silence wasn't the uncomfortable kind that needed filling, it was the other kind, the kind that two people arrived at when they were both too tired to perform anything for each other and had silently agreed not to.

After a few minutes I heard her breathing change, slower and more deliberate, like she was doing the thing she did when she was managing pain, working around it methodically instead of through it, and I sat beside her and let the silence do what it was doing and watched the ice on the fountain and didn't push.

At eleven twenty three she shifted slightly beside me.

"The mark is getting worse," she said quietly, to the courtyard rather than to me, the way people said true things when they weren't sure they were ready to say them to a specific person, "I think it might break soon."

I stayed very still.

"How soon," I said.

"Days, maybe." A pause. "Maybe less."

The Sylvan soul stirred at the edge of my awareness, not surging, just noting, the way it noted everything that was relevant to its purposes, and I kept it at that distance and stayed present in the courtyard with her.

"When it breaks," I said, "they'll all know what you are."

"Yes."

The wind moved over the wall again, cold and without a direction, lifting a strand of her hair and setting it back down.

"Everyone in range will sense it," I said, "not just us."

"I know." She was looking at the dead fountain, at the thin ice on the standing water. "Dr. Elara will know, whoever she has watching will know, anyone with the sensitivity to read that kind of signal will know immediately."

"Yes."

The courtyard held the silence for a moment and I let it hold.

Then I said, "Are you afraid?"

She didn't answer immediately, which meant she was actually considering it rather than reaching for the easy answer, and I waited while she sat with the question and turned it over the way she did with things she was being honest about.

"No," she said slowly, something slightly surprised in her voice, like the answer had come back from the question differently than she expected, "that's the terrifying part."

I looked at her profile and she looked at the fountain and the morning light moved off the bench above us as the sun continued its arc, and under my sleeve, against the inside of my left forearm where the Sylvan soul's mark had lived for as long as I could remember, the skin began to burn with a slow, cold, violet light.