Rhys

She saw him three more times during that week before he in fact saw her.

There was one time in the corridor outside the training yard, racing along because he was late for his shift as he always seemed to be, with a coil of rope slung over one shoulder and mud on his boots. There was another time when he was crossing the dining hall, laughing at something a friend had said, the kind of free laugh that Wren had remembered from when he was twelve and had not yet learned how to keep it, before the world had taught him which laughs it was safe to let out in front of people. And there was one instance at the edge of the sparring ring, arms crossed, watching a pair of Betas go through their footwork with the flat, critical look of someone who used to be one of them and wasn't entirely sure anymore where he stood.

He was taller than she remembered, broader in the shoulders, and had a scar along his jaw which hadn't been there three years before; the scar was thin and pale, the sort that results from a blade rather than an accident. She would have liked to ask him about it, but she couldn't because she wasn't meant to know his face well enough to have noticed the scar, wasn't supposed to know that it hadn't been there before, and wasn't allowed to know anything about the boy who used to fall asleep against her shoulder during the long pack meetings when he was small.

She was watching him exactly as people watch something precious through a window that one isn't permitted to open, carefully noting the small changes in the same way she had noted the changes in the house itself. Now he stood differently, with his weight distributed more evenly, showing the posture of someone who had learned to fight properly rather than the way he had fought when he was a boy. He still had the habit of running a hand through his hair when he was thinking, just as their mother had done, although Wren doubted whether he remembered where he had picked up that gesture.

On the fourth day he spoke directly to her and that almost finished her.

She was walking through the courtyard with a folder of trade papers in one arm when he joined her, naturally, just as he used to do when he happened to like the way someone looked. "You're the Halloway envoy," he said, "Selene, aren't you?"

Yes, that's correct. She maintained a light tone, continued to walk, and kept her eyes directed forward rather than looking at his face since she wasn't certain what her expression might be if she looked at him directly.

"Rhys," he said and held out his hand, to which she took it. It was more of a strain than the simple wrist shake had been, since his hand was now larger, a man's hand, with calluses on the palm just as fighters' hands do. She had spent three years avoiding any thought of the boy who used to hold hers as he crossed this courtyard on his way to lessons, small and warm and always a bit sticky from whatever he had been eating. "You've been here for how long now? People are already talking about you."

"Good things, I hope."

It depends on who you ask,' he said with a easy grin, and for a moment he looked so much like their father that she was startled by it; indeed, she had never noticed the resemblance before since their father had died when Rhys was six, long before he had had the chance to develop it. 'Cassius won't stop asking questions about you. It usually means that he's either impressed or worried, and with him it's difficult to tell which it is most days.'

"Maybe both."

Perhaps both, he agreed, and he looked at her for a moment longer than the conversation required, a certain expression passing briefly over his face—the sort of look someone might adopt when a smell or a sound brings back something they can't quite identify. He then tilted his head a little. "You have a strange way of speaking, without intending to be offensive, as if you're used to people listening even if they don't want to."

I am frequently told that.

I'd wager that. He slightly shook his head, as if getting rid of something, and left it at that. As for it, welcome to Ashcombe. If you get the chance, go to the kitchens since they have a rabbit stew which will make all the other packs' cooking seem poor by comparison.

Is that going to be a professional recommendation or a personal one?

"Both," he said. "I go to that place the majority of nights. Cook likes me and gives me extra food." He said it in the way of a small confession, as if he were making an apology dressed up as a boast, and Wren felt a part of her chest break at how exactly like himself he still sounded, after three years and a lifetime had passed.

"I'll remember that," she said.

"Do," he said, nodded once in satisfaction, and began to move off towards the training yard, only to halt and turn around to look at her, that brief expression passing over his face once more but now more quickly and having disappeared almost as soon as it appeared. "I'm sorry. You remind me of somebody, but I can't remember who it is. It's probably nothing."

"Most likely nothing," she agreed, forced herself to smile, and watched as he jogged off towards the yard without giving him any further reason to stay there thinking about it.

She remained in the courtyard for a long time after he had left, putting one hand flat against her own chest, not out of display this time but simply because she needed something solid to hold on to while the ground beneath her settled back into place.

On that day she did not go to the kitchens. Although she had intended to and had told herself that she would, she eventually found herself walking back towards her own rooms since she wasn't certain that she could sit across the table from him a second time within one day and still keep her face carrying out the thing it was meant to do.

She returned to her room and sat down on the floor with her back pressed against the door—just as she used to do when she was a child and the house had seemed too big and too noisy, pulling her knees up and wrapping her arms around them—and allowed herself to cry for exactly four minutes, the length of the cry timed by the clock on the mantel, since Ivy had told her that grief had to have a container or else it would take up the whole day if you didn't put it in one.

While crying, she thought at the same time about a great many little things: when Rhys was six years old and would not go to sleep unless she sang to him, even though she had never been able to sing properly, and he never appeared to mind; and when Rhys was fourteen and, being sullen and angry about some little matter she no longer remembered, banged a door so hard that it rattled in its frame. At the age of nineteen Rhys was pale among a crowd who wouldn't allow him to move, his mouth trying and failing to form her name while two Betas held him back from the fire which he could not reach.

She stopped after four minutes, washed her face in the basin and looked at her reflection twice before she was sure enough to go back out.

That had been the agreement she had come to with herself since the fire, an agreement that Ivy had helped her to make during the most difficult of the early months, when the grief came suddenly and from the side and might overwhelm whole days if she allowed it. Simply notice it at the time of the clock and then keep it away. It had mostly succeeded for three years and had never before had to endure an afternoon such as this—one with her brother's hand in hers, a joke about rabbit stew, a stranger's face mimicking a boy she knew better than her own reflection.

She was beginning to realize that some debts didn't much care what the clock showed.

She considered the idea of telling Ivy but decided against it at least for tonight. Certain things had to remain inside a person for a while before they could cope with being mentioned aloud, and this was one of those cases. Instead she went to dinner, sat through the trade talk which she didn't really follow, and stayed away from the kitchens. Yet she kept thinking about the rabbit stew more than once and uselessly wondered if it tasted as it had when she remembered.

She saw him once more nine days later, and in this instance the situation was even more bad since he deliberately looked for her.

While she was in the little library off the east hall going through the old trade correspondence that Cassius had left for her to look at, Rhys put his hand against the frame and leaned in through the doorway.

"You said that you'd be coming in." He didn't enter, but instead just leaned against the door, as he usually did when leaning against anything. "I'd like to offer my apologies. The other day I probably stared at you for too long in the courtyard and it must have seemed odd."

You didn't look for too long.

"I only did a bit," he said with a rueful grin. "Cassius thinks it's impolite to stare at guests as though they're obliged to give you an explanation for the fact that they have a face. He's right. I've just been thinking that you looked like somebody, and I still don't know who it is, and that's been bothering me for the past two days, which is embarrassing to admit aloud."

Perhaps I'm just born with an ordinary kind of face.

"Though you don't," he said plainly, with no flirtation, merely making an observation, the sort of thing a brother would say without intending anything by it. "As for that, I wanted to properly apologize and actually invite you to dinner in the kitchens this time, rather than just suggesting it and then leaving like an idiot."

It's a kind proposal for a person whom you hardly know.

I am a generous sort of person," he said, shrugging as if it didn't matter. "Moreover, the cook enjoys having people around, and as far as I know most of the Halloway family are busy tonight arguing about grain tariffs, so I prefer to eat with someone who isn't talking about grain tariffs."

She ought to have declined. At the same time that the words were being formed, she knew that each further hour spent in his company was an hour which she couldn't fully explain, an hour during which her vigilance had to be twice as great because of a pull that was nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the specific discomfort of sitting across a table from her own brother and being unable to say so.

She said yes anyway.

The kitchens were warm and noisy and had the smell of woodsmoke and rosemary, and the cook, an older woman called Bess whom Wren had a vague memory of from years earlier, though she was now older and had a softer middle section, looked after both of them without ever really looking at Selene's face. Rhys carried on chatting easily during the meal, talking about matters concerning the pack, about a hunting trip he had taken the week before, and about almost nothing at all. Selene found herself laughing at something he had said before she had actually made up her mind to do so.

Later, having stayed awake and still tasting the rabbit stew on her tongue, she realised that it was the first time in three years that she had laughed without first making sure that it was safe to do so.

She stayed awake for a long time that night, going over the evening in her mind and attempting to work out if it had been a mistake, but in the end couldn't bring herself to feel any regret even though all the careful and disciplined parts of her told her that she should.

She stared at the ceiling and considered an alternative version of her life in the event that the fire had never taken place. Rhys, then nineteen and afterwards twenty, and then growing older too, becoming the man he was becoming, with Wren by his side the entire time, not a stranger stealing meals in the kitchens under a false name, but simply his sister, there, ordinary and dull in all the ways that really counted. She allowed herself to keep that thought for a while, just as you press on a bruise to find out how much it still aches, and discovered that the pain was much greater than she had anticipated after three years.

She also questioned whether Rhys had grieved her properly or if the way she had died, the shame associated with it, and the fact that it had been a public event had made grief seem like a risky thing to show in front of a crowd that had wanted her dead. She recalled the flowers at the crossroads shrine, which were fresh but out of season, and, for the first time since she had crossed the border, began to wonder if it was he who had left them.

She didn't sleep well, never did these days in fact. Yet that night the sleeplessness had a kind of tenderness about it, rather than the usual sharp dread, and she thought that must be something, even though she hadn't yet worked out what.