Homecoming

"Marie! Oh my goddess, is it really you?" 

 

Sera came running across the courtyard before the carriage door had even fully opened, skirts bunched in her fists, hair loose behind her. She looked younger than Marie remembered. Softer. Untouched. She threw her arms around Marie's neck before Marie had both feet on the ground. 

 

"I prayed every night," Sera said into her shoulder, voice already thick. "I told Father we should visit, I begged him, and he said it would only make things worse, and I never knew what to do, I should have written, I should have done something." 

 

Marie stood still and let the girl hang on her. 

 

Behind Sera, Callum watched with his shoulders finally dropping, some of the tension leaving his face. This, at least, made sense to him. The guilty little sister getting her chance to apologize. The older sister forgiving her, because that's who Marie had always been. He must have decided, sometime on the ride back, that whatever had happened in the carriage was just anger. Understandable anger. The kind that would wear off now that she was surrounded by people who loved her. 

 

Nothing in Marie softened. Sera's arms around her neck felt like nothing, a weight without meaning, and underneath it something older stirred, something that had nothing to do with Sera at all. Hands grabbing her collar. Fingers closing too fast around her wrist. Her body had learned in that prison that arms coming at her quickly usually meant something was about to hurt, and it hadn't unlearned that yet. Not even here. Not even for someone as harmless as Sera. 

 

She stepped back, and Sera's arms slid off her. 

 

"It's good to see you," Marie said, which was true only in the narrowest sense. Sera was alive. Healthy. Glowing in the way people glow when they've never once slept on stone. 

 

Something flickered across Sera's face, just for a second, before the warmth settled back over it. "You must be exhausted. Come inside, I'll have them draw you a bath, I'll tell Mother to make your favorite. Do you still like the honey cakes? You used to sneak them before dinner." 

 

Callum touched her elbow to guide her forward, and this time Marie didn't flinch, because she saw his hand coming and had a half second to brace for it as a hand, not a blow. He noticed anyway. She could tell he was noticing, filing it away next to the bruises on her wrist, next to the way she'd folded into herself in the carriage like something trying to disappear. He didn't ask about it. He wasn't ready to ask yet, she thought. He wanted a version of events that didn't require him to have failed her. 

 

They walked into the front hall and it didn't feel like her own life. It felt like walking into someone else's house that happened to share her old address. A new portrait hung at the top of the stairs, Sera in pale blue, painted in the soft gold light artists save for daughters loved without complication. Marie's old portrait wasn't anywhere she could see. 

 

A servant girl passed carrying linens and glanced at Marie with polite, empty curiosity, the look you give a guest whose name you haven't caught yet. She didn't recognize her. Two years was long enough for the staff to turn over completely, long enough to become a stranger inside the walls she grew up in. 

 

"We put you in the blue room," Callum said, a little too fast. "It's comfortable. Near the gardens." 

 

He meant her old room was gone. She already knew that. 

 

"That's fine," she said. 

 

He looked almost disappointed she hadn't argued, hadn't demanded her old room back, hadn't turned this into the fight he'd apparently braced for. The old Marie might have cared, loudly, about which room she slept in, whether her portrait still hung where it used to. This Marie had learned, in a cell with four other women and no windows, that caring about small injustices cost energy she needed for bigger ones. 

 

"I don't expect anything to be the way it was," she added, mostly because his face seemed to need her to say it. 

 

"That's not," he started, and didn't finish, because it clearly was exactly that. 

 

She had already decided, somewhere on the ride home, what she was going to do here. She would stay long enough to see that her mother was steady. Long enough to pay back whatever was left of the one kindness she'd actually been given in this house. Then she would leave. Everyone else could sort out whatever they wanted to feel about that. 

 

They found Isolde in the receiving room going over a guest list with the steward, reading glasses pushed up into her greying hair. When she looked up and saw Marie in the doorway, something crossed her face that was different from anything Marie had seen on Callum or Sera. It wasn't performance. For one unguarded second it was just grief, plain and old, the look of a woman seeing a daughter she'd feared she might never get back whole. 

 

"Marie." Isolde's voice cracked the same way Callum's had in the carriage, but under it there was something else, something that pulled at Marie despite every wall she'd spent two years building. 

 

For the first time since the gate, something moved behind her ribs that wasn't calculation. She stepped forward, and for one dangerous second she almost let herself want the thing she'd stopped letting herself want months ago. A mother's arms. Somewhere to finally put it all down. 

 

But Isolde's eyes had already slid past her, to Sera hovering behind. 

 

"Darling, are you tired?" Isolde reached out to smooth a curl off Sera's forehead. "You didn't sleep well last night, I heard you pacing. Are you ready for tonight? The King's steward says his party arrives by dusk, you have to look perfect." 

 

"I'm fine, Mother," Sera said, leaning into the touch. "I'm just so glad Marie's home." 

 

"Yes." Isolde turned back to Marie, gentler now, but somehow further away too, like she'd just remembered a duty instead of a feeling. "It's good you're back." 

 

That was it. No question about the prison. No asking if she'd been hurt, if she'd eaten enough, if two years had left marks that wouldn't fade. Isolde's eyes swept over her once, quick, careful, the way you'd check a piece of furniture for damage after a move, and then went right back to the list on the table. 

 

"You need to get ready properly, Sera. This match matters to your father." Isolde hesitated, glancing at Marie with something close to discomfort. "Marie, I think, given everything, it might be easier if you rested tonight. It'll be a lot of noise and new faces, and you've only just gotten back. You'll need time to settle." 

 

She didn't finish the thought. She didn't need to. Marie had already understood before the first word left her mouth. Rest tonight meant don't come down. It meant we can't have the Lycan King asking who the pale, hollow-eyed girl in the corner is, or why she flinches when a servant walks by too fast with a tray. It meant whatever Marie had become in that prison didn't fit into the evening her mother had spent weeks planning. 

 

"Of course," Marie said. "I'll stay upstairs. I won't get in the way." 

 

Callum's head turned toward her fast. She could feel him waiting for the question the old Marie would have asked without thinking. Why. Why can't I come. What's so wrong with me that you'd rather hide me in a guest room while a king visits the house I grew up in. The old Marie would have asked. Would have made someone answer for it. Might have even cried a little just to make the unfairness land somewhere. 

 

This one just turned toward the stairs. 

 

She climbed alone while the house filled up with motion around her. Servants carrying flowers and polished silver. Sera's laugh drifting up from the kitchens as she argued gown colors with her mother. Callum's voice low and urgent, already giving orders about the King's arrival. Nobody called after her. Nobody asked if she needed anything brought up, or if she was hungry, or if two years in that place had left something behind that still needed tending to. 

 

There was no hug waiting at the top of those stairs. Nobody had asked a single real question about the prison, about what four hundred nights inside those walls had done to her, about the silence sitting where her wolf used to be. Nobody seemed curious at all. 

 

It hurt in the quiet, unremarkable way old hurts do, the kind that doesn't bring tears anymore because the body's used up whatever it needed for surprise. Marie reached the top of the stairs, looked down once at the bright, busy hall below, at the family getting ready to shine for a king while she disappeared upstairs like something unfinished, and told herself, the way she'd told herself so many times in a cold cell that smelled like stone and other people's fear, that she was already used to this. 

 

She shut the door to the blue room quietly. Nobody downstairs even noticed the sound.