Islept through the night.
The realization comes slowly, the way dawn comes in the mountains. Not a sudden break but a gradual brightening, each thought surfacing clearer than the last. I'm lying on a stone floor. My back is against the bed frame. My arm is wrapped around something warm and small that fits against my chest like it was designed to go there.
Maren.
She's still asleep. Her breathing is slow and even, her head tucked under my chin, one hand curled against my ribs. My cloak is tangled around both of us, and at some point in the night she pulled her legs up, knees bent, so her whole body is folded into the curve of mine.
The beast is quiet.
Not the tense quiet of something waiting. Not the grudging silence I've learned to manage through eight years of discipline and white-knuckled control. This is different. Distant. Like a door has closed between me and the rage, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, the space behind my ribs feels like it belongs to me.
I don't move. I barely breathe. Because this moment is not mine to keep, and I know it, and I want it anyway.
Light creeps through the narrow window. Gray morning, mountain cold, the smell of woodsmoke and old books from the room beyond. I can hear Mother Sanque moving out there. The scrape of a chair. The rustle of pages. She's been up all night.
Maren stirs. Her fingers tighten against my ribs, then relax. She makes a small sound, not quite awake, and presses closer.
“Morning,” she says. Her voice is rough with sleep.
“Morning.”
She lifts her face toward mine. Gray eyes, half-lidded, searching me the way she always does. Reading me the way she reads wounds.
“The beast?”
“Quiet. Still quiet.”
Something shifts in her expression. That look she gets when data confirms a hypothesis. The healer's satisfaction of a pattern holding.
She sits up, stretches, winces at the stiffness from sleeping on stone. I want to pull her back. Instead, I let my arm fall away.
“She's awake,” Maren says, listening to the sounds from the other room. “She's been working all night.”
“I heard.”
“Then we should hear what she found.”
She stands and offers me her hand. The absurdity of it almost makes me smile. She weighs nothing. She could not pull me up if I were truly stuck.
But I take her hand and rise. We dress. She takes my hand again as we walk through the door and doesn’t let go.
Mother Sanque'sworkroom is chaos.
Books cover every surface, a disaster of open volumes, pages marked with strips of cloth, notes scrawled in margins in handwriting so cramped it looks like insect tracks. The table is buried under scrolls and loose pages. Three candles have burned down to nubs, wax pooling across the wood.
She sits in the middle of it, sharp-eyed and alert despite the dark circles under her eyes. She looks like she hasn't slept in days. She looks like she doesn't need to.
“Sit,” she says. Same command as last night. Same tone that makes it clear refusal isn't an option.
I lower myself to the floor beside the hearth. Maren takes the chair. Our hands separate, and I feel the loss of contact like a change in pressure.
Mother Sanque watches us. Those glass-sharp eyes move from my face to Maren's, to the space between us, to my hands where they rest on my knees.
She nods once at me. “When was the last time you slept through the night?”
I think about it. “Before the stronghold fell.”
“Eight years.” She says it flatly, the way she says everything. Filing information. “And the beast?”
