Page 17 of The Bear Between Us

I call the session and she walks back to the building.

I stay in the field for a while after, in the cooling afternoon, with my bear making its opinions known at considerable volume, and I ponder the word Brennan didn't say this morning.

It has a shape now that it didn't have a week ago.

I'm going to have to do something about that.

13

ELOWEN

The mark and I have reached an agreement.

Not a comfortable one. More like the kind of arrangement you make with a difficult neighbor, a mutual acknowledgment that you're both present and neither of you is leaving, so a functional détente is preferable to constant conflict. Maris has been working with me every morning lately and what she's helped me find isn't control exactly, more like a conversation. I stop trying to reach past the mark and start reaching through it, and what comes back is bigger than what I had before, less precise but more powerful, like the difference between a scalpel and a current.

It unsettles me more than the conflict did.

"You're doing it again," Maris says from across the workroom she's set up in one of the outbuildings, watching me with her chin in her hand.

"Doing what."

"Making that face. The one where you've understood something and you're deciding whether to be upset about it."

"I don't make a face."

"Elowen. You absolutely make a face." She tilts her head. "The mark isn't taking anything from you. It's adding to what's already there."

"By rearranging it without asking."

"Sure." She concedes. "That part is genuinely unfair. I'm not going to tell you it isn't." She leans forward. "But what you just did with that ward, a week ago you couldn't have held it at that size for thirty seconds. You held it for four minutes."

I held it for four minutes and twenty seconds but I don't say that. "It doesn't feel like mine."

"It will." She says it simply, without the false reassurance that would make me distrust it. "Give it time."

Time. Everyone keeps offering me time as if I have a reliable supply of it.

The afternoon session with Kaedric starts the same way it has every day, with him already in the field when I get there, running some kind of assessment of the perimeter I'm probably not supposed to notice is also monitoring my approach. I've stopped pretending not to notice. He's stopped pretending he's not doing it. This is, I think, what passes for progress between us.

Today he has two heavy wooden training staves leaning against the outbuilding wall.

"No."

"You need a close-range option for when your magic isn't responding fast enough."

"I'm a witch, not a soldier."

"You were on the creek path four nights ago with a fractured ward and two creatures inside your perimeter. At that point the distinction stops mattering." He picks one up and holds the other out to me. "Your grandmother taught you forest skills. Did she teach you to use a staff?"

I take the staff because the answer is yes and he'll find out in about thirty seconds anyway. My grandmother believed, as I mentioned, in being capable. The staff work she taught me was practical rather than martial, but the underlying mechanics transfer, and when Kaedric runs the first sequence I match it well enough that he pauses and recalibrates whatever he was planning to teach me.

"Adjust the grip," he says, coming to correct my hand position, and then he's close enough that the mark flares warm and I focus very deliberately on the grip adjustment.

We work for an hour. It's physical in a way the magic training isn't, demanding and concrete, and I find I don't mind it the way I expected to. There's something clarifying about a problem that exists entirely in the physical world, where the variables are finite and the feedback is immediate.

We argue about defensive positioning again. We argue about risk assessment. The second argument develops the way their arguments have been developing lately, starting in tactics and migrating somewhere else without either of us apparently deciding to go there, and by the time I realize we're no longer talking about defensive positioning we're standing closer than we started and the argument has lost most of its heat and replaced it with something else.

He pulls back first. He always pulls back first.