( Elena)

He leaves at two in the morning.

I don’t go to the gate. That was a decision I made an hour ago, deliberately, because standing at the gate watching him walk into the dark is not something I can do and still be useful for the next four hours, and the next four hours require me to be useful.

So I stand at the war room window instead.

The yard is lit by two torches and the thin nothing of a clouded moon. I watch him cross it — him and Cade and four others, moving with the specific economy of people who are trying not to be seen even inside their own walls. Rhydian is in front. He walks the way he walks when he’s going somewhere that requires everything he is, which I’ve come to understand is different from how he walks everywhere else. Slightly lower. More deliberate. Like he’s putting his weight into the ground on purpose.

He doesn’t look up at the window.

I told him not to. I said *don’t look back, it makes it harder* and he said *for you or for me* and I said *both* and he didn’t argue.

He doesn’t look up.

Cade is behind him and I can see even from here that the boy is nervous in a way Rhydian isn’t — the shoulders slightly too high, the pace slightly too quick, the particular energy of someone running on something that hasn’t metabolized yet. He’ll settle. He settled in the yard, settled in the council hall, settles every time the thing he’s afraid of actually arrives. He’s better than he knows.

Rhydian knows. That’s why he asked for him.

They reach the east gate and then they’re gone, and the yard is just a yard again, two torches burning for no one.

I stay at the window for longer than I should.

---

The war room needs me.

Brennan is running the eastern patrol coordination, which means he’s in and out every twenty minutes with updates that require responses, and there’s the matter of Ferris who is technically still on the council and technically still present in the settlement and who I’ve been watching with the specific attention of someone managing an asset that might become a liability depending on what the next twelve hours look like.

I manage all of it.

I’m good at managing things. I’ve been good at it since I was twelve and my father started bringing me to council sessions, setting me in the corner with *watch how it’s done* and trusting that I would. I watched. I learned. I built the capacity for exactly this — the ability to be present and functional and clear-headed when the thing I’m most afraid of is happening somewhere I can’t see it.

It’s a useful capacity. I’ve never been more aware of how much it costs.

Senna finds me around three.

She doesn’t say anything about the gorge mission or where Rhydian is or the particular quality of the way I’ve been standing for the last hour. She just appears with two cups and sets one on the table near my elbow and stands there drinking hers.

After a while she says, "How far along?"

"Eight weeks. Maybe nine."

She nods. "Any morning sickness."

"Some."

"Worse when you’re—" She pauses, choosing the word. "Managing things?"

I look at her sideways. She doesn’t look back. She’s looking at the map with the expression of a healer reviewing someone else’s domain.

"Yes," I say.

"Eat something before dawn." She sets her cup down. "Not for you. The nausea gets worse on an empty stomach and you need to be functional in—" She glances at the window, at the dark. "A few hours."

"I know."

She goes.

I pick up the cup she left. It’s the bark tea, the one she’s been giving me since the confirmation, the one that’s apparently fine during pregnancy in the right dose. It’s bitter and it tastes like something that’s good for you rather than something you’d choose, and I drink it standing at the map table and I think about eight weeks.

Eight weeks since the hot spring.

Eight weeks since the world had a particular quality of being very far away and neither of us thought about anything practical.

I press my thumb against the outside of the cup until the ceramic is warm.

---

The reports come in at regular intervals.

Brennan’s tracking pairs on the border. The eastern patrol check-in at three-thirty. A runner from the north fence at four. Nothing about the gorge. No signal fire, no runner, no anything, which is either because everything is going correctly and silence is the plan or because—

I stop that thought.

He’s fine. He knows the terrain. He has Cade and five good wolves and a plan he spent three hours building from a map he’s been staring at for days. He’s been keeping himself alive on instinct and competence since he was seventeen and the particular version of both that he has now is sharper, not duller, than it was when they dragged him here in chains.

He’s fine.

I check the window again anyway.

---

The war room eventually empties. Brennan takes his last update and goes to reposition the eastern patrol before dawn. The junior wolves rotate out. For about twenty minutes, which feels longer, I’m the only one in there.

I look at the map for a while. Then I stop looking at the map because I’ve memorized it and looking at it isn’t helping anymore.

I go to our room.

It’s cold — the fire has died down and no one has tended it because I’ve been in the war room and Rhydian tends the fire now, that’s just how it’s arranged itself, it’s one of the dozens of small domestic divisions that happened without discussion. He does the fire. I do the window latch that sticks. He makes the bed when he wakes up second, which is always, because he sleeps in a way he didn’t when he arrived, deeply and late, his body finally believing it’s allowed.

The fire has died because he’s not here.

I get it going again. It takes a few minutes and I do it on my knees in front of the grate and it’s the most ordinary thing I’ve done in six hours and that ordinariness does something — my hands start moving a little slower, a little less efficiently, the carefully managed composure developing a small crack that I don’t immediately seal.

I sit back on my heels.

The fire catches. Orange and unsteady at first, then better.

I’m sitting on the floor in front of the grate at four in the morning while my husband runs a gorge crossing in Shadowpine territory.

I put my hands on my stomach.

It’s become a habit, unconscious now, the way Rhydian’s hands find my waist in the dark. My palms just — go there. Settle. Like there’s something to check on, something to reassure, even though there’s nothing to feel yet except ordinary warmth and the faint evidence of a life that is entirely theoretical from the outside and entirely real from the inside.

"Your father," I say, to the room, to the fire, to the theoretical small real thing — "is a fool."

My voice comes out different than I expected. Rougher. Not from crying — I’m not crying, I’ve been specifically not crying since two in the morning because there isn’t time and also because once I start I’m genuinely uncertain about my ability to stop.

"A brave fool," I say. "Which is worse." I press my palms a little flatter. "He saw the supply line and he just — he saw the whole picture and he found the one place we could actually reach and he asked to go himself because that’s who he is." The fire pops. "Because he spent four years alone figuring out that the only reliable thing is yourself, and now he’s here and he keeps— he keeps using that. Keeps putting himself at the point of the thing because he trusts himself there and he knows he can do it and he’s right, which makes it impossible to argue with." A pause. "Impossible to argue with and extremely difficult to—"

I stop.

My thumb moves. Slow circle.

"He’s coming back," I say. Quieter.

Not to the fire.

Not even really to the small theoretical thing under my hands.

Just to the room. To the dark. To the version of the next hour that I need to believe in hard enough to function.

He said he’d come back.

And Rhydian doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean. Took me three weeks to teach him to say things at all, and now when he says them, he means them completely, the way he does everything — fully, without reservation, with the specific commitment of someone who spent four years with no one to make promises to and is now making up for lost time.

I stay on the floor in front of the fire until my knees start to protest.

Then I get up.

I put his pillow on my side of the bed. Not because I need it there. Just because it smells like him, which is a thing I will never in my life admit to anyone, and I sit on the edge of the mattress and I wait for dawn, and I don’t look at the window, and I listen.