6. Ellie
ELLIE
Iwake up different.
Not in a big way. The room’s the same—pale stone, silk coverlet, the arched window with its pretty bars.
The light comes through in the same slats.
The fountain sounds the same. But the edges are back.
The restlessness the tea settles every morning is running loose, and with no evening dose to hold it down through the night, it’s had hours to sharpen.
The silk on my arms. I can feel every thread of it.
Not the soft general blur I’m used to—each strand on its own against my skin, the whole weave readable through my forearms. I push the coverlet back and my bare legs meet the air, and the air has a temperature now in a way it never used to.
Not cold, exactly. Just there. The air is touching me and I can feel it touching me, the warm pocket under the coverlet against the cooler room pressing on my calves, my ankles, the tops of my feet.
I sit up. My pulse is faster than usual. I can feel it in my wrists, in my throat, a beat I never notice because the tea keeps it somewhere under my attention. Without the evening dose it’s come up to the surface. My body’s announcing itself.
My room smells different. Or it smells the same and I’m smelling it different, the almond oil on my pillow, the faint mineral tang of the stone, the jasmine from the garden below.
And under all of it, the green pressing smell of the canopy that lives in these walls whether the sisters admit it or not.
The smells have layers. They’ve always had layers.
I just could never pull them apart before.
The almond oil’s sweet and a little rancid at the edge, the oil going old.
The stone smells like rain that dried a long time ago.
The jasmine’s alive and the stone isn’t, and I can feel the difference in my nose, in the back of my throat, sharp enough that it’s almost too much.
My hands are shaking. Not from fear—from something waking up.
Muscles held at half-attention for thirteen years, suddenly running at full.
I hold them up in front of my face. The light catches the fine hairs on my forearms. I’ve never once seen them catch the light before.
The tea smoothed that too, I guess—even the sight of my own skin.
The morning bell rings. I dress. The linen on my skin is an event, the cool slide of it over my shoulders, the seams pressing my collarbones, the way the skirt brushes my thighs when I move.
I stop at the door with my hand on the latch and feel the iron under my fingers, cold, a little rough with age, and it hits me that I’ve touched this latch every morning for thirteen years and never once noticed what it felt like.
Everything’s louder. Not in volume. In presence. The world’s the same world it was yesterday. I’m the one who’s different.
I walk down the east corridor toward breakfast and I see the lock.
A heavy iron bolt set in the door at the end of the hall, the one to the sisters’ quarters.
I’ve passed it every day. Thousands of times.
Today I see the weight of it, the newness of the metal next to the weathered oak, the keyhole set low enough you’d have to crouch to use it. Today the lock looks like a lock.
In the dining hall, Tessa’s at the far table on her own.
Her attendant—Sister Vael, the narrow-faced one with the careful hands—stands three paces back, by the wall.
Not sitting. Standing. Watching. I’ve seen attendants trail women before.
I’ve seen it the way I see the bars on the windows, as part of the scenery, a feature of the place I never thought to read.
Today the three paces look like watching. Today the standing looks like guarding.
The sharpness is everywhere. Every surface, every sound, every face. It’s too much. I want the tea.
Mora comes with the tea.
She smiles. She sets the tray down. My cup with my name on the bottom.
The warmth curls up off it in a thin line of steam that catches the window light.
The floral scent reaches me and my body leans toward it—not a choice, an instinct.
The way a plant turns to the sun. Thirteen years of this, every morning, the warmth and the settling and the smooth erasing of whatever woke me up too sharp.
“Good morning, love.”
I take the cup. The ceramic’s warm against my palms. I look at the surface of the tea—pale amber, clear, the smell rising. I bring it to my lips.
I stop.
Mora’s watching me. Not the soft watching of most mornings—a particular kind of attention, her eyes on my mouth, waiting for the swallow.
It’s only there for a second. She smooths it away fast, swaps it back for the warm easy look she always wears.
But I caught it. The attention was there.
It was waiting for the moment the tea went down.
“Mora,” I say. “Do all the cups have names on them?”
“Mm? Oh—yes. The sisters label them. Keeps things orderly.”
“Orderly.”
“Forty-one women, love. Easier to keep track when everything’s got a name.”
Track. She said track. The word sits in my mouth like a pebble, hard, not the word you use about tea. You track animals. You track supplies. You track things that might wander somewhere you didn’t mean them to go.
I drink.
The warmth goes in. The settling starts, that old smoothing, the world’s edges rounding off, the restlessness easing back down where it usually lives.
And I feel it happen. I’ve felt it every morning for thirteen years, but this is the first time I’ve felt the shift itself—the before and the after, the sharp going soft, the sharp dropping away.
Like a hand laid gentle over my eyes. Like someone turning down a lamp.
The corridor lock goes back to being just a lock.
Tessa’s attendant goes back to being just an attendant.
The seams of my dress stop pressing my collarbones.
I hate it.
The hate is new. Small, quiet, a candle flame in a windless room. But it’s there. The tea is doing something to me and I can feel it doing it and I don’t want it to. I drink the rest anyway, because I’m not ready.
The world at full clarity was too much. The silk too close.
The air too near. The smells too many. I’m not ready to live without the filter, and that cowardice sits in my chest like a stone, because the cowardice might be mine, or it might be the thing the tea builds, the comfort of going numb, the way a cage turns into a home the day you quit testing the bars.
I can’t tell which. That’s the point. That’s what thirteen years of the tea does. It makes you unable to tell what’s yours and what’s the drug.
The tea settles me. The hate settles down with it. Mora goes. The tray’s empty. My cup sits on the bureau with my name turned to the wall, and I don’t know if I’ve always set it that way or if the sharpness made me do it—hide the name, the proof that the warmth I’ve been drinking has an address.
I go to the garden. The jasmine’s bloomed all the way overnight, the bushes heavy with white, the smell thick enough to taste.
Even through the tea’s smoothing it’s stronger than yesterday, the flowers open wider, the petals near see-through in the sun.
The olive trees throw their usual shadows. The fountain runs.
Neve finds me inside the hour.
She sits beside me on the bench. Doesn’t speak right away. She pulls a stem of jasmine off the nearest bush and turns it in her fingers, studying the petals like she’s reading something written in code. I wait. Neve’s silences have a shape of their own—not empty, loaded. She’s choosing what to say.
“You skipped the tea last night,” she says.
I look at her. “How did you know?”
“Your eyes.” She tilts her head. Studies me the way she studied the jasmine. “They’re different this morning. Wider. More here.” She taps two fingers to her own temple. “You looked at Tessa’s attendant at breakfast. Actually looked. You never do that.”
“I drank the morning tea.”
“I know. But you missed a dose. The thing runs on doing it every day—one miss doesn’t undo thirteen years, but it opens a crack.” She drops the jasmine. The petals scatter on the stone between our feet, white on pale gray. “How did it feel?”
“Loud.” I can’t find a better word. “Everything was loud. The silk. The air. I could smell layers in my own room I didn’t know were there.”
“The almond oil,” she says. Not a question.
“How did you—”
“It goes a little rancid after a week. They swap it out every ten days. You can only smell the turn when you’re sharp.
” She reaches into the fold of her skirt and brings out a little clay cup—her own, her name on the bottom.
Half full. The amber catches the light, the floral scent rising faint.
“I’ve been drinking half for six months.
Pouring the rest in the garden when no one’s looking.
The jasmine’s very well-watered.” A flicker of something that might be humor, dry, barely there—the first time I’ve seen her mouth curve since she came back from the clearing.
“The withdrawal takes time,” she goes on.
“Your body has to remember what full attention even feels like. It isn’t comfortable.
The first week I cried every night. Not sad—just swamped.
The sheets felt like sandpaper. The fountain sounded like a waterfall.
I could hear the sisters’ footsteps three corridors off, the exact weight of each one, and I couldn’t make it stop. ”
“Neve—”
“Don’t skip twice in a row.” Her voice drops.
Not a whisper—urgency packed down small.
She leans in. I can smell her skin under the jasmine, warm and faintly bitter, the smell of someone burning through the tea a different way than I am.
“Once sharpens you. Twice makes you restless enough that the sisters notice. Then they adjust the dose. I’ve watched it happen. ”
She pauses. Her jaw works, the muscle tightening under the skin.