The Garden
By the end of the first week, Rion was strong enough to sit up on his own and take his meals without assistance.
The healers pronounced themselves pleased with his physical recovery, noting that his ribs were knitting well and the burns across his chest and arms were fading to pink scar tissue.
He could walk short distances now, though he tired quickly, and the tremor in his hands had mostly subsided.
None of this changed the silence.
Lark continued her daily visits, following Morena’s advice with a tenacity that felt increasingly hardheaded.
She sat beside his bed and told him about Springhope, about the terraced streets and the geothermal heating and the goats that seemed to outnumber people three to one.
She mentioned Pippa’s fascination with the local metalwork and Darian’s ongoing battle with the altitude.
She told him about Noctis, who paced the guesthouse rooms and whined at the door and had taken to sleeping at the foot of her bed as though seeking comfort from someone who smelled like his master.
Rion listened. Or seemed to listen. His eye would track her face when she entered and remain there while she spoke, which was more than he had offered in the early days.
Sometimes he nodded. Once or twice, he had asked a brief question, a request for clarification about something she had said.
These small moments felt like victories, like cracks in the walls he had built around himself.
But he didn’t reach for her, didn’t smile. He offered nothing of himself beyond the minimum courtesy required.
She kept showing up anyway.
On the eighth morning, Lark woke with an idea.
Noctis was already awake, lying at the foot of her bed with his head on his paws, watching her with those intelligent yellow eyes.
He had been subdued since their arrival in Springhope, his usual energy dampened by the absence of his master.
He ate when she fed him, walked when she took him out, and curled up beside her at night, but there was a listlessness to him she recognized.
He was waiting, enduring, getting through the days until Rion came back to him.
“How would you like to go on an adventure?” she asked him.
His ears pricked up. His tail thumped once against the mattress.
Lark smiled, the expression strange on her face after so many days of worry. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
The healing halls had a garden.
Lark had noticed it during her visits, glimpsed through windows and doorways, a terraced space carved into the mountainside behind the main building.
Stone pathways wound between raised beds filled with medicinal herbs, and wooden benches sat at intervals along the paths, positioned to catch the morning sun.
It was a place for recovering patients to take the air, she assumed.
A place to remember that the world existed beyond sickroom walls.
Getting Rion there proved easier than she had expected. The young healer, who had first tended to him, a woman named Catrin with kind eyes and a competent manner, agreed readily when Lark explained her plan.
“Fresh air would do him good,” Catrin said. “He’s been cooped up in that room for over a week. The body heals faster when the mind has something to engage with.”
“And his wolf?”
Catrin hesitated only briefly. “Animals aren’t usually permitted in the healing halls. But the garden is technically outside, and if the wolf is well-behaved …” She glanced at Noctis, who sat at Lark’s heel with an expression of composed dignity. “I don’t see why we couldn’t make an exception.”
Lark thanked her and went to collect Rion.
He was sitting up in bed when she entered, staring out the window at the sliver of mountain visible from his pillow. He turned his head at the sound of her footsteps, that now-familiar adjustment to compensate for his lost eye, and then his face changed when he saw Noctis at her side.
“I thought you might like some fresh air,” Lark said. “There’s a garden. Catrin says you’re well enough to walk that far if you take it slowly.”
Rion’s gaze had dropped to Noctis. The wolf stood rigid at Lark’s heel, every line of his body straining toward the bed, but he didn't move. Waiting for permission. Waiting, as he had been waiting for over a week, for some sign from his master.
“Noctis,” Rion said, his voice cracking on the name.
It was all the permission the wolf needed.
He bounded forward in two great strides and was on the bed before Lark could blink, his head pushing into Rion’s chest, his tail sweeping back and forth with enough force to send the blankets sliding to the floor.
A sound emerged from his throat, a noise between a whine and a howl, the vocalization of an animal whose heart was too full for silence.
Rion’s arms came up around the wolf’s neck. He buried his face in the thick black fur and held on, his shoulders shaking with sobs, or laughter, or perhaps both at once. Noctis pressed closer, as close as he could get, his body curved around Rion’s as though trying to shield him from the world.
Lark stood in the doorway and watched, saying nothing, her heart aching. This moment was not hers. She was merely the person who had brought them together, the bridge between two souls who had been separated too long.
After a while, Rion’s grip loosened. He lifted his head from Noctis’s fur and drew a shaky breath. His eye was red-rimmed, his face wet, but when he looked at Lark, there was life in his expression that had not been there before.
“Thank you,” he said.
Two words. But they were the first words he had spoken to her in over a week that carried any real weight. The first words that acknowledged her as more than a visitor making polite conversation at his bedside.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Now come outside. The sun is shining, and you’ve been staring at these walls long enough.”
The garden was everything Lark had hoped it would be.
They found a bench in a sunny corner, sheltered from the mountain wind by a low stone wall.
Rion lowered himself onto it carefully, his movements still stiff and cautious, while Noctis settled at his feet with a contented sigh.
The wolf had not strayed more than a few inches from Rion’s side since they left the sickroom, his body pressed against his master’s legs as though reassuring himself that Rion was real and not going to disappear again.
Lark sat at the other end of the bench, leaving space between them. She had learned by now not to crowd him, not to demand more than he was ready to give. Morena’s advice echoed in her mind.
Demand nothing. Just let him know you’re not going anywhere.
For a while, they sat in silence, but this was a different silence than the one that had filled his sickroom.
This one had a texture to it. The whisper of the wind through the herb beds.
The soft sound of Noctis’s breathing as he dozed in the sun.
It was a silence that asked nothing of them, that simply existed, a space they could share without the pressure of words.
Rion’s hand moved absently through Noctis’s fur, his fingers tracing patterns that the wolf probably didn’t notice but seemed to soothe them both.
“I thought I’d never see him again,” he said quietly. “When they took me.”
Lark looked at him. His eye was fixed on the mountains in the distance, his profile sharp against the pale sky.
"He’s stayed with me the whole way, wouldn’t leave my side."
“He knows who brought me back.” Rion’s voice was soft. “He knows who saved me.”
Lark didn't know how to respond to that, so she said nothing. They sat together in the quiet garden while the sun climbed higher and the morning chill faded to warmth.
“Morena told me that Springhope has an archive,” she said eventually.
She kept her tone casual, conversational, as though the thought had only just occurred to her.
“Apparently, there are records going back centuries. Journals, treatises, histories of things that have been forgotten everywhere else.”
Rion’s hand stilled on Noctis’s fur. He didn’t look at her, but she could tell he was listening.
“I’m going to look into it. Dark aetheria, what it is, where it comes from, whether there’s any way to contain it or neutralize it.” She paused. “It seems important. Given everything that’s coming.”
Still he said nothing. But his head had turned slightly, his eye no longer fixed on the distant peaks but on some middle ground between them. Thinking.
“You’re being released soon,” Lark continued.
“Catrin said another few days, maybe less. Once you’re settled at the guesthouse, if you wanted to come with me to the archive …
” She let the sentence trail off, leaving space for him to fill or ignore as he chose.
Then, almost as an afterthought, she added, “You always did love a library.”
The words hung in the air. Lark kept her gaze on the herb beds, on the small green shoots pushing up through the soil, giving him privacy to respond or not respond without the pressure of her attention.
Noctis shifted, moving closer to Rion’s legs. “I’ll consider it,” he said.
Three words. Noncommittal. Offering nothing and promising nothing.
But he had not said no.
Lark allowed herself, just for a moment, to hope.
They stayed in the garden until the sun began its descent toward the western peaks and the air took on the sharp edge of approaching evening.
Catrin eventually appeared to shepherd Rion back to his room, clucking about overexertion and the importance of rest, but her eyes were soft when she looked at him and softer still when she looked at Noctis, who had to be physically coaxed away from Rion’s side.
“Tomorrow,” Lark told the wolf as she led him back through the healing halls. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”
Noctis whined but followed, his ears flat against his head, his tail drooping. He understood, she thought. He knew that being separated from Rion was temporary now, that the worst was over, and that patience would be rewarded. But understanding did not make it easier.
She knew the feeling.
At the entrance to the healing halls, she paused and looked back.
Through a window she could see Rion’s room, could see him sitting on the edge of his bed while Catrin checked his bandages.
His head was bowed, his shoulders curved inward, but there was a difference in his posture. It looked less defeated.
He had laughed today. Not a full laugh, not the brash sound she remembered from before, but a huff of breath when Noctis had licked his face with excessive enthusiasm. An almost-laugh. A beginning.
And he had said he would consider coming to the archive. Which meant he was thinking about the future. About life beyond the walls of his sickroom, beyond the confines of his own suffering.
It wasn’t much. But it was more than she had dared to hope for a week ago.
Lark turned and walked back toward the guesthouse, Noctis padding at her heels, the setting sun gilding the terraced streets of Springhope in shades of gold and rose.
Tomorrow she would return. Tomorrow, she would sit with him again, in the garden or beside his bed, and she would keep showing up until he was ready to reach out.
One small thing at a time.