Isolde slept.
Eleanor sat with her for a long time — longer than I expected, though I wasn't sure what I had expected. Twenty minutes, perhaps more. She talked to Isolde in the same low and unhurried way, about the pack she was arriving into and what it had been and what it was now. About Aveline — briefly, carefully, naming her so that the name was in the room from the beginning. About what it meant to carry something and not be defined by the carrying.
I watched Eleanor's face while she talked. The controlled surface that was her permanent register had — not dissolved, exactly. Been set aside. She was not performing anything for the room. She was simply here, with Isolde, in the way she had been with the pack for forty-three years: present, findable, the thing she was regardless of the
