Six weeks after Marcus was born, Lyra could walk to the end of the eastern corridor and back without stopping to rest.
She noted this as progress without celebrating it, which was how she had learned to move through recovery. Celebration felt premature when the distance was still so small, when six weeks ago the corridor had seemed impossible and now it was merely difficult, and when the distance between difficult and ordinary still stretched further than she could see.
Eleanor had told her that her body had been through two significant traumas simultaneously, the cumulative damage of five years of captivity and the physical demand of labor and delivery under conditions that no healer would have chosen for a first birth. The recovery timeline was not a standard one. Eleanor had said this matter-of-factly, without softening it, which Lyra had appreciated. She had spent five years being managed and handled and controlled. Straightforward information felt like respect.
