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The light came in sideways.
Sarah noticed it before anything else — the particular angle of early morning sun cutting through the gap in her curtains, golden and unhurried, laying itself across the floor in a long stripe that had no interest in the day's schedule whatsoever. She lay still and watched it for a moment. It was the kind of morning light that expected nothing of you.
She didn't often have mornings like that.
Her quarters were warm. More than warm — they had the particular quality of a room that had been carefully sealed against the outside world by some combination of good insulation and sheer will. The fort was quiet beyond her walls. Not the alert quiet of early drills, not the tense quiet of a base on high readiness, but something looser, gentler — the quiet of a place that had been allowed to exhale.
Of course. Beltane.
The day after always felt like the morning after a great storm — the air cleaner than it had any right to be, the world slightly rearranged but intact. The fort's stones breathed differently today. She could feel it even from here, the deep hum of renewed energy in the runes, as though the very ground had drunk its fill.
Sarah could have gotten up. She was aware of this in the abstract, theoretical way that one is sometimes aware of what they should do. She'd been awake for perhaps ten minutes already, running through a brief inventory of the day ahead — no exercises, no reviews, no state correspondence that couldn't wait. The Witchfather's party had begun their departure preparations at dawn. She was expected to see them off.
Expected. Interesting word.
She turned her attention inward instead, reaching along the quiet thread of the Biddies' connection. It was there the way it always was — present, warm, a low hum of shared existence at the edge of her consciousness. But the texture of it was different today. Softer. They were quieter than usual, moving through the morning with a particular kind of deliberate gentleness, and when she listened more carefully—
Yes. They were absolutely listening for her… like a group of friends knowing very well what happened and waiting for the official news.
A smile found its way to her mouth before she decided to allow it.
She sent the thought along the connection the way one might clear one's throat.
“Inform Petra I won't be attending the Witchfather's departure this morning. I find I have other priorities.” She sent throught the link.
The confirmation came back immediately — and with a particular quality - very specific, unsurprised kind. The kind that said we know, and we have known, and we have been waiting very patiently for you to say so.
She couldn't quite bring herself to be annoyed about it. The Biddies were not, strictly speaking, immune to Beltane. Their connection to her made the celebration something they shared, however indirectly — they felt the renewal, the loosening of the usual rigid structure of things. She could allow them a little amusement at her expense. They had earned considerably more, over the years.
She made a weak attempt to mentally organise the day… which was nice way of saying that she was checking if she really had anything that required her to leave this room soon. The troop rotation could wait. The fort had survived three and a half centuries; it would manage another morning without her reviewing reports before breakfast.
Good.
She was still somewhere in her thoughts when the warmth beside her shifted.
Not dramatically. A small sound, half-formed and entirely asleep, and then Tally Craven was moving closer — tucking herself into Sarah's side with the absolute, uncomplicated confidence of someone with no idea she was doing it. An arm tightened loosely around Sarah's middle. A breath, even and slow, exhaled against her shoulder.
Sarah looked at her.
She brought her arm around carefully, drawing the younger woman in rather than allowing her to simply drift. Tally settled without waking, her breathing unchanged, and Sarah held very still again, as though any movement might disturb the moment.
But the world clearly did not care about the priorities she had in her mind.
Then the Biddies' connection sparked alive again — delicate, apologetic, like someone who knew they were interrupting and could not help it.
Two things.
Sequential.
First: Petra Bellweather had been informed.
And second: Cadets Bellweather and Collar were, apparently, looking for Craven.
Right. Of course they were. Sarah sighed internally.
“Assign them to kitchen duty”, she sent back, and she was aware, even as she did it, how it sounded. She just didn’t really care.. Let the fort's commanding general spend one morning being unreasonable. She had been reasonable for three hundred years.
A ripple of undisguised amusement answered her — fond, gently teasing, the kind that said ‘yes, General,’ and ‘of course, General’ deliberately using her title. Like they never really do.
She had not actually meant kitchen duty. Goddess, she was really doing this.
“Just tell Quartermain to find them an assignment for now” She sent throught the link “Please.”
She was reasonably certain Anacostia would know exactly why the instruction was coming, and from where, and would have the grace not to say a word about it to anyone. Probably.
The connection settled back into its morning quiet, and Sarah permitted herself, for the span of several breaths, to simply be still.
She was not tired. That was the odd thing — the thing she'd been circling around since she woke. After Beltane, she was usually hollowed out in a particular way, functional but emptied. The celebration was, in practice, a working — a long and demanding one, the fort's renewal threaded through her the way all workings eventually were, and she was its conductor. She guided the energy, shaped it, let it move through the runes and the walls and the ground and the Biddies and out into the surrounding land, and at the end of it she was a clean vessel. Useful. Ready to be filled up again with tomorrow's requirements.
She rarely kept anything for herself.
This morning, though, she felt full.
Full. She turned the word over once, carefully, and left it where it was.
Beside her, Tally began to wake.
It happened in stages — the slow, reluctant rise of consciousness.. A slight change in breathing first. Then a subtle shift in the weight of the arm. Then Tally went still in the way of someone who had become abruptly aware of their surroundings and was performing the rapid, silent calculation that such moments inevitably required.
Sarah waited.
"...oh," said Tally Craven, very quietly, into her shoulder.
"Good morning," Sarah said.
A pause. Then: "Hi."
"I've learned several new things about you recently, Craven." She kept her voice entirely level. "The most pressing of which is that you are, apparently, a cuddler."
A beat of silence. She could see the tips of Tally's ears going red.
"I," Tally started. Stopped. "That's not — I don't—" Another pause. "I was asleep."
"Mm."
"I'm not — usually." She didn't move. This was, Sarah noted, interesting. The flustered protest paired with the absolute failure to actually retreat from the position she was protesting. "It… was an accident…"
"Of course," Sarah agreed with warm teasing tone that seemed to surprise Tally.
For a moment, Tally didn't say anything else. Sarah could almost see how Craven’s mind was slowly working through the whole context of the situation. The cuddle. The proximity. Slight but kinda playful shyness… and then something more alert: the particular focus of a mind that had just remembered there was considerably more to account for than a blanket and a compromising proximity.
Baltane. They spend the whole night together. And General Alder was now witnessing Tally go through multiple stages of awareness, with memories flooding her mind.
There was a cascade of microexpressions on Tally’s face. It was… cute. And Sarah mentally made a note of the fact that she just used word ‘cute’ while thinking of one of her cadets. Three hundred and forty-seven years. You would think, by now, she would have developed some kind of reliable defence. No. There was no defence for Tally Craven it seems.
The girl finally seemed to break out of the internal loop she was in.
"I… I should probably get going. This was — I mean," Tally said carefully, "it was Beltane."
"It was," Sarah agreed.
"And Beltane is..." Tally seemed to be choosing her words carefully while blushing furiously "Beltane is a specific kind of... it doesn't necessarily mean—"
"Craven."
"—anything in particular, people do things during Beltane that don't—"
"Craven." Sarah repeated this time putting her hand on Tally’s shoulder squeezing lightly. “Stop.”
Tally froze. She looked at Sarah, then at the doors… and then again at Sarah.
"Let me tell you what my Beltane mornings usually look like." Sarah's voice was measured and gentle. "Witchfather departs at dawn. I see him off, exchange the appropriate words. I return here, review the overnight reports, and begin the day. I do not stay in bed past sunrise." A beat. "I very rarely share my bed at all. The morning after Beltane, I am particularly disinclined to do so." She paused. "Does that clarify anything?"
Tally looked at her. The flush along her cheekbones still red and burning but her gaze less panicked.
"A bit. But… also makes a lot of things way more confusing," She answered with blunt honesty that made General smile.
"Good. So let’s talk about options…" Sarah said, "You could, get up. Get dressed. Walk out of here. We are adults capable of being civil to one another. It is Baltan, and while you are spending the night with me will be fuel for gossip for a while… it is not a scandal in our world."
She stopped for the moment, and when Tally said nothing, she continued
"You're my cadet." Sarah didn't look away. "That's a complication. I'm not going to pretend it isn't… then again. I've been alive for three hundred years. Which means there is something complicated about every single possible version of this conversation, with every possible person. The complication stops being a convincing reason to do nothing somewhere around century two."
A long pause.
"So," Tally said slowly, "you're saying I could stay."
"I'm saying you could stay," Sarah confirmed. "Things will be considerably more complicated if you do. But I find myself… reluctant to let you go."
And that moment? That was the moment Sarah Alder saw the brightest and most beautiful smile she had ever seen.