“YOU NEVER REALLY SAW ME” — The Quiet Queen’s Goodbye Shattered The Alpha King’s Cold, Untouchable Heart
The first thing Lena learned about being the Alpha King’s mate, was that silence had many textures.
There was the silence at formal pack dinners, where 40 wolves sat around a table long enough to lose someone at, and she sat at the far end, so distant from Calin that she had to strain to hear his voice when he addressed his generals.
There was the silence of corridors. She walked alone, servant stepping aside, not out of respect, but out of uncertainty.
Who is she exactly? This quiet woman the king brought home three years ago.
There was the silence of their shared chambers where she slept on her side of the enormous bed, and he slept, when he slept there at all, on his, and the space between them held more cold air than two people had any right to share.
And then there was the silence he gave her specifically.
The one that felt like a door, closed and locked from the inside.
Lena had learned to fill her days so she wouldn’t notice.
She managed the household accounts. No one had done it properly in years, and the head steward, Brin, had nearly wept with gratitude when she quietly took over.
She tended the medicinal garden in the east courtyard, the one that had gone to weeds under the previous keeper.
She sat with the elder she wolves of the pack on cold afternoons, and learned the old remedies, the pack histories, the songs that hadn’t been sung since the last queen was alive.
She did not complain. She had not been raised to complain.
She had been raised in the border territories, the fifth daughter of a mid-rank beta family in a house that smelled of pine resin and woodsm smoke, where her mother hung herbs from the rafters, and her father mended harnesses by firelight.
When the Alpha King’s emissary arrived with the formal bonding request, a political arrangement the emissary had been careful to clarify, beneficial to the border pack standing.
Lena had been 22 and practical enough to understand what the offer really was.
Security for your family, for your pack. She had said yes.
She had always been practical. What she had not been practical enough to prepare for was Kalin himself.
He was not cruel. She wanted to be clear about that.
Even in the private accounting she kept of her own heart.
He had never raised his voice at her, never spoken to her with contempt, never done anything that would give her a clean and obvious wound to point to.
What he had done was harder to name. He looked through her, not at her.
Through her the way you look through a window at something more interesting on the other side.
In three years of legal mating, of shared meals and pack ceremonies, and the performance of partnership before the assembled wolves of Iron Crest, she could count on one hand the number of times his gray eyes had landed on her face and stayed.
The pack assumed it was the nature of kings, too burdened with territory and politics for domestic warmth.
His inner circle knew better. She had overheard Godric, his second once.
He’s not here. He hasn’t been here since Mere. Mire, the name that no one said to Lena’s face.
And everyone said behind her back. His first mate who had died four years ago.
Fever. They said the same way people say storm or earthquake.
Something vast and impersonal that happens to you rather than something with a shape and a face.
Kalin had not remarried for a year. Then the political situation at the borders had required a gesture of alliance, and Lena had said yes, and here she were.
The ghost of a woman she had never met occupied more space in this stronghold than Lena herself did.
She had tried in the early months. Small things. She had learned how he took his morning tea, black, no sweetening, with a sprig of dried rosemary, and began leaving it on his desk before he arrived.
He drank it without comment. She had attended every formal function at his side, learned the names and ranks and temperaments of every alpha and beta in the region, and acquitted herself well enough that Brinn had told her quietly.
She was the most politically astute consort Iron had seen in a generation.
Kalin had never said so, had never said much of anything.
On their first anniversary, she had waited in the great hall in a dress the color of winter wheat, with her hair properly done for once, thinking that perhaps the occasion might prompt something.
He had sent Godric with a gift, a fine emerald brooch, expensive and impersonal, and his regrets.
A border matter required his attention. She had thanked Godric, pinned the brooch to the dress, and gone to bed.
On their second anniversary, she hadn’t waited. By the third, she had stopped noticing the date.
It was Ivy who finally broke something open in her.
Ivy was 7 years old, the daughter of one of the kitchen staff.
A small, solemn girl with a missing front tooth and an opinion on every subject she encountered.
She had attached herself to Lena 6 months ago, with the unstoppable determination of a climbing vine, appearing in the medicinal garden every afternoon to ask questions and offer unrequested help that mostly involved handling things she wasn’t supposed to touch.
“Why are you always alone?” Ivy asked one afternoon, seated on the garden wall with muddy boots and a comfy leaf tucked behind her ear like a feather.
“I’m not alone. You’re here. You know what I mean?
Lena pressed a cutting into the soil. Queens are often alone.
It’s the nature of the position. My mom says you shouldn’t be a queen if it makes you sad.
Your mom is very wise. She also says the king is an idiot.
Lena bit the inside of her cheek. She didn’t say that.
She said something like that. Ivy swung her boots against the wall.
Are you sad? Lena looked at the garden, the rose she’d coaxed from weeds, the herbs coming in thick and fragrant, the climbing roses she’d trained up the east wall over two full growing seasons.
Beautiful, hers, and completely irrelevant to whether she was happy.
I think, she said carefully, that I have been patient for a very long time.
What happens when patient runs out? Lena didn’t answer, but the question followed her inside.
She began paying attention differently after that. Not to Calin, she had long since stopped watching the door for him, stopped noting the exact hour he retired, and whether he would come to their chambers, or simply fall asleep in his study over maps and council documents.
That particular habit had cost her too much sleep in the first year.
She began paying attention to herself. What she noticed was not encouraging.
She had lost weight she hadn’t meant to lose. She slept poorly and woke tired.
She had not laughed genuinely, not the polite social performance of it, in so long she couldn’t remember what it sounded like coming from her own mouth.
She had not spoken to her mother in 2 months because every letter she wrote felt like a lie by omission, all careful cheerfulness, and nothing real.
She had become, she realized with a cold clarity, a woman who was disappearing inside her own life, not dramatically, not all at once.
The way a candle goes so gradually that you don’t notice the room growing darker until you can no longer see your hands.
She thought about it for three days. Then she stopped thinking and started making a list.
The suitcase had belonged to her grandmother, a sturdy thing of worn brown leather with brass fittings and a lock that still worked.
She had brought it with her from the border territories on the day she arrived at Iron Crest, and it had lived under the bed ever since, a small rectangular reminder of who she had been before she became the Alpha King’s mate.
She pulled it out on a Tuesday morning when Calin was in council, and the stronghold was loud with the ordinary business of a large pack going about its day.
She set it open on the bed. She did not cry.
She was past crying about this, had done that in the first year, quietly in the bath where the sound of the water covered it.
Now she simply moved. She packed practically warm wool dresses that would survive the border winters.
Her healer’s kit wrapped carefully in cloth. The books she had accumulated, not many, but each one chosen and annotated and genuinely loved.
The letters from her mother and sisters tied in bundles with kitchen twine.
The small carved wolf figurine her father had pressed into her hand on the morning she left, saying nothing because he was a man of few words who communicated in objects.
She did not take the emerald brooch. She set it on the dressing table where it could be found and returned to whatever account it had been purchased from.
She packed slowly and in silence, the way you do when you want to remember each thing you’re touching, because you understand that you are not just packing clothes.
You are closing a chapter, folding it neatly, and setting it down.
She was reaching for her grandmother’s shawl, the blue gray one that smelled faintly of cedar from the chest it lived in when the door opened.
She didn’t turn around. She recognized his footfall. 3 years of sharing space with someone teaches you their weight on floorboards, whether you wanted to or not.
You’re back early, she said, and folded the shawl. Calin had come back early because Godric had sent him a look across the council chamber.
Just a look. But Godric had been his second for 12 years, and they had a language of glances that covered most situations, and this one said, “Go home and go now.”
He hadn’t asked why. He had learned to trust Godric’s instincts more than his own in certain matters.
He stood in the doorway of their chambers and looked at his mate.
She was folding a gray shawl with the focused care of someone engaged in an important task.
The brown suitcase on the bed was half full. He could see the healer’s kit, the books, the bundles of letters.
His eyes moved to the dressing table. The emerald brooch sat there, separate from everything else, gleaming under the window light like a reproach.
He had known somewhere beneath the distance he had cultivated, and the numbness he had mistaken for control.
He had known that this day had a shape and a direction, and that he had been walking toward it for 3 years.
He simply had not expected it to arrive on a Tuesday quietly while he sat in a council meeting arguing about river trade.
Lena H. She reached for something else. Didn’t look at him.
What are you doing? Packing. She said it the way she said everything without drama, without accusation, with the steady plainness that had unnerved him from the beginning because he had never learned how to fight against someone who wasn’t fighting.
I can see that. Then the question answers itself. He came into the room and closed the door behind him.
She moved to her wardrobe, opened it, began making decisions.
He sat in the chair by the window, his chair, the one he’d sat in perhaps a dozen times in 3 years, and watched her.
Where will you go? Home first. Then I’ll see. She folded a green dress.
My mother has been asking me to come for a year.
I kept telling her I was needed here. The flatness in her voice when she said needed landed somewhere behind his sternum.
You are needed here. She stopped folding, set the dress down on the bed, turned around for the first time, and looked at him.
Really looked at him with eyes that were not angry, which would have been easier, but simply tired.
Worn down to something honest underneath. Kayn, she said, “When did you last ask me a question?
He opened his mouth, closed it. Not a logistical question, she clarified.
Not. Are you attending the Northern Assembly or did you authorize the herb purchases?
A real question. Something you wanted to know about me.
He could not answer. Not because he was deflecting. He had done enough of that.
But because the honest answer was a weight he hadn’t prepared to carry today.
I brought you rosemary tea every morning for 6 months.
She said, “You drank it. You never asked how I knew you liked rosemary.”
She picked up the dress and folded it again, though it was already folded.
I thought maybe that would be the question. How did you know?
Something. Anything. Lena, I learned the name of every wolf on your council.
I know that Aldrich’s youngest has a recurring chest problem, and I’ve been sending him a tincture every winter.
I know that Godric’s mother is declining and that he rides to see her every fourth moon and that he thinks no one notices, but I leave extra food in his saddle bag on those days.
She paused. You didn’t know any of that. He didn’t.
He knew it with absolute certainty the moment she said it.
I have been here, she said. For 3 years I have been here, Kalin, in this stronghold, in these rooms, in the life you brought me into and then walked away from.
And I understand her voice didn’t waver, which was somehow harder to witness than if it had.
I understand that I wasn’t who you wanted. I understand that losing me.
Don’t. The word came out sharper than he intended. Broke something in you that you didn’t know how to fix.
She didn’t stop. I understand that. I have never blamed you for grief.
I have only ever asked for the smallest portion of what was left over.
And even that, a breath, even that was too much.
Apparently, the silence that followed was the worst kind. Not comfortable.
Not the silence of two people who have run out of words because they’ve said all the important ones.
The silence of someone who is finished. I’m not angry, she said.
I want you to know that I am tired and I am sad and I am going home, but I am not angry.
And that’s it. He heard his own voice and barely recognized it.
Something raw in it than he’d allowed in years. You pack a bag and leave.
I have been leaving for a long time, Kalin. You simply weren’t watching.
He let her finish packing. It was not because he didn’t want to stop her.
It was because he understood in some part of himself that had been deliberately muffled for 4 years that he had not yet earned the right to stop her.
That walking into a room and saying, “Wait,” was not enough.
That she had waited long past the point where waiting made sense, and he had given her nothing to wait for.
He went to his study, sat at the desk, looked at the maps he’d been arguing over all morning.
Marray’s portrait was on the wall opposite, a formal thing commissioned in the first year of their bonding, painted by an artist from the Southern Territories.
She looked out of it with dark eyes and a slight complicated smile, the way she had looked at everything, as if the world perpetually offered her a private joke.
He had loved her with the uncomplicated intensity of a young wolf who has not yet learned that love does not protect against anything.
She had died in the same season they had decided to start a family.
He had held her hand through the fever and talked to her when she stopped answering and stood at her grave in the cold and felt the place inside him where she had lived seal over like a wound that heals wrong, solid and numb and useless.
He had told himself that the arrangement with Lena was practical, that she understood the terms, that he owed her comfort and provision and respect, and that was a fair exchange for what the alliance required of her, and that anything more was beyond his capacity, and therefore beyond her expectation.
He had been a coward dressed up as a pragmatist.
Godric knocked and entered without waiting, a privilege of 12 years.
He looked at Kalin’s face and sat down in the opposite chair with the air of a man who has been anticipating this conversation.
“She’s packing,” Kalin said. “I know. You knew before I did.
I’ve known for 6 months that this was coming.” Godric clasped his hands.
I was hoping you’d figure it out before it got to suitcases.
Why didn’t you say something? Godric looked at him with the measured patience of someone very tired.
I said something 17 times in various ways at various levels of directness.
A pause. Last autumn I told you that your mate was running the household accounts, managing the medicinal supply for three border villages and had personally negotiated a trade arrangement with the Ashvin Pack that saved us 40 wolf hours of labor a month.
And your response was good. Glad it’s handled. Kalin said nothing.
She is not a steward, Kalin. She is your mate.
Godric leaned forward. And she has been more present in this pack’s life in three years than some wolves who were born into it.
The elder women ask her advice. The kitchen staff adors her.
Old Aldri’s boy is alive this winter because she noticed a cough no one else did and treated it before it became something worse.
He stopped. “And you have looked through her like glass every day of those three years.
While she did all of that, the words landed with the particular weight of things that are true and have been true for a long time and are only now being said aloud.
I didn’t know how to No, Godric said not unkindly.
You didn’t know how to let yourself. That’s different. He stood.
Marray is gone. Calin, I know that. I mourned her, too.
But you cannot grieve her at Lena’s expense forever. At some point that becomes a choice, not a wound.
He left. Kalin sat for a long time looking at the portrait.
Then he stood up and went to the medicinal garden.
Lena was there, which he had not expected. He had expected to find her in their chambers, suitcase closed, perhaps waiting for a carriage to be arranged.
Instead, she was kneeling in the dirt with her hands in the soil, checking the root system of something he couldn’t name.
She looked up when she heard him. Her expression was careful, the careful of someone who has said the important thing and is not sure what comes next.
He sat down on the low stone wall. Not beside her, across from her, where she could see his face and make her own assessment of it.
I don’t know how you take your tea, he said.
She sat back on her heels. What? I don’t know.
I’ve never asked. He looked at his hands. I know you leave mine on my desk.
I don’t know what’s in yours or if you even drink tea in the mornings or if you prefer something else.
A silence then mint with a little honey in winter, plain in summer.
I didn’t know that. No. He looked at her then, made himself look the way he had been failing to for 3 years.
She had a smear of soil on her cheek. Her hands were capable and unhurried, the hands of someone who worked with them regularly.
She wore no jewelry except for a small ring on her right hand that he had never asked about.
“That ring,” he said. “Where did it come from?” She glanced at it.
A simple silver band worn thin with age. “My grandmother.”
She left it to me, she said, a slight hesitation, deciding whether to continue.
She said to give it to the first piece of ground that felt like home.
“But you kept it. I kept it. The weight of that was considerable.
He let it settle. You said you’ve been here for 3 years, he said.
And you’ve been leaving for a long time. He met her eyes.
When did it start? The leaving. She considered him for a moment, considering he thought whether he deserved an honest answer.
She decided he did. The first anniversary, she said. When Godric brought the brooch, he closed his eyes briefly.
Not because of the brooch, she said. Gifts don’t matter much to me.
Because of what it meant, that you had thought of the occasion enough to send something, but not enough to to simply be there.
A pause. I had worn a dress. I don’t usually bother.
She said it without self-pity, which made it considerably worse.
I understood after that what the shape of this was going to be.
And you stayed anyway. I stayed anyway. She pulled a weed from the bed beside her because I am not someone who abandons things.
And because there was real work to be done here, and it felt good to do it, even if she stopped, even if no one was watching, he finished, even if the person I most wanted to notice didn’t.
Calin was quiet for a moment. The garden was warm, the late afternoon light slanting gold across the climbing roses she’d trained up the east wall.
He hadn’t known she had done that either. He noticed it now.
I was watching Marray, he said. Even after she was gone, I was watching the place where she’d been, and everything else was peripheral.
He paused, finding the right words, the honest ones rather than the armored ones.
I told myself I was being fair to you by not pretending to feel things I didn’t.
That it was better to be honest in my distance than dishonest in a performance of warmth.
That’s a reasonable thing to tell yourself, she said, not agreeing, not forgiving, simply acknowledging the logic of it.
It was also a way of not having to try, he said, which is less reasonable.
She looked at him. I have not been fair to you, he said.
I brought you into my house and my life and my pack and then I left you to manage all of it alone and called that an arrangement rather than what it was.
He paused. It was a failure. Mine. The garden was quiet around them.
Somewhere in the stronghold, something dropped and someone laughed. Why are you saying this now?
She asked. Not suspicious, genuinely asking. Because you’re packing a suitcase, he said.
And I have realized that I would rather learn how to be present than watch you leave.
Kalin, I’m not asking you to unpack it, he said quickly.
I’m not asking you to stay because I’ve said some true things this afternoon.
I know that’s not how it works. He held her gaze.
I’m asking you to give me a conversation tonight, tomorrow.
As many as it takes for you to decide whether there is anything here worth staying for.
Not for the pack, not for the alliance, for you.
Lena looked at him for a long time. He let her look, didn’t deflect or fill the silence.
“You don’t know anything about me,” she said finally. “No,” he agreed.
“That’s what the conversations would be for.” Something shifted in her face.
Small, not quite a softening, but a crack in the careful neutral she had been maintaining.
“You want to learn me now after 3 years? I want to start, which is different from having done nothing, even if it’s not as different as I’d like.
She looked down at her hands, the worn silver ring on her right hand, the soil under her fingernails.
I make lists, she said. He waited. When things feel out of control, I make lists.
It’s how I think. She turned the ring on her finger.
I made one yesterday of things I would miss when I left.
She paused. The garden was on it. The elder she wolves and their songs.
Ivy, who is 7 years old and has an opinion on literally every plant I own.
A pause. Your territory is beautiful, Kalin. Even when I was unhappiest here, I walked the RGLine in the early mornings, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
I didn’t know you walked the ridge line every morning for 2 years before anyone else is awake.
She looked up at him. I’ve never seen you there.
I go at dusk, he said. When the council is done.
Something passed between them. The specific quiet that comes from realizing two people have been sharing a place without knowing it.
Was I on the list? He asked. A long pause.
There was something on the list that I didn’t know how to name.
She said that might have been you. What I thought you could be.
What I kept waiting to find out you were. I’d like to show you, he said, if you’ll let me.
She did not unpack the suitcase that night. She left it on the bed, closed but not locked, while they sat in the library across from each other with cups of tea, mint with honey, which he had made himself badly but correctly.
And she told him about the border territories and the pine resin and the woodsm smoke and her father who mended harnesses and her mother who strung herbs from the rafters and he listened the way he hadn’t listened to anything in 4 years.
He told her about the ridgeeline at dusk, how the light went red and bronze over the eastern peaks, and for 20 minutes everything in the territory was visible and still.
He told her about the siege of Thornwall 9 years ago, the worst week of his life before Mire, and why he still sometimes woke from it.
He told her things he hadn’t said to anyone, not because they were secrets, but because he had stopped speaking outward, and she was the first person in a long time who made him want to try again.
Ivy’s mother had apparently said something like that the king was an idiot.
He discovered this because Lena told him, watching his face carefully as she did.
And when he laughed, genuinely the rusty real version, she looked startled and then startled at herself for looking startled.
You should do that more, she said. Probably, he agreed.
They talked until well past midnight when the fire burned low and neither of them had moved to rebuild it.
Too occupied to notice the cold coming in. It was not a resolution.
Lena was clear about that, not in words, but in the particular way she rose and said good night.
The way she closed the door of their chambers, and he heard from the other side of it the absence of the lock turning, not an invitation, but not a closed door either.
Something that needed tending. The next morning, she walked the ridgeine at dusk, not dawn.
He was there. He had known she might be, and he was there.
They walked without speaking for a while, side by side, the territory spread out below them in the last red light.
She had a green wool scarf that he hadn’t seen before, wound twice around her neck against the cold.
My sister sent it, she said, catching him looking. She knits badly, but with dedication.
Do you have many sisters? Three. All of them more interesting than me, according to my mother, who doesn’t mean it unkindly.
That’s simply how she sees us. Marta is the clever one.
Pira is the brave one. Kora is the beautiful one.
A pause. I’m the practical one. Who decided that? It was decided collectively early, and I never disputed it.
He looked at the woman beside him, who had reclaimed a ruined garden, learned an entire packs worth of names and ailments and needs, negotiated trade arrangements, befriended a seven-year-old with mud on her boots, and walked alone every morning for 2 years through the most beautiful view in the territory without once pointing it out to anyone.
I think, he said, that practical is what you call someone when you run out of other words, when actually they are simply doing 10 things at once without requiring applause for any of them.
She looked at him sideways, a careful look, assessing. You’re trying, she said.
Yes, it shows. Another pause. I haven’t decided yet whether to stay.
I know. I mean that genuinely. I am not saying it to be to keep leverage or whatever.
I genuinely don’t know. She looked out at the territory, the red light going bronze.
I have spent three years becoming someone I am reasonably proud of despite the circumstances.
I don’t want to give that person up for the possibility of something that might not materialize.
What would help? He asked indeciding. She thought about it.
Keep talking, she said. The way we did last night, not about policy or the pack or useful things.
Just talk. I can do that. And stop looking through me.
I know. He paused. I’ll need you to tell me when I do it.
I don’t always know. She turned and looked at him fully, the way she had in the doorway of their chambers with the same tired honesty.
Only now there was something else in it. Not warmth yet, but the possibility of warmth, the way a hearth looks when you’ve just laid the wood and reached for the flint.
All right, she said. I’ll tell you. The sun finished dropping.
The territory went the color of ash and silver, and they were still standing there close enough that their shoulders nearly touched, both looking at the same piece of sky.
“The ring,” he said, “from your grandmother.” She said, “Give it to the first ground that feels like home.”
“M you’ve been here 3 years.” She was quiet for a moment, then.
I know. So it hasn’t, he said. Felt like home.
Another quiet longer then carefully with the honesty of someone deciding how much truth to offer.
Not yet, she said, “But I am still holding it.”
The suitcase stayed on the bed for another two days.
On the third morning, she moved it back under the bed.
Not dramatically, not as a statement. Simply put it away the way you put away something you’ve decided you don’t need right now.
Reaching into the back of the wardrobe for the grandmother’s cedar chest.
He saw her do it. He was sitting in the chair by the window, his chair, which he had begun sitting in more deliberately, reclaiming it from the category of things that existed in the room without being used.
She didn’t explain. She didn’t need to. He went down to the kitchen and made two cups of tea, mint with honey and rosemary, and brought them back up, and they sat across from each other in the early morning light, and began very slowly the work of learning each other.
It was not the story of a king who swept in at the last moment and fixed everything with a speech and a gesture.
Lena would have found that insulting. It was the story of two people who had been living in the same space, orbiting at a distance, and who, one of them, late, far too late, he knew, had finally found the courage to close the gap.
He learned that she sang to herself when she was concentrating, that she had a philosophical disagreement with Lavender that had been going on for several years, and that the lavender was currently winning, that she had wanted, as a small child, to be a cgrapher, and still owned three maps she had drawn herself at age nine, kept folded in the back of her favorite book.
She learned that he was afraid of small spaces, not paralyzed, but afraid from a cave-in at Thornwall that he had never told anyone the specifics of.
That he read the same three books on a rotation and had done so for 15 years and found the repetition steadying.
That he laughed when he actually laughed with his entire face.
She told him about Ivy. He started leaving biscuits near the garden wall because she’d mentioned the girl was always hungry.
He told her about the ridge line at dusk. She started meeting him there.
Small things, the architecture of closeness, built the only way it can be, one thing at a time, unremarkably, over days that accrete into weeks into something that holds.
Ivy asked her one afternoon if she was still sad.
Lena thought about it honestly. Less, she said. Different. Is the king less of an idiot?
My understanding, Lena said carefully, is that he is working on it.
Ivy seemed to find this acceptable. She handed over a slightly crushed wild flower she had been carrying and went back to examining a beetle with great scientific attention.
Lena turned the flower in her fingers. On her right hand, the worn silver ring caught the afternoon light.
She thought of her grandmother, of the instruction that had traveled down years to reach her.
Give it to the first piece of ground that feels like home.
She looked at the garden, her garden, the roses climbing the east wall, the medicinal beds in their careful rows, the small stone wall where a seven-year-old sat most afternoons with mud on her boots, and something to say about everything.
She looked at the ridgeine, visible from here, catching the beginning of its evening color.
She thought about two cups of tea on a winter morning.
A man learning to look at her. A long way still to go.
She did not take the ring off. It was not a moment for gestures.
It was a moment for continuing, which is what she had always been best at.
But she felt for the first time in 3 years that she was staying towards something rather than simply refusing to leave.
It was not everything. It was not yet what it needed to become.
But it was a beginning, honest and unhurried, which was the only kind that lasts.
And Lena, who was practical above all things, understood that a real beginning was not nothing.
