Thalia Grace reintegrated with the camp at the specific speed of someone who had been extraordinary before and was discovering that three years of tree-time had not diminished that, only compressed it, and the compression was now releasing at considerable velocity.
She was fierce. He had expected fierce — the books, the bloodline, three years of enforced stillness in wood while the world moved without her. He had not expected the specific flavor of her fierceness: precise, immediate, without posturing. She did not perform strength. She simply had it, the way structural steel has it.
She also had a sense of humor that had survived intact, which he found unexpectedly touching.
They sat together on the hill one evening in the first week — she had started coming to the pine tree herself, which he understood. The tree was not her prison; it was something else. The place where she had made her most significant choice. She visited it the way you visit a place that changed you.
'You've been sitting with my tree for two years,' she said. Not a question. She had confirmed the timeline.
'Yes.'
'Why?'
He thought about what to say. He had several true answers and the question was which level of true to give her. He decided: the real one. 'Because I knew you were going to come back and I thought someone should be keeping the hill company until you did.' He paused. 'Also because — I had some information that you were worth knowing. And trees take their time.'
She looked at him. The lightning eyes were steadier now, the wildness calibrating as the days accumulated. 'Some information,' she said, in the tone of someone filing that phrase for later.
'You'll get the fuller version at some point,' he said. 'The short version is: I have an unusual relationship with prior knowledge. It's one of the stranger things about me. I'll explain it properly when the time is right.'
'Is the time right now?'
'Not quite,' he said. 'But soon.' He looked at her. 'In the meantime — tell me about the tree. If you want.'
She was quiet for a moment. Then she started talking, and she talked for a long time, and what she described was not exactly sleep and not exactly consciousness but something between — the awareness of time passing without the ability to act in it, the dream-like quality of hearing the camp below without being able to respond, the specific terror of feeling the poison entering the roots and being unable to do anything except wait and hope.
'I could feel someone,' she said. 'On the bark. Most nights. It wasn't the same as what Chiron and the others did when they checked the tree's health — that was external. This was someone sitting with me. Like—' She stopped. 'Like they were keeping me company.'
'Yes,' he said.
She looked at him. She didn't say anything for a moment. Then: 'Thank you,' she said, simply, without decoration. She said it in the specific way of someone who means it in the full weight of the word, who is not performing gratitude but giving it.
'You're welcome,' he said, in the same way.
They sat on the hill and watched the August evening come in over the Long Island Sound and he thought: she is exactly who she needed to be. Three years in wood and she is still herself. That is extraordinary and not surprising and both things matter.