Page 48 of Run Rabbit Run

Violence is what small men reach for when they've run out of patience, and I’ve never once run out of patience.

Breaking a person is like gardening.

You don't shout at a seedling to make it grow the way you want.

You control what reaches it.

Light and water and cold, given and withheld, until the seedling bends itself toward the only warmth on offer and calls the bending its own idea.

My father never understood that.

He thought breaking was something you did with your hands, fast, and all he ever grew was a wife who died to get away from him and two children who watched her go.

I learned the opposite lesson at his knee, the way you learn what not to be from a bad example.

What I learned instead was patience, the one tool he never picked up.

I have Wren in the east wing now, and I have forever with her.

I intend to use all of it.

The first days I give her almost nothing.

A warm room. I've no use for cold. Cold only teaches a body to brace, and I don't want her braced.

Food she doesn't have to ask for, arriving without a face attached to it, so she never learns a rhythm she can trust.

A locked door. A window that shows her the woods she failed to cross. No clock.

No word about her brother, whether the debt cleared, whether the boy is safe, though of course it cleared, of course he's safe, I keep my bargains.

But she doesn't know that. Not knowing is the point.

A person who doesn't know whether the people she loves are safe will do a great deal to earn the knowing, and I’m the only one on this mountain who can give it to her.

That's the design of it, laid in the first week.

I’m the source of everything now.

Food, warmth, information, the sight of another human face.

Every good thing in her world flows from one hand, and it's mine.

Sooner or later a body learns to turn toward the hand that feeds it no matter what else that hand has done.

She fights it. God, she fights it, and I love the fight, I've said so.

She tries the window the first night and finds it fitted tight.

She tries the door and finds it true in its frame.

She goes over the room inch by inch with those tracker's eyes, hunting the gap or the loose board that isn't there, because I had a year to think about this room and she had a night to lose.

She doesn't cry where I can see her.

She eats everything on every tray, fuel, not comfort, a soldier provisioning for a war she still thinks she's fighting.

Good. Let her think it. The fight is part of the garden too.