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It came on all fronts, walloping her again and again.
She couldn’t catch her breath. Her heart pounded so hard it frightened her. She was nauseated. Sweating. Hot, then cold. Thenthis closeto bursting out of her skin—
And all the while the tent spun around and around and around, until she was so dizzy she was afraid she might fall down.
It took her a long while to realize that she was already lying flat.
Slowly, laboriously, she pulled herself up, but she couldn’t stand. On and on it went, as if she was caught on some sort of horrid carnival ride. Eventually she made to the side of the wide bed, then to the floor, crawling on her hands and knees across priceless rugs, sure she would die there. Any moment.
There were too many things in her head. The certainty that this time, she really was going to die. That she’d minimized these attacks, called thempanic, but this would be the end of her. Left behind in her wedding dress, on her hands and knees on the floor of a tent in a desert that even her emotionally vacant father had warned her she’d only chosen to stay in because something was terribly, terribly wrong with her.
She was sobbing or she was gagging, or it was both at once. But still, Anya crawled until she found the bathroom.
And then she celebrated her first night as Queen of Alzalam by curling up in a wretched ball next to yet another toilet, waiting for this violent death to claim her once and for all.
Which gave her ample time to think about all the things that Tarek had thrown at her tonight.
Her love. His horror that she would even use the word. His talk of duty, and her place.
She thought of the Queen’s Cell and felt the panic rise all over again as she imagined him throwing her straight back in for another stint of cold stone walls and unyielding iron bars.
Not that it mattered, she thought miserably, there on the floor. Because wasn’t this marriage just another kind of prison? Not the way she’d imagined it, but clearly the way Tarek intended.
A sick little repeat of her childhood and the life her mother had left her to, however unwillingly.
Anya already knew where that led.
To this, right here. To that throbbing, blaring knot in her chest and her in a ball on the floor, alone.
And then, through all of that noise and riot, nausea and anguish, she heard a voice as clearly as if someone stood over her.
She blinked, but she was still alone.
“You are brave, Anya,”said her mother in her head. In her heart.“You are fiercer than you know. And you can make your life whatever you want it to be.”
My life, she thought then.And certainly my marriage.
She pulled in a shaky breath, deep. Then let it out, and like magic, the panic disappeared with it.
As if it had never been.
Anya sat up carefully. Gingerly. Waiting for all of those terrible sensations to slam back into her and throw her straight back down into that miserable ball, writhing within reach of yet another toilet.
But it was still...gone.
“You are the bravest girl I know,”her mother whispered, deep inside, where Anya understood, then, she always would.
She pressed her hand to that place in the center of her chest, the place where that knot had always blazed at her, and felt her eyes fill anew.
But for a different reason this time.
She’d thought it earlier today, hadn’t she? That the panic was her feelings all along. That all those things she’d locked up in her attempt to please her father had only ever waited for her there.
Now she understood that it was more than that.
It had come out medically, because that was the only thing she allowed herself. It had burst forth in symptoms, so she could catalog them. List them. Pretend she could clinically examine her own breakdowns.
Because medicine was the only emotional language she’d ever allowed herself.
