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Here is a secret Tula will keep until the day she finally stumbles down into her grave: having Jaysohn should have killed her.
In truth, having Jaysohn already had.
She often wonders if she knows for certain what really happened that night, but has long resigned herself to the idea that she likely never will. There had been a sickening dread that had subsumed her in a split-second, the choking awareness of Ava and Lila just behind her, the look on Geoffery's face as he'd run, faster than he'd ever run before, like he could sense it the same instant Tula had — that something had gone terribly wrong. He'd run in the hopes of finding them a medic, but Tula's mother had stayed behind, nosing anxiously at Tula's face.
For a moment, that had been the last thing Tula had been aware of — her mother pleading with her to just hold on a little bit longer, but Tula had already known, the way every living creature eventually knows, that it was too late.
And then Lila began to cry, and even through the pressure in her head and the pain in her belly, Tula had heard it, and suddenly the terror of leaving her children was all-consuming. She couldn't think through it, except to find the certainty that she couldn't, that she had to do anything else; anything less was unthinkable. So Tula dug her claws into the meat of a miracle that none of them have ever truly understood and simply refused to let go.
Tula still isn't certain she knows what happened, but the frightened snarl on her mother's face when Tula had gasped in a new breath and finally cleared her vision was an answer in itself.
Ava never speaks of it and Tula never asks, not sure she'll like the answer she'd get. She'd decided that night, laying curled protectively around Lila and Jaysohn afterwards, that it hardly mattered.
She would not question the nature of the miracle that kept her with her children. She can't. She'll count it as a blessing and never let herself be anything but grateful for it, that they did not have to grow up in a world without her.
But sometimes she wonders. She can't quite help it.
There's something wrong with her, now; Tula knows it and thinks perhaps she has never not known it. Her body is different in ways that are difficult to quantify — there is a Before and there is an After, and Tula is never sure what to make of it.
She used to be faster, she used to tire less often. Her heartbeat had been strong where now it seems to pulse and flutter at odd, inconvenient moments. Her muscles had been fit where now they ache and tense around her joints. Her freedom to use the Blue used to be less of a strain, less of a risk. Her body is more prone to breaking, where it used to be sturdier. She falters, now, where she hadn't before.
Tula names it Motherhood and does not dwell on it. She is well enough to take care of her children, and that is all she needs to be able to do. It does not matter if her grasp on the Blue is less than it used to be, as long as she can still soothe Lila and Jaysohn's wounds and cure their illnesses, that's all she needs from it.
Geoffery may have had a point that there was a need to understand what had happened to her, what was happening to the forest around them, what it meant for their children and their children's children. Tula was also correct to point out that there were others in the warren who could investigate it without either of them. She does not blame him for his choice to press on regardless of her misgivings; she doesn't blame herself for not being enough to convince him.
But now he's gone, and Tula is more certain than ever that her children need her, and she will do whatever it takes to continue to stand at their sides.
After all, Tula's mother is wily and strong, but every day that passes shows more and more that her memory is failing her. She is already older than her own mother had ever been, and Tula cannot forget this. If anything happened to her, Ava would step in to help look after Jaysohn and Lila, but it would come to pass all to quickly that she wouldn't be able to help them for as long as they could need her.
And Viola and Thorn would step up if Tula needed them to, she knows it, but there is far too much on their minds already. Tula doesn't understand the nature of the group they'd built up for themselves — what they hope to accomplish or how many they plan to take under their wings — but she knows that it is a lot to lead a people. Either Lila and Jaysohn would wind up neglected, or the others under their care would, and Tula does not want to ask it of them.
So the fact remains: as long as Tula's children need her, she simply cannot die.
No matter how much she might sometimes want to.
It is not an active desire, but a passive awareness: Tula is alive, but she should not be. Tula should have died months upon months ago — this is the nature of things. It is something unnatural that has kept her alive this long. It is an aberration Tula cannot bring herself to regret.
Sometimes she swears she can smell her body rotting beneath her, that she can feel her bones beginning to bleach under her skin, that she can hear her organs failing inside her belly, but her body continues to move through it because Tula needs it to. Because her children need it to.
So Tula will not die, but she should have, and it's nothing but her own stubborn refusal to do so that has kept her body in motion as long as it has been. It is painful, and it is exhausting, and some days there is almost nothing more indulgent than the thought of finally giving in, of letting her tense iron grip on the Blue relax just a little, of letting the cramping tension release, of letting herself lie down somewhere and finally rest.
Some days, but Tula never wavers, because she knows exactly what her relief would cost.
(That does not mean it does not grate.)
Her children are unusual little handfuls. Lila is strange and precocious; she has questions about the world that no one else would be willing to satisfy. Jaysohn's energy is unmatched and untamed; a fervor and enthusiasm no one else would willingly indulge. Tula cannot think of anything more saddening than the thought of those wonderful qualities being quashed by someone who would not put their time into understanding them.
(She cannot think of anything worse than her name being added to the arsenal she has heard so many around her wield against them. 'You would never behave like this in front of your father,' hissed and angry, 'Think of what Geoffery would say'. Tula does not want her memory to be a weapon wielded against her loved ones, so she will press on as long as it takes to never allow her name to stain the mouths of those trying to stomp down her children's spirits.)
They are so clever that sometimes it could be easy to forget how young they truly are. All too easy for someone other than Tula to see their skill and push them as if they were already adults; she can imagine it so vividly that it makes her chest ache. The world in which Jaysohn's skillful guidance through the forest was corralled by someone snarling and impatient nipping at his tail, the world in which Lila's success against those strange chipmunks was met with nothing but a pressing expectation for more, regardless of what it might cost her. The world in which no one thought to look after them, where no one remembered to lick the blood out of Lila's ears or comb through Jaysohn's matted fur, where no one sat with them and listened to them talk about it all until they finally fell asleep — settled comfortably into their skins again.
"I thought I saw something scary," Lila had admitted, soft and whispered into Tula's ears as they'd followed her mother out of the bear's corpse. "About your insides."
Tula had felt the words rock through her, in the cold slush of her blood and the unsteady beat of her heart. She'd sighed, just a little, and leaned down to clean more of the blood off of Lila's snout, ignoring the odd crack of her shoulder slipping in its socket, and thought about what to say in the face of that — in the acknowledgement.
(It does not count as protecting them if they know just how fragile she truly is.)
"The Blue does a lot for us," she'd settled on, "even when it thinks it knows better."
There is a lot you can force yourself to endure, she does not say, if you have a good enough reason.
Tula knows the answer she gave won't be enough to satisfy, that the only reason she'd gotten away with saying so little at all was that Lila was too exhausted and wounded to do anything more than take her at her word, more easily distracted than she would normally be at the discovery of Viola and Thorn inside the bear's skull. Knows that the moment she wakes up in the morning, Lila will be at Tula's side, asking her questions incessantly until she gets a response that actually answers her question. One that sates her worries.
Tula knows it, and she won't run from it when it finally happens, but she wishes that things could have been different. Wishes that she could have lived her life as something normal, that she was more than something mostly-dead held together out of a stubborn refusal to accept the fate that life had handed her.
But Tula wishes for a lot of things that were not ever in the cards for her, and she's well used to accepting that by now.
(She'd wanted for her children to grow up with a father. Wanted them to have never caught sight of the mangled remnant of Geoffery's body. She wanted for them to grow up in a burrow that was safe and free from harm. She'd wanted them to grow up surrounded by other stoats who could keep an eye on them, who could love them as much as she did, who would encourage them instead of stifling them. She wanted for them to never know anything of hardship, for them to be safe and cared for forever.)
Those things are far out of reach now, and Tula will not waste time mourning for what will never be. If she lets herself look back, she knows it will do nothing but leave her oblivious to what lies ahead — the dangers and opportunities both — and they do not have the privilege to overlook a single thing. There will be a safe place again, eventually, and Tula will be there to help her children acknowledge what they had survived and help teach them how to continue living with it.
She will. Tula knows it, because she put her foot down once, and no matter how much it aches and pains and bleeds her to leave it where it is, Tula will continue to refuse to relent, even a little bit.
Her children will not see her body rot, they will not be the ones to find her dead, they will not yet know a world without her in it.
No matter what it costs her, Tula refuses.