Ursik
Icarry the crate the rest of the way with Aislin three steps behind me and slightly to my left.
I know she's there the same way you know when someone's got a bow trained on your back — not by sound, exactly, but by the particular quality of attention.
It's a pressure. She's watching the way I move, the way my weight shifts, whether I turn my head.
I can feel the calculation in it like something physical.
She doesn't trust me. I've established that much.
What I hadn't established — what has reorganized itself considerably in the last two minutes — is that she's armed.
Has been armed. This entire time, apparently, while I was dropping supplies at the cabin door and nodding to whoever answered and trying to take up less space than I actually occupy, she's had a sling and a river stone somewhere on her person, and she'd had it halfway through the arc before she'd stopped.
Before she'd stopped. I keep returning to that.
She'd stopped. Mid-motion, with the full mechanical commitment of someone who absolutely meant to follow through — you can see it in someone's shoulder when they're sincere about hitting you, and her shoulder had been completely sincere — and she'd arrested it herself. Because she'd recognized my face.
I think that might be the most impressive thing I've seen all season, and I watched Falla reattach a warrior's youngest's baby finger last month with nothing but a needle, gut thread, and the expression of a man who finds incompetence spiritually offensive.
The gap between the trees opens onto the path behind the two cabins, and I walk it the way I've learned to walk it over the last week — not fast, not looming, not taking the straight line between two points the way I naturally would because the straight line takes me past windows and doors and apparently a woman has to be told that seven consecutive days of food delivery means no one is planning anything sinister.
Falla said to give it time. I'd been giving it time.
I find the concept of time considerably more frustrating in practice than in theory.
The young one with the sprained ankle — Idris — is sitting outside the smaller cabin with a blanket over her knees, the same spot she's occupied most of the warmer part of the day since Falla said she could start putting weight on it.
She looks up when I come around the corner.
Her expression does the thing most of them do when they see me coming: a quick, honest assessment that cycles through large, green, tusks before settling on it's the one who brings things.
"Morning." I hold up the crate. "More of the same. Falla packed the left side, so whatever's wrapped in the linen is his and will be labelled, and the rest is from the stores."
"Thank you." Hesitant, but there. She gives me a small, careful smile — the kind that means something because it's chosen rather than automatic. "Is there more bread?"
"Bottom right corner." I set the crate down on the step. "He was going to send more broth but we ran out of the vessel situation. That's being worked out."
She nods. Her eyes shift briefly to somewhere behind my left shoulder — checking where Aislin is, presumably — and then come back to me.
I give her a smile. Wide. Friendly. I've been told I have a good smile when I try, which is a sentence that has never not made me want to look at whoever said it and ask what they think I'm doing with my face the rest of the time.
Idris's smile gets a fraction less careful in response.
I turn around.
Aislin is watching me with the flat, concentrated look of a woman who has decided she is not going to react to anything I do, and is succeeding.
I smile at her too, on reflex. Wider, because the first one had worked on Idris and I'd had a good morning before the almost-rock-to-the-head and wasn't ready to entirely abandon the mood.
She glares.
Not the flinching look I sometimes get from some of the others, the involuntary one — the type that comes from muscle memory that I can't take personally because it isn't about me.
This is deliberate. Considered. She looks at my smile the way you look at something that's been left in the wrong place and is now mildly obstructing traffic.
I turn back to the crate.
I have nothing for that. I don't know what to do with it.
I've been working hard all week to keep my voice down, take up less space in doorways, move slowly, knock before arriving.
Bronn would say I'm being soft. Falla would say I'm being practical.
Kai would probably make some thoughtful observation about it and then ask me how I feel, which is the thing Kai does now that Saela has organized his emotional vocabulary.
None of them would know what to do with someone who looks at my best smile like it personally offended her.
Wren appears in the cabin doorway, stepping around Idris's legs.
She's got that measuring quality too — they all do, every one of the eight, and I understand it, I'm not stupid about what they came out of — but Wren's seems to operate with less hostility and more genuine assessment.
She looks at me, then the crate, then back.
"Did Falla send the willowbark? For Maret? She prefers the tea over the tincture."
"Left side, linen-wrapped. He labelled it."
"Good." She leans in the doorway, and there's something easy in the way she holds herself — not relaxed exactly, but not coiled either. Easier than some. "You don't have to deliver it yourself, you know. You could leave it at the path."
"I know." I scratch the back of my neck. "The crate was heavy."
"Mm." She looks at me a moment longer, and there's something slightly amused at the corner of her mouth. "We appreciate it."
I glance back toward Aislin, which I tell myself is incidental — just accounting for everyone in a space, the way you do, the way any soldier does out of habit.
She's moved six feet to my right. Still watching. The sling isn't visible now, which means it's back wherever she keeps it, which is a separate question I find I'm turning over with some interest.
She's slight. That's the thing that had hit me the morning they'd arrived — all of them pale and hollow from months in Stonevein hands, but Aislin standing at the front of the group with her chin up and her shoulders squared and her green eyes doing exactly what they're doing right now, and I'd been two steps forward with everyone else before I'd clocked that this small human woman was positioning herself between the group and us.
Like a door. Like a wall. Like something that had decided it was a wall even if the physics didn't quite support it.
Bronn had looked at her and made some assessment I didn't get to hear because I'd been busy watching her watch us, cataloguing us the same way she's cataloguing me now.
I'd thought, at the time: this one won't stay afraid.
The others were frightened in a way that might stay frightened for a while yet — and fair, I can't argue with fair — but Aislin had looked at us like fear was a practical problem she was actively solving.
A week later, apparently, the solution involves a river stone and enough arm speed to matter.
I genuinely cannot decide whether this is a problem.
I pick up the empty crate I'd left from yesterday's drop and tuck it under my arm, and I do the calculation that I always do in small spaces: how large am I, how close is the nearest person, what's the least invasive way to move between points A and B.
It's a calculation I never had to run before last winter, before Saela crashed into our base, before Falla and I helped Kai rescue Saela and Ressa from the Stonevein and I had seen what damage — real, emotional damage — at the hands of orcs looked like.
Something about the way Kai had looked at all of us — look at the size of us, Ursik, look at the size of us next to them — had gotten into my head and stayed there.
I'm not Falla. Falla can do small and quiet the way some people breathe — natural, unconsidered, a factory setting. I do it the way you learn to do something with your non-dominant hand: correctly, technically, but you can see the effort.
I'm not Bronn either. Bronn's version of not frightening people is simply to not care whether he's frightening people, which at least has the virtue of consistency.
I just — I'm loud. I've always been loud.
Kai used to say my laugh could reach the east watchtower from the training ground, which isn't an exaggeration.
I think in large gestures and I speak before I've finished thinking and I take up space the way weather takes up space — not trying to, just constitutively, as a feature of existing.
Every single one of the eight women has been slowly, incrementally relaxing around me.
Idris with her almost-smile. Wren with her slight amusement.
Even Maret, who won't come to the door herself, had apparently told Pell to pass along that the broth had been good, which Pell had delivered with the gravity of a formal diplomatic communication.
Aislin is glaring at my smile.
I shift the empty crate to my other arm and nod toward the cabin.
"I'll be back tomorrow," I say. To Wren, to Idris. Loud enough that Aislin will hear it without me making it a point to direct it at her, because I've noticed that directing things at her makes the glare more architectural.
"We know," Wren says, and there's warmth in it, which I take.
I walk back the way I came, and I don't look back, and I am fairly certain Aislin watches me all the way to the tree line.
The training ground sits on the opposite side of the settlement, past the longhouse and the stores and the particular stretch of hard-packed earth where Kai makes the newer recruits run laps until they stop looking smug about their stamina.