Aislin
The path around the back of the second cabin is forty-two steps. I know this because I've walked it every morning since the second day, when I'd decided that waiting inside for something to happen was a strategy that worked well for people who'd never had something happen to them.
Forty-two steps. I know where the ground dips near the third pine, where the frost doesn't clear until midmorning and the footing turns unreliable.
I know the gap in the treeline that gives a clear sightline to the main settlement path — the one the big one, Ursik, uses when he comes through with the crates.
I know the blind spot behind the woodpile where you can stand without being visible from either cabin window, and I know the smell of the air when someone's been through the trees recently, pine sap disturbed, needles turned up from the soft layer underneath.
I've been mapping this place since we arrived. Not because anyone asked me to. Because someone has to.
Pell thinks I'm being excessive. She'd said so on day three, not unkindly, watching me come back in from the first circuit of the morning with frozen fingers and mud on my boots.
You're allowed to stop, Ais. I'd looked at her for a long moment — long enough that she'd dropped it — and then I'd gone out again the following morning.
We'd been in the Stonevein camp for three months.
I'd learned the layout from listening in the first week.
I'd known which guards rotated which posts, which ones had bad knees, where the supply routes came in.
I'd spent three months building a map in my head that I never got to use because the orcs here had come first and killed the Stonevein chieftain.
And then they dumped us in the woods and left us to die out of fear of retaliation before I'd had the chance to try anything I'd planned.
I'm not making the same mistake again.
The morning is cold and pale, the kind of early spring cold that looks like winter when the sun hasn't climbed above the trees yet.
My breath makes small clouds. The ground crunches under my boots where the frost is still holding.
I'm on the back stretch of the circuit — past the second cabin, angling toward the treeline — when I hear footsteps on the main path.
I stop.
Not panic. Assessment. Two sets of footsteps, which means two people, which is already different from the usual morning pattern.
Ursik comes alone with the crate. He's been coming alone with the crate every morning for a week, and I've watched him from the gap in the treeline every single morning, cataloguing: how fast he moves, how much of the path he takes up, whether he looks toward the windows or the doors, whether he changes his approach.
He hasn't changed his approach. He brings the crate, he speaks in a low voice, he smiles with the terrible friendliness of someone who has decided smiling is a project, and he leaves.
Two sets of footsteps is not the pattern.
I move to the gap in the treeline. Slowly, because slow and deliberate is quieter than cautious-and-rushed. The gap gives me a clean line of sight to the main path where it bends toward the cabins, and I get there just as the two figures come around the bend.
One of them is Ursik. He has the crate under one arm and a loop of something — rope, maybe — over his shoulder that he didn't have yesterday.
The other one is smaller. Much smaller. Human-shaped, human-sized, red hair visible even at distance with a braid over one shoulder, moving beside him with her arms crossed against the cold.
I've seen her before. Ressa. Falla's human. I listened to her talk about having been brought here after the Stonevein, too. Listened to her talk about the orcs.
I remember thinking: she trusts them. Or she's decided to trust them, which isn't quite the same thing.
I don't know what's worse.
She's talking to Ursik now, and something in the set of her shoulders — even from here, even at distance — has the quality of a person delivering a message they've been tasked with.
Her chin is up. Ursik turns toward her with an expression that, even from fifty feet away, reads as surprised she's here.
He says something. She says something back, gesturing once with a hand. He opens his mouth. She cuts him off.
I move closer. Not stepping onto the path — I stay in the treeline, one hand on the nearest trunk, moving heel-to-toe over the pine needles until I'm close enough to hear.
"— Falla sent you," Ursik is saying. He doesn't sound offended. More like he's encountered a development he finds mildly entertaining.
"Falla sent me." Ressa's voice is dry. "He said, and I'm quoting directly: go make sure he doesn't do anything with more confidence than sense."
"That's very specific."
"He knows you."
Ursik adjusts the crate under his arm. "I'm not doing anything bad. I'm bringing the supplies. Same as every morning."
"With rope."
A pause. "That's for the —"
"Ursik."
He holds up the hand that isn't managing the crate, which is the gesture of a man who has been caught and knows it. "I had an idea."
"Of course you did." Ressa unfolds her arms to pull her coat tighter. "How exactly does checking in on traumatised women go, in your experience?"
"It's been going fine. They're warming up."
She gives him a look that, even from the side, lands with weight.
"I couldn't be around Shae for weeks. Shae, Ursik.
She is the warmest person in this settlement and I still flinched every time she got within arm's reach.
" She says it without bitterness — just as fact, the same way you'd reference weather, something that happened and has since passed.
"It took me two months to even get near you. "
"I'm aware of that."
"Are you? Because you're standing here with rope and a smile and I want to make sure we're calibrated."
"I swear to you," he says, and the lightness drops just slightly out of his voice, becomes something more straightforward underneath, "I'm not planning anything that'll make it worse."
Ressa looks at him for a moment that stretches. Then she sighs. "I know that. That's why I'm here instead of Falla, who would've just turned you around at the path." She falls back into step beside him. "I'm coming in with you."
I pull back from the treeline.
Not because they'd have seen me — I'm well behind the line of the trees, and neither of them was looking this direction.
I pull back because the rest of the circuit still needs doing, and because standing in the trees listening to them for another minute means I'm tracking them instead of the perimeter, and the perimeter is what matters.
I tell myself that twice and then finish the circuit in thirty-eight steps because I'm moving faster than usual, and I'm not interested in examining why.
They're already at the front of the first cabin by the time I come around the back corner.
I hear Idris's voice from the doorway — the slightly-lifted note she gets when something's surprised her pleasantly — and then Ressa's lower answer.
I come around the side of the cabin and stop at the corner, where I can see the whole front without being committed to it.
Ursik spots me first. He always spots me first — I've noticed this, filed it. He has good peripheral awareness, which is useful information. He turns toward me with that smile, the one he aims at everyone and appears to manufacture in quantity, and raises a hand.
"Morning."
I stare at him.
He lowers his hand. The smile stays, a fraction more effortful now.
"What are you doing here?" I say it flat. Not quite a question. Questions suggest I need information from him, and I don't want him thinking that.
He turns the crate to show me it. "Supplies."
"You brought company."
"Ressa wanted to come." He glances at Ressa, who is watching this exchange with her arms folded and the patient look of someone prepared to let it play out.
"I also —" He sets the crate down on the step, which puts him a fraction lower, and I notice that he does this consciously.
Takes up less height when he can. I've seen him do it before and I still don't fully trust it, but I notice it. "I actually came to talk to you."
I keep my face even. "Me."
"You." He straightens, not to his full height — keeps something contained about it, which costs him something, I can see that.
Takes deliberate effort, the containing.
"Falla's working with the others on the healing side.
Saela and Shae are keeping the supply lines going, making sure everyone's got what they need.
That's all sorted." He pauses. "But I thought — it might help. If someone offered to teach."
The word sits in the air between us.
I look at him. At the rope on his shoulder, which I'd clocked the moment he came around the corner.
At his hands, which are open and down at his sides with the self-consciousness of someone who's been told open hands, keep them visible.
At the way he's standing with just slightly too much careful space between us.
"Teach what."
"To fight." He says it plainly, no decoration.
"Self-defense. Anyone who wants to learn.
It might help with the recovery — movement's good for the injuries, Falla said so — and I thought —" He stops.
Restarts. "You shouldn't have to feel like the only thing between them and whatever you think is coming. "
My jaw tightens. Not at the offer. At the accuracy of it — that he's looked at me and read something I didn't intend to show him, and that it's in the open between us now and I can't put it back.
"I don't trust you," I say. Blunt. No softening.
"I know." He doesn't flinch from it. "Come train with me once. Just once. See if it'll help."
Ressa is quiet. She hasn't intervened, and I find that I'm aware of her as a different kind of variable — not a threat, not an ally, but something in between.
A person who has done something I don't understand yet, which is survive whatever happened to her and end up here, choosing to stand beside him.
I look back at Ursik.
He's watching me with the particular quality of someone who has made their case and is now simply waiting, which is either patience or the confidence of someone who doesn't expect to be refused.
I can't tell which. I add it to the map in my head, next to: good peripheral awareness, lowers his height consciously, drops the friendliness when it stops landing.
More time with him means more information.
It means watching him move, learning how he telegraphs, learning where the weight goes in the pivot — the places where something that large has to commit before it can stop itself.
It means understanding, properly, what the actual gap is between me and an orc at close quarters, instead of theorising about it from forty feet of treeline.
I know what she'd say, Pell. You're allowed to stop, Ais. She'd look at me coming back from a training session with an orc and she'd call it something it isn't. But Pell is in the cabin, and the cabin doesn't patrol itself.
"Once," I say.
He's stupid grin makes me almost regret it.