Ursik #2
"I saw it."
"That's where you go." I step back and give her the full shape of it. "You make that happen, I shift, you've got two steps before I can redirect. That's your window."
"Two steps isn't much."
"Two steps is everything." I roll my shoulder out. "Two steps and you're already thinking about step three. That's what separates someone who knows how to move from someone who panics." I look at her. "You don't panic."
She doesn't answer. Doesn't confirm, doesn't deny. Just watches me with those sharp green eyes doing the same arithmetic they've been running all morning, and I find myself aware, with an uncomfortable specificity, that I don't want to be on the wrong side of that calculation.
She glares at me plenty. The glaring is almost conversational at this point — it's how she keeps the space managed, I think.
Holds the distance with her eyes so her feet can stay in the work.
When she's drilling, when the mechanics have her attention, the glaring drops off and she's just — there.
Completely there. More present than anyone I've trained in a long time.
I'm not going to say any of this to her.
She shakes out her left wrist and I see the motion catch — the small tightening around the joint that means she's been nursing something. Not fresh. The kind of ache that's been there so long it's just part of the landscape.
"Wrist?" I ask.
Her eyes come up sharp. "Fine."
"I'm not asking you to stop. I'm asking about the wrist."
A pause. "The Stonevein hung us by the wrists." Flat. No performance. She is telling me a fact the same way she told me the weather. "It didn't set right."
I hold still. Not because I don't have a response but because anything I put into the air right now is going to be wrong.
I think of Falla's voice, telling me what he'd found when they brought the women in.
I think of the time I'd spent in the Stonevein compound looking for Saela, and the things I'd seen in those corridors that I haven't told anyone except Falla, who I knew wouldn't sleep well on it but who needed to know.
I think about something very large and very hot sitting in my chest and I breathe out through my nose, slow.
"We'll work around it today," I say. "Falla can look at it if you want."
"I don't."
"All right." I shift us to a different drill. New position, takes the wrist load off, doesn't require explanation.
She notices. I see her notice. She doesn't say anything, but she notices, and she doesn't argue about moving on.
We work for another half hour after the wrist conversation, and I can feel the shift in it — not a big one, nothing I'd point to if she asked, but the quality of the space between us has changed.
She's still all sharp edges and controlled motion, still watching me like I might do something worth cataloguing, but the watching has loosened slightly around the edges. Less inventory. More practice.
When I finally call it — the light changing through the trees, the air heating up — she's breathing harder than she was but standing cleaner. Feet better placed. Shoulders down a fraction from where they'd been at the start of the morning.
She's working on the forearm redirect, the last repetition, and she gets it clean — properly clean, the rotation through the hip, my arm swinging wide into nothing — and she stops. Shakes out her hands. Looks at the clearing like it's told her something useful.
I don't say good job. She'd bite me for it.
"Same time tomorrow?" I ask instead.
She turns. Studies me for a moment with the same face she's been running all morning, the one that checks everything twice. Then:
"Be here after sunrise," she says. "I'm not waiting around."
I put my hand to my chest. "You're giving me orders now."
"Apparently." She turns for the treeline. "Don't be late."
"Yes, ma'am," I say, and I don't entirely keep the chuckle in.
She doesn't turn around. But I see it — the small sideways movement of her head, the set of her jaw shifting — and it is, unmistakeably, an eye roll. Contained, compressed, barely there. Gone before she steps between the first trees.
It's the best possible outcome. I hold onto that the whole walk back.
I'm almost to the main path when Kerra hits me.
Not by accident — Kerra doesn't do anything by accident, which is the thing people underestimate about her until she's already got them in a hold.
She comes around the side of the storage building at a pace that is technically walking and actually a small controlled collision, her shoulder catching mine with enough force to knock me half a step sideways.
"Oi," I say.
"Ursik." She falls into step beside me without breaking stride, which is how she operates — the attack and the greeting are one motion, you catch up or you don't. "You've been in the woods."
"Observant."
"I'm always observant." She glances at me sideways. "Pestering the poor girls again?"
"I'm not pestering anyone." I pull a bit of bark off my sleeve. "I'm teaching."
"There's a fine line between the two, with you."
"That's unfair."
"Is it?" She tips her head. "Because I watched you 'teach' Bren last month and the man came back from three sessions looking like he needed a long lie down and a quiet conversation with the gods."
"Bren needed to actually commit to a swing. I was helping him commit."
"You yelled at him until he swung just to make you stop."
"That also worked," I say. "He swings fine now."
Kerra makes a noise in her throat that she uses specifically when she's decided not to win an argument because the argument isn't the point.
I know all her sounds. We've been side by side since before either of us was old enough to be trusted with a patrol, and she is easier to read than she thinks she is, which I have the sense not to tell her.
She's quiet for a few steps. The path back to the main buildings curves through the edge of the tree cover, and the light comes through in flat grey sheets, the spring still making up its mind.
She's got her guard jacket on, one toggle undone at the throat the way she always does it, and she walks with her hands loose at her sides.
"Those girls," she says, and her voice has dropped the edge. Not soft, exactly — Kerra doesn't really do soft, it's not her natural register — but lower. More careful. "They've been through a lot."
"I know that."
"Do you?" She's not needling. She's checking. "I mean it, Ursik. Not in the way where you know it and you feel bad about it and you move on. In the way where you're making decisions about it."
I look at her. "What does that mean?"
"It means—" She pulls a breath through her nose.
"You've got a big heart. Biggest one I know, under all the noise.
But you're loud, and you push, and for most people that's fine because most people aren't—" She pauses.
Turns the words over. "They haven't been managed by people bigger than them. You understand what I mean?"
I understand exactly what she means. I've been understanding it all morning, in the spaces between every drill — the way Aislin checks my hands before she checks my face, the way she registers exactly where every exit is from the clearing, the way she logged my loud reaction and filed it under threat data before she'd even consciously decided to.
Kerra doesn't need to explain this to me.
But I let her, because she's doing it because she cares, and that's different.
"I'm not pushing," I say. "I swear it. I'm trying to help."
Kerra glances over, and I can see her trying to decide what to say. I know that she's one of the only people that sees both sides of me.
"I know what it looks like when someone has too much energy and a temper," I say.
"I'm helping her learn to feel safe and giving her something to do that will keep her from going insane unlike pacing around those cabins.
" I pause. "I'm not nudging her into anything.
I'm just — " I find the right word. "Showing up. "
Kerra is quiet. She does that when she's revising her read on something, the same concentrated stillness she goes into before she changes strategy mid-spar.
"All right," she says, at last. "I know it was my suggestion, but I just want to make sure it helps, not hurts."
"I know what I'm doing," I add.
"I know you do." And that's the other thing about Kerra — when she's done warning you, she stops.
No lingering. No repeated point. She decided to say it, she said it, and now she's moved on.
She knocks her shoulder against mine again, lighter this time, the way that means I trust you rather than pay attention.
"Just making sure the loudest orc in the settlement remembers to use his inside voice. "
"I only have one volume."
"Unfortunately."
I shoulder her back, and she grabs my arm to steady herself, laughing — a short, genuine thing — and then we are back at the main path and she's already splitting off toward the guard post, collar still undone, hands still loose.
I know she's looking out for me.
I just want Aislin to know what that's like too.