Ursik
The gathering fire is already high by the time I get there.
I can hear it from the edge of the settlement — the particular quality of sound that a full clan makes when everyone is in one place, layered voices and boots on hard ground, children cutting through it all at a higher register.
The fire snaps above it. Drogath's ceremony fire always burns too tall, which is either deliberate for dramatic effect or because he simply refuses to learn proportionality, and I have stopped being able to determine which.
The lunar cycle has turned. That much everyone knows because Drogath told everyone, at length, several days before he intended to tell them, because Drogath cannot hold a revelation in his chest without symptoms. He'd cornered me near the armory three days ago to inform me that he had found something.
The precise nature of the something had been heavily withheld for effect.
He'd looked at me with the expression he reserves for moments of personal greatness — chin elevated, eyes half-lidded, shoulders carrying the weight of arcane knowledge — and said only:
The Long-Eared One has been waiting.
I have been thinking about that ever since with the specific pleasure of not knowing what it means, because the not-knowing with Drogath is always better than the knowing. The knowing involves standing very still while he explains it to you.
I come around the far side of the longhouse, through the passage between the storage buildings, and the whole gathering opens up in front of me.
The clan is arranged in the loose half-circle that forms for announcements, the same shape we make for everything — mating ceremonies, border briefings, Drogath's increasingly elaborate interpretations of human tradition.
There must be sixty people here. I scan the shape of it, looking for Kai and Falla, and instead I find something I was not expecting.
Eight women standing at the far edge of the half-circle.
My feet stop entirely.
They are standing slightly apart from the main gathering, in the way that makes sense — close enough to see and hear, far enough to have a clean line of exit. Seven of them are turned toward the fire with the forward lean of the genuinely curious.
Wren has her head tilted to the side, watching Drogath's attendants — yes, he's dragged other people into this — stack what appear to be bundles of something colorful near the ceremony table.
Pell is saying something to Idris, quiet-mouthed, their eyes bright with it.
Maret is standing beside Deva with a stillness that reads as cautious interest rather than fear, which is different from two weeks ago.
I notice these things because I have been paying attention to these things, because their wellbeing is connected to Aislin's, and Aislin's is connected to whether the morning sessions work.
That is the reason I notice them. I'm certain of that.
And Aislin.
Aislin is standing at the far end of the group's cluster, slightly removed even from them, which is her architecture — always the last body in the line, always the one with the view of everything.
Her arms are crossed. Her chin is up at an angle that manages to communicate active hostility to an open-air gathering ceremony she has not technically been recruited into yet.
Her dark hair is half-loose in the way it always is by mid-morning, pulled by whatever she'd done with it in the dark and never renegotiated, and she is looking at Drogath's attendants and then at the fire and then at the assembled clan with the expression of someone who was told this would be brief.
She looks like she was brought here against her will by a force she couldn't directly oppose, has identified every exit, and has decided to be magnificent about it anyway.
"You look like a man who's just seen something he can't stop looking at."
Kai. He's appeared at my left shoulder with a cup of something and the flat assessing expression he puts on when he's found something worth observing, which means he's already found it and I'm the something.
"I'm doing a perimeter check," I say.
"Of the east side of the gathering."
"That's part of the perimeter."
"It's one spot," Kai says. "Who are you staring at?"
"That's Aislin." Ressa, materializing on my right from absolutely nowhere in the way she does, which I have never gotten used to and will not be getting used to.
She has a cup as well, the same as Kai's, and she is looking at the same spot I was looking at and smiling the smile she uses when she's privately delighted about something she's going to be mature about.
"The one on the end. That specifically is Aislin. "
"I know who it is."
"You were staring quite hard for someone who knows who it is."
I look at Falla, who has arrived from the direction of the fire and is standing with us now because apparently this is where everyone has decided to gather. He is watching the same slice of the eastern edge with the moderate interest of a man doing an attendance check.
"You told them about this," I say.
Falla takes a drink. "I may have mentioned, in the course of describing what the clan does and how it functions, that we observe certain festivals based on Drogath's research."
"You told them about the Valentine Rites and the Padraig's events." I look at the cluster of women, who are demonstrably here of their own interested volition. "How much detail?"
"Enough detail that Wren and Pell asked if they could come."
"And Aislin."
A brief pause.
"Aislin," Falla says, with the precision of a man who treats words like instruments and selects the right one, "was informed of the gathering. She was not specifically discouraged."
Ressa makes a small sound into her cup.
"What?" I say.
"Nothing." She is not quite hiding the smile now. "She came, didn't she?"
She did come. She came and she's standing there looking at the assembled clan of the Frostfang like they're a weather event she's decided to document rather than flee from, and her arms are crossed and her jaw is set and she is here, at the edge of the lunar gathering, on this cold spring morning, because she decided to be.
Because something in the calculus of the last two weeks landed somewhere that let her decide that.
I know what I've put into those two weeks and I'm not going to be stupid about what that means, but I'm also not going to pretend it means nothing.
Saela has drifted over to the group's edge and is standing near Aislin in the way Saela stands near people she's decided to stand near, which is without announcement, which works on Aislin in the same way it works on everyone because Saela figured that out instinctively.
Shae is with Wren and Pell and she's saying something that makes Pell lean forward, eyebrows up.
Shae gestures at the ceremony table. Pell turns back to Wren and the lean doubles.
Aislin watches this. Her expression doesn't shift exactly, but there's a quality change in it — the hostility drops one register, and for one moment what's there instead is just watchful. Just taking in the information.
I am definitely still looking at her. This is definitely still a thing that is happening.
"Your competitiveness is going to make this complicated," Kai says, in the tone he uses when he's being helpful.
"I'm not being competitive."
"You're already calculating something. I can hear it."
I turn my head. He looks back at me. He has the expression he gets when he's been paying attention to more than he mentioned, which is constant, which is exhausting.
"I'm thinking about the month," I say.
"Right."
"Whatever Drogath's found, it runs the lunar cycle. That's—" I do the rough count. "Four weeks."
"A month, yes, that's what a lunar cycle is."
"I'm saying there will be events."
"There will always be events," Kai says. "Drogath will ensure there are events."
"Events," I say, with the patience of making a point to someone who has decided not to receive the point, "that involve the clan. Together. Over a month."
Kai looks at me. He takes a drink. He looks at where I was looking a moment ago, which is not subtle of him. He looks back at me.
"There it is," he says.
"That's what I say—"
"I am telling you," he says, not unkindly, "that whatever your competitiveness has just found a use for, it will find a way to make the month harder than Drogath has already made it."
"For who?"
Falla, who has been quiet in the way Falla is quiet when he's waiting for his moment: "For someone you've already picked out."
He doesn't look at anyone specific. He doesn't have to.
Ressa is fully smiling now and has given up hiding it.
I open my mouth and then the horn sounds — Drogath's attendant with the long horn, three short blasts, which is the signal for everyone to turn and face the centre — and the gathered clan rotates and the moment disperses into the general forward attention of sixty people.
Drogath is already at the ceremony table.
He is wearing the ceremonial layering that adds approximately four inches to his already considerable height, which he knows, and he has arranged the colorful bundles on the table behind him in a pattern that I'm certain means something to him specifically.
He lets the silence build — he always does, he is a man who understands that silence is a tool and has the discipline to use it, which I respect even when it's for something absurd — and then he opens his arms.
"People of Frostfang." His voice fills the clearing. Even after all these years, the shaman's voice has a quality that hits the chest. "The moon has turned. The earth turns with it. Life turns with it."
Beside me, Kai exhales. It's a deep sigh, one that relays every bit of his unwillingness to be here. Though he is decidedly more invested in this than he was in the Valentine Rites, so there's progress.
"I have spent many weeks," Drogath continues, each word given its full weight and then a little more on top, "in deep study of the ancient texts recovered from the human settlements.
Many weeks." He pauses. He does not pause because he's lost his place.
He pauses because he has calculated this pause.
Drogath is nothing if not dramatic. "I have uncovered something extraordinary. "
The gathering is quiet. Even the children, with the instincts of creatures who understand when an adult has become genuinely compelling, have gone still.
"The great Spring festival." Drogath raises one hand.
An attendant, on cue, lifts one of the colorful bundles — something bright, painted, done in colors that don't occur naturally this close to the snowline — and holds it aloft.
"Passed down through human tradition, carried in the oldest texts, connected to the great cycle of rebirth itself.
" His voice drops half a register. "The Festival of Easter. "
A murmur moves through the clan. I hear the word passed back through the rows — Easter, Easter — the way words pass when they're new and interesting.
"Easter," Drogath repeats, savoring it. "Known in the human records as a festival of the earth's renewal.
Of new life emerging from what appeared to be ended.
" He pauses again. Lets that land. "Presided over by — and I tell you this as someone who has read the texts carefully, who has cross-referenced across sources, who has studied —" a single breath, "— Peter the Long-Eared. "
I press my lips together.
Beside me, Falla makes a very small sound. Ressa's shoulders shake once, quickly suppressed.
We are all barely holding it together.
"What the fuck is Peter the Long-Eared," Kai mutters, and I nearly break.
Drogath's expression holds the absolute serenity of a man who has no idea what he's just said to us.
He sweeps his hands wide and the attendants begin distributing something to the nearest rows, passing objects forward.
Painted wood. Bright colors. I take one when it reaches me — a small rounded thing, smooth and dense, decorated in red and gold — and hold it and try to think of what it is and fail.
"There will be four great Observances," Drogath announces, voice climbing again. "One each week until the moon turns again. Each connected to the sacred lore of Peter the Long-Eared and his gifts to the season. Each—" he extends the word into something close to music, "—greater than the last."
I look over at the eastern edge of the gathering.
Aislin has uncrossed her arms.
Instead she is holding one of the painted objects in both hands and she's looking down at it with the expression of someone who has encountered a thing they did not expect to encounter, which is to say an expression that isn't armor.
She turns it over. Looks at the back. Tilts it.
Something in her face does a thing that isn't quite a smile but has the structural bones of one.
"This," Drogath says, grandly, gesturing at the object in her hands and everyone's hands, "is only the beginning."
If this is what the next few weeks hold, I am going to have an excellent month.