Aislin
The painted wooden egg sits on the table in my room like it belongs there, which it does not.
I'd brought it back because leaving it behind had felt rude in a way I couldn't justify refusing, and now it's there next to my sharpened stick and my leather-wrapped river stone like a small cheerful accusation.
It's red with a gold stripe down the middle.
Someone had clearly done it with care. The symmetry is almost perfect.
I ignore it and go to bed.
Ursik is already at the sparring ground when I arrive.
Normally he is on time. I've been able to count on that.
But now something has changed — he's here before me, moving through the basic warm-up sequence I'd watched him do that first morning, the slow shoulder rolls and the weight shifts from foot to foot, and he looks completely unbothered by the hour and by the cold and by existing generally.
"You're early," I say.
"You're on time." He doesn't stop moving. "I was early."
"I don't care about the distinction."
"Good morning to you too."
I set down my outer layer on a low branch and roll my sleeves. The air still has teeth in it this far north at dawn, even as the season turns. The frost on the ground crunches under my boots. I walk through my own warm-up and don't look at him, which is the default.
"So," Ursik says.
"Don't."
"I haven't said anything."
"You were about to." I roll my left shoulder and feel the joint pop satisfyingly. "Don't."
"We both know I'm no good at being quiet.
" He completes his shoulder roll and turns to face me.
In the low morning light he is very large and very difficult to make peripheral, which is a physical quality I resent him for.
"I was going to say that Drogath looked particularly excellent yesterday.
Very dramatic entrance. I thought the horn was a good touch. "
"The horn was three blasts."
"A considered three blasts."
"It was loud."
"It was ceremonial—"
"Ursik." I face him squarely. "I don't care about the horn."
He grins. It does the thing it does where it takes over most of his face and he looks like an enormous idiot who is delighted with himself. I have catalogued this expression extensively. It has not grown less irritating.
"So," he says again. "What did you think of Peter the Long-Eared?"
I give him the look that has historically ended conversations and start toward the marked centre of the sparring ground. He falls into position opposite me with the ease of someone who has done this enough times that his body knows the choreography before his brain does.
"I think," I say, settling my weight back onto my heels the way he'd drilled me the first day, "that your shaman found some texts he didn't understand and made them worse."
"That's— yes, actually, that's about right." He's got his hands up, loose, and his weight distribution is already doing the thing I've learned to watch for, the left side carrying slightly more than the right when he's planning to move left. "But he means well."
"I'm sure he does."
"And the events are genuinely good."
"I'm sure they are."
"The first one is today," he says, and there it is, the exact tone I'd been waiting for, that particular brightness that means he has decided to want something from this conversation. "Midday. The Dyeing of the Shells."
"I know."
"Are you going?"
"No."
He moves. I read the left-side weight shift and step to counter it, and for a few seconds it's just movement — the familiar call-and-response of it, weight and block and the sharp satisfaction of reading him right.
He's better than me and we both know it but the gap is closing and we know that too, and there's a different quality to sparring with someone who respects you enough to not soften the edges.
He disengages. We circle.
"Why not?" he says, like we hadn't just spent ten seconds trying to put each other on the ground.
"Because painting wooden eggs with a symbolic significance I don't believe in is not something I have time for."
"You have time. Your morning is full and your afternoon is not."
"My afternoon is mine."
"Your afternoon is you sitting in the cabin sharpening your stick while the others go to a festival." He tilts his head. "Wren and Pell are going. Maret and Deva are going."
I know. I know they're going because Pell had knocked on the dividing wall between our rooms before the fire had fully caught that morning and told me through the wood, her voice careful and bright at the same time.
I know Wren had already ironed out the practicalities, the timing and the distance and whether they'd be expected to interact or if watching was acceptable, because Wren irons out practicalities the way some people breathe, automatically and without stopping.
I know Deva is nervous in the specific way she is always nervous but had decided yes anyway. I know Corrie is going to go because Pell asked her specifically, and Pell asking specifically is different from a general invitation.
I know all of this because I pay attention to them. Because that is the thing I do.
"They can go," I say.
"You could go with them."
"I'm busy."
"Sharpening your stick."
"It's not finished."
Ursik moves again, faster this time, and I'm half a second behind reading it, which costs me ground. I recover, reset, and he's watching me with the expression he uses when he's interested in something — not the grin, something quieter, something that has more thought behind it.
"Tell you what," he says.
"No."
"You haven't heard it."
"It ends with me agreeing to go to your shaman's egg painting festival and I'm not going."
His expression tips into something that is technically not the grin but is clearly related to it. "If I can get you into a hold you can't get out of," he says, steady, like he's proposing something entirely reasonable, "you come today. Midday."
I stare at him.
He stares back. Six foot eight of absolute confidence, hands loose at his sides, utterly certain he's already won this and letting me take my time realizing it.
"And if I get out?" I say.
"Then I leave you alone about it entirely. No more mentioning it. For the whole month."
"The whole month."
"You have my word."
I look at him for a long moment. He is bigger than me. He is stronger than me. He has been training fighters for longer than I've been alive. The logical position, the survival position, is to decline this on the grounds that the outcome is not in my favor.
"Fine," I say.
He blinks. Just once, just a flicker of — something. Then the not-grin reassembles. "Fine?"
"Don't repeat it." I bring my hands up. "Come on then."
What follows is, objectively, the best I've done in two weeks of these sessions.
I'm faster than I was when we started — I can feel the difference, the way my body has begun to trust its own reflexes — and I read two of his feints before he can convert them, which last week I couldn't do.
There's a sequence in the middle where I have the angle and I use it, forcing him wide, and for a fraction of a second I think I've managed something real.
I almost miss the shift because I'm already calculating the follow-through.
Almost.
And then his arm comes around, not from where I'd anticipated, from the other side — my own forward momentum working against me like a door I'd walked into — and he adjusts his grip with the fluency of someone who has done this ten thousand times, and suddenly I am in something.
I test the structure of it immediately. Hands.
Feet. Hip angle. I try the twist I know works on his left side and hit nothing but more hold.
I try the drop that had gotten me out of a similar position on day four and he has already accounted for it, the weight distribution completely different, nothing giving.
I push against the part that should flex and it doesn't flex.
"Hmm," says Ursik.
"Shut up."
"I'm not saying anything."
"You're humming." I try the drop again. Still nothing. "Stop humming."
"I'm just standing here." The sound in his chest is definitely a chuckle, low and felt before it's heard, and it is absolutely infuriating. "Take your time."
I take my time. I try three more things. None of them work. He holds the structure with the comfortable patience of someone who parked themselves somewhere pleasant and has no reason to leave.
"Agreement?" he says.
"I'm still working on it."
"Are you?"
"Give me a minute—"
"Aislin." His voice has no cruelty in it and that is somehow worse than if it did. "Agreement."
I stop moving. I breathe. The hold is solid on every axis I've tested and he has been patient about all of it and has not made me feel stupid once, which is a thing I'll acknowledge inside my own head and nowhere else.
"Fine," I say, through my teeth. "Midday."
He releases me cleanly, no drag, stepping back to give me the space before I've had to ask for it, which is a thing he always does and which I have never commented on. I straighten. Shake out my arms. He is wearing the expression that is the grin's smug older sibling and I point at it.
"Don't."
"I'm not saying anything—"
"Your face is saying something."
He covers his mouth with one hand, which does absolutely nothing. His eyes are completely incapable of concealing the fact that he is very pleased with himself. I collect my outer layer from the fence post and sling it over my shoulder.
It is only when I'm three steps away, the frost crunching under my boots and the settlement beginning to stir in the middle distance, that I notice: my heart rate is from the sparring and nothing else. He had me locked down, no movement, and my heart rate is from the sparring and nothing else.
He'd had me in a hold.
I hadn't panicked.