Aislin #2
I don't turn around. I keep walking and I take that information and I put it somewhere quiet to sit with, and I don't know what to do with it yet, so I don't do anything with it yet.
I walk back toward the cabin in the pale spring morning and I think about Deva deciding yes when she was frightened, and Pell knocking on the wall before the fire was fully caught, and I think about going somewhere instead of watching others go.
I think about a small painted egg sitting on a table like it belongs there.
That is how I find myself, at midday, standing at the edge of the gathering ground with Wren on my left and Pell on my right, surrounded by the entire Frostfang clan and what appears to be a table covered in small bowls of color.
"This is ridiculous," I say.
"It looks fun," Wren says.
"Those are not mutually exclusive," says Pell.
Saela finds us before we've been standing there a full minute — she appears from the direction of the longhouse the way she tends to, direct and without ceremony, and something in her face does something quiet and warm when she sees all of us. Not surprised. Something better than surprised.
"You came," she says.
"We were invited," I say.
"You were." She doesn't make more of it than that, which is one of the things I have reluctantly noted about her — she knows when to leave space around things.
She falls into step alongside us as the gathering moves forward, Shae appearing on the other side of Pell, and the women from the cabins fold into the current of the clan without ceremony and without being made to feel the difference.
I watch Deva's shoulders drop half an inch. I watch Corrie look at the colored bowls on the table with the expression of someone who has encountered a small, unexpected piece of the world being good.
I scan the assembled crowd until I find the cluster of them — Falla and Ressa together, which is where they always are, and a massive figure beside them with ice-blue eyes and the bearing of someone accustomed to being the most important person in a room.
Kai. Saela's mate. I know who he is by the way the crowd gives him space and by the way Saela's posture changes slightly when she angles toward his direction.
Ursik is standing with them. He sees me at the same moment I see him.
The expression on his face does not do the grin.
It does something else instead — something that is two parts pleased and one part something I don't have a word for — and then he turns back to Falla and they are talking about something.
Drogath ascends.
This is the only accurate description of what happens.
He moves to the front of the gathering with a pace that implies he has come from somewhere more significant than the rest of us, and he raises his arms, and the collected Frostfang clan does the thing they always do for Drogath, which is fall quiet without being asked to.
"The first Observance," he says, allowing the words the full weight of ceremony, "of Easter."
He draws the word out the same way he had yesterday, and again I hear it passed through the crowd — Easter, Easter — the low murmur of something new being tasted.
"The Dyeing of the Shells." He gestures wide at the long tables that I can now see have been arranged in a large open square, each one holding shallow bowls of deep color — reds and blues and greens and a yellow so bright it hurts to look at — and between them, the rounded wooden eggs, dozens of them, pale and waiting.
"The ancient texts are clear," Drogath continues, with the authority of a man who has not entertained the possibility that the ancient texts are not clear at all, "that the brightly colored shells drive away the dangers that lurk at the threshold of new spring.
Each pattern, each color, a ward. Each shell, when completed, a protection.
" His voice drops. "You are not painting eggs. You are building shields."
Wren makes a small sound of interest beside me. Pell has already started walking toward the tables. Deva is looking at the colors with an expression that wants something it hasn't let itself want yet.
"This is not how shields work," I say, to no one in particular.
"It's symbolic," Wren says.
"It's paint on wood."
"That's what symbolic means—"
I pick up a wooden egg from the nearest table and I don't immediately put it down, which is the extent of my participation. The surface is smooth, the same density as the one in my cabin. The bowls of color are in front of me. There is a small brush.
"Interesting choice," says a voice from approximately six inches to my left, and I close my eyes briefly.
Ursik is standing at the same table, too close, holding his own egg and looking at me with the expression of a man who has been pleased with himself since before noon and has not stopped since.
"I picked it up," I say. "That's all."
"Sure." He looks at the color bowls. "You going to use any of them or is the plain one the talisman?"
"Go away."
"I'm at this table."
"Go to a different table."
"I like this one."
I pick up the brush. I put it in the red because red is the first one my hand reaches and not for any other reason. I put a line of it on the egg and it's brighter than I expect, the same deep red as the one sitting in my cabin, and I look at it and feel nothing in particular about it.
"Not red," says Ursik.
I turn my head and look at him with precision.
"I mean—" He holds up his free hand. "Peter the Long-Eared traditionally associates red with winter dangers. You probably want something more spring-oriented."
"You made that up."
"I might have made that up." He is definitely not hiding the grin now. "But the green is nice."
"I don't want green."
"The blue—"
"I want the red."
"Bold choice." He dips his own brush into a color without looking down and begins moving it across his egg with the casual confidence of someone who does not care at all what the outcome looks like, which means the outcome is going to look effortless, which is irritating in a very specific way.
"Very aggressive talisman. Really threatening spring energy. "
"Thank you," I say.
"That wasn't a compliment."
"I know." I put another line on the egg, parallel to the first. "But you keep talking."
He makes a sound — not quite the chuckle, not quite the grin, something in the middle — and moves incrementally closer to look at what I'm doing, which I don't notice for approximately three seconds before I do notice it, at which point he's simply there, at the edge of my space in the way he was at the edge of my space every morning, and my hands don't stop moving.
"The lines aren't bad," he says.
"Tell Peter the Long-Eared I said thanks."
His shoulder moves against mine when he laughs, brief and actual, and I look down at the red lines on the pale egg and think about how I snapped back at him without planning to, without the half-second calculation I normally do first, and I think about that with the same careful quiet I'd used walking back from the sparring ground this morning.
I don't know what to do with it yet.
I put another line on the egg.