Ursik
There is a specific quality to Aislin's focus when she is working on something.
I've had two weeks of mornings to catalogue it — the way she goes still inside whatever storm is running underneath her when her hands have something to do, the particular set of her jaw when she's made a decision to engage and is not going to announce it.
During sparring she channels it outward, all the sharp edges angled away from her own body and toward the problem. Here, her hands are moving with that same attention but she isn't braced. The set of her shoulders isn't the same set I get at dawn. It's something else.
She is adding a third line to the egg. Red, parallel to the others, and the geometry is deliberate — she'd gone straight for the sharp edge of it, the lines even. She hasn't looked up from it in four minutes.
I keep working on my own egg and stay where I am and don't say anything, which is not my natural condition but which I have learned, over two weeks of mornings, is sometimes the right call with her.
On the far side of the tables I can see Kai watching Saela help the young one — Deva — find a color she likes.
Saela has the particular patience with her that she uses when she is paying attention to how someone is doing rather than what they are saying, and Deva is holding a pale blue egg now and looking at it like it gave her something.
Falla is two tables down with Ressa, who has picked up a brush with the cautious enthusiasm of someone who is still getting accustomed to little things like this. He is watching her with a fondness I no longer find surprising on my friend's face.
I know what it looks like when a person has decided someone matters.
I look back at Aislin's parallel lines and keep that thought to myself.
She switches to the blue without commentary. Adds a line between the red ones, crosses it at the far end. The pattern starts to take on a structure that isn't accidental.
"You've done this before," I say.
"I've painted before." She doesn't look up. "Doesn't have to be eggs."
"What did you paint?"
"Walls." A pause. "My parents built much of the newer parts of our settlement. I helped when I was small enough to do the lower sections without a stool." She turns the egg, inspects the angle, adjusts her grip. "It was very decorative and not particularly useful."
"You're doing the same pattern."
"I'm doing a pattern." She finally glances at me sideways. "What are you doing?"
I hold up my egg.
She looks at it. Her expression goes through a sequence of things, beginning with assessment and moving through something like surprise and ending, briefly, on what I am almost certain is the early architecture of finding something funny.
"That's a circle," she says.
"It's a sun."
"It is a circle."
"Suns are circles."
"That's a generous—" She presses her lips together, which is what she does instead of smiling when the smile is trying to happen without her permission. "That's a generous interpretation."
"It's the spirit of a sun. Drogath said symbolic."
"He said the pattern builds the ward. Yours has one shape."
"One very powerful shape." I turn the egg. "It is, arguably, the most important shape. Peter the Long-Eared would be impressed."
"You're going to cite Peter the Long-Eared as a source for everything, aren't you."
"He is the authority here. I don't make the rules."
She turns back to her egg, but the pressed-lip thing is still happening, and that is — that is something I want to be careful with.
Not in the way of being cautious. In the way of not rushing toward it and startling it off.
She's standing at the table with her outer layer still on and her brush moving and the storm underneath her taking a breath, and I am aware, in a way I haven't been about much that isn't a tactical problem, of how much I want her to just — be here.
Not on guard. Not scanning. Not planning the exit.
Just here, at the table, with the red and blue lines and the too-bright yellow she hasn't touched yet.
I add a yellow dot to the centre of my circle. Sun, completed.
"Do yours have meaning?" I ask. "The pattern."
She is quiet for long enough that I think she is not going to answer.
Then: "The borders my mother did had specific meanings in the old style.
Not wards, exactly. More — this room is a room where bread rises.
This room is a room where children sleep well.
The pattern said something about what the space was for.
" A short pause. "I don't know if I believe it works.
But the principle is sound. A room where you've taken care is different from one where you haven't. "
I look at the lines on her egg. The blue between the red, the cross at one end starting to form a corner that will probably become something more complete. She has taken care with it.
"Yours is going to be the most powerful talisman at the table," I say.
"It's going to be the most geometric talisman at the table, which is different."
"What if geometry is the power?"
"What if you're not as clever as you think you are."
"Statistically unlikely." I dip my brush back into the yellow and look at the egg. "What should I add?"
She glances at it. "Are you asking me?"
"You have the most transferable expertise present."
"You have an enormous circle."
"A sun—"
"Add something that isn't a circle," she says, the flat authority of someone who has decided to take this seriously now that I am asking, which I find genuinely excellent. "Even one thing. A line. Give the sun something to shine on."
I put a line at the base. It comes out crooked.
"Hmm," she says.
"That's a horizon."
"That is a horizon in the same way that was a sun."
"It's the spirit of a horizon—"
"Ursik." She points at my egg with her brush, and there is something so specific about the way she addresses the problem directly — no preamble, no softening — that it gets me somewhere under the ribcage in a way that has nothing to do with sparring.
"Give the brush a moment. Don't push it. You're forcing the line."
"Am I?"
"You do it in sparring too. When you want something done, you push through it. Sometimes you have to slow down." She demonstrates on her own egg, a line pulled with clear, even pressure. "Let the tool do the work."
I watch her do it. Her hands are steady. Whatever is underneath the vigilance, underneath the sharp-glass defiance and the early mornings and the inventory she keeps of every threat in her radius — whatever sits under all of that, it has good hands. Patient hands.
I try the line again. It's better. Not straight, but better.
"There," she says.
"Are you teaching me?"
"I am correcting you, which is different."
"You said slow down in sparring."
"I said—" She stops. She did say that, in our third session, after I'd overcommitted to a sequence and she'd used it against me.
I'd told her afterward it was the sharpest read she'd made.
She hadn't responded then. Now she is doing the pressed-lip thing again, this time without trying to stop it, and it opens slightly at the left corner. "Fine. Maybe it transfers."
The almost-smile is there for three full seconds.
I want to say something about it. I want to tell her that her hands do something particular when they have a task to care about, or that she is teaching me things in these mornings that have nothing to do with sparring technique, or that when she'd first looked at us across the clearing two weeks ago like she was calculating how fast she could put us all down, I'd thought — briefly and inexplicably — there you are.
Some person-shaped feeling of recognition that I haven't been able to account for since.
I don't say any of that.
Instead I look down at my egg — the optimistic circle, the improved horizon — and then I look at hers, and I say, "What do you call a bad egg at a festival?"
She doesn't look up. "Don't."
"A shell of its former self."
The silence that follows is approximately two seconds long.
It is a silence with texture. And then she makes a sound — short, involuntary, punched out of her by something that got past her guard before she could position against it — and it is the smallest and most complete thing I have heard since the first morning she'd disarmed herself out of the knife-crouch and just looked at me with green eyes that already knew every angle of the space between us.
She covers her mouth with the back of her wrist. The brush is still in her hand.
"That," she says, from behind her wrist, "was terrible."
"But you laughed."
"I made a noise—"
"That was a laugh." I am not doing the grin. I am doing something I have less control over. "That was definitely a laugh."
"It was a sound of suffering—"
"I accept both." I look back at my egg with the sun and the improved horizon and feel something settle in my chest that I have no tactical framework for whatsoever. "It was a laugh."
Aislin turns back to her egg. She puts a line on it with more force than strictly necessary. But the corner of her mouth is still doing something.