Aislin
The morning is cold enough to sting the inside of my nose, the kind of early-spring cold that hasn't decided yet whether it's committed to becoming something warmer.
I move through it with my hands in my sleeves and my breath making small white shapes ahead of me, following the path through the treeline that my feet have started to learn without my eyes needing to help.
Two weeks of mornings will do that. Muscle memory isn't just for fighting.
Behind me, the cabins are quiet. Deva had a bad night — I'd heard her through the wall, the particular kind of wakefulness that isn't peace — but by the time the sky started going grey she'd gone under again, and I'd checked on everyone before I'd left.
Pell was sleeping with one arm thrown over her face.
Wren had her blanket pulled up past her ears.
Maret's breathing was even. The window latch on the second cabin still doesn't quite close the same, but I'd taken the iron piece out of my collection and wedged it differently, and now it holds better than it did.
I check on them every morning before I leave. I don't think about why I started doing that separately from checking on them the rest of the time. I don't examine the specifics.
The path bends left through the last cluster of birch and opens onto the clearing, and I'm already rolling my shoulders back, already thinking about whether I'm going to try the arm-block reversal again or go for the foot sweep I've been working on, when I see that someone is already there.
Not Ursik.
I stop at the treeline.
The orc woman is standing in the middle of the clearing with her arms folded, looking at the frost on the grass like she's evaluating it professionally.
She's a guard — or built like one, which in Frostfang amounts to the same thing.
Green skin a shade lighter than Ursik's, dark hair cropped close on the sides and longer on top, a posture that says I occupy this space and I am comfortable about it.
She's young, or younger than I'd expected.
Not as large as Ursik, but large in the way that makes me automatically revise my estimates of what I could and couldn't do against her.
She looks up when she hears me at the treeline, and her expression does something open and uncomplicated.
"You're earlier than I thought you'd be." She unfolds her arms. "I'm Kerra."
I stay where I am. "And you're here to trespass on my sparring session?"
"Not quite. Though it's a great spot to do so." She gestures at the clearing like it's hers to gesture at. "I wanted to have a look at you before Ursik got here."
Something in me goes sideways. Not aggressive — more the particular alertness that arrives when the situation isn't what I'd arranged for in my head. I'd been thinking about the arm-block reversal. I had not been thinking about being looked at.
"Have a look," I say.
"He's been going on about you," she says, which is not what I expected. The directness of it is so undecorated that I don't immediately have a response to it. "Ursik. Not — it's not a bad thing. I just wanted to make sure he wasn't being a bully about the sparring. Or too pushy in general."
I think about the first morning. The way he'd come at me without softening it, without the careful calibration I'd seen in men who thought they were being kind by going easy on a woman who was smaller than them.
The way that had felt like the first honest thing anyone had offered me since the Stonevein.
"He's not a bully," I say, and I hear that I mean it, and I decide not to think about that too hard.
Kerra's expression does something satisfied. Not smug — just the look of someone who has checked something off a list they'd been carrying. "Good." She rocks back on her heels. "He's got a big heart but he doesn't always have a quiet mouth to go with it. I wanted to be sure."
I'm trying to decide how to feel about her. She's clearly not a threat. She's clearly trying to be the thing I don't have a good name for — not friendly, exactly, or not just friendly. Checking in. Making sure. The impulse I recognize from standing in front of the other women with my arms out.
I'm not sure I want to feel good about her. It doesn't stop me from feeling it anyway.
The birch at the far end of the clearing moves, and Ursik steps through it.
He takes in the scene in one sweep — Kerra, me at the treeline, the particular quality of the silence — and his eyes narrow. It's a playful narrowing, which I've learned to distinguish from the strategic one. The expression of a person who has found something that requires immediate interrogation.
"What," he says to Kerra, "are you doing here?"
"I came to show Aislin what a real arse-whooping looks like." She turns to face him fully, weight shifting forward onto her toes. "As a public service."
"Get out of my clearing."
"Your clearing." She laughs, short and bright. "You've been using it for a few weeks and now it's yours."
"Squatter's rights. Ancient tradition." He points at the treeline path she came from. "Go away."
She doesn't go away. She moves toward him instead, and he moves toward her, and then they're grappling with the particular ease of two people whose bodies know each other's weight and habits, laughing, one of her hands coming up to shove at his shoulder and one of his coming up to block it, and neither of them is trying very hard and both of them are trying exactly enough, and there's an ease to it that I don't have a word for that doesn't sound like something I don't want to be thinking.
They break apart. Kerra steps back, still grinning.
"I'm going," she says, already turning toward the path. She glances at me on her way past, quick and warm. "Have fun."
And then she's gone into the birch, and the clearing is just Ursik and me and the frost-stiff grass and the cold air, and I realize I've been standing at the treeline this entire time like I'm watching something I wasn't supposed to see.
I walk into the clearing.
Ursik stretches his neck to one side, then the other. "Ready?"
"She follows you often?" I hear myself say.
"Kerra?" He looks at me, assessing the question. "She goes wherever she wants. It's mostly annoying." The word annoying carries unmistakable warmth. "Why?"
"No reason." I roll my wrists out. "Come on, then."
He comes at me with the opening sequence I've started to read well enough to adjust for — a feint left, weight to the right, driving low — and I move, but something's off in the timing and his hand closes around my forearm before I've quite cleared the angle.
I twist, the wrong direction, and he releases me before it goes anywhere.
He steps back. Looks at me.
"Where are you?" he asks.
"Right here."
"Your feet are here. The rest of you is somewhere else."
I reset my stance. He comes at me again and I do better — I get the redirect and put distance between us and land in something my feet are happy with — but I know he slowed down for the last half of it and I know he knows I know.
He doesn't say anything. That's almost worse.
We go through two more sequences. I'm functional. I'm not where I usually am. My head keeps pulling sideways to something that isn't the problem in front of me, and the problem in front of me is Ursik, who is patient about it in a way that somehow makes it more aggravating.
"Are you and Kerra together?" I say.
It comes out during a break between sequences, flat and conversational, like a question about weather. I watch him process it. And then he laughs.
It's not a chuckle. It's not even a regular laugh. It is a full-bodied, loud, startled roar of laughter that cracks out across the clearing and probably disturbs every bird in the birchwood, and I take a half-step back before I can stop myself, because the sheer volume of it is a physical thing.
But it's — it's a good sound. I notice that after the startle clears. It has no edge in it. It's completely undefended.
I've never heard him laugh like this. It's like I've always got the condensed version. And right now…I like seeing him unrestrained.
"Together." He gets the word out between the laughter, pressing one hand flat to his chest like he needs to contain it. "Me and Kerra."
"It's not a strange question."
"It is an absolutely strange question." He's still laughing, quieter now, but the shape of it still on his face.
"Kerra is like — she's like a younger sister to me.
She's been around me my entire life. She used to follow me around the base and ask me questions about grips until I taught her just to make her stop.
" He shakes his head, the laughter tapering.
"There has never been anything else. There will never be anything else.
It would be like—" He makes a face of emphatic distaste. "No."
"Fine," I say.
"Why?" He tilts his head. The gray eyes are doing something specific, not quite a smirk but adjacent to one, waiting to see if I'll give him anything. "Did I look like I was taken?"
"You two looked familiar," I say, and I keep my voice even when I say it, because my voice can be managed even when the thing underneath it is being less cooperative. "It was a tactical question."
"A tactical question."
"About the situation."
"Ah." He nods, solemn. "Very strategic."
"Are you going to spar or are you going to be insufferable."
"Both," he says, moving forward. "Simultaneously. I'm talented."
I should not like the fact that he's not seeing anyone.
I know I shouldn't. I know what that kind of information does when it takes root — the particular gravity of it, how it starts to pull other things toward it without asking permission.
I know what that leads to. I know exactly what trusting the feeling that someone is yours to worry about ends up costing.
I know all of that and I can construct the entire argument against it without pausing for breath.
And I still like the sound of it.
I move first this time, and he meets me, and I put that knowledge somewhere it can't get at me while I work.