Aislin
The week passes in mornings.
That's how I've started to measure time here, which is strange, because I used to measure it in threats. How long since the Stonevein fed us. How long since they rotated guards. How long since someone checked the perimeter. Time as a series of windows and gaps and things to prepare for.
Now I measure it in the clearing, in frost and birch and the specific cold that comes at dawn before the sun commits to anything.
We spar every morning. That is all it is.
He shows me something, I work at it until I've got the shape of it, he pushes back, and I push back harder, and we do that until the sun is fully up and the base has started moving around us and there's no longer any reason to still be standing in the clearing.
Then I walk back to the cabins and he walks back to the longhouses and that's the end of it.
Except it isn't quite, anymore.
I don't know when that shifted. Somewhere in the middle of the week I stopped leaving the moment we finished, and I didn't make a decision about it — I just didn't walk away quite when I would have before.
He said something about the foot sweep I'd been working on, how I was telegraphing it in my left shoulder before I committed to it, and I'd argued, and the argument had taken another ten minutes standing in the clearing while the frost melted off the grass around us, and then I'd walked back and thought about it the rest of the morning.
I haven't seen Kerra again. I refuse to admit why I've even thought of that.
And I absolutely will not question if he goes to see her after he leaves me.
The morning he asks me about the Trial of the Hare, we've just finished and I'm working the ache out of my right wrist — he'd gotten the reversal on me twice and I'd been pressing harder than I should to compensate — and he's not even slightly winded, which is one of the more aggravating things about him.
"You're going to the trial," he says. Not a question.
"I wasn't planning on it."
"Change your plans. I'm going to be the fastest." He says it with the same tone he'd use to report on weather. Absolute. Untroubled by the possibility of argument. "In the whole clan."
"Kerra will be there," I say, because Ressa mentioned it two days ago while checking in on Idris's ankle, and my mouth apparently stores information independently of my permission.
He grins at that. It does what it always does, which is take up more space than a grin should. "Is that a reason to come watch me beat her?"
Something in the way he says it — come watch me — lodges somewhere unhelpful.
The goading is transparent. I know it's transparent.
He knows I know. That particular layer of the thing is completely legible to both of us, and he does it anyway because that's who he is, and I'm starting to understand that it's not a tactic so much as a fact of his nature.
"It might be," I say.
He doesn't make a performance of it. He just nods, easy, like he'd expected nothing less, and walks toward the base, and I stand in the clearing for a moment looking at the place he was standing.
Tactical, I tell myself. You want to see what the course looks like. You want to know the terrain.
But Wren looks at me like she sees through every layer of that argument when I tell them I'm going.
She doesn't say anything. That's worse. She just does the thing with her face where her expression goes very still and attentive in a way that communicates clearly that she has understood exactly what's happening and has chosen, generously, not to make it into something I'd have to defend myself against.
Pell is less reserved about her happiness. "You're coming?"
"To watch," I say.
"Of course." Pell is already reaching for her coat. "We'll come too."
Idris, whose ankle has graduated from bad to manageable, declares she's capable of standing in one place for the length of a competition, and that's how there are four of us walking toward the training yard instead of one, which was not the morning I'd planned, but it is the morning I have.
The yard is loud when we get there. Loud in a Frostfang way, which is to say the baseline volume is already enough to rattle a window, and several people haven't yet reached their full contributions.
Drogath is standing on a wooden platform at the near end of the course with his ceremonial robes doing something dramatic in the wind, consulting a piece of parchment like it contains military intelligence.
I take in the course before I take in anything else.
It runs the length of the yard and then some — log jumps set at varying heights, a balance beam stretch that's been elevated and slicked, what looks like a rope pull across a pit of sodden leaves, a sprint finish through a gate of hanging hides you have to push through.
Someone has built this with genuine consideration for being difficult.
There are three puddles that I don't think are accidental.
Practical part of my brain: I could do this.
Other part: I should find where we're standing and stop looking at the course like I'm already mapping my approach.
I find where we're standing, which turns out to be not far from Saela and Ressa, who are on the edge of the gathering next to Kai and Falla.
Ressa spots me and lifts her chin in that particular nod that she uses as a greeting, which I appreciate about her — no performance, no warmth she hasn't earned the right to give yet.
Just acknowledgment. I can work with acknowledgment.
Saela says something to Kai that makes him look at me with that assessing quiet he carries everywhere, and then he looks back at her and whatever he says makes her roll her eyes, which I find I like about her.
Ursik is there, beside Kerra, and I see them before he sees me.
She's got her head tilted back laughing at something, and his arms are folded but the set of his shoulders is loose and relaxed in the way that's particular to him when he's not thinking about how he's presenting himself, which is the version of him I've been watching across mornings in the clearing.
He's shaking his head. Grinning. His long hair is tied back and he's in a sleeveless training wrap that I'd have something to say about in this temperature if I were going to say anything.
There's a thing that happens in my chest. I don't like it.
I examine it anyway, the way you'd probe a bruise to measure its edges: it's not jealousy, exactly.
It's more adjacent to the thing I'd felt in the clearing when I'd learned he and Kerra were nothing, that same unhelpful rearrangement of something I hadn't consciously arranged in the first place.
And then I make myself look at him the way I'd look at anyone.
He's handsome. It's not a complicated observation — it's just accurate, the way the course layout was accurate, information my eyes collected and delivered without asking first. The line of his jaw, the way he moves when he's comfortable, the size of him that I've stopped reading as a threat over mornings of learning exactly what he does and doesn't do with it.
My body has apparently filed all of that away into a category I hadn't labelled yet.
He sees me.
His grin doesn't change shape but it changes quality — something specific in it, pointed at me, a frequency I've started to be able to read.
He says something to Kerra without looking away from me. She looks over, sees me, and does something with her mouth that might be a smirk if it were on anyone less composed. Then she turns back to whatever she was saying and Ursik walks over, and I fix my face.
"You came," he says.
"I said I might."
"You said it might be." He marks the exact words back. The grey eyes are warm. "That's practically a commitment."
"It's categorically not."
Wren, to my left, makes a very quiet sound that she converts smoothly into a cough when I look at her.
Drogath clears his throat on the platform. The gesture is theatrical — his whole body participates in it — and the crowd settles into the particular attention that Drogath commands not through authority but through the sheer curiosity of what he'll say next.
"Children of the Frostfang." His voice carries with the practice of someone who has never entertained the possibility of not being heard. "In the ancient wisdom recovered from the human texts—"
Kai closes his eyes, clearly fighting the eye roll that Ressa does not.
"—it has been revealed that the Hare survives not through size, nor strength, but through the speed of the clever mind and the quickness of the fleet foot.
" Drogath unfurls the parchment fully, in the manner of someone unveiling a treaty.
"The Trial of the Hare calls us to prove ourselves worthy of the spring's gifts.
You will face the course. You will not fall.
You will not lag." He pauses for emphasis. "The Long-Ear Bringer is watching."
"What is a Long-Ear Bringer," Idris says, very quietly, next to Pell.
"I genuinely don't know," Pell whispers back.
Ursik crouches down next to me — which brings him only slightly less enormous, proximity-wise — and says, low, next to my ear, "He found a pamphlet. About a rabbit."
"And built an obstacle course from it."
"He also built a shrine, but Kai had it taken down before the morning."
I don't smile. I almost smile.
The first competitors go, two young guards who take the log jumps with aggressive confidence and lose most of it on the balance beam.
One of them hits the slicked section and goes sideways into the mud with a sound that makes the whole crowd wince and then immediately laugh, including the guard himself, which tells me something about Frostfang that I've been slowly accumulating evidence for.
Ursik shouts commentary the entire time they're on course, which is predictable, though some of it is surprisingly specific about technique and I find myself listening more to the second half than the first.
"Kerra's next," he says, tracking the rotation. "She'll be fast. But she won't be fastest."
"You're very confident."
"I'm accurate." He glances at me sideways. "Different thing."
Then it's Kerra's turn, and I watch her move and understand why he said what he said — she's fast, genuinely fast, her footwork on the balance beam clean and deliberate and not the overcautious shuffle that had slowed the two guards down.
She drops into the sprint finish at full pace and clears the hanging hides with her shoulder down like she'd done it before. The time someone calls out is good.
She finds us in the crowd and points at Ursik. The gesture means something I don't need translating.
"Encouraging," he says.
"She'll beat you," I say.
He turns to look at me directly. "Watch me."
And then it's his turn, and he's stepping forward toward the start, and something about the shift in him — the way the ease of him folds up and gets replaced with a different kind of attention, focused and clean — catches me before I'm ready for it.
He moves differently on the course than he moves in the clearing.
In the clearing I know his patterns, I've mapped the habits of him, I know what his shoulders do before he commits to something.
Here, watching him take the first log jump with a controlled power that makes it look effortless, I'm watching him cold.
The balance beam — he goes faster than Kerra did, weight low and centered, adjusting mid-step when the slick section tries to take him and correcting before I'd even seen the slip.
The rope pull is when I stop pretending to be a casual observer.
The muscles in his arms and back do something under the skin that I have no business cataloguing as carefully as I do, but my eyes have their own opinions, and they're thorough.
He hits the sprint finish already at full speed and clears the hides quickly. He's in the running to win, something the crowd seems to know, and the noise they make is significant.
He comes back breathing harder than the clearing ever makes him, the first flush of real exertion visible at the back of his neck, and he finds me in the crowd with a look that is several degrees more than just pleased with himself.
"Well?" he says.
I'm aware that I've been watching him with slightly more transparency than I'd intended, and that there isn't much I can do about that now except not make it worse.
"Might have been the fastest," I say.
His grin is immediate. "Let's see if I'll hold it."