Ursik
The waiting is the worst part of any competition.
Not for me — I don't do waiting, I do standing near waiting while making it someone else's problem — but around me the crowd has settled into that specific restless energy of people who've already seen the best of it and aren't sure if the remainder will deliver.
I'm still thinking about her saying might have been.
Not was. Not even a concession. Might have been.
Like she was leaving herself room to retract it if I got too pleased about it, which I did, which she clocked immediately, which is why she said might.
I've started to understand the architecture of how she gives things and then shores up the gap immediately after, and understanding it doesn't make it less effective, it just means I see it coming and get hit by it anyway.
The competitors cycle through. I track the times in my head without meaning to — habit from years of knowing where I stand in any given ranking — and I'm still holding the front position, though two of the younger guards came close enough that I'm not comfortable yet.
Kerra is making a face at me from across the yard that communicates she finds this appropriate.
Aislin is standing beside me. Not close, but close enough that I'm aware of it in the specific way I've been aware of distance between us since around the third morning in the clearing, when she'd corrected my grip demonstration without asking and then stepped back like she was checking whether that had been a mistake.
She'd filed that away, and I'd filed away the fact that she'd done it, and we'd both gotten on with the session, and that was the shape of things.
She's watching the course. I've watched her watching the course for the last twenty minutes, and I know what that look is, because it's the look I wear when I'm reading terrain. She's been mapping it since we got here.
Which means she's thinking about running it.
The rotation lands on her name before I've finished thinking it.
Drogath, who has been calling competitors with the gravity of a man announcing fates rather than obstacle courses, unfurls his parchment slightly for no reason I can identify and announces her name.
She'd been added to the list — I know because I'd mentioned to Drogath, as an aside, that several of the newer members might want the chance to participate if they wished, and Drogath had written it down with the enthusiasm of a man receiving prophecy.
The crowd doesn't know her. There's a murmur, curious rather than hostile, but it's a lot of noise from a lot of large bodies, and I feel rather than see the change in her.
It's the smallest thing. A tightening. The way her weight shifts back a fraction, the chin that's always up dropping just barely, the particular stillness that isn't her ready-to-fight stillness but something under it — the part of her that hasn't decided yet whether this is safe.
In three weeks of mornings I've seen her stare down a hold she couldn't break and come back harder.
I've seen her hit the ground and get up before I'd finished the motion of stepping back.
I've never seen this version, the one that looks less like fire and more like something trying to decide if there's enough fire left.
I don't think about it. I just jump in, give her something to focus on.
"You're going to be slow," I tell her.
Her head turns. The familiar sharpening happens in her face, the one that means I am about to need all of your attention for what I'm about to say to you.
"I haven't moved yet."
"Exactly." I fold my arms. "You're already slow. Standing there looking at it like that. Hare doesn't hesitate, that's the whole point, Drogath's been very clear on this."
"Drogath found a pamphlet."
"About a rabbit," I confirm. "An extremely instructive pamphlet. The Long-Ear Bringer doesn't hesitate."
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Something shifts in her expression — not quite the thing I wanted yet, but closer, the calculation behind her eyes moving from the crowd and the noise and the unfamiliar bodies to the more comfortable problem of me being irritating.
"My time is going to beat yours," she says.
There it is.
"It absolutely won't," I say, cheerfully. "But you're welcome to try. If you can keep your feet on the beam, which I'm also skeptical about, no offense—"
"I'll keep my feet on the beam."
"I'll believe it when I see it."
Aislin lifts her chin and stalks off, looking far too ready to prove me wrong. There's no hesitation. No fear. Which makes me feel justified in what I said to her.
Because she looks so damn beautiful like that.
Something I shouldn't be thinking but can't keep denying.
"Ursik."
Kerra has appeared at my left shoulder, which she does sometimes without apparent transit, a habit I've never been able to predict.
She's watching Aislin walk toward the start line, and there's a specific quality to her attention that I recognize as the one she uses when she's turning something over.
"What," I say.
"She's beautiful." Kerra doesn't look at me when she says it. Her tone is entirely neutral, the flatness of someone making an observation rather than a point. "Fierce."
The word lands somewhere. Not because it's new information — I haven't been blind in the clearing, I've been the opposite of blind, I've been extremely thorough about exactly what I've observed about her — but because hearing it said aloud by someone else makes it take up space differently.
"She is," I say. I watch Aislin reach the start position and roll her shoulders back, and the line of her is exactly what Kerra said.
Even in the hesitation, even with whatever that moment of uncertainty was, the sharpness of her doesn't go anywhere.
It just gets pointed somewhere interior. "What are you getting at?"
Kerra shrugs. One shoulder. The kind that means she's said the thing she wanted to say and has no interest in elaborating.
"Kerra."
"Nothing," she says, and she says it like she means it, which is almost more infuriating. She keeps watching the start line.
Drogath gives the signal, making the crowd start to get loud in anticipation again.
Aislin moves — and something is wrong.
Not dramatically, not in any way the crowd would notice, but I've spent twenty mornings watching how she moves.
She hits the first log jump slightly too cautious and the rhythm doesn't establish the way it should.
On the second jump her plant foot slides half an inch and she compensates but it costs her momentum, and I can see the correction run up through her whole body.
She's in her head. She's still partly in whatever that moment was at the start line, standing in the noise of too many people she doesn't know yet — too many orcs — and it's bleeding into her feet.
I move.
I'm running along the outside of the course before I've made a full decision about it, parallel to her, which puts me ahead of her by one obstacle length because she's lost time, and I don't bother moderating my volume.
"You're slower than I thought," I call across to her. "My time's already safe. Relax."
She looks over. Even in profile I can see the irritation light up.
"I'm just getting started," she calls back.
"Are you? Because from here it looks like you're being careful." I put enough contempt on the word careful that it lands correctly. "The hare isn't careful, remember? Pamphlet was very specific—"
"Stop quoting the pamphlet at me—"
"Balance beam," I say, because she's coming up on it and I need her eyes forward.
She hits it at pace. Not Kerra's pace, not yet, but the wobble from the first section is gone and her jaw is set in that particular way it gets when she's got something to prove and it's me she's proving it to.
The slick section doesn't take her. She adjusts before it can.
Good foot placement, weight exactly where I'd told her in the fourth morning when we'd been working on her base.
"Better," I call. "Still not close. You'd need to find another second at least—"
"I'm going," she says, through her teeth, and something about it is wonderful.
She goes.
She hits the rope pull and it's not elegant — she hasn't built the upper body for the length of it the way I have — but she drives with her legs instead, which is what you're supposed to do, and I find I'm grinning without permission as I run the outside to keep pace with her.
"Sprint," I call. "Everything you've got. You're still behind my time—"
"How far behind—"
"Far enough that you need to stop talking and run."
She stops talking and runs.
She comes through the hanging hides at full pace, shoulder down the same way Kerra had, and she's through the finish with every scrap of speed she had left and I cross the sideline a step after her and catch her — she's still carrying the forward momentum and the turn is too fast and I have both arms around her before the physics of it finish resolving, and she's breathing hard against my shoulder and neither of us has moved yet.
It's a moment. It's more than a moment. The warmth of her, the way her breathing is coming in fast against the side of my neck, my arms around someone who three weeks ago would have put a weapon between us before I'd gotten within two feet.
The crowd noise is happening somewhere outside the immediate fact of this, and I feel her register it at the same time I do, the brief tension that checks whether she's going to pull back.
She doesn't, quite yet, and I don't let go either.
Eventually, she does, though, and I have to release her. We both turn back to watch the rest of the competition and then the announcement without another word. Because all I can think about is what it felt like to hold Aislin close.
I don't even care that Kerra wins. My time was just shy.