Ursik #2
But of course she won. She's been running that kind of course since before I was promoted to captain, and she hit the sprint section like she had something personal against the ground, and her time came in clean and fast and entirely deserved.
She makes a face at me across the yard that communicates all of this without requiring words.
Aislin's time came in just behind mine. That put her third overall, which is remarkable, something I didn't say because she would have done something with it that I wouldn't have liked.
The crowd disperses into smaller shapes, the familiar post-event noise of the clan finding its natural clusters. Drogath is already writing something down with the gravity of a man recording history, and I suspect he's annotating the pamphlet with today's findings.
Kerra has been absorbed into a group of the younger guards who want to argue about her technique. She throws me a look over her shoulder as she goes, and I read it correctly: it says nothing at all, and therefore says everything.
I haven't let Aislin get far.
Not deliberately. Not in a way I planned.
But the crowd has moved in particular directions and I've moved in one of them and she's moved in the same one, and the net result is that we're standing perhaps four feet from each other in the thin clearing that the dispersing bodies have left behind, and she's still getting her breath back properly, color in her face and her dark hair further gone from any containment it had started the day with.
I keep thinking about my arms around her.
It's a problem. It was six seconds from the outside looking in, and it was purely the physics of momentum and an ill-timed turn, and she'd stepped back and I'd let her go and we'd both watched the competition and that had been that.
But the warmth of it is sitting somewhere I can't quite file away — the reality of her that close, breathing against my shoulder, the moment where she didn't pull back.
Three weeks of mornings in the clearing and she'd never been that close except in the specific geometry of a hold, which is a different kind of close entirely, which is about reading leverage and angle and doesn't do whatever this is doing to my concentration.
I should probably stop thinking about it.
"I'll walk you back," I say.
She looks at me. Not the threat-assessment look, not the I'm about to say something that will require your full attention look. The one that's harder to read, the one that's been appearing more recently, that sits somewhere between weighing and considering and something else I haven't named yet.
"You don't need to," she says.
"I know."
The look holds for another moment. Then she turns and starts walking, and I fall into step beside her, and that's how it is.
The path between the main yard and the outer cabins cuts through a stand of birch, and the festival noise drops behind us in stages — first the crowd, then the individual voices, then almost entirely, until what's left is our footsteps on the path and the ordinary sounds of the settlement going about its afternoon.
It's the quietest I think I've ever been with her.
The mornings have their own rhythm, instruction and effort and the specific back-and-forth we've built, and that's never quiet. This is different.
She doesn't seem to need to fill it.
I find, unexpectedly, that neither do I.
We walk. The birches are doing something thin and pale against the spring sky. I'm aware of the space between us, closer than she usually allows on a path, close enough that her arm nearly brushes mine when the path narrows. She doesn't move away.
I've been thinking about what Kerra said. Fierce. Said in that flat observational tone, the one she uses when she's not making a point so much as just setting a fact down where it can be seen.
I'd known it before she said it. I'd known it the first morning in the clearing when Aislin had moved like she was conducting something, all controlled edge and forward intent, and I'd thought: yes, there it is, the thing that had been visible from the first day I'd clocked her watching me from the cabin threshold like I was something to be assessed and neutralized.
If I'm being honest, I noticed it her second day here when she was cleaned up and I was viewing her as a person who needed help instead of a vicious warrior.
What I hadn't expected, in any of it, was this. The walking. The quiet that feels like something between us rather than the absence of something.
I break it.
"You were fierce out there." I don't look at her when I say it, I look at the path ahead. "Impressive. The balance beam especially — you made the correction before it had fully gone wrong. You have great instincts."
She doesn't answer immediately. I listen to four footsteps before she does anything.
She stops.
I stop half a pace after her and turn, and she's standing on the path looking at me, and the expression on her face is the one that means she's about to ask the question she's actually been carrying, not the surface version.
"Why did you do that?" Her voice is level. Genuinely asking.
"The walk back—"
"At the course." She watches my face. "You came out on the outside. You ran alongside me." A beat. "You pushed me."
I hold her gaze. The green of her eyes is very particular in this light, catching something in the birch-filtered afternoon that makes them more themselves somehow.
"You were in your head," I say. "You'd gone somewhere that wasn't the course. I know what that looks like on you."
"So you insulted my pace."
"It worked."
She makes a sound that is almost something and isn't quite. Her arms have crossed, not the defensive fold, the one that means she's thinking. "You do that. You read me and you find the thing that—" She stops. "Why?"
"Because I'm your friend." The word sits simply.
I mean it simply. "That's what it is. You've got enough people watching you to make sure you're safe.
You don't need another pair of eyes tracking you, inspecting you.
I want—" I pause, finding the exact edge of what I mean.
"I want you to run the course. I want you to hit the balance beam at pace.
I want you out there, not standing at the start line.
" I look at her. "That's what a friend does. I'll always push. That's the offer."
The silence comes back, but it's a different silence now, weighted differently.
"I don't understand." She's looking at me like she can't grip what it means for someone to want you to let down your walls for no reason in return. To just know that you feel safe enough to.
"I've worked," I say, and I hear something rougher in my own voice, something I hadn't quite planned on, "to earn your trust. Two weeks of mornings.
Sparring sessions that have shown you every one of my intentions.
" I don't move toward her. "Have I not earned it yet?
Do you not believe I can just want the best for you? That that's all this is?"
She's studying me.
It's the most complete assessment she's ever run on me, and I've had a few.
This one moves through everything, slow and thorough, and I hold still for it the way I've learned to hold still in the mornings when she needs to take the measure of something before she'll commit to it.
I don't perform patience, I just actually wait, because she's earned that from me as much as anything goes the other direction.
Whatever she finds, it doesn't seem to be lacking.
Because she moves forward and she kisses me.
It takes me a full second — a full, genuine, lost second — to understand what's happening, the warm press of her mouth against mine and the small movement it took her to close the remaining distance, and then I understand, and I stop being still.
I pull her in.
Both arms, all the way, the same hold as before except nothing like before, nothing like physics and momentum, this is entirely deliberate and she comes with it and kisses me harder.
She tastes like cold air and exertion and something underneath that I can't name yet, and I am very thoroughly not thinking about anything except this — her hands finding the front of my shirt, the way she fits against me, the specific quality of kissing someone who does nothing halfway.
I lose myself in it. Completely. The birches and the afternoon and the sound of the settlement are somewhere extremely far away, and what's here is her, the press of her mouth and the grip of her hands and the warmth of her in my arms, and I hold her closer because she's here and she chose this and I am absolutely not wasting a second of it.