Aislin
I've kissed people before.
Not many, and not like that mattered particularly — the mechanics of survival don't leave a lot of room for tenderness, and what passed for it in my life before the Stonevein was hurried and practical and nothing I'd filed away.
Oliver, once, behind his mother's house when we were seventeen, and I'd thought afterward: is that it, then?
Pressed my fingers to my mouth more in confusion than anything else and gone back inside.
That was not this.
This is the problem.
My mind finally kicks in — because it hadn't been present when I decided to kiss Ursik when my words failed me.
I pull back and I don't know how long it's been — long enough that my chest has done something complicated, that my hands are still holding the front of his shirt, that his arms are still around me.
His face is very close and his eyes are open and he's watching me with an expression I've never seen on him, all the usual noise stripped out of it, and I can't look at it directly.
I let go of his shirt.
His arms loosen. Not immediately, with a kind of deliberateness, like the decision had to be made rather than arriving automatically.
My mouth is still warm where his was.
"I'll see you in the morning," I say.
It comes out level. It comes out completely level, which is frankly the bravest thing I've done this week including the balance beam, and I step back once, twice, and then I turn and I walk and I do not look back and I do not run because running would mean something I'm not prepared to commit to.
I make it around the first stand of birches before the walking stops being sufficient.
Not running. Not running. I'm walking at a pace that is aggressively not running, through the thin afternoon light, past the outer edge of the yard where the festival noise has settled into post-event cleanup and small conversations, and I do not go toward the cabins. I can't.
The cabins mean faces I'm responsible for and eyes that read me better than I'd like, and I am currently not a person who should be read.
I am currently a person who made an enormous mistake in a birch grove and is carrying the consequences of it somewhere behind her sternum where it won't stop pressing.
He'd held on.
That's the part. He'd pulled me closer, like that was the obvious thing, like there was no world in which the response to being kissed by me was anything except yes, more of that, and I'd gone with it — I'd gone with it — and for somewhere between thirty seconds and the entire collapse of my good judgment, I'd been completely unreachable.
Not vigilant, not watching the angles, not cataloguing exits. Just. There.
Lost.
I've kept myself for years on the understanding that lost is how you get killed. Lost is how you get given away by someone who was supposed to be—
I stop that thought before it finishes.
I keep walking.
The settlement's perimeter runs longer than I've traced it in a while, and I let myself go around the far edge, past the eastern storage buildings and the corrals and the place where the ground goes soft near the stream crossing.
This part I've checked before — I always check, it's the first thing I do in any new territory, map it until I know which directions offer cover and which offer speed and which are traps dressed as exits.
The Frostfang perimeter is a known quantity.
Normally that knowledge sits comfortable.
Right now I'm just walking because walking is the alternative.
The trees thicken past the corrals, and the path I'm on narrows and goes a little uphill, and I follow it because it's going somewhere that isn't where I just was, and that's sufficient qualification.
The afternoon is doing something particular with the light in here — coming through at a low angle, catching the new leaf growth that's started to blur the branches, and the ground is soft and the sound of the settlement is very faint.
The path opens up.
It's a clearing. Not large — maybe twenty feet across, roughly circular, with the treeline pulling back to let in a wider square of sky overhead.
The grass is early-spring pale and thick, and someone has been here recently enough that there's a flat rock near the centre that's been cleared of debris, the kind of clearing people make when they've sat somewhere more than once.
Ressa is on it.
She has a waterskin and she's tipped her face up toward the sky, eyes closed, the late light doing something warm on the red of her hair. She looks like a person actively choosing to be exactly where she is, which is an expression I'm not sure I've ever worn.
I take a step back into the path.
"You can stay." She hasn't opened her eyes. "There's enough sky for both of us."
I stop moving. "I was leaving."
"I know." She opens her eyes and looks at me, and her expression is easy, no particular agenda in it. "You don't have to, though."
I stand in the opening of the path for a moment that goes on a little too long, and then I come in and sit on the grass a few feet from her rock, because the alternative is going back to the birch grove in my own head and I've been living there for the last twenty minutes and it hasn't improved anything.
The sky above is very blue still, with the first of the evening color starting at the edges.
"You ran well today," Ressa says.
"Thanks."
"Third overall." She glances at me briefly. "That's not nothing, in this clan. The guards train daily."
I nod. I know. I know because I've spent weeks in a clearing at sunrise learning that their daily training is thorough and unglamorous and has produced people who move like a different category of problem than anything I've had to navigate before.
I know because I have been one of those people, partially, and the knowledge of it is still strange to me.
Ressa is quiet for a while. She's good at quiet. It doesn't accumulate the way some people's silences do, building pressure until something has to be said into it. She just sits with it, turning the waterskin over in her hands.
"Something happened," she says.
It isn't a question.
Normally, I wouldn't tell anyone. But Ressa seems to understand me better than most, and I've buried too many things down deep. My stores are full and this one is pushing me over the edge.
"I kissed Ursik." I say it at the sky. Flat. The same voice I'd use to say there's a structural problem with the eastern fence or we need more lamp oil. Information delivery. Entirely controlled.
Ressa makes a small sound. Not quite a laugh. Not quite surprise, either — more like someone setting a thing gently on a table.
"Right," she says.
"It was—" I stop.
I have about four different completions for that sentence and none of them are going to come out in a useful shape.
It was fine is a lie so extravagant I can't fit my mouth around it.
It was a mistake is what I've been telling myself on the walk over here and it hasn't settled into anything true yet.
It was the most present I've been in months is the version I'm not going to say aloud to anyone.
"Complicated?" Ressa offers.
"I don't do that." I pull my knee up, rest my arm across it. "I don't—I don't like letting people too close."
"And you did."
"And I did." The words sit in my mouth like a confession I didn't plan to make. "For about thirty seconds I was just — not anywhere useful. And he was—" I stop again.
"Large," Ressa says.
"I was going to say thorough."
A pause. "Also large," she says.
"Also large." Something in my chest does an uncomfortable thing that is adjacent to laughing, and I press my mouth into my knee to keep it where it belongs.
"I know what I'm supposed to think about this.
I've run it. He's an orc. Three months ago I was in a cage with—" The sentence hits a wall and I let it stop there.
"I don't know how to trust that this isn't the same machinery. "
The evening birds have started somewhere in the treeline. Small sounds, unconcerned with anything that's happening on this rock.
Ressa turns the waterskin over again. Once. Twice. Then she sets it down.
"I was in worse shape than you when they brought me here," she says.
"I'm not saying that for comparison. I'm saying it because you should know that I sat in a cabin for weeks and Falla brought my meals to the door and didn't come in unless I asked, and I still thought—" She exhales.
"I still thought every time that it was the precursor to something.
That it would tip over. That there had to be a corner where the face he was showing me stopped being the face he had. "
I'm listening.
"There wasn't a corner," she says. "He kept being the same person at every angle I looked at him from.
And that was—" She laughs a little, at herself.
"That was somehow the hardest part. Because I knew how to handle cruelty.
I'd learned that. I didn't have the first idea when it came to kindness and understanding, how to handle someone that cared. "
I think about twenty mornings in a clearing. I think about Ursik running the outside of the course, loud and irritating and absolutely deliberate, and the way he'd looked at me in the birch grove with all the noise stripped off his face and said: I know what it looks like on you.
"He's been the same person," I say. It comes out half-recognizing something. "Maybe a little softer in the beginning. But he never loses patience. Never stops grinning or joking."
"He's the loudest one," Ressa says. "Falla talks about him like he's a natural disaster. But he's—" She considers it. "He's got the biggest heart of any of them. And he doesn't keep it quiet. He's never kept it quiet in his life." She tilts her head at me. "He ran alongside you today."
"That was to annoy me into running properly."