Ursik
Idon't tell anyone about the kiss.
It might be a first for me. Kai would make a face that meant seventeen things he was too smug to say directly, and Falla would give me his long, considering look that functions exactly like a lecture without requiring him to open his mouth, and either of those would require me to have something useful to say about what happened with Aislin, which I don't. I have nothing useful.
I have a memory of dark hair and green eyes and the precise weight of someone who'd made a decision and acted on it, and the way my arms had pulled her in before the rest of me caught up with my arms, and I've been turning it over since I watched her walk away and I am no closer to any kind of shape for it.
So I don't tell anyone.
I eat my evening meal with Kai and Saela and I am perfectly normal about it.
Kai gives me a look once, briefly, that might mean something or might mean nothing, and I let it pass without acknowledgement.
I sleep, which is to say I lie in my bed and look at the ceiling for three hours and then I sleep for the last four.
I wake up before sunrise and I go to the clearing.
The cold is still doing its thing in the mornings — the Frostfang valley sits low enough that the temperature drops differently here than on the heights, frost coming in through the grass even when the trees have started their new growth, and my breath makes company as I work through the warm-up forms.
The light is that particular early grey, before the color has come back into anything, and the clearing is the same as every morning. Log, soft ground, the treeline dark at the edges.
I keep doing the forms.
She came third. Against my guards, who train daily, who have years of footwork I've put into them personally — she placed third in her first competitive attempt, and I'd watched her do the balance beam correction, and I'd thought, she's good.
She's actually good. Not practiced-good, not trained-good yet, but built-from-the-bone good, the kind that comes from years of moving through situations where the cost of getting it wrong wasn't a bruise.
That's not why I ran alongside her.
I ran alongside her because I'd seen what was happening in the crowd before she could fully name it — the way her breathing changed, the stillness that wasn't concentration but something older and less voluntary, the particular kind of trapped that looks from the outside like composure.
I know what that looks like. I've pulled enough people out of it after combat. Get the mind moving and the body follows, so I made myself the loudest, most annoying thing in her immediate sightline and let the rest of it take care of itself.
It worked.
She'd finished the sprint like she was angry at the course personally, which is the best possible running motivation, and then she'd nearly knocked me flat and I'd—
I'd held on.
I stop in the middle of a form.
Stand there with my arms where the movement left them, the cold air very present, and think about something that is rapidly becoming a structural problem: I am thirty-two years old.
I've been in this clan since I was born, been a warrior since I could hold a blade.
I have excellent judgment about terrain, about threat assessment, about when something is going to go badly in the next three seconds and how to interrupt it.
I have historically poor judgment about one specific category of thing, which is when I decide I want something and the wanting gets ahead of every other consideration.
I want to see her.
That's the whole of it. No architecture on top of it, no rationale.
I just want her to come through the tree line at the edge of this clearing like she has every morning this week, with that expression on her face that starts as I'm here under protest and shifts by the fourth hold into something that looks almost like she's enjoying herself.
I want to see what her face does when I make her work for it.
I want to watch the moment she stops defending and starts fighting back.
I go back to the forms.
Twenty minutes pass. Maybe twenty-five. The grey lifts slightly, the color beginning to return to the treeline, and I've moved from forms into footwork patterns and I'm not watching the path, I'm absolutely not watching the path, and then there's movement at the edge of my peripheral vision and I look and—
She's there.
She's wearing the same training gear she always wears, her dark hair pulled back, and she's walking in with her shoulders doing the thing they do when she's made a decision she's slightly annoyed with herself about.
She doesn't look at me directly. She looks at the training ground and she walks to it and she starts her own warm-up, the sequence she's developed over the last couple of weeks that tells me exactly what she's been working on when I'm not watching.
I watch her.
"You came," I say.
"I come every morning." She still hasn't looked at me. "Don't make it mean something."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
She moves through the warm-up sequence with the kind of focused attention that means she's using it as a wall.
Methodical. Eyes on her own hands. I've seen her use the forms this way before — as something to stand behind while the rest of her settles — but usually she's past it by the third rotation, coming up to look at me with one of her assessments.
She's on the fifth rotation now and hasn't surfaced.
I don't like it.
I like her sharp and present and giving me grief.
I like the way her eyes track when she's actually watching me, calculating, and the half-second before she moves when I can see the decision forming.
I do not like this — this careful withdrawal, this particular kind of absence that still has her standing in front of me.
I roll my shoulder and step into her practice space. "Start with the escape sequence. Left side first."
She finally looks at me.
The look is complicated, several layers running under the surface, but at least it's direct and I file the relief away where she won't see it.
"Left side," she repeats.
"You favor the right. Falla would tell you to work the weak side first."
"Falla isn't here."
"Fortunately, I am." I set my feet. "Left side, Aislin."
She sets hers. And we begin.
It's quiet, the way sparring sometimes goes — not unfriendly-quiet, just the particular focus of two people working a problem together, the communication happening in the contact rather than around it.
She's better on the left side than she admits to. She's been practicing without me, which I already knew from the footwork warm-up but now have confirmation of, and the knowledge of it does something pleasant in my chest.
Three sequences in, she breaks a grip I've had on her wrist — the correct break, clean, with the turn and pull together — and I release and we reset.
"I heard something about the next trial," I say.
She drops into the starting position. "Don't care."
"It'll be a partner event."
Her eyes come up.
"A hunt across the whole territory." I keep my voice easy, like I'm discussing weather. "Teams of two, hidden tokens everywhere. Takes most of the day."
"I'm done with the events." She says it to the space between us, flat and final, which is a tone I recognize as the one she uses when she's made a decision she doesn't want examined. "I came to the first one. That's what I agreed to."
"You came to the first two."
"I know how many I came to."
"So what's another?"
She moves first — a good opener, she's been improving the tells, I nearly miss the weight shift — and I sidestep and get my arm around and she drives an elbow back before I can complete the hold and I let her turn out of it because that's a correct counter and she's earned the reset.
"The events are your shaman's project," she says, breathing only slightly harder. "Not mine."
"You had fun. I saw you have fun. You liked arguing with me while painting your eggs. You enjoyed picking apart the obstacle course. I watched you, Aislin."
I know you I want to tell her.
"That isn't fun, that's—"
"You were delighted."
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Comes at me from the right and I redirect and she uses the redirect like she planned it and nearly gets me, which — honestly, I'm proud, she's going to be terrifying in three months — and we end up at the reset again.
"I'll think about it," she says.
"I'll take it."
It's not a yes. I know it's not a yes. But it's not the flat no she'd started with, and that's a foothold, and I know how to work with footholds.
She doesn't look at the birch grove on the way out.
The next four mornings, I ask.
Not the same way each time — that's not how you get somewhere with Aislin, who can identify a pattern and lock a door against it faster than anyone I've trained. I don't push. I don't build pressure. I just find the angle that fits the morning and I put it there and I let it sit.
The first morning, the day after she'd come and not looked at me, I mention, "The egg hunt covers the river territory. You haven't been to the river."
"No." Flat. Final. Onto the next sequence.
I let it sit.
The second morning, she's warmer, only slightly, the way temperature changes by a degree and you can't see the difference but you can feel it.
I don't mention the event. I work with her on the choke break she's been struggling with and I get the angle wrong twice on purpose so she has to correct me, because nothing loosens her up like being right about something.
By the end she's breathing hard and a little flushed and she almost — almost — smiles.
"The hunt's in four days," I say, when she's putting her coat back on.
"Ursik."
"Just noting it."
She gives me a look that would peel bark off a tree and walks out.
I stand in the clearing and note, privately, that she didn't say no with quite the same weight as yesterday.
The third morning, she comes in and she's carrying something, which is new — a wrapped bundle that turns out to be flatbread from the cabin stores, still warm, which she drops near the equipment pile without comment and doesn't explain.
It's not an offering, her posture is very clear that it's not an offering, it is simply bread that exists in this location and I can eat it or not eat it as I see fit.
I eat it.
"These are good," I say.
"Pell made them." She starts her warm-up. "She's been experimenting with the spice stores."
"Talented."
"Don't tell her I brought them. She'll make a thing of it."
I mime a sealed mouth. She looks at me like she's questioning every choice that led to this moment, and then we start, and an hour in she does something I've been waiting two weeks for: she beats me to the counter.
Not close, not nearly — she reads the setup correctly and she moves before I've finished the approach and she puts me flat on the cold grass and she looks down at me with two fists in my shirt and a knee on my ribs and her expression is pure electric triumph.
"Ha," she says.
Just the once. But it's very good.
"Don't let it get to your head," I say, from the ground.
"Too late." She releases me and stands and offers me a hand up and I take it and she immediately does something with the leverage that nearly puts me back down, grinning now — actually grinning — and I roar with laughter because I walked directly into it and I deserve everything I got.
This is why I enjoy her. When she lets down those walls, she fits me too well.
"Three days," I say, when I've gotten my balance back.
"You're relentless." But it's not an irritated relentless, it's an exasperated relentless, and there's a difference, and she knows I know the difference.
"Famously," I agree. "Don't make me find someone else to partner with."
"You wouldn't win with them." She throws my coat at me and walks out, and I catch it grinning.
On the fourth morning, she's already in the clearing when I arrive. She has her back to the path and she's working through a balance sequence she invented herself — I've never given it to her, it's entirely hers — and she doesn't stop when she hears me coming, just keeps the sequence moving.
I drop my gear.
Start my warm-up without comment.
Let the silence do its work.
Five minutes in, she says, without turning around:
"If we find a token, I'm keeping it."
I stop.
She finishes the sequence. Turns to face me.
Her expression is the one she reserves for things she's decided against her better judgment, practical and clear-eyed and not particularly happy about it, but decided nonetheless.
Not a woman who's been worn down. A woman who has looked at something from all available angles and arrived at a conclusion on her own terms, which are the only terms she operates on.
"Deal," I say. I know better than to push, but I had a feeling that Aislin would cave closer to the event.
"One event." She holds up one finger. "The hunt. After that, I'm done."
"Completely reasonable."
"I mean it."
"I believe you."
She looks at me for a moment with the expression that means she's checking for angles, and I let her check. She doesn't find any, because there aren't any, and eventually she puts her hand out and I shake it and she grips firmly, which I expect, and then she releases and sets her feet.
"Stop grinning," she says.
"Can't help it."
"Try harder."
I can't try harder, because I'm still grinning when she swings for the opening hold, and I'm grinning when I block it, and I'm grinning when she gives me a look that contains several words she's chosen not to say, and I'm still grinning twenty minutes later when I take the long route to the food hall.
Kerra falls into step beside me from approximately nowhere, which is a skill she's had since she was sixteen and which I have never gotten accustomed to.
"You look obscene," she says. "What happened?"
"I have a partner for the hunt."
She processes this for three full steps. "You found someone other than me."
"Shocking development."
"I'm wounded." She puts a hand flat on her chest, not wounded in the slightest. "Deeply wounded. Replaced like a—"
"You're going to be fine."
"—like a worn-out boot—"
"Kerra."
She drops the performance and looks at me sideways, with the particular quality of attention she uses when she's actually reading something. A small smile starts at the corner of her mouth.
"It's Aislin," she says.
I say nothing.
The smile completes itself. "Oh, you are so deep in this."
"Shut up."
"Ursik."
"Walk faster."
She matches my stride, still smiling, and knocks her shoulder into mine with the easy familiarity of someone who has been doing it since we were half our current height.
"Good," she says. Just that. Low and real, the teasing set entirely aside.
I knock her shoulder back.
We keep walking.