Aislin
The morning of the hunt, I stand in front of the small square of polished metal that passes for a mirror in the cabin and I cannot explain what I'm doing.
I'm not doing anything. I'm standing here. That's all.
Wren appears in the doorway behind me, wrapped in a blanket, her pale hair loose around her face. She looks at me looking at the mirror and she doesn't say anything, which is either kindness or Wren being Wren, and I can't always tell the difference.
"I'm going to the hunt," I say.
"I know." She leans on the doorframe. "You told us last night."
"I'm just reminding you."
"We'll be fine." She pulls the blanket tighter.
"Pell's got the morning sorted. Deva slept all the way through, did you hear?
" A small brightness in that — Deva's bad nights have been improving by degrees, and every full night feels like a collective exhale.
"Maret's headache's been gone for three days. "
I know all of this. I've been tracking it like a perimeter I check twice daily. But hearing Wren say it out loud does something — releases something — that I don't have a name for yet.
"I'll be back by afternoon," I say.
"Aislin." She says it patiently, the way she says most things. "We know."
I pick up my coat.
The reason I agreed to this — I've been turning it over for days and I'm no closer to a clean answer.
It's not the event itself. Painted wooden eggs and whatever Drogath thinks they mean isn't exactly what I'd choose to spend a morning on, left entirely to my own devices.
It isn't the territory, the river I haven't seen yet.
I have absolutely no interest in whatever tokens or charms are inside those eggs.
It might be the kiss.
I'd kissed him. Me, Aislin — who has not done a single impulsive thing in years, who has not let anyone that close in months.
I'd kissed him and he'd kissed back and then I'd run because that's what I do, that's the move I have, I run and I rebuild my walls and I get behind them and I point out every reason why the thing I want is actually something I should fear.
I know what I do. Knowing it doesn't stop me doing it.
The other thing — the smaller thing, the one I like even less — is what I'd thought when he mentioned the hunt.
Don't make me find someone else to partner with.
And I'd felt something that I refuse to call what it is and I'd said yes before that feeling had time to talk itself into sense.
I hadn't wanted someone else spending a day in the forest with him.
Hadn't wanted someone else getting the ridiculous grin.
That's a problem. That's a new problem and I'm carrying it across the base in the midmorning sun, bundled in my coat with my hands shoved deep in my pockets, walking toward whatever this is.
The center of the base is already busy. I hear it before I see it — Drogath's voice carrying over the crowd, describing the hunt's sacred meaning, and under that the noise of pairs finding each other, of people I've started to recognize by their voices if not always by name.
The Frostfang clan is loud in aggregate.
They are loud as individuals too, but there's something about all of them in one place that creates a particular kind of roar, a physical presence.
I find Ursik because I always find Ursik. You could blindfold me and put me in the middle of this base and I'd triangulate him by sheer volume.
He's with Kerra, which doesn't surprise me, the two of them facing each other with the energy of people who have been having this argument for twenty years and are finding it newly enjoyable.
Kerra has someone beside her — a young guard, very young, with the expression of a person who has perhaps underestimated what they signed up for.
He's watching Kerra work herself up and he looks slightly pale.
"—absolutely down," Kerra is saying, "going straight down, you are going to choke in the final quarter and I am going to be standing at the finish with every token and a list of your failures—"
"You and this child—" Ursik gestures at the young guard, who I'm increasingly certain regrets all his choices, "—are going to come in last and I will be gracious about it—"
"You've never been gracious about anything in your life—"
"—I'll be gracious because that's the kind of man I am, Kerra, a gracious man—"
"Name one time—"
"I'm a very gracious man—"
He sees me.
The argument doesn't stop — Kerra hasn't noticed, still building her case — but something shifts in his face, quick and real, before it settles back into the grin.
"My partner," he announces, to Kerra, to me, to the general vicinity. He throws his arm around my shoulders and I don't startle. Instead, I sink into his hold, which is something I absolutely should not do. "The two of us are going to dismantle whatever plan you've got, Kerra, I promise you that."
"I'm going to dismantle your kneecaps—"
"That's not in the spirit of the festival."
"I don't care about the spirit of the festival—"
Ursik looks down at me and raises his eyebrows in a way that very clearly means do you see this?
this is what I deal with, and the thing is — the genuinely inconvenient thing — I can't stop the grin.
I feel it happen and I can't interrupt it, he's just too ridiculous standing there with his arm around me arguing with Kerra like the fate of the clan depends on painted wooden eggs.
Kerra clocks me grinning and points.
"She's laughing at you," she tells Ursik.
"She's laughing with me."
"She's absolutely laughing at you."
"It's complicated," I say.
The young guard looks at me with what I think might be relief — another outsider in the general chaos, someone to share the bewilderment with — and I offer him a brief, sympathetic look and he gives me a weak smile back.
Then Drogath steps up onto the flat rock he uses as a speaking platform and the crowd settles by degrees, the way a fire settles when you stop adding to it.
He is, as always, extremely committed.
"The Long-Ear Bringer," he announces, with the gravity of a man delivering difficult news, "has seeded this territory with tokens of prosperity.
" He pauses. Lets it land. "To find them is to receive the blessing of the great renewal — to miss them is to invite stagnation into your household for the full turn of the season. "
Ursik leans down, near enough that I can feel the warmth of him through my coat.
"He made that last part up," he says quietly.
"All of it or just the stagnation bit?"
"Honest answer? Unclear."
"—pairs will each take a different route," Drogath continues, "and those routes are sacred, determined by the stars, and not to be traded for convenience or personal preference—"
A woman near the front tries to trade her route for convenience. Drogath's expression suggests she has personally offended the stars.
Our route takes us east, toward the river, which is the one piece of this I've been quietly interested in despite everything.
The base's eastern edge is where the treeline thickens, the ground dropping down to the water.
I haven't been there. I've marked it on the internal map I keep, the one I update every time I learn something new about where the exits are, but I've never walked it.
Ursik holds the small drawn map they gave us at the start and studies it with the focused expression he sometimes gets — the one that turns up in sparring when a problem needs solving, all the humor temporarily filed away.
He doesn't have it out long before he folds it back and tucks it away and we start moving.
"You know where we're going?" I ask.
"I've been a captain for six years. I can read a trail map."
"That wasn't an answer."
"East path, down past the two silver birches, follow the stones to the river bend. Simple."
"And if you're wrong?"
"Then we find the river by finding the river." He holds a low branch out of the path and waits for me to pass. "It runs downhill. We're capable of walking downhill."
The trees open up as we move east, the dense frost-tipped growth of the outer treeline giving way to older growth, the spacing wider, light coming through at better angles. It smells different out here — green and damp and cold in a way that isn't unpleasant. Spring doing its work.
I find the first egg fifteen minutes in, tucked into the knotted base of a tree that would be invisible if you weren't moving at roughly eye-level with the knot in question. Which I am. Ursik is not.
"I've got one."
He turns. "Already?"
"You were looking at the wrong height." I pick it up — smooth painted wood, deep blue, lighter than it looks. It rattles faintly when I shake it. "Something's in it."
"Open it."
The egg splits at the seam, two halves coming apart cleanly. Inside, nested in a scrap of cloth, there's a small folded piece of paper.
I unfold it.
"'The renewal demands bold living,'" I read. "'Before the next egg, one truth.'"
I look up.
Ursik looks back at me with an expression I can't immediately classify.
"That's a…demand," I say.
"Drogath has had a very specific vision for this." He sounds both fond and resigned, which is apparently a register he reserves exclusively for Drogath. "One truth. That's the dare."
"That's not a dare, that's—"
"It's very much a dare if you find honesty difficult."
I fold the paper back up and put it in my pocket.
Ursik watches me do it with that expression still on his face and doesn't push, which is — that's him, actually, that's the thing I keep running up against, he knows when to push and when to leave space, and he gives me the space without making it significant.
We keep walking.
We find two more eggs in the next twenty minutes — one contains a small carved charm, a leaf shape, smooth under my thumb — and then the trees thin properly and I hear the river before I see it, the sound of moving water underneath everything else, and when the path turns we come out above a bank where the water runs fast over pale stones and the light is doing something complicated on the surface.
I stop.
It's not much. It's a river. I've seen rivers. But there's something about the sound of it, the particular velocity, the cold clean smell, that sits in my chest and stays there.
Ursik stops beside me.
He doesn't say anything. He looks at the river the way I look at it and doesn't fill the silence, and that's — it's too easy, being here with him.
That's the problem. I want to find the problem, point at it clearly, and the problem keeps turning out to be that it's too easy, that his company fits, that I am standing on a riverbank in the spring morning and not counting exits.
"The truth," I say.
He turns to look at me.
"The dare." I keep my eyes on the water. "I've been thinking about it."
He waits.
"I don't know how to—" I stop. Try again.
"I've spent a long time making sure I didn't want anything.
" I say it to the river because that's easier than saying it to him.
"It was safer. Not wanting anything means nothing can be used against you.
Means you can't be—" The word I want is bartered, but I don't use it. "It's a clean way to live."
The water moves.
"It's been less clean lately," I say.
Ursik doesn't speak for a moment. The river fills the space instead, which is what rivers are for.
"That counts," he says finally. His voice is level, no angle in it.
"Does it?"
"As a truth? Yes." He picks up a flat stone from the bank and turns it over in his palm. "That's not nothing, Aislin. Saying that out loud."
I take the stone from his hand before I can think about it and turn it over in my own. Cool, smooth, the weight of something that's been in water long enough to lose all its edges.
Maybe Ressa is right. Maybe he isn't the thing I made him into, in the first weeks — the threat, the size, the unknown variable I watched from behind locked doors.
He's loud and ridiculous and he ran alongside an obstacle course to keep me from falling into myself, and he's stood at the river and let me say something real without making a thing of it.
Not what I was afraid of. That's what Ressa had said, eyes warm, hands wrapped around a mug. He's not what you were afraid of.
I'm starting to think she might know what she's talking about.