Aislin
Ifind three more eggs before I notice the sky.
That's on me. Normally I'd have clocked it twenty minutes ago — the light going flat, the particular way the wind shifts direction twice in quick succession, the smell of it.
I know weather. I've spent twelve years on a watch rotation that taught me to read the horizon like a second language.
Today, apparently, I've been reading something else entirely.
She's just finding painted wooden eggs. But there's something about the way she moves when she isn't thinking about being watched — easy, precise, none of the wound-tight defensiveness she wears like armor in the base. Out here she's just herself.
"There's two in here," she says.
"Two?"
"Drogath hid two in the same log."
"He'd call that sacred abundance."
She looks up at me from her crouch and there it is — the grin.
Not the half-smile she gives when she's deciding whether something is worth her time, not the sharp edge of her laugh when I've said something she finds accidentally funny.
The real one. I've been cataloguing the differences without meaning to, without admitting to myself that I was doing it, and this one still hits me the same way it did the first time I earned it.
She pulls both eggs out and stands and holds one out to me.
I take it. Our fingers don't quite touch.
She opens hers first — another charm, a small carved moon — and I open mine and unfold the paper inside and read it and fold it back up before she can see it.
"What does yours say?"
"Sacred abundance," I say.
She gives me a look that means she doesn't believe me, which is correct, and I put the paper in my pocket and she shakes her head and we keep moving.
What it says is: Bold living: tell your partner one thing you want.
I'll come back to that.
The first raindrop hits me on the back of the hand.
I look at it, then I look up, and that's when I see what I should have seen twenty minutes ago.
The sky to the north has gone the colour of old iron, the clouds stacked and moving fast, and the light that was doing that complicated thing on the river is entirely gone now, flattened under the front rolling in.
"Ursik—"
"I see it." I'm already scanning the bank. We're two hundred paces from the cave I know is cut into the rock face east of the river bend — I've sheltered there before, it's deep enough, wide enough. "Come on."
She doesn't ask questions. I like that about her. In a crisis she moves and talks later, and I grab her hand without thinking and she doesn't pull away, which I also file somewhere.
The rain decides not to build gradually.
It comes down all at once, the way spring rain does when it's been saving itself — heavy and cold and immediate, soaking through my shirt before we've covered fifty paces.
I hear Aislin's sharp exhale somewhere behind me and then we're both running and the bank is slick under our feet and the noise of the river doubles under the rain.
The cave is where I remember it. The entrance is lower than I'd like — I have to fold myself through it, shoulders first — but it opens up inside, the ceiling lifting to twice my height, dry stone floor with a scattering of old deadfall against the back wall.
Some previous version of this same desperate decision left it here. I'm grateful.
Aislin comes in behind me, pushing wet hair out of her face. She's drenched. Her coat's heavy with water, her dark hair plastered flat, and she looks around the cave the way she looks at everything — immediately, cataloguing, noting where the exits are — before she registers that she's shivering.
The wind throws rain hard against the cave entrance.
I start on the fire before anything else.
The deadfall is dry enough; whoever left it stacked it against the driest part of the back wall, far from the entrance.
I build it quickly, and I'm aware that Aislin hasn't moved from the entrance, hasn't taken her coat off, standing in her wet things with her arms crossed tight over her chest.
The fire catches.
I sit back on my heels and watch it settle and think about being soaked through and about the walk back to the base in wet clothes, about how long this will take to pass, and I strip my shirt off over my head and lay it flat on the stone beside the fire.
As I stand, I find Aislin staring at me. With wide eyes and a little flush to her cheeks.
"What are you doing?" she says.
I freeze.
Then I actually think about what I've done and I reach for something to say. I hadn't thought before undressing in front of her. "It'll dry faster."
She stares at me.
"By the fire." I gesture at the shirt as though this requires explanation.
"The clothes. They'll dry faster." I smooth the fabric out against the stone, laying it properly, giving myself something to do with my hands.
"I didn't — I wasn't thinking. I just." I clear my throat.
"I won't look. If you wanted to do the same. "
A long pause.
"Turn around," she says.
I turn around. I face the cave wall and look at the stone and listen to the rain and to the fire and to the soft sounds behind me that I absolutely do not think about, the rustle of cloth, the quiet of it. I look at the wall. The stone has interesting texture. I count the layers.
"Alright," she says.
I turn back and I try. I genuinely try. She's sitting beside the fire with her coat, shirt, and pants laid out on the stone to dry, her dark hair loose and damp around her shoulders, and she's — the problem is that she's her, precisely herself, green eyes catching the firelight, and the word I keep not-thinking sits there anyway.
Devastating. She is devastating, sitting in a cave in her underthings with her arms around her knees, and I sit down beside her and look at the fire and not at her.
She shivers.
"Come here," I say.
She glances at me sideways.
"Just body heat." I extend my arm, an invitation, nothing more than that. "I'm warm. You know that. You've complained about it twice."
"I haven't complained—"
"You said, and I'm quoting, you put out heat like a furnace, it's unreasonable—"
"That's not a complaint—"
"Aislin." I keep my arm where it is. "Come here."
She looks at the fire for a moment, working through something, and then she shifts and tucks herself against my side and I close my arm around her and she fits there exactly as I'd known she would, slight and precise and warm despite the shivering, and I feel her exhale slowly, degrees of tension leaving.
We sit in the fire's sound.
"I'm glad you were my partner today," I say.
She doesn't answer immediately. The rain hits the rock outside in sheets.
"I know I'm—" I try to find the honest version of this.
"I know I'm loud. I know that's most of what I am, most of the time.
I shout at sparring matches and I argue with Kerra and I'm not exactly quiet company.
" I watch the fire work through the deadfall.
"But I've liked this. What we've been building. I've liked becoming your friend."
Aislin shifts against me.
"Is that what we are?"
I look down.
She's looking up at me, and there's something open in her face that she doesn't usually allow — no barricades up, no sharpness held ready, just Aislin looking at me from three inches away with the firelight moving across her.
"Have I not earned it by now?" I ask. "Your trust? Your friendship?"
She's quiet for a beat.
"Yes." It comes out soft, almost a whisper. "I think you have."
I hold her gaze and she holds mine and neither of us look away.
"Do you regret it?" she asks. "The kiss."
"No." The word is immediate, no hesitation in it, because there isn't any. "I didn't want to press you. You ran and I—" I stop. "I wasn't going to push for something you weren't ready to give. I'll take whatever you want to give me, Aislin. As little or as much. I'm not going anywhere."
She looks at me for a long moment, reading me the way she reads everything, looking for the angle, the catch, and she doesn't find one because there isn't one, and something shifts in her face.
She kisses me.
It's soft at first, careful, the beginning of something rather than the middle, and then her hand comes up to my jaw and it stops being soft.
I make a sound low in my throat and kiss her back and she tastes like cold rain and warmth underneath it and I'm aware of her hand in my hair, of the fire beside us, and then of nothing else — genuinely nothing else, no cave, no storm, nothing except her.
She makes a small sound against my mouth and I feel it everywhere.
She moves, shifting, and her knee comes over my leg and then she's in my lap, weight settling against me, her hands braced against my bare chest, and I groan into the kiss and pull her closer and she sinks into me like she's been waiting to, like she's been arguing herself out of it for weeks, and the fire cracks and the rain keeps coming and I don't notice either.
She shifts in my lap and I feel it everywhere — the friction of her weight, the warmth of her skin against my chest — and I groan into her mouth, loud enough that it echoes off the cave wall, which is embarrassing, but she makes another small sound in response and I lose track of being embarrassed about anything.
But then it hits me.
Not like a thought — more like cold water, sudden and sharp. I pull back. Not far, just enough that I can see her face, enough to put an inch of honest air between us.
She stops. Her hands are still braced against my chest, her hair falling forward around her face, and she looks at me with her brow furrowed, that familiar sharp assessment snapping back into place.
"What?" she says.