Ursik
It takes a while for the rain to stop.
I notice the silence before anything else — the absence of it, the way the cave suddenly has a different quality without the constant percussion against the stone. Aislin is asleep against my chest, her dark hair spread out over my arm, and for a long moment I don't move.
I watch the fire. It's burned down to embers, still radiating enough heat that neither of us has gone cold, and I watch the orange pulse of it and think about nothing in particular, which is unusual for me.
I'm generally not a man who manages nothing in particular.
I'm a man who manages seventeen things at once, loudly, in sequence.
Right now there is only this.
Aislin, who I can finally stare at and think is unfairly beautiful without guilt. Aislin, who let me in and made me feel like the luckiest man in the fucking world. Aislin, whose moans will haunt me and I couldn't stop myself from making her come over and over just so I could hear them.
Aislin, who I think has stolen a bit of my heart.
She stirs when I shift to check the entrance, blinking up at me with sleep-blurred eyes, and something clenches in my chest at the sight of her — unguarded, that edge of her dissolved completely in sleep, just Aislin looking at me from the crook of my arm with no walls up.
"Rain stopped," I say.
She listens for a moment, confirming it, then sits up and pushes her hair back from her face.
I watch her look around the cave — taking stock, cataloguing, the habit she can't switch off — and I hand her her shirt from the stone beside the fire without being asked.
She takes it without comment, but the corner of her mouth does something.
"How long was I asleep?" she asks.
"An hour. Maybe more."
She pauses with her shirt half-on. "You should have woken me."
"Why?"
She doesn't have an answer for that. But I know why I didn't — because she doesn't sleep easily, I know that, because the girls in those cabins get checked on and walked past and never fully let her rest, because out here there was no one to be on guard for and she let herself go under and I wasn't going to take that from her.
But I don't say any of it. I fold the blanket instead, put the embers out properly, and let her pretend she would have wanted waking.
We gather our things and step out into the aftermath.
The world is all washed stone and quiet dripping, the light that particular pale gold of late afternoon after heavy rain, everything smelling of wet earth and cold water and something green underneath it all.
The river is running higher, louder. The path back to the settlement is going to be muddy and I'd like to apologize in advance to Aislin's boots, which did nothing to deserve today.
She picks her way along the bank beside me, stepping around the worst of the mud, and I watch the way she moves — easy, the same economical precision she has on the training ground, nothing wasted — and I think about her moving beneath me in the firelight, that same efficiency entirely undone, and I have to look at the river.
This is going to be a problem.
I've wanted women before. That's not new.
What's new is this — the specific, particular, maddening quality of wanting this woman, who I've spent weeks learning the shape of in an entirely different context, who I know how to make laugh and how to make furious and how to keep moving through a crowd that terrifies her, and who I now also know makes a sound low in her throat when I find the right angle, who digs her nails in and holds on and calls my name like I'm worth something.
I look at the river for a very long time.
She falls into step beside me when the path widens, close enough that our arms occasionally brush, and she doesn't move away from those brushes, which is something.
It might be the most she's ever not moved away from me, and I'm aware that this is my new baseline — measuring everything in units of how much she didn't pull back.
"Your egg," she says.
I glance at her.
"The dare." She keeps her eyes on the path ahead. "You never told me what it said."
I take the folded paper from my pocket. I've been carrying it since the hollow log and thinking about it intermittently in the way you think about something you're not ready to act on yet. I unfold it and hand it to her without a word and watch the path.
She reads it. I don't look at her.
"Bold living," she says. "Tell your partner one thing you want."
"Yes."
"You didn't do it."
"I'm doing it now." I keep my eyes forward. "I want this again. Not just today. I want — I want to keep whatever this is. I want to not go back to whatever we were before it, where I was pretending I didn't—" I stop. Try again. "I want to not pretend."
I'm not even fully sure what I'm asking. To court her? To bring her to my bed? To have her admit she wants me?
All I know is I need her the way I've never needed anything.
A beat of nothing except our feet on wet ground.
"Alright," she says.
I look at her.
She's looking ahead, chin up, but there's something in her profile that is not quite the controlled blankness she deploys as armor. There's color in her face that wasn't there before my question. She holds the paper out to me and I take it and fold it back up and put it in my pocket.
"Alright," I repeat.
"Don't make it a thing."
"I'm not making it a thing."
"You have a face that makes things into things."
"I have a perfectly normal face."
"You have a face like a man who is about to make a speech." She glances at me with that sideways assessment. "Don't make a speech."
I press my lips together. "Understood."
She nods, satisfied, and we walk.
I am desperately, completely, ruinously in trouble.
The settlement appears through the treeline as the light is going amber, the familiar shape of the perimeter, the smoke from the cook fires, and I slow without meaning to, not wanting to arrive at the point where I have to let her go back to her cabin.
I want to take her back to my quarters. I want her in my bed, wrapped in my blankets. I want to watch her sleep again in something warmer than a cave floor and spend the night learning every other version of the sounds she made this afternoon.
I keep that entirely to myself.
She slows with me as we reach the point where our paths diverge — she goes left toward the refugee cabins, I go right toward the barracks quarter, and we stand in the early evening air with the settlement around us and I look at her.
She looks back.
She is sore. I know she is — I took her more than once in that cave, gave her no reason to be anything other than completely wrung out, and the careful way she's been moving for most of the walk says more than she would ever say out loud about it.
The thought makes me feel simultaneously guilty and something else that I absolutely do not examine further in polite company.
"You should rest tonight," I say.
"I always rest."
"Aislin."
She tilts her head, reading me. "I'm fine."
"I know you're fine." She is the most aggressively fine person I have ever met. "Rest anyway."
The corner of her mouth. "You're doing the speech face again."
"I don't have a speech face."
She reaches out and puts two fingers against my jaw, adjusting it slightly, and the touch is so casual and so completely hers that my brain goes briefly quiet. "There." She drops her hand. "Less speech."
I stare at her.
"I'll see you in the morning," she says, and there is something in it — not a dismissal, not the pulling-back I'd been afraid of in the cave when I asked, something that lands more like a promise — and then she turns and walks toward the left path and I watch her go and I don't move for an embarrassingly long time.
When I finally turn toward the barracks quarter, I take two steps and stop.
Sore. She's sore and she's been out in cold rain, and the clever part of my brain — the part that functions despite everything else currently happening in my chest — presents me with a very clear directive. Falla. I need to go to Falla.
Not to tell him anything. I'm not telling Falla anything, because Falla will tell me three highly specific things in his particular flat tone and then stare at me until I feel appropriately managed.
But I can go to him for a tincture. Something for soreness. Something for a chill if she caught one standing in wet clothes for too long, which she won't admit to and won't treat herself because she doesn't treat herself, she treats everyone else.
I can leave it at her door in the morning without a word and she can choose to use it or she can look at it with her reading-for-danger look until she decides it's fine, but either way it's there.
I change direction toward the healing house.
The door is ajar when I arrive, firelight coming through the gap, and I push it open and begin:
"Falla, I need a — oh."
Ressa is sitting on the low table by the window with her legs folded under her, a cup of something warm in both hands, and Kerra is occupying the large chair beside the fire with her boots off and her feet on the footrest, looking entirely at home.
Falla is at the workbench with his back to me, doing something methodical with small clay jars.
All three of them look at me.
"Ursik," Ressa says, with a carefully neutral expression.
"You're back," Kerra says. "You look odd."
"I don't look odd." I step fully into the room and pull the door behind me and attempt to look like myself. "Falla, I need a tincture."
"For what." He doesn't turn around.
"Soreness. Uh, muscle soreness." There's a pause in which I can feel both Ressa and Kerra looking at me. I keep my eyes on Falla's back. "And possibly a chill. From the rain."
Another pause.
"You went through the storm," Ressa says slowly.
"Everyone in the hunt went through the storm. I'm being responsible." I cross my arms. "Do you have something or not?"
Falla turns around and looks at me the way he looks at everything — a flat, comprehensive, diagnostic look that takes everything in at once — and then he goes back to his jars without saying a single word. Which is fine. That's fine.
"Who's it for?" Kerra raises a brow.
"It's for me."
"You just said soreness."
"I said possibly a chill—"
"Ursik." She points at me with devastating accuracy. "You have come in here looking completely shaken and asked for a remedy you clearly don't need for yourself. Who is it for?"
I look at the ceiling. It is a very normal ceiling. "I need two, actually. One for each."
The room is very quiet.
"Ursik," Ressa says, and there is something in her voice that is careful and warm in equal measure. "Are you alright?"
"I'm fine," I say, to the ceiling. "I'm completely fine. I just need the tinctures."
Kerra stands up from the chair, abandoning the footrest, and comes to stand in front of me with her arms crossed. She is nearly as tall as me. She has known me most of my life, which means she has exactly zero capacity for my deflections and uses it.
"You got caught in the storm," she says.
"Yes."
"With Aislin."
"We were partners for the hunt. You were there when we left, you argued with me about it for twenty minutes—"
"You're different," she says, and the flatness in it is not unkind, it's just accurate, and she looks at me with that look that sees straight past whatever I think I'm doing. Her eyes narrow. "You're completely gone, aren't you."
"I am not—"
"You came in here with that face—"
Why does everyone keep saying that? "I don't have a face—"
"That is absolutely a face, Ursik, I have known your face for twenty-five years—" She turns to Ressa. "He has a face."
Ressa is looking at me with an expression that is soft and knowing and somehow more difficult to endure than Kerra's forensic accuracy. "He does have a face," she agrees, quietly.
I look at Falla, who is still at the workbench, doing his methodical work with his jars, and who has not said a single word since he told me to name my ailment, and who has also, I notice, begun quietly preparing two separate tinctures without any further instruction from me.
At least I can count on my friend.
But no one can help me get my head back on straight.