Aislin
Iknow I'm smiling as I come back from this morning's training session, but I don't care. In the days since the cave, I've been feeling like something has been rearranged inside me.
Not broken, not worse — rearranged. Like furniture that was placed defensively and has been shifted to somewhere it actually makes sense.
Ursik had grabbed my hand when I tried to dart away at the end of our session this morning and pulled me back, and I'd kissed him before he could say whatever smug thing he was building up to, and it had worked on him the way I'd intended — short-circuiting whatever came next — and then backfired entirely because I'd ended up pressed against a tree with both his hands at my jaw and my brain somewhere in the middle distance.
I'm not going to examine that too closely.
The morning air is still cold but the light is different now — that particular spring brightness that comes on like someone turned up the wick, everything sharper and cleaner than it was two weeks ago.
My boots are still slightly stiff from the rain three days ago, no matter what I do to them. Ursik told me this morning that I should oil the leather. I told him that he could oil the leather himself and he'd laughed so loudly that I'm certain they heard it on the other side of the base.
I'm lighter. I notice it the same way you notice you've been carrying something for so long that you forgot it was there, and then you put it down for a moment and your shoulders come up. I feel like that.
I still check my perimeter. I still have the weapons under my bed and I'm not moving them, and when I came through the treeline this morning I clocked every point of entry out of pure reflex, but underneath that the running hum of dread is — quieter. Not gone. But quieter.
Which is why, when I push open the cabin door and find Saela standing inside with Shae beside her and six refugees crowded in the front room of the cabin looking not alarmed but interested, my immediate instinct is that something is wrong.
I stop in the doorway.
Saela looks at me, and the smile that crosses her face is so genuinely bright that it takes me a second to recalibrate. "There she is."
"What happened?" I ask.
"Nothing happened." She tilts her head. "You could come in, actually."
I come in. I look at Shae, who is standing near the window with her arms loosely folded and a bundle of fabric samples draped over one arm, and at the girls — Wren on the floor with her legs folded under her, Pell perched next to Deva, Maret standing by the fire, all of them with that particular quality that means they've been mid-conversation.
Idris has her bad ankle up on a pillow. Corrie is in the corner, quiet as always, but she's turned toward the room instead of away from it, which is something.
"We had come to check on everyone. But after this, Shae and I are going to get ready for the last event," Saela says.
I look at the fabric samples on Shae's arm. At the small pile of objects on the table that I hadn't registered at first — carved wooden bits, dried herbs in paper twists, coins, a spool of ribbon. "It's…baskets, right?" Ursik had mentioned it.
"The basket offerings," Shae says, in a tone that lends it exactly the weight that Drogath would want it to have and also the weight of someone who has been doing these festivals long enough to find them genuinely charming against her better judgement.
"Drogath's already done the assignments.
We came to give you yours. We each make a basket for whoever we're given, fill it with things that are meant to bless them. "
I look at the pile of items on the table. I think about eggs with dares on parchment and the obstacle course and Ursik running alongside the fence telling me to move, and the cold tight thing in my chest does its rearranging thing again.
"Who said I'd participate?"
"You've been at every other event," Saela says, not unkindly.
"That doesn't mean—"
"Drogath already wrote the assignments." Shae produces a folded square of parchment from her pocket.
"He assumed. You know how he is." She extends it toward me with a look that isn't quite a challenge and isn't quite an invitation but sits somewhere between the two — the look of a woman who has watched this work before and is patient enough to let it work again.
I take the parchment.
I don't open it immediately. I look at the girls.
Wren gives me the small, steady look she uses when she's communicating without words — the patient one that she's had since before we arrived, the one that says this is alright, actually.
Pell is watching me with her hands clasped.
She cares about this. She cares about most things with the particular earnestness of someone who hasn't let go of it yet, and I've stopped wanting her to.
I unfold the parchment.
Ressa.
The name sits there in Drogath's cramped, slightly theatrical handwriting, and something moves through me that I wasn't prepared for — a small, specific lurch of feeling that I don't immediately have a word for. Not surprise.
I know Ressa. We've talked. She was the one who sat with me in the dark after the kiss and didn't push, just listened, and told me what it was like to be afraid of wanting someone.
She was held by the Stonevein. I know that without knowing the specifics, the same way I know it about all of us — the particular texture of damage that comes from the same source.
And she found her way to Falla, and I found my way to — something — and neither of us could have been told that this was coming when we arrived here.
"Alright," I say.
Saela's smile does something at the edges that I don't comment on.
I put the parchment in my pocket and cross to the table and look at the objects spread across it.
Shae comes to stand beside me, and for a moment we both just look at the options — the coins, the little carved charms, the dried herbs, a folded scrap of green cloth, a small jar of something amber, a single pressed flower that's been preserved flat and still holds its color.
"The idea is prosperity in the coming year," Shae says.
"Or that's the official version. Drogath will tell you about the spiritual significance for approximately twenty minutes if you ask him.
" She picks up one of the carved charms — a small figure with its arms out.
"But really you're just putting together things that feel right for the person. "
"Things that feel like them," Saela adds, coming around the other side of the table. "Or what you want for them. Both."
I pick up one of the dried herb twists and turn it over. It smells like something medicinal — not unpleasant, clean and slightly sharp. "What's this one?"
"Lavender and yarrow," Shae says. "Falla grows it. It's for calm." She looks at the table rather than at me. "Some people like it for the symbol. Some people use it."
I set it aside in a small pile without saying anything.
Saela is looking at the pressed flower. She doesn't ask me who I'm making the basket for — I don't know who she has and she doesn't know who I have and I'm not inclined to share, and yet somehow I know she isn't going to push.
She picks up the flower instead and holds it out to me. "This one's heartsease," she says. "Old word for it. It was always supposed to be for comfort, I think. After hard things."
I look at the flower. It's purple, the petals still slightly translucent where the pressing has thinned them, and it's very small and very whole.
"Keep it," I tell her.
She closes her hand around it, then nods. She puts it in her own pocket, quietly, and I don't ask.
We work at the table for a long time. The cabin fills with the low noise of women talking, Pell and Deva arguing cheerfully about which coin is luckier based on a criteria I cannot follow, Maret asking Shae something about the green cloth that turns into a longer conversation about weaving.
Corrie moves from the corner to the edge of the table at some point — I notice it but I don't note it aloud, because she's been doing that, incremental repositioning, and drawing attention to it would stop it.
I find a small piece of deep green ribbon and hold it against the back of my hand. Ressa has red hair. Green would work. I don't know why that matters to me but I put it in the pile.
"That's a good color," Shae says, not looking up from the basket she's helping Wren line with strips of cloth.
"Mm."
"Whoever it's for has good coloring, I'm guessing."
I don't answer. She makes a small sound of satisfaction that means she already knows or suspects, and she's pleased with herself, and I let it go.
The lavender and yarrow goes in. The ribbon.
A small coin with a mark on it that Shae tells me means steadiness.
A carved charm that I pick because it's small and precise and well-made, because it looks like something chosen rather than grabbed, and it feels right to give someone something that was chosen carefully.
I find a small smooth river stone at the bottom of the supply pile — polished to something near-perfect, white with a faint vein of grey — and I hold it in my palm for a moment.
I know what it's like to find something solid.
I know what it's like to finally feel the ground under your feet after running for so long that you'd forgotten it existed.
Ressa has found that. She found it in Falla, and I've seen it even from a distance, and it looks — not like rescue.
Like landing. Like someone who had been holding themselves up for years finally let a wall take some of the weight.
I put the stone in the basket.
"You're a natural at this," Saela says, appearing at my shoulder and looking down at the basket. She doesn't know who it's for, but something in her expression suggests she's putting things together, and she doesn't say anything further, and I like her for that.
"I'm putting objects in a container," I say.
"The intention is the hard part."
I look at the basket. The ribbon, the coin, the herb twist, the charm, the stone.
I think about Ressa in the dark, telling me about the moment she realised what Falla was to her.
The way she'd described it — not as something gentle, but as something inevitable, like trying to hold a river back with your hands and finally accepting that you are going to get wet.
I don't have words for what it feels like to make this for her. It's something adjacent to solidarity. Something that shares a root with the recognition you feel when someone understands the specific shape of your particular fear without you having to build them a map of it.
Something that might, if I pressed it, be called gratitude.
I find a small length of deep red cord in the supply pile and use it to close the basket, because it's her color, and because I want there to be at least one thing in it that is specifically and only hers.