Ursik
Iget the parchment from Drogath at the same time as everyone else, standing in the loose crowd outside the hall where he'd called us together to hand out the assignments.
He'd made a ceremony of it — of course he had, it's Drogath — walking through the group with his beaded staff clicking on the frozen ground and his robes catching the morning wind, pressing the folded squares into each person's hands with the particular gravity of a man delivering something sacred.
I unfold mine before I've taken three steps.
Aislin.
I stand there for a moment with the wind off the mountains cutting across the base and the noise of the clan dispersing around me, and I read the name twice.
Then I fold the parchment back up very carefully and put it in my vest pocket and walk directly to Kerra.
She's already watching me. She has her assignment in her fist and she's wearing the expression that means she already knows and is delighted by the fact that I don't know she knows.
"Don't," I say.
"I haven't said anything."
"You don't have to."
She holds up her own assignment, though I can't see who it is. "Most people have already started preparing for this," she says, walking beside me toward the training yard, "and I'll wager two coins that you haven't thought about it once because you were too busy mooning over—"
"I've thought about it."
She looks at me with both brows raised, which is the expression that on anyone else would require words.
"I've thought about it a little."
She makes a sound in the back of her throat that means that's what I said. "So what are you putting in it?"
I don't answer. The training yard is quiet at this hour, just the stakes and the weaponry rack and the long scar in the dirt from an earlier session.
It reminds me of when I'd swept Aislin's feet and she'd dragged me down with her and we'd ended up in the mud laughing until she remembered herself and pulled her expression back toward neutral.
Which never quite works anymore because I've seen the real one too many times now.
I know what her actual laugh looks like.
I know the version that breaks out before she can stop it, the one that reaches the corner of her eye on the left side.
I know which jokes land before she admits they've landed.
I turn that thought over and then turn it back and then put it somewhere useful.
"She doesn't have much," I say. I don't care if Kerra knows. I won't be able to keep it in.
Kerra looks at me. She's dropped the teasing register, which she does sometimes with no warning, just switches into something quieter and more direct. "No," she says. "She doesn't."
"None of them do. They arrived with nothing.
Whatever they had before—" I stop. I know what was done to the women the Stonevein had.
I know some of it from the rescue when we got Ressa, and the rest in the way you know things in this clan, through the particular silence that settles around a subject nobody wants to describe in detail.
"Well, they don't have it now. And her priorities have shifted.
She keeps three weapons under her bunk."
She chuckles. "I knew I liked her."
I look down at my hands, at the three fingers on my left hand that Falla spent six hours putting back in the right order, and think about what it costs a person to turn damage into architecture.
To build the wreckage into something they stand behind.
"She always says she's fine. She acts like she can weather any storm, and I just…
" I sigh, so terrible with words that aren't ridiculous jokes.
Kerra sits down beside me. She doesn't say anything, which is the thing I like best about her — she knows when silence is the more useful tool.
"I want her to know I see her," I say. "Not the sharp edges. Not the weapons. Not even the woman I've been sparring with, though I like her too." I look at Drogath's folded parchment in my palm. "The actual person. The one underneath all the walls."
Kerra is quiet for a moment. Then she says, "So put that in the basket."
"Very helpful. Thank you. That really solves it."
"I mean—" she shoves my shoulder with enough force that I have to brace, "—think about what you actually know about her. Not what she's told you. What you've seen."
The problem is that I think about it for three days and every time I get close to something right, it slips sideways on me.
I know things about Aislin. I know them from the mornings, which is the most honest time to know anyone — before the day has given them something to perform against.
I know she runs a perimeter check before she speaks to me, even now. I know she takes up space differently than she did three weeks ago, less compressed, but still coiled, still ready, the way a spring holds tension even when nothing is pressing it.
I know she's funny in a way that sounds like cruelty until you realize she's saving the actual cruelty for people who deserve it.
I know she held those women together for months in Stonevein captivity through sheer will and razor wire and that she's still doing it, still walking the edge of their little camp, still putting herself between them and any threat she's identified — real or probable.
I know she kissed me first.
I know that every time she pulls back from something — a kiss, a good moment, the afternoon in the cave that I'm not thinking about, I'm absolutely not thinking about it, I haven't thought about it at all — she doesn't run from me the way she did at the beginning.
She just resets. Checks the exits. Comes back.
That's not a woman who doesn't want this. That's a woman who is very carefully making sure she chose it.
But I know she's caring and kind. That she's funny and competitive. That she’s smart and sometimes I make her laugh and it's the best damn thing I've ever done.
I go to Falla on the second day.
He's in his workroom, which smells like dried herbs and the particular clean sharpness of whatever he uses to wash the worktable. He looks up when I come in, looks down at the poultice he's working on, looks up again.
"You look terrible," he says.
"I need to know what plants mean things." I sit down on his stool uninvited. "For the basket."
He puts down his pestle. He studies me with the expression he uses when he's deciding whether to be blunt immediately or take a running start at it. He goes for immediately, because he always does. "You drew Aislin."
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't have to." He crosses his arms. "You've been walking around base for two days like you're trying to solve something.
You only get that look for training problems or personal problems, and you haven't asked me about any injuries, so.
" He tilts his head at the rack of dried herbs above the worktable.
"Lavender for calm. Yarrow for strength through wound — healing, but the kind that comes after.
Rosemary is for remembrance, if you want it to mean something about not forgetting.
" He pauses. "Heartsease is older. Comfort after hard things. "
I look at the rack. The light through the small window cuts across the bundles at an angle, and everything smells like the beginning of spring, and I think about Aislin standing in cold morning air with her jaw set and her eyes moving over the treeline.
"Yarrow," I say.
"I'll tie some up for you." He turns back to his worktable. Then, without looking at me: "She's doing better than you think."
"I know she is."
"I mean—" he picks up his pestle, "—she's settling. Not done. But the direction's changed." He grinds something. The sound fills the quiet. "Don't put anything in that basket that makes her feel like she's still broken."
I look at the side of his head. I want to say something cutting, but the truth is he knows his people, Falla, and he's been watching these women for weeks with the particular attention of a healer who takes his work seriously.
And he's right. I don't want to give her something that says you survived.
I want to give her something that says look what you're doing now.
"I know," I say.
He nods once and doesn't say anything else about it.
Kai finds me on the third day.
I'm sitting outside the hall with a collection of things spread on the table in front of me — the yarrow twist from Falla, a small coin that Kerra had declared was "good weight, don't ask where I got it," two wooden carvings I'd pulled from the communal supply, a length of cord, a small river-polished stone — and I'm looking at all of it with the expression of a man trying to read a map in a language he only partially speaks.
Kai sits down across from me. He looks at the objects. He looks at me.
"Not a word," I say.
"I'm sitting."
"I can see you forming a comment."
He picks up one of the carved wooden figures I'd rejected — it's a warrior pose, arms raised, very clearly combative — and holds it up with one eyebrow raised.
"Too obvious," I say. "She's not a fighter for sport. She fights because she had to. Giving her something that makes that look like a personality trait rather than a survival mechanism felt—"
"Wrong," Kai says.
"Yes."
He sets it down. He looks at the rest of the table.
He's good at this — reading a room, reading a spread of objects the way he reads a map, taking in the whole picture before he speaks.
It's why he's a better commander than me, though I'd sooner eat the training beam than say that out loud to him directly.
"What do you want her to understand?" he says.
"That I see her." The words come out before I've decided to say them, and I leave them there because they're accurate.
"Not—" I move the carved figure aside, "—what she does.
Who she is. She's been armor for those women for months.
She runs herself into the ground every morning, she checks every perimeter, she put herself between them and every threat real or imagined, and nobody has—" I stop.
"Nobody's looked at the person doing all that and said you don't have to be the weapon right now. You can just be."
Kai is quiet for a long moment.
Then he says, "Then tell her that."
"In a basket."
"Ursik." He meets my eyes. "She'll understand."
He gets up and leaves me with the table, and I sit there with the morning light coming across everything and Kerra appearing in my periphery with her arms folded and the particular quality of silence that means she's been listening from the doorway for at least two minutes.
"Don't," I say.
"You're nervous," she says.
"I'm not nervous. I don't get nervous."
"You've rearranged those objects eleven times."
I look down at the table. The objects are in a different configuration than they were ten minutes ago. I don't remember moving them.
"Tell anyone," I say, "and I'll put frogs in your bunk."
She sits down where Kai was, pulls the table toward her, and looks at everything with the critical eye she uses for scouting assessments. "Alright," she says. "Let's actually do this."
I watch her sort through the objects, and the nervousness — which is definitely not what this is — sits in my chest like a stone I can't identify, and I think about Aislin's face in the morning light and the way she'd looked at me after the cave with something new in it, something that wasn't armor, and I want her to have that.
I want her to know that I know what it costs her.
That she doesn't have to spend it, not with me.