Aislin
Today, I'm alone.
The other girls insisted that since they weren't participating, they should stay behind. I was surprised by how nervous I felt leaving without them.
The morning is pale and sharp, frost still sitting on the rooftops, and I walk the perimeter out of habit before I turn toward the hall. Three weeks ago I wouldn't have called it habit — I'd have called it necessary, essential, the kind of ritual that sits between you and disaster.
Today I do it because my feet know the path and because it settles something in my shoulders, and somewhere between those two things is the distance I've traveled since we arrived here.
I don't examine that too closely.
The ceremony is outside the hall, in the wide courtyard where they'd held the obstacle course.
There are more people than I expected — the whole clan, it looks like, gathered in loose groups with baskets in their arms or set at their feet, the morning light slanting long and gold across everything.
It smells like pine and beeswax and someone's baked something nearby, warm and sweet, drifting from the direction of the kitchens.
I'm standing at the edge of it all, basket in both hands, watching the crowd arrange itself, when someone steps up beside me.
Saela. She glances around — probably looking for her mate in the same way I refuse to admit I was looking for Ursik — before her eyes land on mine.
She's holding a woven basket with a blue ribbon, and there's something in the easy way she holds herself, in the soft smile and greetings she gives everyone as they pass, that makes even me feel calmer.
"Where are yours?" she says.
"They decided to sit this one out."
"Ah." She watches the crowd.
"They're fine," I say, and mean it, which is a strange thing to mean and feel simultaneously true. "Pell practically threw me out."
The corner of Saela's mouth moves. "That sounds right."
We stand there together for a moment in a silence that doesn't need filling. That's the thing about Saela — she doesn't perform comfort. She just exists beside you and somehow that's enough.
I think about Ressa telling me she'd done the same thing, the standing-beside-you-quietly thing, probably since they were children. I think about what it means to have someone who learned your silences before you knew what they cost.
Then Drogath arrives, and the moment evaporates entirely.
He comes from the hall doors with his beaded staff and his ceremonial robes — the deep blue ones he reserves for what he calls threshold moments — and his particular walk that manages to be both a shuffle and a procession depending on which angle you're watching from.
The crowd parts. Of course it parts. Drogath carries himself with the absolute conviction of a man who has never once considered the possibility that a room wasn't arranged to receive him.
"People of Frostfang," he begins, and his voice carries the way voices do when a person has spent decades making sure they carry, "and our honored guests—"
That would include me. Saela and I exchange a glance, and I find myself fighting a smile. I'm getting used to this, and I really can't help finding it amusing.
"—we gather today in the ancient tradition of the Offering, a practice stretching back to the very first humans who understood that prosperity is not a solitary condition.
" He raises his staff. One of the beads catches the morning light.
"The baskets we carry today are not vessels of object.
They are vessels of intention. Of knowing.
The ancient texts are clear on this point—"
"What ancient texts?" Kai mutters, loud enough to draw attention.
Saela covers her mouth at her mate's protest as he approaches.
"—the Offering asks us to look at another soul and say: I have seen you.
Not your surface. Not your armor. Your marrow.
" He touches his own chest with one hand, eyes closing briefly.
"The Long-Ear Bringer himself taught his people that a gift given without knowledge is merely an object. A gift given with knowledge is a bond."
I look down at the basket in my hands. The deep red cord I'd tied the top with, chosen because it was Ressa's color. The lavender inside that I'd twisted with yarrow. The green ribbon. The coin, the charm, the small white stone with its faint grey vein.
Saela glances over. "You look nervous."
"I'm not nervous."
She looks at the basket and then at me with an expression that is entirely too similar to Ressa's particular brand of knowing silence for my comfort. "You worked hard to make it look good. The cord is a perfect bow."
"I wanted it to sit right."
"Mm." She looks back at the front of the crowd where Drogath is still going, gesturing now at the sky as though the clouds have something to contribute to the proceedings. "It's a good basket, Aislin."
I don't answer. I tighten my grip on the handle and watch Drogath wrap up his speech with the particular theatrical deceleration of a man who has been told, at some point, that endings should land with weight.
"—and so." He lowers the staff. The crowd stills. "Go. Find your person. See them."
People begin moving, and the courtyard shifts from a gathered thing into something looser and warmer, small clusters forming and breaking apart, the sound of laughter and surprised exclamations threading through the morning air.
I spot Ressa near the far end, her red hair catching the light, standing with Falla who has both hands in his vest pockets and the quiet expression he wears when he's content.
I make my way over.
She sees me before I reach her and her face softens in a way that makes me feel like our slowly growing friendship isn't one sided — not the careful smile she uses for strangers, but the real one, the one that reaches her freckles. I hold out the basket and she takes it with both hands.
"Aislin." She looks down at it, at the red cord. Something in her expression shifts and settles. "This is mine?" She runs her thumb along the cord.
"I thought the color suited you," I say, because it's easier than saying the rest of it.
She unties the top and looks inside, going quiet in the way people go quiet when they're actually moved and have enough dignity not to perform it.
She lifts out the ribbon, holds it to the light.
Sets it carefully aside. The coin next, then the carved charm, then the stone with its grey vein catching the pale morning.
"White with grey," she says. "Like finding solid ground."
I don't say anything.
"The yarrow." She touches the herb twist. "Falla's told me about yarrow. Healing that comes after." She looks up at me. Her brown eyes are very bright. "You paid attention."
"I pay attention to most things," I say. "I'm good at that."
She laughs, quiet and warm, and then she steps forward and wraps her arms around me and I hold very still for a moment before I bring my arms up and hold her back, which is not something I do readily or easily and she knows that, and the fact that she doesn't make a thing of it is exactly why I could do it.
"Thank you," she says into my shoulder. "Really."
I step back. "Don't make it enormous."
"It already is." But she's smiling, and she pulls back and tucks everything carefully back into the basket and ties the red cord again, and I watch her turn to show Falla, who examines the stone with the solemn attention of a man who understands that certain objects carry weight beyond their mass.
I'm still watching them when something shifts in my periphery.
Ursik.
He's coming from the left side of the courtyard, moving through the crowd the way he always does — not carefully, just solidly, people adjusting around him the way water adjusts around stone.
He's got his basket in one hand and there's something in the set of his jaw that I can't immediately name. He's not grinning. He's not doing the loud, broad version of himself that he uses for an audience. He's just — coming toward me. Looking at me.
Something in my chest shifts.
I make myself stand still as he reaches me, and he holds out the basket without preamble, without a joke, without the deflecting layer of humor he usually keeps between himself and anything earnest.
"For you," he says.
I take it.
It's heavier than I expect. I look down at it — woven dark, practical, nothing decorative about the basket itself.
The cord tying the top is plain and well-knotted and the color is not arbitrary, a deep forest green that is exactly the color of nothing I own and everything I might if I'd ever had the luxury of choosing.
I don't know how he knew that. I stand there and I know that he knew that.
I untie the cord.
The yarrow twist is on top, and I recognize it immediately — Falla's work, the particular way he bundles dried herbs.
Strength through wounding. Healing that comes after the hard part.
I set it aside and reach in again and find the coin, and it's old and worn smooth and heavy in my palm the way only real use makes a coin heavy, not fresh-minted, not decorative. Something that has been carried.
Steadiness. I know it without being told.
There's a carved piece underneath it, small and precise, the carving careful in a way that says time rather than talent — someone who sat with it. I turn it over and it's a figure, not a warrior stance, not a weapon, just a person standing. Upright. Still.
I look up at Ursik.
He's watching me with that quiet expression that doesn't have a name in his usual register, the one I've seen a handful of times in the mornings when he thinks I'm not looking back.
I look down again. My fingers find the last thing at the bottom of the basket, and I already know before I pull it out that I'm not going to be ready for it.
The river stone is white with a faint grey vein and it is — it is identical in weight and look to the one I'd put in Ressa's basket. Not a coincidence. A conversation. Someone who paid attention to what I chose and understood what it meant to me and then gave it back.
The ground shifts.
Not physically. But something underneath the morning, underneath the courtyard and the noise and the smell of pine and baking and dried herbs — something that had been standing firm for a very long time makes a sound I don't have a word for, and I stand there holding the stone and I understand with the sudden terrible clarity of a person who has just looked down and found the edge much closer than they thought, exactly how far inside my walls he is standing.
Not at the perimeter. Not at the door.
Inside.
He knows which jokes land before I admit they've landed.
He knows why I check the treeline. He knows I keep three weapons under my bed because he listened, and he didn't flinch, and he kept coming back every morning, and somewhere in all of those mornings I stopped noticing I was letting him, and now he's standing here with a basket full of proof and I am holding a stone that mirrors the one I chose for the person I see myself most in this settlement and my hands are—
My hands are shaking.
I trusted Oliver. I trusted him the way you trust someone who grew up beside you, someone who knows your name before it meant anything, and he counted us up like inventory and traded us for goods and I remember standing in the Stonevein camp and understanding that there is no weight too small for someone to put on a scale with you, if the other side holds something they want more.
I've known Ursik for weeks. Weeks. And he was looking at me like—
"Hey." His voice drops, just slightly. "Aislin—"
I shove the basket back into his chest.
It hits harder than I mean it to and he catches it, surprised, off-balance for half a second — and that half second is enough.
I'm already moving, turning away from the look on his face and the stone and the carved figure and all of it, already pushing through the edge of the crowd with my heart hammering in my ears and the morning feeling suddenly very bright and very loud.
I don't run.
I walk fast, and I don't look back, and the courtyard falls away behind me.