Ursik
Istand there for three full seconds after she disappears into the crowd.
The basket is in my hands. The cord she'd barely looked at, the stone she'd held for less than a breath before pressing the whole thing back into my ribs like I'd offered her something she needed rid of.
The courtyard carries on around me — laughter, the clink of objects being drawn out of baskets, Drogath's voice somewhere to the left narrating someone's exchange with the satisfaction of a man watching his own prophecy prove itself — and I just stand there like I've been planted.
I've stood in front of blades with less of this particular stillness.
Kerra appears at my shoulder. She looks at the basket, then at the space where Aislin was, then back at the basket. She says nothing for a moment, which is actually the most unsettling thing about it.
"Don't," I say.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were going to."
She considers this. "I was going to say you should probably not stand there holding that basket with that face on you for much longer or Drogath is going to notice."
She says it a half-second before he arrives, which means she saw him coming and timed it, and I file that away for later.
"Ursik." Drogath draws up beside me with the particular solemnity of a man who has been waiting his whole life for this exact dramatic beat.
His beaded staff shifts as he plants it.
He surveys the empty space where Aislin had stood, then the basket in my hands, then back again with the slow, mournful sweep of someone composing a ballad in real time. "Your offering was rejected."
I look at him.
"This is significant." He lowers his voice, which means he raises it slightly and adds a resonant quality that he probably calls gravitas. "The ancient texts speak of this — when the gift is turned away, it is an omen—"
"Drogath."
"—the spring herself recoils, and the coming season—"
"Drogath—"
"—carries the weight of this refusal like frost that—"
"I will remove your head from your body if you keep talking." My voice is very flat. "I will do it with my hands, which is harder than using a blade and takes longer and I will not mind. If you say one more word about the spring, I will find out if that staff floats and test it in the river."
He blinks.
Silence, for just a moment.
Then Kerra steps slightly to her left — not away from me, just a small repositioning that says I am not part of this and also I agree with him and also you should leave — and Drogath reads the room with the survival instincts of a man who has been threatening with decapitation for most of his life and closes his mouth.
He retreats with enormous dignity in the direction of someone else's basket exchange.
Kerra watches him go. "Smooth."
"Don't."
"I genuinely wasn't." She turns toward me and the humor drops out of her face, replaced by the version of her that doesn't perform anything. "Go find her."
"She pushed the basket back, Kerra."
"I know what she did."
"If she wanted me there, she—"
"Ursik." Her hand lands on my arm, solid and still.
The same way she'd stopped me from stepping off a ledge on a Stonevein raid when I was reading the ground wrong and didn't know it.
"She's not pushing you back. You know the difference.
You've always known the difference." Her gray eyes hold steady. "Go find her."
The basket is heavy in my hands. I set it down on the nearest table, next to someone's abandoned cup and a scattering of herbs, and I walk.
She's in the clearing like I expected
I come through the tree line and she's standing in the middle of the sparring ground with her arms crossed and her back half-turned, looking at the far edge of the tree line the way she looks at things when she's deciding whether they're a threat or just furniture.
The frost is gone from here — the clearing catches the morning sun earlier than the rest of the territory — and the light is coming through the pines in long, quiet slats that fall across her shoulders and the dark mess of her hair.
She doesn't turn when she hears me. She knows my footfalls by now. She'd told me once, three weeks ago, that she'd catalogued the sound of every person who moved through the settlement and she said it like it was a practical thing and I'd thought yes, of course you did.
"I don't need you checking on me," she says.
I cross the clearing and I don't stop until I'm standing a few feet away — close enough that she'd have to make a choice about whether to look at me, not close enough to crowd her. I know the difference. I've learned it morning by morning by morning.
"I know," I say.
She still doesn't turn.
The trees move. The light moves. Somewhere behind us, very distantly, the sounds of the courtyard drift through the pines and then don't.
"I know you didn't come here looking for — any of this," I say.
"Me included." I find the words slowly, not the way I usually talk, which is fast and loud and takes up space on purpose.
This isn't that. This wants to be careful.
"I know I'm a lot. I know I can be — I know the noise of me doesn't always help, and I know this has all moved fast and maybe that's on me. Maybe I've pushed too—"
"You haven't pushed," she says. Quiet. Slightly grudging, like admitting it costs her something.
"Alright." I breathe out through my nose.
"Then let me say it plainly. You want time, I'll give you time.
You want a friend, I'll be your friend. You want to be left completely alone and never have this conversation again—" I pause, because I want to mean this and not just say it, "—I'll give you that too.
I'll wait. I'll be here in the morning and I'll be your sparring partner and I'll be the loudest idiot in the settlement and I'll be nothing else unless you decide you want something else. That's it. That's all I'm saying."
The line of her shoulders shifts, something tightening and then releasing in the same breath.
"I won't push. I won't—" I make myself stop before I start listing promises as though volume is the same as meaning. I start again. "I want what's good for you. Whatever that looks like. Whatever you need to feel steady and safe and yours. I'll find it and I'll give it to you."
The pause stretches long enough that a bird starts up somewhere in the pines, a short bright note, and then quiet.
"What if it's not you?" she asks.
It's not a challenge. It comes out smaller than that, genuinely uncertain, and that small uncertain quality hits differently than a challenge would. I'd know what to do with a challenge.
But I hear what she's asking: what am I willing to give if I get nothing in return?
"Then I wait," I say. "I'll be your friend.
I'll show up every morning and I'll give you everything you need and I'll be patient for as long as it takes for you to know — really know, not just think, but know — that I'm not going anywhere and I'm not going to hurt you.
" I don't move closer. "I can do that. I will do it without a second thought. "
She turns.
It's slow, deliberate, the kind of turning that's a decision.
She's looking at me now with those green eyes that are always doing three things at once — assessing, guarding, calculating — and underneath all of it something else that I've watched grow for weeks without naming it because naming it felt like pressure she didn't need.
"That doesn't make sense," she says. Her brow draws together, not in anger.
In genuine confusion. "Orcs take what they want.
I've seen it." Her voice doesn't waver but the word seen carries the specific weight of someone who means it literally.
"They don't give time and space. They don't wait.
They don't listen or care or any of the things you do, Ursik, and sometimes, I'm not sure what to think of you. "
I reach for her. Not grabbing — just my hand, open, moving toward her face slowly enough that she can watch every inch of it, slowly enough that she could step back, turn away, tell me no.
She doesn't.
My fingers find her jaw, just barely, and I tilt her chin up the smallest amount so she's looking at me straight and even and there's nothing between us except six inches of morning air.
"Some orcs might," I say. "Some are cruel and selfish.
Just like some people." My thumb moves once, careful, along the line of her cheekbone.
I don't tell her I know that her friend sold them, that Wren told me the story and how it cut Aislin personally.
I don't admit that I've always known her trust was broken above anyone else's.
"All I want is for you to be happy. That's it. That's everything."
She studies me, and I feel like I'm watching her walls finally break. They crumble under the weight of everything I've said.
Not into grief — not the way things broke open in the Stonevein compound, not the way she'd looked the morning she told me about learning she'd been sold in clipped, controlled sentences while we sparred and I'd stood there absorbing every word and not moving until she was done.
This is something else. Her resolve giving way not because it was broken down but because the person who built it up has decided, consciously and at cost, to open the gate.
She closes the six inches between us and kisses me.