Ursik
SIX MONTHS LATER…
Iwake before Aislin does.
That happens sometimes — my body clocking sunrise before my brain catches up, the old soldier's habit of snapping alert at the first grey light.
But where once I'd be on my feet with my boots half-laced before the thought formed, these days I stay exactly where I am. I've gotten very good at that particular stillness. It's the best kind of discipline I've ever practiced.
Aislin is curled into my side, her cheek pressed to my chest, her dark hair splayed out against my arm in the way it always manages to escape whatever she's done to contain it the night before.
She's smaller than me in every measurable way and somehow takes up more of the bed than any person I've ever slept beside.
I've given up the left side entirely. It's hers now.
She migrates there in her sleep like it was always owed to her and I find I don't mind in the slightest.
Her breathing is deep and even. No tension in her shoulders. No tight set to her jaw.
She sleeps like this now. Loose, open, taking up the space without bracing for something to snatch it back.
It took months. I watched it happen so gradually I couldn't have told you the exact morning when the difference settled in, only that one day I looked at her across the training yard and she was laughing — properly, from the belly, at something Kerra had said — and I thought: there she is.
Not the Aislin who arrived here with a split lip and three weapons under her bed and eyes that catalogued every exit in the room before she'd sit down. That woman is still in there, still part of her, still the thing that makes her her. But she doesn't have to be her all the time anymore.
I pull her a little closer. She makes a sound against my chest, not quite awake, and her hand tightens in my shirt.
Six months. I turn the number over. It doesn't feel like six months in the way that time usually does, all the dull spots and long stretches.
It feels like six months' worth of things I want to remember.
The first morning she beat me in a sparring drill and didn't bother hiding how pleased she was about it.
The first time she sat at the fire with Kerra and Ressa and laughed unabashedly.
The afternoon she stayed to help Falla reorganize the healing house and he told me later, in his bluntest possible way, that she had a better instinct for it than anyone he'd trained.
The look on her face the first time Saela pulled her into a hug and she didn't flinch.
The night she told me she wanted me.
And the next morning when I convinced her to move in.
That one I keep at the front where I can reach it.
I'd already known — in the way you know things before they're said aloud, the knowing that lives in the body before it reaches the mouth — but hearing it from her, from Aislin, who spent so long treating the words like a vulnerability she couldn't afford, sat in my chest like a banked coal.
Still there. Still warm when I reach for it.
She stirs. Her nose scrunches first, then her eyes open, green and sharp even before she's fully awake, and she tips her chin up and finds me watching her.
"You're so weird," she says. Voice rough with sleep.
"What?"
"You're staring." She presses her face back into my chest. "You do it every morning. It's unnerving."
"You find everything unnerving. Remember when you tried to bash my head in?"
She huffs. "When will you let that go?"
"Never." I press my mouth to the top of her head. Her hair smells like the herb rinse Ressa gave her, something green and sharp that suits her completely. "Good morning."
She tilts her head back again, and I lean down and kiss her — soft, unhurried, the kind of morning kiss that has nothing to prove. She makes a quiet sound against my mouth that she would absolutely deny later and I tuck it away with all the other things I keep at the front.
She pulls back and studies my face with that particular Aislin assessment, the one I used to find unsettling before I understood that it isn't suspicion, not anymore. It's just how she looks at things she cares about. She looks hard at the things that matter to her.
"You're in a very good mood," she says.
"I'm always in a good mood."
"You're in a suspicious good mood." Her eyes narrow. "What did Kerra do?"
I school my expression into something innocent. I've had years of practice looking innocent and I'm terrible at it. "Kerra hasn't done anything."
"You're a dreadful liar."
"Good thing I don't do it much." I move before she can press further, swinging out of the bed. "Come on, up. We're going to be late."
"Late for what?"
"Training." I find my shirt on the back of the chair where she folded it last night — she does that, folds things with a precision that is completely at odds with every other aspect of her personality, some habit she probably formed when every possession was something she could afford to lose — and pull it over my head.
"Your footwork on the left side has been lazy. "
"My footwork on the left side," she says from the bed, sitting up with her hair spectacular around her face, "has been a point of deliberate tactical deception."
"It's been lazy."
"It is a strategy."
"Get dressed."
She throws a pillow at me. I catch it without looking. She makes the small exasperated noise that means she's pleased and starts getting up, and I look away and grin at the wall before she can see it.
The morning air is crisp. Fall is coming in and the air is changing with it — the river now running cold enough to shock you sensible if you're foolish enough to wade in, which I know because I've done it twice in the last month and Falla lectured me both times.
The settlement is already alive with movement; voices carrying from somewhere near the cook house, the distant rhythm of guards doing drills in the yard.
Aislin walks beside me. Close enough that our arms brush every few steps. She doesn't hold my hand in public, not yet, but she leans in. She's been leaning in for months and I've never once named it aloud because some things you just take, quietly and gratefully, and you don't make a fuss.
She's talking — something about Deva, who has started working with Shae in the cookhouse, and about how Pell has been spending time with one of the younger patrol orcs and won't say a word about it to anyone which Aislin finds hilarious for reasons she can't quite articulate to herself.
"It's because she tries to look like she doesn't care about anything," she says. "And she obviously cares about him enormously. It's very uncomfortable to watch."
"The irony," I say pleasantly, "of you finding that uncomfortable."
She elbows me in the ribs. My ribs are roughly the width of a wagon but she finds the gap anyway, same spot every time, which I suspect is intentional.
"I was nothing like that," she says.
"You tried to set me on fire with your eyes the entire first two weeks I knew you."
"I was assessing you."
"You called me a hazard to public safety."
She pauses. "You are a hazard to public safety.
That's not relevant." But she's fighting a smile.
I can see it pulling at the corner of her mouth, at the scar there that has faded to a thin white line.
I can read her face now the same way I read weather — the small shifts, the subtle tells, the difference between the smile she gives strangers and the one she gives me.
I steer her right, off the path toward the training yard.
She notices immediately. "Training's that way."
"I know."
"You've turned us the wrong way."
"Have I?" I keep walking. I can feel her looking at me — the full weight of the Aislin assessment, suspicious and sharp — but I don't look back.
"Ursik."
"Almost there."
She stops walking. I turn to find her standing with her arms crossed, eyes narrowed to slits, her whole posture radiating the specific energy of a woman who has spent six months learning exactly which of my expressions mean trouble.
"I am not walking into an ambush," she says. "Not even for you."
"It's not an ambush." I hold out my hand. She looks at it. She looks at my face. The look goes back and forth twice, the calculation running, and then something in her shoulders drops a fraction and she takes it.
Her hand in mine still does something to me. Every time. I'm not above admitting that.
I lead her through the pines, down the narrow path toward our new clearing — the one we found by accident three months ago when she'd dragged me away from a particularly tedious supply inventory to walk off her restlessness, and we'd ended up here where the trees opened to a wide flat space with a view down the valley, and she'd gone quiet in the way she only does when something strikes her as genuinely beautiful.
We step through the tree line and I feel her hand tighten on mine.
The clearing is full.
Kerra sees us first and her grin splits wide, the obnoxiously pleased grin she's been wearing every time I've looked at her for the past four days because she cannot keep a secret if it is physically killing her.
Beside her, Wren claps once, small and delighted. Saela is there, standing with Kai who has the mild expression he wears when he's actually deeply content about something.
Ressa's face has gone soft, leaning back into Falla who looks, for once, exactly as pleased as he is.
Shae has her hand to her mouth. Bronn is standing with his arms crossed and a look that could pass for his resting expression except that I've known him long enough to read the warmth underneath it.
The other girls — Deva, Pell, Idris, Maret, Corrie, Niobe — all of them, scattered through the clearing, and every single face is turned toward the two of us at the tree line.
Aislin has gone completely still.
"Ursik." Her voice is very quiet.
"Happy birthday," I say.
She doesn't move. I watch her take it in — the clearing decorated with spring flowers and colored ribbon, the table someone has loaded with food, the fire already built at the center, every person she has spent six months painstakingly, cautiously, sometimes grudgingly letting into her life standing here together.
"How did you even know?" She turns to look at me and her green eyes are bright, and she blinks once, deliberate, the way she does when she's managing something that has caught her off guard. "I never — I didn't tell anyone."
"Pell told Kerra," I say. "Kerra told me. I was sworn to secrecy about my source but Pell already knows I'm terrible with secrets so I imagine she's forgiving me from over there as we speak."
From across the clearing, Pell gives a small wave that confirms this entirely.
Aislin makes a sound — something between a breath and a laugh — and then she steps into me and her arms go around my waist and she presses her face into my chest and I fold both arms around her, one hand at the back of her head, holding her there.
She shakes once. Just once, the way things do when something that's been held very tightly lets go.
"We weren't going to just let it pass," I say into her hair. "You should know that. None of us were going to let it pass."
She pulls back and her hands come up to my jaw, cupping my face in both palms the way that still undoes me every time, and she looks at me for a long moment. The look she gives the things that matter.
"Do you like it?" I ask.
Something moves across her face. The sharp edges of her, all that careful armour, all the things she earned the hard way — still there, still hers, just with more room around them now for the rest.
"I love it," she says. "I love all of it." Her thumbs sweep once across my jaw. "But not nearly as much as I love you."
My chest fills up like a room with a fire lit in it.
"I love you," I say. The simplest true thing I know.
Her smile breaks wide — the real one, the one she gave no one for months, the one I get to see every day now — and she keeps her hands on my face like she's anchoring us both.