"To fight." He says it plainly, no decoration. "Self-defense. Anyone who wants to learn. It might help with the recovery — movement's good for the injuries, Falla said so — and I thought —" He stops. Restarts. "You shouldn't have to feel like the only thing between them and whatever you think is coming."
My jaw tightens. Not at the offer. At the accuracy of it — that he's looked at me and read something I didn't intend to show him, and that it's in the open between us now and I can't put it back.
"I don't trust you," I say. Blunt. No softening.
"I know." He doesn't flinch from it. "Come train with me once. Just once. See if it'll help."
Ressa is quiet. She hasn't intervened, and I find that I'm aware of her as a different kind of variable — not a threat, not an ally, but something in between. A person who has donesomething I don't understand yet, which is survive whatever happened to her and end uphere,choosing to stand beside him.
I look back at Ursik.
He's watching me with the particular quality of someone who has made their case and is now simply waiting, which is either patience or the confidence of someone who doesn't expect to be refused. I can't tell which. I add it to the map in my head, next to:good peripheral awareness, lowers his height consciously, drops the friendliness when it stops landing.
More time with him means more information. It means watching him move, learning how he telegraphs, learning where the weight goes in the pivot — the places where something that large has to commit before it can stop itself. It means understanding, properly, what the actual gap is between me and an orc at close quarters, instead of theorising about it from forty feet of treeline.
I know what she'd say, Pell.You're allowed to stop, Ais.She'd look at me coming back from a training session with an orc and she'd call it something it isn't. But Pell is in the cabin, and the cabin doesn't patrol itself.
"Once," I say.
He's stupid grin makes me almost regret it.
4
URSIK
We set up in the clearing behind the second cabin because it's the most defensible open space I could find when I arrived, which means Aislin has already found it too. I know this because when I suggest it, she just turns and starts walking without asking where it is.
I file that.
Ressa had stayed at the first cabin, which I'd expected. She'd said something quietly to Aislin before we left — something too low for me to catch — and Aislin had given her the short nod of someone who hasn't decided yet whether they're grateful. Ressa had caught my eye over Aislin's shoulder and made a face that meant:try not to be an idiot about this.
Fair enough.
The clearing is good. Not too large — large enough that there's room to move, small enough that it stays comprehensible. The frost is mostly off the ground here, which helps; I don't need her going down on bad footing before we've even started and deciding that's my fault. The trees on the north side break the wind. The light is decent.
She stops at the edge of it and turns to face me.
She's changed her weight distribution already — I can see it, that subtle shift where the back heel drops half an inch and the hips square up. She doesn't know she's done it. Someone's trained her before, or she's learned it from watching, or she's spent enough time bracing for impact that her body has worked it out on its own. Either way.
"Right," I say. "Show me what you've got."
Her eyes narrow. "I thought you were teaching me."
"I'm teaching you what you're missing. First I need to see what you've already got." I spread my hands. "Come at me."
"You're three times my size."
"More like four." I keep my voice level. Not flat — level, which is different. Flat saysI'm not interested,level saysI'm listening.I've been figuring out, in the two minutes it took to walk here, that this woman reads everything, and I need to be careful about what I let her read off me. "I'm not going to do anything yet. I just want to see how you move."
She looks at my hands. At my feet. She's doing what I'd do — reading where the weight is, checking the arms. Then she moves.
She's fast. Faster than I'd clocked from watching her at distance, and she's quiet with it — no telegraph, no shifting of the shoulders — and she goes for the wrist, which is exactly right. Not the chest, not a swing, but the wrist, because the wrist is the point of mechanical control. Get the wrist and you redirect the whole arm, and if you can redirect the arm you've changed the angle of the threat.
I let her take it.
She gets two fingers around my wrist — as much as she can manage, the span of her hand not quite reaching — and she yanks, stepping sideways and ducking under the arm in a motion that is half-remembered and half-instinct and would absolutely work on someone smaller than me, or someone who wasn't braced for it.
I don't move. I'm a wall. She comes to the end of the yank and the wrist doesn't go anywhere, and for just a second — just the edge of a second — I see the calculation in her eyes before the frustration moves in behind it.
