She's working on the forearm redirect, the last repetition, and she gets it clean — properly clean, the rotation through the hip, my arm swinging wide into nothing — and she stops. Shakes out her hands. Looks at the clearing like it's told her something useful.
I don't saygood job.She'd bite me for it.
"Same time tomorrow?" I ask instead.
She turns. Studies me for a moment with the same face she's been running all morning, the one that checks everything twice. Then:
"Be here after sunrise," she says. "I'm not waiting around."
I put my hand to my chest. "You're giving me orders now."
"Apparently." She turns for the treeline. "Don't be late."
"Yes, ma'am," I say, and I don't entirely keep the chuckle in.
She doesn't turn around. But I see it — the small sideways movement of her head, the set of her jaw shifting — and it is, unmistakeably, an eye roll. Contained, compressed, barely there. Gone before she steps between the first trees.
It's the best possible outcome. I hold onto that the whole walk back.
I'm almost to the main path when Kerra hits me.
Not by accident — Kerra doesn't do anything by accident, which is the thing people underestimate about her until she's already got them in a hold. She comes around the side of the storage building at a pace that is technically walking and actually a small controlled collision, her shoulder catching mine with enough force to knock me half a step sideways.
"Oi," I say.
"Ursik." She falls into step beside me without breaking stride, which is how she operates — the attack and the greeting are one motion, you catch up or you don't. "You've been in the woods."
"Observant."
"I'm always observant." She glances at me sideways. "Pestering the poor girls again?"
"I'm not pestering anyone." I pull a bit of bark off my sleeve. "I'm teaching."
"There's a fine line between the two, with you."
"That's unfair."
"Is it?" She tips her head. "Because I watched you 'teach' Bren last month and the man came back from three sessions looking like he needed a long lie down and a quiet conversation with the gods."
"Bren needed to actually commit to a swing. I was helping him commit."
"You yelled at him until he swung just to make you stop."
"That also worked," I say. "He swings fine now."
Kerra makes a noise in her throat that she uses specifically when she's decided not to win an argument because the argument isn't the point. I know all her sounds. We've been side by side since before either of us was old enough to be trusted with a patrol, and she is easier to read than she thinks she is, which I have the sense not to tell her.
She's quiet for a few steps. The path back to the main buildings curves through the edge of the tree cover, and the light comes through in flat grey sheets, the spring still making up its mind. She's got her guard jacket on, one toggle undone at the throat the way she always does it, and she walks with her hands loose at her sides.
"Those girls," she says, and her voice has dropped the edge. Not soft, exactly — Kerra doesn't really do soft, it's not her natural register — but lower. More careful. "They've been through a lot."
"I know that."
"Do you?" She's not needling. She's checking. "I mean it, Ursik. Not in the way where you know it and you feel bad about it and you move on. In the way where you're making decisions about it."
I look at her. "What does that mean?"
"It means—" She pulls a breath through her nose. "You've got a big heart. Biggest one I know, under all the noise. But you're loud, and you push, and for most people that's fine because mostpeople aren't—" She pauses. Turns the words over. "They haven't been managed by people bigger than them. You understand what I mean?"
