He grins. It's a large grin — most things about him are large, it's inescapable — and it does what it does to his face,which is make him look approximately ten years younger and considerably less like something you should be wary of. I've been ignoring this particular observation since day two.
Day two had been when I'd been watching him demonstrate a hold on himself, explaining the angle of the torque, and I'd noticed the way the morning light hit the line of his jaw and how his hands moved — those enormous hands, three fingers on one side just a little off because of a story I'd heard from Wren who'd heard it from someone else, and isn't that something, that someone had cared enough to spend six hours putting them back — and I'd made the observation and immediately filed it underirrelevant.
It has continued to be irrelevant. I've been very thorough about that.
"One more," I say, because standing here is starting to feel like standing somewhere, which is not what I'm here for.
We run it one more time. He gives me a harder angle than I've had all morning, something that requires me to move first instead of waiting to react, and I do move first — I commit to it, down through the drop and through the rotation, and my forearm catches his wrist and redirects it wide and I'm already in motion, two steps, three, before I stop.
He looks at me across the clearing.
"Done," he says.
I nod. My breath is making small clouds in the cold air and my shoulders are hot under the chill of it and I am, under everything, in a better state than I arrived in, which is the whole point and also somehow the thing that keeps catching me slightly off guard.
I've always known that anger needs somewhere to go. I've been putting it through the walls of the cabin with my eyes for seven days, trying to turn it into watchfulness, into planning, into the controlled useful thing it needs to be. Here it goessomewhere with clean mechanics and a measurable result, and at the end of the session it has become something quieter. Not gone. Quieter.
I don't say this to him.
I pick up my jacket from where I'd draped it over the low branch at the edge of the clearing and he starts shaking out his arms in the way he does when we're done. There is a ritual quality to the endings — we both have one, I've noticed, a brief decompression before either of us speaks again. His is the arm-shaking, a checking of his own joints. Mine is the jacket.
"Same time tomorrow," I say.
"I'll be here."
"Don't be loud," I add. "Maret's headaches have been worse."
He pauses. Looks at me. "You want me to walk quietly past the cabins."
"I want you to exist at a lower volume in the general vicinity of someone whose head hurts, yes."
A beat.
"I can do that," he says, and he means it, I can hear that he means it, and that's another one for the file.
The cold has fully arrivedby the time I get back, the kind that sits in the shade and doesn't move all morning. I wash quickly, efficient with the water because I'm always efficient with supplies, and change into the dry layer I've kept set aside. Old habit. Always have a dry layer set aside.
Saela and Shae arrive mid-morning.
I hear them coming from the far path — Shae's voice carries, warm and carrying and not quiet about it, and Saela's a lower counterpoint beside it. I'm sitting outside the second cabin on the stump I've claimed as a general observation post, and Iwatch them come through the tree line and track them the way I track everything that moves on the perimeter.
I track Shae slightly longer than I track Saela.
She is an orc. I know she's — I know what they've told me she is, what her place is here, what Ressa has said about her in the careful gentle way Ressa says things she wants you to receive properly. I know she's the one Bronn listens to. I know she checks on all of us, or tries to, and that I have been the specific reason thetrieshasn't becomedoes.I have been very clear about that boundary and she has, to her credit, not pushed it.
She doesn't look like the Stonevein.
I know that doesn't mean anything. The Stonevein had not looked like what they were, at first. They had looked like an opportunity — like someone else's problem to worry about until they became mine because the man who'd handed us over had said so and I had trusted him until that moment because I was a fool. Looks don't mean anything. I have that carved into me.
But she doesn't look like them.
She's standing outside the first cabin now with her hand on Deva's shoulder — Deva who has not slept cleanly since we arrived, who wakes up twice a night with the sounds still in her — and Deva is not pulling away. Deva, who pulls away from everything, is standing there with Shae's hand on her shoulder and her face doing something that isn't the compressed tight-featured nothing it usually is.
I watch that for longer than I mean to.
Saela drifts toward me. She doesn't make a production of it — doesn't make eye contact from a distance and signal her approach like I'm a skittish animal, just moves through the space in my direction and ends up nearby in a way that gives me the full option to decide whether that's a conversation or not.
"How was this morning?" she asks.
