"Fine."
"Wren said you've been up before sunrise every day this week."
"Wren should sleep later."
Saela almost smiles. She has a dry quality that I don't mind, which is more than I can say for most people. "Did he teach you anything useful?"
"Possibly." I look back at Shae. Deva has been joined by Pell now, and the two of them are standing inside the orbit of this orc woman who is not the Stonevein, and Pell is saying something that makes Shae laugh — a full sound, unguarded — and Pell, who I have not seen with her face open like that since before any of this started, is laughing too.
I am watching something happen in front of me and I cannot decide what to do with it.
My perimeter has always had one rule: I manage it. Everything and everyone who comes inside it comes in because I've decided they can. I am the line. The line keeps them safe. That's the arrangement.
Except here is Shae, inside the line, not because I moved it — or not exactly — but because the line has been moving, in small increments, without me quite deciding to move it. Five mornings of a clearing and an orc who shows up exactly when he says he will and doesn't cross a line I haven't drawn yet. Saela beside me, not pushing, not managing, justhere.And Deva's face doing the thing it just did, the opening.
I let out a breath.
I'm not where I was when we arrived. The weapons under my bed are still there — they will stay there — but I check them slightly less frantically in the night. I walked the perimeter this morning and found it the same as yesterday, which is not the same as safe but is something.
"She's good with them," I say, and I say it about Shae, because it's true and because I have to give truths their space or they start taking up more room than they should.
Saela follows my gaze. "She is." She doesn't add anything to it. Just lets it sit.
I watch Shae crouch down to Deva's eye level to hear something she's saying, patient and unhurried, and I think about the file, and how sometimes new information requires you to actually update the file and not just add to it. And I think about what Ursik had said, the very first day, about two steps being everything because two steps means you're already thinking about step three.
I'm not ready to call this trust. Not yet.
But I think I might be on step two.
6
URSIK
The gathering fire is already high by the time I get there.
I can hear it from the edge of the settlement — the particular quality of sound that a full clan makes when everyone is in one place, layered voices and boots on hard ground, children cutting through it all at a higher register. The fire snaps above it. Drogath's ceremony fire always burns too tall, which is either deliberate for dramatic effect or because he simply refuses to learn proportionality, and I have stopped being able to determine which.
The lunar cycle has turned. That much everyone knows because Drogath told everyone, at length, several days before he intended to tell them, because Drogath cannot hold a revelation in his chest without symptoms. He'd cornered me near the armory three days ago to inform me that he hadfound something.The precise nature of the something had been heavily withheld for effect. He'd looked at me with the expression he reserves for moments of personal greatness — chin elevated, eyes half-lidded, shoulders carrying the weight of arcane knowledge — and said only:
The Long-Eared One has been waiting.
I have been thinking about that ever since with the specific pleasure of not knowing what it means, because the not-knowing with Drogath is always better than the knowing. The knowing involves standing very still while he explains it to you.
I come around the far side of the longhouse, through the passage between the storage buildings, and the whole gathering opens up in front of me.
The clan is arranged in the loose half-circle that forms for announcements, the same shape we make for everything — mating ceremonies, border briefings, Drogath's increasingly elaborate interpretations of human tradition. There must be sixty people here. I scan the shape of it, looking for Kai and Falla, and instead I find something I was not expecting.
Eight women standing at the far edge of the half-circle.
My feet stop entirely.
They are standing slightly apart from the main gathering, in the way that makes sense — close enough to see and hear, far enough to have a clean line of exit. Seven of them are turned toward the fire with the forward lean of the genuinely curious.
Wren has her head tilted to the side, watching Drogath's attendants — yes, he's dragged other people into this — stack what appear to be bundles of something colorful near the ceremony table. Pell is saying something to Idris, quiet-mouthed, their eyes bright with it. Maret is standing beside Deva with a stillness that reads as cautious interest rather than fear, which is different from two weeks ago. I notice these things because I have been paying attention to these things, because their wellbeing is connected to Aislin's, and Aislin's is connected to whether the morning sessions work.
That is the reason I notice them. I'm certain of that.
And Aislin.
