"Don't."
"I'mnot saying anything?—"
"Yourfaceis saying something."
He covers his mouth with one hand, which does absolutely nothing. His eyes are completely incapable of concealing the fact that he is very pleased with himself. I collect my outer layer from the fence post and sling it over my shoulder.
It is only when I'm three steps away, the frost crunching under my boots and the settlement beginning to stir in the middle distance, that I notice: my heart rate is from the sparring and nothing else. He had me locked down, no movement, and my heart rate is from the sparring and nothing else.
He'd had me in a hold.
I hadn't panicked.
I don't turn around. I keep walking and I take that information and I put it somewhere quiet to sit with, and I don't know what to do with it yet, so I don't do anything with it yet. I walk back toward the cabin in the pale spring morning and I think about Deva decidingyeswhen she was frightened, and Pell knocking on the wall before the fire was fully caught, and I think about going somewhere instead of watching others go.
I think about a small painted egg sitting on a table like it belongs there.
That ishow I find myself, at midday, standing at the edge of the gathering ground with Wren on my left and Pell on my right,surrounded by the entire Frostfang clan and what appears to be a table covered in small bowls of color.
"This is ridiculous," I say.
"It looks fun," Wren says.
"Those are not mutually exclusive," says Pell.
Saela finds us before we've been standing there a full minute — she appears from the direction of the longhouse the way she tends to, direct and without ceremony, and something in her face does something quiet and warm when she sees all of us. Not surprised. Something better than surprised.
"You came," she says.
"We were invited," I say.
"You were." She doesn't make more of it than that, which is one of the things I have reluctantly noted about her — she knows when to leave space around things. She falls into step alongside us as the gathering moves forward, Shae appearing on the other side of Pell, and the women from the cabins fold into the current of the clan without ceremony and without being made to feel the difference.
I watch Deva's shoulders drop half an inch. I watch Corrie look at the colored bowls on the table with the expression of someone who has encountered a small, unexpected piece of the world being good.
I scan the assembled crowd until I find the cluster of them — Falla and Ressa together, which is where they always are, and a massive figure beside them with ice-blue eyes and the bearing of someone accustomed to being the most important person in a room. Kai. Saela's mate. I know who he is by the way the crowd gives him space and by the way Saela's posture changes slightly when she angles toward his direction.
Ursik is standing with them. He sees me at the same moment I see him. The expression on his face does not do the grin. It does something else instead — something that is two parts pleasedand one part something I don't have a word for — and then he turns back to Falla and they are talking about something.
Drogath ascends.
This is the only accurate description of what happens. He moves to the front of the gathering with a pace that implies he has come from somewhere more significant than the rest of us, and he raises his arms, and the collected Frostfang clan does the thing they always do for Drogath, which is fall quiet without being asked to.
"The first Observance," he says, allowing the words the full weight of ceremony, "of Easter."
He draws the word out the same way he had yesterday, and again I hear it passed through the crowd —Easter, Easter— the low murmur of something new being tasted.
"The Dyeing of the Shells." He gestures wide at the long tables that I can now see have been arranged in a large open square, each one holding shallow bowls of deep color — reds and blues and greens and a yellow so bright it hurts to look at — and between them, the rounded wooden eggs, dozens of them, pale and waiting.
"The ancient texts are clear," Drogath continues, with the authority of a man who has not entertained the possibility that the ancient texts are not clear at all, "that the brightly colored shells drive away the dangers that lurk at the threshold of new spring. Each pattern, each color, a ward. Each shell, when completed, a protection." His voice drops. "You are not painting eggs. You arebuilding shields."
Wren makes a small sound of interest beside me. Pell has already started walking toward the tables. Deva is looking at the colors with an expression that wants something it hasn't let itself want yet.
"This is not how shields work," I say, to no one in particular.
"It's symbolic," Wren says.
"It's paint on wood."
