URSIK
There is a specific quality to Aislin's focus when she is working on something.
I've had two weeks of mornings to catalogue it — the way she goes still inside whatever storm is running underneath her when her hands have something to do, the particular set of her jaw when she's made a decision to engage and is not going to announce it.
During sparring she channels it outward, all the sharp edges angled away from her own body and toward the problem. Here, her hands are moving with that same attention but she isn't braced. The set of her shoulders isn't the same set I get at dawn. It's something else.
She is adding a third line to the egg. Red, parallel to the others, and the geometry is deliberate — she'd gone straight for the sharp edge of it, the lines even. She hasn't looked up from it in four minutes.
I keep working on my own egg and stay where I am and don't say anything, which is not my natural condition but which I have learned, over two weeks of mornings, is sometimes the right call with her.
On the far side of the tables I can see Kai watching Saela help the young one — Deva — find a color she likes. Saela has the particular patience with her that she uses when she is paying attention to how someone is doing rather than what they are saying, and Deva is holding a pale blue egg now and looking at it like it gave her something.
Falla is two tables down with Ressa, who has picked up a brush with the cautious enthusiasm of someone who is still getting accustomed to little things like this. He is watching her with a fondness I no longer find surprising on my friend's face.
I know what it looks like when a person has decided someone matters.
I look back at Aislin's parallel lines and keep that thought to myself.
She switches to the blue without commentary. Adds a line between the red ones, crosses it at the far end. The pattern starts to take on a structure that isn't accidental.
"You've done this before," I say.
"I've painted before." She doesn't look up. "Doesn't have to be eggs."
"What did you paint?"
"Walls." A pause. "My parents built much of the newer parts of our settlement. I helped when I was small enough to do the lower sections without a stool." She turns the egg, inspects the angle, adjusts her grip. "It was very decorative and not particularly useful."
"You're doing the same pattern."
"I'm doingapattern." She finally glances at me sideways. "What are you doing?"
I hold up my egg.
She looks at it. Her expression goes through a sequence of things, beginning with assessment and moving throughsomething like surprise and ending, briefly, on what I am almost certain is the early architecture of finding something funny.
"That's a circle," she says.
"It's a sun."
"It is a circle."
"Suns are circles."
"That's a generous—" She presses her lips together, which is what she does instead of smiling when the smile is trying to happen without her permission. "That's a generous interpretation."
"It's thespiritof a sun. Drogath said symbolic."
"He said the pattern builds the ward. Yours has one shape."
"One verypowerfulshape." I turn the egg. "It is, arguably, the most important shape. Peter the Long-Eared would be impressed."
"You're going to cite Peter the Long-Eared as a source for everything, aren't you."
"He is the authority here. I don't make the rules."
She turns back to her egg, but the pressed-lip thing is still happening, and that is — that is something I want to be careful with. Not in the way of being cautious. In the way of not rushing toward it and startling it off. She's standing at the table with her outer layer still on and her brush moving and the storm underneath her taking a breath, and I am aware, in a way I haven't been about much that isn't a tactical problem, of how much I want her to just — be here. Not on guard. Not scanning. Not planning the exit.
