The almost-smile is there for three full seconds.
I want to say something about it. I want to tell her that her hands do something particular when they have a task to care about, or that she is teaching me things in these mornings that have nothing to do with sparring technique, or that when she'd first looked at us across the clearing two weeks ago like she was calculating how fast she could put us all down, I'd thought — briefly and inexplicably —there you are.Some person-shapedfeeling of recognition that I haven't been able to account for since.
I don't say any of that.
Instead I look down at my egg — the optimistic circle, the improved horizon — and then I look at hers, and I say, "What do you call a bad egg at a festival?"
She doesn't look up. "Don't."
"A shell of its former self."
The silence that follows is approximately two seconds long. It is a silence with texture. And then she makes a sound — short, involuntary, punched out of her by something that got past her guard before she could position against it — and it is the smallest and most complete thing I have heard since the first morning she'd disarmed herself out of the knife-crouch and just looked at me with green eyes that already knew every angle of the space between us.
She covers her mouth with the back of her wrist. The brush is still in her hand.
"That," she says, from behind her wrist, "was terrible."
"But you laughed."
"I made anoise?—"
"That was a laugh." I am not doing the grin. I am doing something I have less control over. "That was definitely a laugh."
"It was a sound ofsuffering?—"
"I accept both." I look back at my egg with the sun and the improved horizon and feel something settle in my chest that I have no tactical framework for whatsoever. "It was a laugh."
Aislin turns back to her egg. She puts a line on it with more force than strictly necessary. But the corner of her mouth is still doing something.
9
AISLIN
The morning is cold enough to sting the inside of my nose, the kind of early-spring cold that hasn't decided yet whether it's committed to becoming something warmer. I move through it with my hands in my sleeves and my breath making small white shapes ahead of me, following the path through the treeline that my feet have started to learn without my eyes needing to help.
Two weeks of mornings will do that. Muscle memory isn't just for fighting.
Behind me, the cabins are quiet. Deva had a bad night — I'd heard her through the wall, the particular kind of wakefulness that isn't peace — but by the time the sky started going grey she'd gone under again, and I'd checked on everyone before I'd left.
Pell was sleeping with one arm thrown over her face. Wren had her blanket pulled up past her ears. Maret's breathing was even. The window latch on the second cabin still doesn't quite close the same, but I'd taken the iron piece out of my collection and wedged it differently, and now it holds better than it did.
I check on them every morning before I leave. I don't think about why I started doing that separately from checking on them the rest of the time. I don't examine the specifics.
The path bends left through the last cluster of birch and opens onto the clearing, and I'm already rolling my shoulders back, already thinking about whether I'm going to try the arm-block reversal again or go for the foot sweep I've been working on, when I see that someone is already there.
Not Ursik.
I stop at the treeline.
The orc woman is standing in the middle of the clearing with her arms folded, looking at the frost on the grass like she's evaluating it professionally. She's a guard — or built like one, which in Frostfang amounts to the same thing. Green skin a shade lighter than Ursik's, dark hair cropped close on the sides and longer on top, a posture that saysI occupy this space and I am comfortable about it.She's young, or younger than I'd expected. Not as large as Ursik, but large in the way that makes me automatically revise my estimates of what I could and couldn't do against her.
She looks up when she hears me at the treeline, and her expression does something open and uncomplicated.
"You're earlier than I thought you'd be." She unfolds her arms. "I'm Kerra."
I stay where I am. "And you're here to trespass on my sparring session?"
"Not quite. Though it's a great spot to do so." She gestures at the clearing like it's hers to gesture at. "I wanted to have a look at you before Ursik got here."
