Something in me goes sideways. Not aggressive — more the particular alertness that arrives when the situation isn't what I'd arranged for in my head. I'd been thinking about the arm-block reversal. I had not been thinking about being looked at.
"Have a look," I say.
"He's been going on about you," she says, which is not what I expected. The directness of it is so undecorated that I don't immediately have a response to it. "Ursik. Not — it's not a bad thing. I just wanted to make sure he wasn't being a bully about the sparring. Or too pushy in general."
I think about the first morning. The way he'd come at me without softening it, without the careful calibration I'd seen in men who thought they were being kind by going easy on a woman who was smaller than them. The way that had felt like the first honest thing anyone had offered me since the Stonevein.
"He's not a bully," I say, and I hear that I mean it, and I decide not to think about that too hard.
Kerra's expression does something satisfied. Not smug — just the look of someone who has checked something off a list they'd been carrying. "Good." She rocks back on her heels. "He's got a big heart but he doesn't always have a quiet mouth to go with it. I wanted to be sure."
I'm trying to decide how to feel about her. She's clearly not a threat. She's clearly trying to be the thing I don't have a good name for — not friendly, exactly, or not just friendly. Checking in. Making sure. The impulse I recognize from standing in front of the other women with my arms out.
I'm not sure I want to feel good about her. It doesn't stop me from feeling it anyway.
The birch at the far end of the clearing moves, and Ursik steps through it.
He takes in the scene in one sweep — Kerra, me at the treeline, the particular quality of the silence — and his eyes narrow. It's a playful narrowing, which I've learned to distinguish from the strategic one. The expression of aperson who has found something that requires immediate interrogation.
"What," he says to Kerra, "are you doing here?"
"I came to show Aislin what a real arse-whooping looks like." She turns to face him fully, weight shifting forward onto her toes. "As a public service."
"Get out of my clearing."
"Yourclearing." She laughs, short and bright. "You've been using it for a few weeks and now it's yours."
"Squatter's rights. Ancient tradition." He points at the treeline path she came from. "Go away."
She doesn't go away. She moves toward him instead, and he moves toward her, and then they're grappling with the particular ease of two people whose bodies know each other's weight and habits, laughing, one of her hands coming up to shove at his shoulder and one of his coming up to block it, and neither of them is trying very hard and both of them are trying exactly enough, and there's an ease to it that I don't have a word for that doesn't sound like something I don't want to be thinking.
They break apart. Kerra steps back, still grinning.
"I'm going," she says, already turning toward the path. She glances at me on her way past, quick and warm. "Have fun."
And then she's gone into the birch, and the clearing is just Ursik and me and the frost-stiff grass and the cold air, and I realize I've been standing at the treeline this entire time like I'm watching something I wasn't supposed to see.
I walk into the clearing.
Ursik stretches his neck to one side, then the other. "Ready?"
"She follows you often?" I hear myself say.
"Kerra?" He looks at me, assessing the question. "She goes wherever she wants. It's mostly annoying." The wordannoyingcarries unmistakable warmth. "Why?"
"No reason." I roll my wrists out. "Come on, then."
He comes at me with the opening sequence I've started to read well enough to adjust for — a feint left, weight to the right, driving low — and I move, but something's off in the timing and his hand closes around my forearm before I've quite cleared the angle. I twist, the wrong direction, and he releases me before it goes anywhere.
He steps back. Looks at me.
"Where are you?" he asks.
"Right here."
"Your feet are here. The rest of you is somewhere else."
I reset my stance. He comes at me again and I do better — I get the redirect and put distance between us and land in something my feet are happy with — but I know he slowed down for the last half of it and I know he knows I know.
