His grin doesn't change shape but it changes quality — something specific in it, pointed at me, a frequency I've started to be able to read.
He says something to Kerra without looking away from me. She looks over, sees me, and does something with her mouth that might be a smirk if it were on anyone less composed. Then she turns back to whatever she was saying and Ursik walks over, and I fix my face.
"You came," he says.
"I said I might."
"You saidit might be." He marks the exact words back. The grey eyes are warm. "That's practically a commitment."
"It's categorically not."
Wren, to my left, makes a very quiet sound that she converts smoothly into a cough when I look at her.
Drogath clears his throat on the platform. The gesture is theatrical — his whole body participates in it — and the crowd settles into the particular attention that Drogath commands not through authority but through the sheer curiosity of what he'll say next.
"Children of the Frostfang." His voice carries with the practice of someone who has never entertained the possibility of not being heard. "In the ancient wisdom recovered from the human texts?—"
Kai closes his eyes, clearly fighting the eye roll that Ressa does not.
"—it has been revealed that the Hare survives not through size, nor strength, but through the speed of the clever mind and the quickness of the fleet foot." Drogath unfurls the parchment fully, in the manner of someone unveiling a treaty. "The Trial of the Hare calls us to prove ourselves worthy of the spring's gifts. You will face the course. You will not fall. You will not lag." He pauses for emphasis. "The Long-Ear Bringer is watching."
"What is a Long-Ear Bringer," Idris says, very quietly, next to Pell.
"I genuinely don't know," Pell whispers back.
Ursik crouches down next to me — which brings him only slightly less enormous, proximity-wise — and says, low, next to my ear, "He found a pamphlet. About a rabbit."
"And built an obstacle course from it."
"He also built a shrine, but Kai had it taken down before the morning."
I don't smile. I almost smile.
The first competitors go, two young guards who take the log jumps with aggressive confidence and lose most of it on the balance beam. One of them hits the slicked section and goes sideways into the mud with a sound that makes the whole crowd wince and then immediately laugh, including the guard himself, which tells me something about Frostfang that I've been slowly accumulating evidence for.
Ursik shouts commentary the entire time they're on course, which is predictable, though some of it is surprisingly specificabout technique and I find myself listening more to the second half than the first.
"Kerra's next," he says, tracking the rotation. "She'll be fast. But she won't be fastest."
"You're very confident."
"I'm accurate." He glances at me sideways. "Different thing."
Then it's Kerra's turn, and I watch her move and understand why he said what he said — she's fast, genuinely fast, her footwork on the balance beam clean and deliberate and not the overcautious shuffle that had slowed the two guards down. She drops into the sprint finish at full pace and clears the hanging hides with her shoulder down like she'd done it before. The time someone calls out is good.
She finds us in the crowd and points at Ursik. The gesture means something I don't need translating.
"Encouraging," he says.
"She'll beat you," I say.
He turns to look at me directly. "Watch me."
And then it's his turn, and he's stepping forward toward the start, and something about the shift in him — the way the ease of him folds up and gets replaced with a different kind of attention, focused and clean — catches me before I'm ready for it.
He moves differently on the course than he moves in the clearing. In the clearing I know his patterns, I've mapped the habits of him, I know what his shoulders do before he commits to something. Here, watching him take the first log jump with a controlled power that makes it look effortless, I'm watching him cold.
The balance beam — he goes faster than Kerra did, weight low and centered, adjusting mid-step when the slick section tries to take him and correcting before I'd even seen the slip. The rope pull is when I stop pretending to be a casual observer. The muscles in his arms and back do something under the skin thatI have no business cataloguing as carefully as I do, but my eyes have their own opinions, and they're thorough.
