"It absolutely won't," I say, cheerfully. "But you're welcome to try. If you can keep your feet on the beam, which I'm also skeptical about, no offense?—"
"I'll keep my feet on the beam."
"I'll believe it when I see it."
Aislin lifts her chin and stalks off, looking far too ready to prove me wrong. There's no hesitation. No fear. Which makes me feel justified in what I said to her.
Because she looks so damn beautiful like that.
Something I shouldn't be thinking but can't keep denying.
"Ursik."
Kerra has appeared at my left shoulder, which she does sometimes without apparent transit, a habit I've never been able to predict. She's watching Aislin walk toward the start line, and there's a specific quality to her attention that I recognize as the one she uses when she's turning something over.
"What," I say.
"She's beautiful." Kerra doesn't look at me when she says it. Her tone is entirely neutral, the flatness of someone making an observation rather than a point. "Fierce."
The word lands somewhere. Not because it's new information — I haven't been blind in the clearing, I've been the opposite of blind, I've been extremely thorough about exactly what I've observed about her — but because hearing it said aloud by someone else makes it take up space differently.
"She is," I say. I watch Aislin reach the start position and roll her shoulders back, and the line of her is exactly what Kerra said. Even in the hesitation, even with whatever that moment of uncertainty was, the sharpness of her doesn't go anywhere. It just gets pointed somewhere interior. "What are you getting at?"
Kerra shrugs. One shoulder. The kind that means she's said the thing she wanted to say and has no interest in elaborating.
"Kerra."
"Nothing," she says, and she says it like she means it, which is almost more infuriating. She keeps watching the start line.
Drogath gives the signal, making the crowd start to get loud in anticipation again.
Aislin moves — and something is wrong.
Not dramatically, not in any way the crowd would notice, but I've spent twenty mornings watching how she moves. She hits the first log jump slightly too cautious and the rhythm doesn't establish the way it should. On the second jump herplant foot slides half an inch and she compensates but it costs her momentum, and I can see the correction run up through her whole body. She's in her head. She's still partly in whatever that moment was at the start line, standing in the noise of too many people she doesn't know yet — too manyorcs— and it's bleeding into her feet.
I move.
I'm running along the outside of the course before I've made a full decision about it, parallel to her, which puts me ahead of her by one obstacle length because she's lost time, and I don't bother moderating my volume.
"You're slower than I thought," I call across to her. "My time's already safe. Relax."
She looks over. Even in profile I can see the irritation light up.
"I'm just getting started," she calls back.
"Are you? Because from here it looks like you're being careful." I put enough contempt on the wordcarefulthat it lands correctly. "The hare isn't careful, remember? Pamphlet was very specific?—"
"Stop quoting the pamphlet at me?—"
"Balance beam," I say, because she's coming up on it and I need her eyes forward.
She hits it at pace. Not Kerra's pace, not yet, but the wobble from the first section is gone and her jaw is set in that particular way it gets when she's got something to prove and it's me she's proving it to. The slick section doesn't take her. She adjusts before it can. Good foot placement, weight exactly where I'd told her in the fourth morning when we'd been working on her base.
"Better," I call. "Still not close. You'd need to find another second at least?—"
"I'mgoing," she says, through her teeth, and something about it is wonderful.
She goes.
