She hits the rope pull and it's not elegant — she hasn't built the upper body for the length of it the way I have — but she drives with her legs instead, which is what you're supposed to do, and I find I'm grinning without permission as I run the outside to keep pace with her.
"Sprint," I call. "Everything you've got. You're still behind my time?—"
"How far behind?—"
"Far enough that you need to stop talking and run."
She stops talking and runs.
She comes through the hanging hides at full pace, shoulder down the same way Kerra had, and she's through the finish with every scrap of speed she had left and I cross the sideline a step after her and catch her — she's still carrying the forward momentum and the turn is too fast and I have both arms around her before the physics of it finish resolving, and she's breathing hard against my shoulder and neither of us has moved yet.
It's a moment. It's more than a moment. The warmth of her, the way her breathing is coming in fast against the side of my neck, my arms around someone who three weeks ago would have put a weapon between us before I'd gotten within two feet. The crowd noise is happening somewhere outside the immediate fact of this, and I feel her register it at the same time I do, the brief tension that checks whether she's going to pull back.
She doesn't, quite yet, and I don't let go either.
Eventually, she does, though, and I have to release her. We both turn back to watch the rest of the competition and then the announcement without another word. Because all I can think about is what it felt like to hold Aislin close.
I don't even care that Kerra wins. My time was just shy.
But of course she won. She's been running that kind of course since before I was promoted to captain, and she hit the sprintsection like she had something personal against the ground, and her time came in clean and fast and entirely deserved. She makes a face at me across the yard that communicates all of this without requiring words.
Aislin's time came in just behind mine. That put her third overall, which is remarkable, something I didn't say because she would have done something with it that I wouldn't have liked.
The crowd disperses into smaller shapes, the familiar post-event noise of the clan finding its natural clusters. Drogath is already writing something down with the gravity of a man recording history, and I suspect he's annotating the pamphlet with today's findings.
Kerra has been absorbed into a group of the younger guards who want to argue about her technique. She throws me a look over her shoulder as she goes, and I read it correctly: it says nothing at all, and therefore says everything.
I haven't let Aislin get far.
Not deliberately. Not in a way I planned. But the crowd has moved in particular directions and I've moved in one of them and she's moved in the same one, and the net result is that we're standing perhaps four feet from each other in the thin clearing that the dispersing bodies have left behind, and she's still getting her breath back properly, color in her face and her dark hair further gone from any containment it had started the day with.
I keep thinking about my arms around her.
It's a problem. It was six seconds from the outside looking in, and it was purely the physics of momentum and an ill-timed turn, and she'd stepped back and I'd let her go and we'd both watched the competition and that had been that.
But the warmth of it is sitting somewhere I can't quite file away — the reality of her that close, breathing against my shoulder, the moment where she didn't pull back. Three weeks of mornings in the clearing and she'd never been that closeexcept in the specific geometry of a hold, which is a different kind of close entirely, which is about reading leverage and angle and doesn't do whatever this is doing to my concentration.
I should probably stop thinking about it.
"I'll walk you back," I say.
She looks at me. Not the threat-assessment look, not theI'm about to say something that will require your full attentionlook. The one that's harder to read, the one that's been appearing more recently, that sits somewhere between weighing and considering and something else I haven't named yet.
"You don't need to," she says.
"I know."
The look holds for another moment. Then she turns and starts walking, and I fall into step beside her, and that's how it is.
The path between the main yard and the outer cabins cuts through a stand of birch, and the festival noise drops behind us in stages — first the crowd, then the individual voices, then almost entirely, until what's left is our footsteps on the path and the ordinary sounds of the settlement going about its afternoon. It's the quietest I think I've ever been with her. The mornings have their own rhythm, instruction and effort and the specific back-and-forth we've built, and that's never quiet. This is different.
She doesn't seem to need to fill it.
I find, unexpectedly, that neither do I.
We walk. The birches are doing something thin and pale against the spring sky. I'm aware of the space between us, closer than she usually allows on a path, close enough that her arm nearly brushes mine when the path narrows. She doesn't move away.
I've been thinking about what Kerra said.Fierce.Said in that flat observational tone, the one she uses when she's not making a point so much as just setting a fact down where it can be seen.
