"I know." She opens her eyes and looks at me, and her expression is easy, no particular agenda in it. "You don't have to, though."
I stand in the opening of the path for a moment that goes on a little too long, and then I come in and sit on the grass a few feet from her rock, because the alternative is going back to the birch grove in my own head and I've been living there for the last twenty minutes and it hasn't improved anything.
The sky above is very blue still, with the first of the evening color starting at the edges.
"You ran well today," Ressa says.
"Thanks."
"Third overall." She glances at me briefly. "That's not nothing, in this clan. The guards train daily."
I nod. I know. I know because I've spent weeks in a clearing at sunrise learning that their daily training is thorough and unglamorous and has produced people who move like a different category of problem than anything I've had to navigate before. I know because I have been one of those people, partially, and the knowledge of it is still strange to me.
Ressa is quiet for a while. She's good at quiet. It doesn't accumulate the way some people's silences do, building pressure until something has to be said into it. She just sits with it, turning the waterskin over in her hands.
"Something happened," she says.
It isn't a question.
Normally, I wouldn't tell anyone. But Ressa seems to understand me better than most, and I've buried too many things down deep. My stores are full and this one is pushing me over the edge.
"I kissed Ursik." I say it at the sky. Flat. The same voice I'd use to saythere's a structural problem with the eastern fenceorwe need more lamp oil.Information delivery. Entirely controlled.
Ressa makes a small sound. Not quite a laugh. Not quite surprise, either — more like someone setting a thing gently on a table.
"Right," she says.
"It was—" I stop.
I have about four different completions for that sentence and none of them are going to come out in a useful shape.It was fineis a lie so extravagant I can't fit my mouth around it.It was a mistakeis what I've been telling myself on the walk over here and it hasn't settled into anything true yet.It was the most present I've been in monthsis the version I'm not going to say aloud to anyone.
"Complicated?" Ressa offers.
"I don't do that." I pull my knee up, rest my arm across it. "I don't—I don't like letting people too close."
"And you did."
"And I did." The words sit in my mouth like a confession I didn't plan to make. "For about thirty seconds I was just — not anywhere useful. And he was—" I stop again.
"Large," Ressa says.
"I was going to saythorough."
A pause. "Also large," she says.
"Also large." Something in my chest does an uncomfortable thing that is adjacent to laughing, and I press my mouth into my knee to keep it where it belongs. "I know what I'm supposed tothink about this. I've run it. He's an orc. Three months ago I was in a cage with—" The sentence hits a wall and I let it stop there. "I don't know how to trust that this isn't the same machinery."
The evening birds have started somewhere in the treeline. Small sounds, unconcerned with anything that's happening on this rock.
Ressa turns the waterskin over again. Once. Twice. Then she sets it down.
"I was in worse shape than you when they brought me here," she says. "I'm not saying that for comparison. I'm saying it because you should know that I sat in a cabin for weeks and Falla brought my meals to the door and didn't come in unless I asked, and I still thought—" She exhales. "I still thought every time that it was the precursor to something. That it would tip over. That there had to be a corner where the face he was showing me stopped being the face he had."
I'm listening.
"There wasn't a corner," she says. "He kept being the same person at every angle I looked at him from. And that was—" She laughs a little, at herself. "That was somehow the hardest part. Because I knew how to handle cruelty. I'd learned that. I didn't have the first idea when it came to kindness and understanding, how to handle someone thatcared."
I think about twenty mornings in a clearing. I think about Ursik running the outside of the course, loud and irritating and absolutely deliberate, and the way he'd looked at me in the birch grove with all the noise stripped off his face and said:I know what it looks like on you.
