"He's been the same person," I say. It comes out half-recognizing something. "Maybe a little softer in the beginning. But he never loses patience. Never stops grinning or joking."
"He's the loudest one," Ressa says. "Falla talks about him like he's a natural disaster. But he's—" She considers it. "He's got thebiggest heart of any of them. And he doesn't keep it quiet. He's never kept it quiet in his life." She tilts her head at me. "He ran alongside you today."
"That was to annoy me into running properly."
"That's also what it was for," she says, with the patience of someone who has already been through the stage of argument I'm currently in. "But we both know that's notwhyhe did it."
I sit with that.
The light is finishing its slow change and the clearing has shifted with it, going from afternoon to something closer to dusk, cooler and softer, the treeline darker at its edges. I've been out here longer than I planned. Below the thinking about Ursik, which is the surface problem, the one I can turn and examine, something older and less convenient is sitting.
Oliver's face.
The way trust had worked before — easy and long-established and completely wrong in every way it had mattered.
"I thought I knew how to read people," I say. "I thought I was good at it. And then—" My jaw tightens. I make it ease. "I was wrong about the most important read of my life. And the cost of that wasn't just me."
Ressa is very still.
"So I stopped reading and started watching distance instead." I look at the sky. "Distance is simpler. Distance doesn't have angles."
"No," she agrees. "But it also doesn't get you much."
A beat of quiet.
"Ursik is not going to give you to anyone," she says. Not softly, not with any particular gentleness — just with the solidity of someone stating a fact they've tested personally. "None of them are. Nor will they hurt you. I know how that sounds, coming from me. I know it doesn't fix the part of you that already knows that safety can be constructed specifically to fail." Shelooks at me directly. "But I'm telling you from the other side of that wall that the thing you're afraid of is not in him."
My throat is doing something inconvenient.
I look at the grass in front of me. The pale spring blades of it, still thin from the cold, just starting to hold their shape.
"I'll see," I say.
It's not a commitment. It's not even close to a commitment. It is the smallest possible door left the smallest possible amount ajar, which is the most I have available at present.
Ressa picks up her waterskin. "That's all it has to be."
The cabin is litwhen I get back. Lamplight through the window, warm and gold against the blue-grey dusk, and from outside I can hear voices — not distressed voices, not the clipped, careful tones people use when they're managing themselves around something dangerous. Actual talking. Someone laughing. The specific, loose sound of people who have put down their guard far enough to be loud about something that delights them.
I stand outside the door for a moment.
I've been gone too long.The thought arrives with its familiar teeth.I've been out there in a clearing talking about my own problems while they were?—
I open the door.
Wren is on the floor near the hearth with Deva, and they've got something spread between them that takes me a second to identify as the painted egg from the first event — Deva's, the one she'd worked over for twenty minutes with a very small brush and visible concentration. They're showing it to Pell, who is sitting on the end of the nearest bed with a waterskin and her legs folded, and Idris is propped against the wall with herankle elevated on a folded blanket and looking notably more comfortable than she has in months.
Maret has the corner position near the window that she always takes when she's feeling well — she only moves there when the headaches ease — and she's saying something to Niobe with her hands moving in the loose, expressive way she has when she's actually not conserving herself.
Corrie is in the middle of the room.
Corrie, who has been quiet as stone since the first day, who gives nods and takes food and sits at the edges of things like she's not sure she's allowed to take up space — Corrie is in the middle of the room, and she is telling a story I've walked in on the middle of, and she's got both arms out in illustration of something, and the others are listening with the bright, full attention of people who have been waiting a while to hear this voice.
"—and she went flat over the first log," Corrie is saying, and there it is again, the shape of a laugh going through the room?—
"I did not go flat?—"
"Aislin."
