Every head turns.
"You're back." Wren's voice is relieved and warm. "We were watching from the edge, the four of us — did you see us? We saw you nearly beat the orcs!"
"Third." Corrie holds up three fingers with a kind of proprietary satisfaction. "She came third. Againstguards."
"The balance beam section was remarkable," Maret says, with a specificity that tells me she was paying close attention. "You made a correction mid-step. I couldn't see exactly what you did but it looked like you shifted the weight before the wobble had finished starting."
"She also," Pell says, raising her waterskin with mock gravity, "very nearly caught Ursik at the sprint. From what I saw. Hewas running outside her lane at the time, which I think is worth noting."
I push the door closed behind me and lean against it, and look at all of them — at the lamplight on their faces and the ease in the room, at Deva with her painted egg and Corrie mid-story and Idris with her ankle up like someone finally resting rather than bracing — and something loosens in me that has been pulled tight since I walked into that clearing.
They're alright.
More than alright. They'rehere.Settled into this room like it's been theirs for longer than a week, and the laughter is real, and nobody is watching the door.
"I came in third," I confirm, and I go and sit on the end of my bed, and Corrie goes back to her story, and I let the sound of them wash over me like water.
I look over at my egg and realize that the only one I want to talk to right now is Ursik.
How did this happen?
13
URSIK
Idon't tell anyone about the kiss.
It might be a first for me. Kai would make a face that meant seventeen things he was too smug to say directly, and Falla would give me his long, considering look that functions exactly like a lecture without requiring him to open his mouth, and either of those would require me to have something useful to say about what happened with Aislin, which I don't. I have nothing useful.
I have a memory of dark hair and green eyes and the precise weight of someone who'd made a decision and acted on it, and the way my arms had pulled her in before the rest of me caught up with my arms, and I've been turning it over since I watched her walk away and I am no closer to any kind of shape for it.
So I don't tell anyone.
I eat my evening meal with Kai and Saela and I am perfectly normal about it. Kai gives me a look once, briefly, that might mean something or might mean nothing, and I let it pass without acknowledgement. I sleep, which is to say I lie in my bed and look at the ceiling for three hours and then I sleep for the last four. I wake up before sunrise and I go to the clearing.
The cold is still doing its thing in the mornings — the Frostfang valley sits low enough that the temperature drops differently here than on the heights, frost coming in through the grass even when the trees have started their new growth, and my breath makes company as I work through the warm-up forms.
The light is that particular early grey, before the color has come back into anything, and the clearing is the same as every morning. Log, soft ground, the treeline dark at the edges.
I keep doing the forms.
She came third. Against my guards, who traindaily, who have years of footwork I've put into them personally — she placed third in her first competitive attempt, and I'd watched her do the balance beam correction, and I'd thought,she's good. She's actually good.Not practiced-good, not trained-good yet, but built-from-the-bone good, the kind that comes from years of moving through situations where the cost of getting it wrong wasn't a bruise.
That's not why I ran alongside her.
I ran alongside her because I'd seen what was happening in the crowd before she could fully name it — the way her breathing changed, the stillness that wasn't concentration but something older and less voluntary, the particular kind of trapped that looks from the outside like composure.
I know what that looks like. I've pulled enough people out of it after combat. Get the mind moving and the body follows, so I made myself the loudest, most annoying thing in her immediate sightline and let the rest of it take care of itself.
It worked.
She'd finished the sprint like she was angry at the course personally, which is the best possible running motivation, and then she'd nearly knocked me flat and I'd?—
I'd held on.
I stop in the middle of a form.
Stand there with my arms where the movement left them, the cold air very present, and think about something that is rapidly becoming a structural problem: I am thirty-two years old. I've been in this clan since I was born, been a warrior since I could hold a blade. I have excellent judgment about terrain, about threat assessment, about when something is going to go badly in the next three seconds and how to interrupt it. I havehistorically poor judgmentabout one specific category of thing, which is when I decide I want something and the wanting gets ahead of every other consideration.
