"That's aweapon," he says again, with the tone of a man who has revised his original assessment upward and isn't sure how he feels about the revision. His grey eyes move from the sling to my face and back. "You were going to hit me with a rock."
"I was going to hit something with a rock." I straighten, but I don't step back. "I stopped."
"You—" He closes his mouth. Opens it. I don't understand why he's looking at me like that. "Youstopped."
"I recognized you."
Something crosses his face that I can't quite read from here — not quite amusement, not quite anything I have a category for yet. He shifts the crate to balance it better on one forearm and looks at me properly, the same long measuring look I've seen from him before, starting at the sling and ending at my face and not performing any opinion about what he finds there.
"Frostfang weapons," he says finally, "are bigger."
"I'm aware." My wrist aches. I don't look at it. "What are you delivering?"
He lifts the crates a little higher, like a gesture. "Supplies for your group." He cocks his head. "Are you going to hit me if I suggest I carry them the rest of the way."
I huff, gesturing for him to walk past me. "No I won't."
But I won't give him my back either.
2
URSIK
Icarry the crate the rest of the way with Aislin three steps behind me and slightly to my left.
I know she's there the same way you know when someone's got a bow trained on your back — not by sound, exactly, but by the particular quality of attention. It's a pressure. She's watching the way I move, the way my weight shifts, whether I turn my head. I can feel the calculation in it like something physical.
She doesn't trust me. I've established that much.
What I hadn't established — what has reorganized itself considerably in the last two minutes — is that she'sarmed.Has been armed. This entire time, apparently, while I was dropping supplies at the cabin door and nodding to whoever answered and trying to take up less space than I actually occupy, she's had a sling and a river stone somewhere on her person, and she'd had it halfway through the arc before she'd stopped.
Before she'd stopped. I keep returning to that.
She'dstopped.Mid-motion, with the full mechanical commitment of someone who absolutely meant to follow through — you can see it in someone's shoulder when they're sincere about hitting you, and her shoulder had been completelysincere — and she'd arrested it herself. Because she'd recognizedmyface.
I think that might be the most impressive thing I've seen all season, and I watched Falla reattach a warrior's youngest's baby finger last month with nothing but a needle, gut thread, and the expression of a man who finds incompetence spiritually offensive.
The gap between the trees opens onto the path behind the two cabins, and I walk it the way I've learned to walk it over the last week — not fast, not looming, not taking the straight line between two points the way I naturally would because the straight line takes me past windows and doors and apparently a woman has to betoldthat seven consecutive days of food delivery means no one is planning anything sinister. Falla said to give it time. I'd been giving it time. I find the concept oftimeconsiderably more frustrating in practice than in theory.
The young one with the sprained ankle — Idris — is sitting outside the smaller cabin with a blanket over her knees, the same spot she's occupied most of the warmer part of the day since Falla said she could start putting weight on it. She looks up when I come around the corner. Her expression does the thing most of them do when they see me coming: a quick, honest assessment that cycles throughlarge, green, tusksbefore settling onit's the one who brings things.
"Morning." I hold up the crate. "More of the same. Falla packed the left side, so whatever's wrapped in the linen is his and will be labelled, and the rest is from the stores."
"Thank you." Hesitant, but there. She gives me a small, careful smile — the kind that means something because it's chosen rather than automatic. "Is there more bread?"
"Bottom right corner." I set the crate down on the step. "He was going to send more broth but we ran out of the vessel situation. That's being worked out."
She nods. Her eyes shift briefly to somewhere behind my left shoulder — checking where Aislin is, presumably — and then come back to me.
I give her a smile. Wide. Friendly. I've been told I have a good smile when I try, which is a sentence that has never not made me want to look at whoever said it and ask what they think I'm doing with my face the rest of the time.
Idris's smile gets a fraction less careful in response.
I turn around.
Aislin is watching me with the flat, concentrated look of a woman who has decided she is not going to react to anything I do, and is succeeding.
I smile at her too, on reflex. Wider, because the first one had worked on Idris and I'd had a good morning before the almost-rock-to-the-head and wasn't ready to entirely abandon the mood.
