I want to see her.
That's the whole of it. No architecture on top of it, no rationale. I just want her to come through the tree line at the edge of this clearing like she has every morning this week, with that expression on her face that starts asI'm here under protestand shifts by the fourth hold into something that looks almost like she's enjoying herself. I want to see what her face does when I make her work for it. I want to watch the moment she stops defending and starts fighting back.
I go back to the forms.
Twenty minutes pass. Maybe twenty-five. The grey lifts slightly, the color beginning to return to the treeline, and I've moved from forms into footwork patterns and I'm not watching the path, I'm absolutely not watching the path, and then there's movement at the edge of my peripheral vision and I look and?—
She's there.
She's wearing the same training gear she always wears, her dark hair pulled back, and she's walking in with her shoulders doing the thing they do when she's made a decision she's slightly annoyed with herself about. She doesn't look at me directly. She looks at the training ground and she walks to it and she starts her own warm-up, the sequence she's developed over the lastcouple of weeks that tells me exactly what she's been working on when I'm not watching.
I watch her.
"You came," I say.
"I come every morning." She still hasn't looked at me. "Don't make it mean something."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
She moves through the warm-up sequence with the kind of focused attention that means she's using it as a wall. Methodical. Eyes on her own hands. I've seen her use the forms this way before — as something to stand behind while the rest of her settles — but usually she's past it by the third rotation, coming up to look at me with one of her assessments. She's on the fifth rotation now and hasn't surfaced.
I don't like it.
I like her sharp and present and giving me grief. I like the way her eyes track when she's actually watching me, calculating, and the half-second before she moves when I can see the decision forming. I do not like this — this careful withdrawal, this particular kind of absence that still has her standing in front of me.
I roll my shoulder and step into her practice space. "Start with the escape sequence. Left side first."
She finally looks at me.
The look is complicated, several layers running under the surface, but at least it'sdirectand I file the relief away where she won't see it.
"Left side," she repeats.
"You favor the right. Falla would tell you to work the weak side first."
"Falla isn't here."
"Fortunately, I am." I set my feet. "Left side, Aislin."
She sets hers. And we begin.
It's quiet, the way sparring sometimes goes — not unfriendly-quiet, just the particular focus of two people working a problem together, the communication happening in the contact rather than around it.
She's better on the left side than she admits to. She's been practicing without me, which I already knew from the footwork warm-up but now have confirmation of, and the knowledge of it does something pleasant in my chest.
Three sequences in, she breaks a grip I've had on her wrist — the correct break, clean, with the turn and pull together — and I release and we reset.
"I heard something about the next trial," I say.
She drops into the starting position. "Don't care."
"It'll be a partner event."
Her eyes come up.
"A hunt across the whole territory." I keep my voice easy, like I'm discussing weather. "Teams of two, hidden tokens everywhere. Takes most of the day."
"I'm done with the events." She says it to the space between us, flat and final, which is a tone I recognize as the one she uses when she's made a decision she doesn't want examined. "I came to the first one. That's what I agreed to."
