"Drogath has had a very specific vision for this." He sounds both fond and resigned, which is apparently a register he reserves exclusively for Drogath. "One truth. That's the dare."
"That's not a dare, that's?—"
"It's very much a dare if you find honesty difficult."
I fold the paper back up and put it in my pocket. Ursik watches me do it with that expression still on his face and doesn't push, which is — that's him, actually, that's the thing I keep running up against, he knows when to push and when to leave space, and he gives me the space without making it significant.
We keep walking.
We find two more eggs in the next twenty minutes — one contains a small carved charm, a leaf shape, smooth under my thumb — and then the trees thin properly and I hear the river before I see it, the sound of moving water underneath everything else, and when the path turns we come out above a bank where the water runs fast over pale stones and the light is doing something complicated on the surface.
I stop.
It's not much. It's a river. I've seen rivers. But there's something about the sound of it, the particular velocity, the cold clean smell, that sits in my chest and stays there.
Ursik stops beside me.
He doesn't say anything. He looks at the river the way I look at it and doesn't fill the silence, and that's — it's too easy, being here with him. That's the problem. I want to find the problem, point at it clearly, and the problem keeps turning out to be that it'stoo easy, that his company fits, that I am standing on a riverbank in the spring morning and not counting exits.
"The truth," I say.
He turns to look at me.
"The dare." I keep my eyes on the water. "I've been thinking about it."
He waits.
"I don't know how to—" I stop. Try again. "I've spent a long time making sure I didn't want anything." I say it to the river because that's easier than saying it to him. "It was safer.Not wanting anything means nothing can be used against you. Means you can't be—" The word I want isbartered, but I don't use it. "It's a clean way to live."
The water moves.
"It's been less clean lately," I say.
Ursik doesn't speak for a moment. The river fills the space instead, which is what rivers are for.
"That counts," he says finally. His voice is level, no angle in it.
"Does it?"
"As a truth? Yes." He picks up a flat stone from the bank and turns it over in his palm. "That's not nothing, Aislin. Saying that out loud."
I take the stone from his hand before I can think about it and turn it over in my own. Cool, smooth, the weight of something that's been in water long enough to lose all its edges.
Maybe Ressa is right. Maybe he isn't the thing I made him into, in the first weeks — the threat, the size, the unknown variable I watched from behind locked doors. He's loud and ridiculous and he ran alongside an obstacle course to keep me from falling into myself, and he's stood at the river and let me say something real without making a thing of it.
Not what I was afraid of. That's what Ressa had said, eyes warm, hands wrapped around a mug.He's not what you were afraid of.
I'm starting to think she might know what she's talking about.
15
AISLIN
Ifind three more eggs before I notice the sky.
That's on me. Normally I'd have clocked it twenty minutes ago — the light going flat, the particular way the wind shifts direction twice in quick succession, the smell of it. I know weather. I've spent twelve years on a watch rotation that taught me to read the horizon like a second language. Today, apparently, I've been reading something else entirely.
Aislin is ahead of me on the bank, crouched over a hollow log she'd spotted from six paces when I'd walked right past it. She's been doing that all morning — finding the low hiding spots, the eye-level knots, the places where the eggs sit invisible to anyone above a certain height. It shouldn't be as satisfying to watch as it is.
