She's just finding painted wooden eggs. But there's something about the way she moves when she isn't thinking about being watched — easy, precise, none of the wound-tight defensiveness she wears like armor in the base. Out here she's just herself.
"There's two in here," she says.
"Two?"
"Drogath hid two in the same log."
"He'd call thatsacred abundance."
She looks up at me from her crouch and there it is — the grin. Not the half-smile she gives when she's deciding whether something is worth her time, not the sharp edge of her laugh when I've said something she finds accidentally funny. The real one. I've been cataloguing the differences without meaning to, without admitting to myself that I was doing it, and this one still hits me the same way it did the first time I earned it.
She pulls both eggs out and stands and holds one out to me.
I take it. Our fingers don't quite touch.
She opens hers first — another charm, a small carved moon — and I open mine and unfold the paper inside and read it and fold it back up before she can see it.
"What does yours say?"
"Sacred abundance," I say.
She gives me a look that means she doesn't believe me, which is correct, and I put the paper in my pocket and she shakes her head and we keep moving.
What it says is:Bold living: tell your partner one thing you want.
I'll come back to that.
The first raindrop hits me on the back of the hand. I look at it, then I look up, and that's when I see what I should have seen twenty minutes ago. The sky to the north has gone the colour of old iron, the clouds stacked and moving fast, and the light that was doing that complicated thing on the river is entirely gone now, flattened under the front rolling in.
"Ursik—"
"I see it." I'm already scanning the bank. We're two hundred paces from the cave I know is cut into the rock face east of the river bend — I've sheltered there before, it's deep enough, wide enough. "Come on."
She doesn't ask questions. I like that about her. In a crisis she moves and talks later, and I grab her hand without thinking and she doesn't pull away, which I also file somewhere.
The rain decides not to build gradually. It comes down all at once, the way spring rain does when it's been saving itself — heavy and cold and immediate, soaking through my shirt before we've covered fifty paces. I hear Aislin's sharp exhale somewhere behind me and then we're both running and the bank is slick under our feet and the noise of the river doubles under the rain.
The cave is where I remember it. The entrance is lower than I'd like — I have to fold myself through it, shoulders first — but it opens up inside, the ceiling lifting to twice my height, dry stone floor with a scattering of old deadfall against the back wall. Some previous version of this same desperate decision left it here. I'm grateful.
Aislin comes in behind me, pushing wet hair out of her face. She's drenched. Her coat's heavy with water, her dark hair plastered flat, and she looks around the cave the way she looks at everything — immediately, cataloguing, noting where the exits are — before she registers that she's shivering.
The wind throws rain hard against the cave entrance.
I start on the fire before anything else. The deadfall is dry enough; whoever left it stacked it against the driest part of the back wall, far from the entrance. I build it quickly, and I'm aware that Aislin hasn't moved from the entrance, hasn't taken her coat off, standing in her wet things with her arms crossed tight over her chest.
The fire catches.
I sit back on my heels and watch it settle and think about being soaked through and about the walk back to the base in wet clothes, about how long this will take to pass, and I strip my shirt off over my head and lay it flat on the stone beside the fire.
As I stand, I find Aislin staring at me. With wide eyes and a little flush to her cheeks.
"What are you doing?" she says.
I freeze.
Then I actually think about what I've done and I reach for something to say. I hadn't thought before undressing in front of her. "It'll dry faster."
She stares at me.
