She glares.
Not the flinching look I sometimes get from some of the others, the involuntary one — the type that comes from muscle memory that I can't take personally because it isn't about me. This is deliberate. Considered. She looks at my smile the way you look at something that's been left in the wrong place and is now mildly obstructing traffic.
I turn back to the crate.
I have nothing for that. I don't know what to do with it. I've been working hard all week to keep my voice down, take up less space in doorways, move slowly, knock before arriving. Bronn would say I'm being soft. Falla would say I'm being practical. Kai would probably make some thoughtful observation about it and then ask me how I feel, which is the thing Kai does now that Saela has organized his emotional vocabulary.
None of them would know what to do with someone who looks at my best smile like it personally offended her.
Wren appears in the cabin doorway, stepping around Idris's legs. She's got that measuring quality too — they all do, every one of the eight, and I understand it, I'm not stupid about what they came out of — but Wren's seems to operate with less hostility and more genuine assessment. She looks at me, then the crate, then back.
"Did Falla send the willowbark? For Maret? She prefers the tea over the tincture."
"Left side, linen-wrapped. He labelled it."
"Good." She leans in the doorway, and there's something easy in the way she holds herself — not relaxed exactly, but not coiled either. Easier than some. "You don't have to deliver it yourself, you know. You could leave it at the path."
"I know." I scratch the back of my neck. "The crate was heavy."
"Mm." She looks at me a moment longer, and there's something slightly amused at the corner of her mouth. "We appreciate it."
I glance back toward Aislin, which I tell myself is incidental — just accounting for everyone in a space, the way you do, the way any soldier does out of habit.
She's moved six feet to my right. Still watching. The sling isn't visible now, which means it's back wherever she keeps it, which is a separate question I find I'm turning over with some interest.
She's slight. That's the thing that had hit me the morning they'd arrived — all of them pale and hollow from months in Stonevein hands, but Aislin standing at the front of the group with her chin up and her shoulders squared and her green eyes doing exactly what they're doing right now, and I'd been two steps forward with everyone else before I'd clocked that this small human woman was positioning herself between the groupand us. Like a door. Like a wall. Like something that had decided it was a wall even if the physics didn't quite support it.
Bronn had looked at her and made some assessment I didn't get to hear because I'd been busy watching her watchus,cataloguing us the same way she's cataloguing me now. I'd thought, at the time:this one won't stay afraid.The others were frightened in a way that might stay frightened for a while yet — and fair, I can't argue with fair — but Aislin had looked at us like fear was a practical problem she was actively solving.
A week later, apparently, the solution involves a river stone and enough arm speed to matter.
I genuinely cannot decide whether this is a problem.
I pick up the empty crate I'd left from yesterday's drop and tuck it under my arm, and I do the calculation that I always do in small spaces: how large am I, how close is the nearest person, what's the least invasive way to move between points A and B. It's a calculation I never had to run before last winter, before Saela crashed into our base, before Falla and I helped Kai rescue Saela and Ressa from the Stonevein and I had seen what damage — real, emotional damage — at the hands of orcs looked like. Something about the way Kai had looked at all of us —look at the size of us, Ursik, look at the size of us next to them— had gotten into my head and stayed there.
I'm not Falla. Falla can do small and quiet the way some people breathe — natural, unconsidered, a factory setting. I do it the way you learn to do something with your non-dominant hand: correctly, technically, but you can see the effort.
I'm not Bronn either. Bronn's version ofnot frightening peopleis simply to not care whether he's frightening people, which at least has the virtue of consistency.
I just — I'mloud. I've always been loud. Kai used to say my laugh could reach the east watchtower from the training ground, which isn't an exaggeration. I think in large gestures and I speakbefore I've finished thinking and I take up space the way weather takes up space — not trying to, just constitutively, as a feature of existing.
Every single one of the eight women has been slowly, incrementally relaxing around me. Idris with her almost-smile. Wren with her slight amusement. Even Maret, who won't come to the door herself, had apparently told Pell to pass along that the broth had been good, which Pell had delivered with the gravity of a formal diplomatic communication.
Aislin is glaring at my smile.
I shift the empty crate to my other arm and nod toward the cabin.
"I'll be back tomorrow," I say. To Wren, to Idris. Loud enough that Aislin will hear it without me making it a point to direct it at her, because I've noticed that directing things at her makes the glare more architectural.
"We know," Wren says, and there's warmth in it, which I take.
I walk back the way I came, and I don't look back, and I am fairly certain Aislin watches me all the way to the tree line.
The training ground sits on the opposite side of the settlement, past the longhouse and the stores and the particular stretch of hard-packed earth where Kai makes the newer recruits run laps until they stop looking smug about their stamina.
I cut through the middle rather than circling wide, which takes me past the forge and through the gap between the grain store and the main wall, and I pass three people who say good morning and one dog who tries to make a case for the empty crate.
I can hear them before I see them. Falla's voice, low and precise — he's explaining something about footwork, which means he's corrected someone's footwork and will now explainthe correction until they either fix it or he exhausts himself. Then Kai, a low rumble of agreement.
