"You have a face that makes things into things."
"I have a perfectly normal face."
"You have a face like a man who is about to make a speech." She glances at me with that sideways assessment. "Don't make a speech."
I press my lips together. "Understood."
She nods, satisfied, and we walk.
I am desperately, completely, ruinously in trouble.
The settlement appears through the treeline as the light is going amber, the familiar shape of the perimeter, the smokefrom the cook fires, and I slow without meaning to, not wanting to arrive at the point where I have to let her go back to her cabin.
I want to take her back to my quarters. I want her in my bed, wrapped in my blankets. I want to watch her sleep again in something warmer than a cave floor and spend the night learning every other version of the sounds she made this afternoon.
I keep that entirely to myself.
She slows with me as we reach the point where our paths diverge — she goes left toward the refugee cabins, I go right toward the barracks quarter, and we stand in the early evening air with the settlement around us and I look at her.
She looks back.
She is sore. I know she is — I took her more than once in that cave, gave her no reason to be anything other than completely wrung out, and the careful way she's been moving for most of the walk says more than she would ever say out loud about it. The thought makes me feel simultaneously guilty and something else that I absolutely do not examine further in polite company.
"You should rest tonight," I say.
"I always rest."
"Aislin."
She tilts her head, reading me. "I'm fine."
"I know you're fine." She is the most aggressively fine person I have ever met. "Rest anyway."
The corner of her mouth. "You're doing the speech face again."
"I don't have a speech face."
She reaches out and puts two fingers against my jaw, adjusting it slightly, and the touch is so casual and so completely hers that my brain goes briefly quiet. "There." She drops her hand. "Less speech."
I stare at her.
"I'll see you in the morning," she says, and there is something in it — not a dismissal, not the pulling-back I'd been afraid of in the cave when I asked, something that lands more like a promise — and then she turns and walks toward the left path and I watch her go and I don't move for an embarrassingly long time.
When I finally turn toward the barracks quarter, I take two steps and stop.
Sore. She's sore and she's been out in cold rain, and the clever part of my brain — the part that functions despite everything else currently happening in my chest — presents me with a very clear directive. Falla. I need to go to Falla.
Not to tell him anything. I'm not telling Falla anything, because Falla will tell me three highly specific things in his particular flat tone and then stare at me until I feel appropriately managed.
But I can go to him for a tincture. Something for soreness. Something for a chill if she caught one standing in wet clothes for too long, which she won't admit to and won't treat herself because she doesn't treat herself, she treats everyone else.
I can leave it at her door in the morning without a word and she can choose to use it or she can look at it with her reading-for-danger look until she decides it's fine, but either way it's there.
I change direction toward the healing house.
The door is ajar when I arrive, firelight coming through the gap, and I push it open and begin:
"Falla, I need a — oh."
