Ressa is looking at me with an expression that is soft and knowing and somehow more difficult to endure than Kerra's forensic accuracy. "He does have a face," she agrees, quietly.
I look at Falla, who is still at the workbench, doing his methodical work with his jars, and who has not said a single word since he told me to name my ailment, and who has also, I notice, begun quietly preparing two separate tinctures without any further instruction from me.
At least I can count on my friend.
But no one can help me get my head back on straight.
17
AISLIN
Iknow I'm smiling as I come back from this morning's training session, but I don't care. In the days since the cave, I've been feeling like something has been rearranged inside me.
Not broken, not worse — rearranged. Like furniture that was placed defensively and has been shifted to somewhere it actually makes sense. Ursik had grabbed my hand when I tried to dart away at the end of our session this morning and pulled me back, and I'd kissed him before he could say whatever smug thing he was building up to, and it had worked on him the way I'd intended — short-circuiting whatever came next — and then backfired entirely because I'd ended up pressed against a tree with both his hands at my jaw and my brain somewhere in the middle distance.
I'm not going to examine that too closely.
The morning air is still cold but the light is different now — that particular spring brightness that comes on like someone turned up the wick, everything sharper and cleaner than it was two weeks ago.
My boots are still slightly stiff from the rain three days ago, no matter what I do to them. Ursik told me this morning thatI should oil the leather. I told him that he could oil the leather himself and he'd laughed so loudly that I'm certain they heard it on the other side of the base.
I'm lighter. I notice it the same way you notice you've been carrying something for so long that you forgot it was there, and then you put it down for a moment and your shoulders come up. I feel like that.
I still check my perimeter. I still have the weapons under my bed and I'm not moving them, and when I came through the treeline this morning I clocked every point of entry out of pure reflex, but underneath that the running hum of dread is — quieter. Not gone. But quieter.
Which is why, when I push open the cabin door and find Saela standing inside with Shae beside her and six refugees crowded in the front room of the cabin looking not alarmed butinterested, my immediate instinct is that something is wrong.
I stop in the doorway.
Saela looks at me, and the smile that crosses her face is so genuinely bright that it takes me a second to recalibrate. "There she is."
"What happened?" I ask.
"Nothing happened." She tilts her head. "You could come in, actually."
I come in. I look at Shae, who is standing near the window with her arms loosely folded and a bundle of fabric samples draped over one arm, and at the girls — Wren on the floor with her legs folded under her, Pell perched next to Deva, Maret standing by the fire, all of them with that particular quality that means they've been mid-conversation. Idris has her bad ankle up on a pillow. Corrie is in the corner, quiet as always, but she's turned toward the room instead of away from it, which is something.
"We had come to check on everyone. But after this, Shae and I are going to get ready for the last event," Saela says.
I look at the fabric samples on Shae's arm. At the small pile of objects on the table that I hadn't registered at first — carved wooden bits, dried herbs in paper twists, coins, a spool of ribbon. "It's…baskets, right?" Ursik had mentioned it.
"The basket offerings," Shae says, in a tone that lends it exactly the weight that Drogath would want it to have and also the weight of someone who has been doing these festivals long enough to find them genuinely charming against her better judgement. "Drogath's already done the assignments. We came to give you yours. We each make a basket for whoever we're given, fill it with things that are meant to bless them."
I look at the pile of items on the table. I think about eggs with dares on parchment and the obstacle course and Ursik running alongside the fence telling me to move, and the cold tight thing in my chest does its rearranging thing again.
"Who said I'd participate?"
"You've been at every other event," Saela says, not unkindly.
"That doesn't mean?—"
"Drogath already wrote the assignments." Shae produces a folded square of parchment from her pocket. "He assumed. You know how he is." She extends it toward me with a look that isn't quite a challenge and isn't quite an invitation but sits somewhere between the two — the look of a woman who has watched this work before and is patient enough to let it work again.
I take the parchment.
I don't open it immediately. I look at the girls. Wren gives me the small, steady look she uses when she's communicating without words — the patient one that she's had since before we arrived, the one that saysthis is alright, actually.Pell is watching me with her hands clasped. She cares about this. She cares about most things with the particular earnestness ofsomeone who hasn't let go of it yet, and I've stopped wanting her to.
I unfold the parchment.
