I don't have words for what it feels like to make this for her. It's something adjacent to solidarity. Something that shares a root with the recognition you feel when someone understands the specific shape of your particular fear without you having to build them a map of it.
Something that might, if I pressed it, be called gratitude.
I find a small length of deep red cord in the supply pile and use it to close the basket, because it's her color, and because I want there to be at least one thing in it that is specifically and only hers.
18
URSIK
Iget the parchment from Drogath at the same time as everyone else, standing in the loose crowd outside the hall where he'd called us together to hand out the assignments. He'd made a ceremony of it — of course he had, it's Drogath — walking through the group with his beaded staff clicking on the frozen ground and his robes catching the morning wind, pressing the folded squares into each person's hands with the particular gravity of a man delivering something sacred.
I unfold mine before I've taken three steps.
Aislin.
I stand there for a moment with the wind off the mountains cutting across the base and the noise of the clan dispersing around me, and I read the name twice.
Then I fold the parchment back up very carefully and put it in my vest pocket and walk directly to Kerra.
She's already watching me. She has her assignment in her fist and she's wearing the expression that means she already knows and is delighted by the fact that I don't know she knows.
"Don't," I say.
"I haven't said anything."
"You don't have to."
She holds up her own assignment, though I can't see who it is. "Most people have already started preparing for this," she says, walking beside me toward the training yard, "and I'll wager two coins that you haven't thought about it once because you were too busy mooning over?—"
"I've thought about it."
She looks at me with both brows raised, which is the expression that on anyone else would require words.
"I've thought about it a little."
She makes a sound in the back of her throat that meansthat's what I said."So what are you putting in it?"
I don't answer. The training yard is quiet at this hour, just the stakes and the weaponry rack and the long scar in the dirt from an earlier session. It reminds me of when I'd swept Aislin's feet and she'd dragged me down with her and we'd ended up in the mud laughing until she remembered herself and pulled her expression back toward neutral.
Which never quite works anymore because I've seen the real one too many times now. I know what her actual laugh looks like. I know the version that breaks out before she can stop it, the one that reaches the corner of her eye on the left side. I know which jokes land before she admits they've landed.
I turn that thought over and then turn it back and then put it somewhere useful.
"She doesn't have much," I say. I don't care if Kerra knows. I won't be able to keep it in.
Kerra looks at me. She's dropped the teasing register, which she does sometimes with no warning, just switches into something quieter and more direct. "No," she says. "She doesn't."
"None of them do. They arrived with nothing. Whatever they had before—" I stop. I know what was done to the women theStonevein had. I know some of it from the rescue when we got Ressa, and the rest in the way you know things in this clan, through the particular silence that settles around a subject nobody wants to describe in detail. "Well, they don't have it now. And her priorities have shifted. She keeps three weapons under her bunk."
She chuckles. "I knew I liked her."
I look down at my hands, at the three fingers on my left hand that Falla spent six hours putting back in the right order, and think about what it costs a person to turn damage into architecture. To build the wreckage into something they stand behind. "She always says she's fine. She acts like she can weather any storm, and I just…" I sigh, so terrible with words that aren't ridiculous jokes.
Kerra sits down beside me. She doesn't say anything, which is the thing I like best about her — she knows when silence is the more useful tool.
"I want her to know I see her," I say. "Not the sharp edges. Not the weapons. Not even the woman I've been sparring with, though I like her too." I look at Drogath's folded parchment in my palm. "The actual person. The one underneath all the walls."
Kerra is quiet for a moment. Then she says, "So put that in the basket."
