"Very helpful. Thank you. That really solves it."
"I mean—" she shoves my shoulder with enough force that I have to brace, "—think about what you actually know about her. Not what she's told you. What you'veseen."
The problem isthat I think about it for three days and every time I get close to something right, it slips sideways on me.
I know things about Aislin. I know them from the mornings, which is the most honest time to know anyone — before the day has given them something to perform against.
I know she runs a perimeter check before she speaks to me, even now. I know she takes up space differently than she did three weeks ago, less compressed, but still coiled, still ready, the way a spring holds tension even when nothing is pressing it.
I know she's funny in a way that sounds like cruelty until you realize she's saving the actual cruelty for people who deserve it. I know she held those women together for months in Stonevein captivity through sheer will and razor wire and that she's still doing it, still walking the edge of their little camp, still putting herself between them and any threat she's identified — real or probable.
I know she kissed me first.
I know that every time she pulls back from something — a kiss, a good moment, the afternoon in the cave that I'm not thinking about, I'm absolutely not thinking about it, I haven't thought about it at all — she doesn't run from me the way she did at the beginning. She just resets. Checks the exits. Comes back.
That's not a woman who doesn't want this. That's a woman who is very carefully making sure she chose it.
But I know she's caring and kind. That she's funny and competitive. That she’s smart and sometimes I make her laugh and it's the best damn thing I've ever done.
I go to Falla on the second day.
He's in his workroom, which smells like dried herbs and the particular clean sharpness of whatever he uses to wash the worktable. He looks up when I come in, looks down at the poultice he's working on, looks up again.
"You look terrible," he says.
"I need to know what plants mean things." I sit down on his stool uninvited. "For the basket."
He puts down his pestle. He studies me with the expression he uses when he's deciding whether to be blunt immediately or take a running start at it. He goes for immediately, because he always does. "You drew Aislin."
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't have to." He crosses his arms. "You've been walking around base for two days like you're trying to solve something. You only get that look for training problems or personal problems, and you haven't asked me about any injuries, so." He tilts his head at the rack of dried herbs above the worktable. "Lavender for calm. Yarrow for strength through wound — healing, but the kind that comes after. Rosemary is for remembrance, if you want it to mean something about not forgetting." He pauses. "Heartsease is older. Comfort after hard things."
I look at the rack. The light through the small window cuts across the bundles at an angle, and everything smells like the beginning of spring, and I think about Aislin standing in cold morning air with her jaw set and her eyes moving over the treeline.
"Yarrow," I say.
"I'll tie some up for you." He turns back to his worktable. Then, without looking at me: "She's doing better than you think."
"I know she is."
"I mean—" he picks up his pestle, "—she's settling. Not done. But the direction's changed." He grinds something. The sound fills the quiet. "Don't put anything in that basket that makes her feel like she's still broken."
I look at the side of his head. I want to say something cutting, but the truth is he knows his people, Falla, and he's been watching these women for weeks with the particular attention of a healer who takes his work seriously. And he's right. I don'twant to give her something that saysyou survived.I want to give her something that sayslook what you're doing now.
"I know," I say.
He nods once and doesn't say anything else about it.
Kai findsme on the third day.
I'm sitting outside the hall with a collection of things spread on the table in front of me — the yarrow twist from Falla, a small coin that Kerra had declared was "good weight, don't ask where I got it," two wooden carvings I'd pulled from the communal supply, a length of cord, a small river-polished stone — and I'm looking at all of it with the expression of a man trying to read a map in a language he only partially speaks.
Kai sits down across from me. He looks at the objects. He looks at me.
"Not a word," I say.
"I'm sitting."
