"I can see you forming a comment."
He picks up one of the carved wooden figures I'd rejected — it's a warrior pose, arms raised, very clearly combative — and holds it up with one eyebrow raised.
"Too obvious," I say. "She's not a fighter for sport. She fights because she had to. Giving her something that makes that look like a personality trait rather than a survival mechanism felt?—"
"Wrong," Kai says.
"Yes."
He sets it down. He looks at the rest of the table. He's good at this — reading a room, reading a spread of objects the way he reads a map, taking in the whole picture before he speaks. It's why he's a better commander than me, though I'd sooner eat the training beam than say that out loud to him directly.
"What do you want her to understand?" he says.
"That I see her." The words come out before I've decided to say them, and I leave them there because they're accurate. "Not—" I move the carved figure aside, "—what she does. Who she is. She's been armor for those women for months. She runs herself into the ground every morning, she checks every perimeter, she put herself between them and every threat real or imagined, and nobody has—" I stop. "Nobody's looked at the person doing all that and saidyou don't have to be the weapon right now. You can just be."
Kai is quiet for a long moment.
Then he says, "Then tell her that."
"In a basket."
"Ursik." He meets my eyes. "She'll understand."
He gets up and leaves me with the table, and I sit there with the morning light coming across everything and Kerra appearing in my periphery with her arms folded and the particular quality of silence that means she's been listening from the doorway for at least two minutes.
"Don't," I say.
"You're nervous," she says.
"I'm not nervous. I don't get nervous."
"You've rearranged those objects eleven times."
I look down at the table. The objects are in a different configuration than they were ten minutes ago. I don't remember moving them.
"Tell anyone," I say, "and I'll put frogs in your bunk."
She sits down where Kai was, pulls the table toward her, and looks at everything with the critical eye she uses for scouting assessments. "Alright," she says. "Let's actually do this."
I watch her sort through the objects, and the nervousness — which is definitely not what this is — sits in my chest like a stone I can't identify, and I think about Aislin's face in the morning light and the way she'd looked at me after the cave withsomething new in it, something that wasn't armor, and I want her to have that. I want her to know that I know what it costs her.
That she doesn't have to spend it, not with me.
19
AISLIN
Today, I'm alone.
The other girls insisted that since they weren't participating, they should stay behind. I was surprised by how nervous I felt leaving without them.
The morning is pale and sharp, frost still sitting on the rooftops, and I walk the perimeter out of habit before I turn toward the hall. Three weeks ago I wouldn't have called it habit — I'd have called it necessary, essential, the kind of ritual that sits between you and disaster.
Today I do it because my feet know the path and because it settles something in my shoulders, and somewhere between those two things is the distance I've traveled since we arrived here.
I don't examine that too closely.
The ceremony is outside the hall, in the wide courtyard where they'd held the obstacle course. There are more people than I expected — the whole clan, it looks like, gathered in loose groups with baskets in their arms or set at their feet, the morning light slanting long and gold across everything. It smellslike pine and beeswax and someone's baked something nearby, warm and sweet, drifting from the direction of the kitchens.
