"I thought the color suited you," I say, because it's easier than saying the rest of it.
She unties the top and looks inside, going quiet in the way people go quiet when they're actually moved and have enough dignity not to perform it. She lifts out the ribbon, holds it to the light. Sets it carefully aside. The coin next, then the carved charm, then the stone with its grey vein catching the pale morning.
"White with grey," she says. "Like finding solid ground."
I don't say anything.
"The yarrow." She touches the herb twist. "Falla's told me about yarrow. Healing that comes after." She looks up at me. Her brown eyes are very bright. "You paid attention."
"I pay attention to most things," I say. "I'm good at that."
She laughs, quiet and warm, and then she steps forward and wraps her arms around me and I hold very still for a moment before I bring my arms up and hold her back, which is not something I do readily or easily and she knows that, and the fact that she doesn't make a thing of it is exactly why I could do it.
"Thank you," she says into my shoulder. "Really."
I step back. "Don't make it enormous."
"It already is." But she's smiling, and she pulls back and tucks everything carefully back into the basket and ties the red cord again, and I watch her turn to show Falla, who examines the stone with the solemn attention of a man who understands that certain objects carry weight beyond their mass.
I'm still watching them when something shifts in my periphery.
Ursik.
He's coming from the left side of the courtyard, moving through the crowd the way he always does — not carefully, just solidly, people adjusting around him the way water adjusts around stone.
He's got his basket in one hand and there's something in the set of his jaw that I can't immediately name. He's not grinning. He's not doing the loud, broad version of himself that he uses for an audience. He's just — coming toward me. Looking at me.
Something in my chest shifts.
I make myself stand still as he reaches me, and he holds out the basket without preamble, without a joke, without the deflecting layer of humor he usually keeps between himself and anything earnest.
"For you," he says.
I take it.
It's heavier than I expect. I look down at it — woven dark, practical, nothing decorative about the basket itself. The cord tying the top is plain and well-knotted and the color is not arbitrary, a deep forest green that is exactly the color of nothing I own and everything I might if I'd ever had the luxury of choosing. I don't know how he knew that. I stand there and I know that he knew that.
I untie the cord.
The yarrow twist is on top, and I recognize it immediately — Falla's work, the particular way he bundles dried herbs. Strength through wounding. Healing that comes after the hard part. I set it aside and reach in again and find the coin, and it's old and worn smooth and heavy in my palm the way only real use makes a coin heavy, not fresh-minted, not decorative. Something that has been carried.
Steadiness.I know it without being told.
There's a carved piece underneath it, small and precise, the carving careful in a way that says time rather than talent — someone who sat with it. I turn it over and it's a figure, not a warrior stance, not a weapon, just a person standing. Upright. Still.
I look up at Ursik.
He's watching me with that quiet expression that doesn't have a name in his usual register, the one I've seen a handful of times in the mornings when he thinks I'm not looking back.
I look down again. My fingers find the last thing at the bottom of the basket, and I already know before I pull it out that I'm not going to be ready for it.
The river stone is white with a faint grey vein and it is — it is identical in weight and look to the one I'd put in Ressa's basket. Not a coincidence. A conversation. Someone who paid attention to what I chose and understood what it meant to me and then gave it back.
The ground shifts.
Not physically. But something underneath the morning, underneath the courtyard and the noise and the smell of pine and baking and dried herbs — something that had been standing firm for a very long time makes a sound I don't have a word for, and I stand there holding the stone and I understand with the sudden terrible clarity of a person who has just looked down and found the edge much closer than they thought, exactly how far inside my walls he is standing.
Not at the perimeter. Not at the door.
