He blinks.
Silence, for just a moment.
Then Kerra steps slightly to her left — not away from me, just a small repositioning that saysI am not part of this and also I agree with him and also you should leave— and Drogath reads the room with the survival instincts of a man who has beenthreatening with decapitation for most of his life and closes his mouth.
He retreats with enormous dignity in the direction of someone else's basket exchange.
Kerra watches him go. "Smooth."
"Don't."
"I genuinely wasn't." She turns toward me and the humor drops out of her face, replaced by the version of her that doesn't perform anything. "Go find her."
"She pushed the basket back, Kerra."
"I know what she did."
"If she wanted me there, she?—"
"Ursik." Her hand lands on my arm, solid and still. The same way she'd stopped me from stepping off a ledge on a Stonevein raid when I was reading the ground wrong and didn't know it. "She's not pushingyouback. You know the difference. You've always known the difference." Her gray eyes hold steady. "Go find her."
The basket is heavy in my hands. I set it down on the nearest table, next to someone's abandoned cup and a scattering of herbs, and I walk.
She'sin the clearing like I expected
I come through the tree line and she's standing in the middle of the sparring ground with her arms crossed and her back half-turned, looking at the far edge of the tree line the way she looks at things when she's deciding whether they're a threat or just furniture.
The frost is gone from here — the clearing catches the morning sun earlier than the rest of the territory — and the light is coming through the pines in long, quiet slats that fall across her shoulders and the dark mess of her hair.
She doesn't turn when she hears me. She knows my footfalls by now. She'd told me once, three weeks ago, that she'd catalogued the sound of every person who moved through the settlement and she said it like it was a practical thing and I'd thought yes, of course you did.
"I don't need you checking on me," she says.
I cross the clearing and I don't stop until I'm standing a few feet away — close enough that she'd have to make a choice about whether to look at me, not close enough to crowd her. I know the difference. I've learned it morning by morning by morning.
"I know," I say.
She still doesn't turn.
The trees move. The light moves. Somewhere behind us, very distantly, the sounds of the courtyard drift through the pines and then don't.
"I know you didn't come here looking for — any of this," I say. "Me included." I find the words slowly, not the way I usually talk, which is fast and loud and takes up space on purpose. This isn't that. This wants to be careful. "I know I'm a lot. I know I can be — I know the noise of me doesn't always help, and I know this has all moved fast and maybe that's on me. Maybe I've pushed too?—"
"You haven't pushed," she says. Quiet. Slightly grudging, like admitting it costs her something.
"Alright." I breathe out through my nose. "Then let me say it plainly. You want time, I'll give you time. You want a friend, I'll be your friend. You want to be left completely alone and never have this conversation again—" I pause, because I want to mean this and not just say it, "—I'll give you that too. I'll wait. I'll be here in the morning and I'll be your sparring partner and I'll be the loudest idiot in the settlement and I'll be nothing else unless you decide you want something else. That's it. That's all I'm saying."
The line of her shoulders shifts, something tightening and then releasing in the same breath.
"I won't push. I won't—" I make myself stop before I start listing promises as though volume is the same as meaning. I start again. "I want what's good for you. Whatever that looks like. Whatever you need to feel steady and safe and yours. I'll find it and I'll give it to you."
The pause stretches long enough that a bird starts up somewhere in the pines, a short bright note, and then quiet.
"What if it's not you?" she asks.
It's not a challenge. It comes out smaller than that, genuinely uncertain, and that small uncertain quality hits differently than a challenge would. I'd know what to do with a challenge.
But I hear what she's asking: what am I willing to give if I get nothing in return?
