Aislin is curled into my side, her cheek pressed to my chest, her dark hair splayed out against my arm in the way it always manages to escape whatever she's done to contain it the night before. She's smaller than me in every measurable way and somehow takes up more of the bed than any person I've ever slept beside. I've given up the left side entirely. It's hers now. She migrates there in her sleep like it was always owed to her and I find I don't mind in the slightest.
Her breathing is deep and even. No tension in her shoulders. No tight set to her jaw.
She sleeps like this now. Loose, open, taking up the space without bracing for something to snatch it back.
It took months. I watched it happen so gradually I couldn't have told you the exact morning when the difference settled in, only that one day I looked at her across the training yard and she was laughing — properly, from the belly, at something Kerra had said — and I thought:there she is.
Not the Aislin who arrived here with a split lip and three weapons under her bed and eyes that catalogued every exit in the room before she'd sit down. That woman is still in there, still part of her, still the thing that makes herher.But she doesn't have tobeher all the time anymore.
I pull her a little closer. She makes a sound against my chest, not quite awake, and her hand tightens in my shirt.
Six months. I turn the number over. It doesn't feel like six months in the way that time usually does, all the dull spots and long stretches.
It feels like six months' worth of things I want to remember. The first morning she beat me in a sparring drill and didn't bother hiding how pleased she was about it. The first time she sat at the fire with Kerra and Ressa and laughed unabashedly. The afternoon she stayed to help Falla reorganize the healing house and he told me later, in his bluntest possible way, that she had a better instinct for it than anyone he'd trained. The look on her face the first time Saela pulled her into a hug and she didn't flinch.
The night she told me she wanted me.
And the next morning when I convinced her to move in.
That one I keep at the front where I can reach it. I'd already known — in the way you know things before they're said aloud, the knowing that lives in the body before it reaches the mouth — but hearing it from her, fromAislin, who spent so long treating the words like a vulnerability she couldn't afford, sat in my chest like a banked coal. Still there. Still warm when I reach for it.
She stirs. Her nose scrunches first, then her eyes open, green and sharp even before she's fully awake, and she tips her chin up and finds me watching her.
"You're so weird," she says. Voice rough with sleep.
"What?"
"You're staring." She presses her face back into my chest. "You do it every morning. It's unnerving."
"You find everything unnerving. Remember when you tried to bash my head in?"
She huffs. "When will you let that go?"
"Never." I press my mouth to the top of her head. Her hair smells like the herb rinse Ressa gave her, something green and sharp that suits her completely. "Good morning."
She tilts her head back again, and I lean down and kiss her — soft, unhurried, the kind of morning kiss that has nothing to prove. She makes a quiet sound against my mouth that she would absolutely deny later and I tuck it away with all the other things I keep at the front.
She pulls back and studies my face with that particular Aislin assessment, the one I used to find unsettling before I understood that it isn't suspicion, not anymore. It's just how she looks at things she cares about. She looks hard at the things that matter to her.
"You're in a very good mood," she says.
"I'm always in a good mood."
"You're in asuspiciousgood mood." Her eyes narrow. "What did Kerra do?"
I school my expression into something innocent. I've had years of practice looking innocent and I'm terrible at it. "Kerra hasn't done anything."
"You're a dreadful liar."
"Good thing I don't do it much." I move before she can press further, swinging out of the bed. "Come on, up. We're going to be late."
"Late for what?"
"Training." I find my shirt on the back of the chair where she folded it last night — she does that, folds things with a precision that is completely at odds with every other aspect of her personality, some habit she probably formed when every possession was something she could afford to lose — and pull it over my head. "Your footwork on the left side has been lazy."
"My footwork on the left side," she says from the bed, sitting up with her hair spectacular around her face, "has been a point of deliberate tactical deception."
"It's been lazy."
