"It is astrategy."
"Get dressed."
She throws a pillow at me. I catch it without looking. She makes the small exasperated noise that means she's pleased and starts getting up, and I look away and grin at the wall before she can see it.
The morning air is crisp.Fall is coming in and the air is changing with it — the river now running cold enough to shock you sensible if you're foolish enough to wade in, which I know because I've done it twice in the last month and Falla lectured me both times.
The settlement is already alive with movement; voices carrying from somewhere near the cook house, the distant rhythm of guards doing drills in the yard.
Aislin walks beside me. Close enough that our arms brush every few steps. She doesn't hold my hand in public, not yet, but she leans in. She's been leaning in for months and I've neveronce named it aloud because some things you justtake, quietly and gratefully, and you don't make a fuss.
She's talking — something about Deva, who has started working with Shae in the cookhouse, and about how Pell has been spending time with one of the younger patrol orcs and won't say a word about it to anyone which Aislin finds hilarious for reasons she can't quite articulate to herself.
"It's because she tries to look like she doesn't care about anything," she says. "And she obviously cares about him enormously. It's very uncomfortable to watch."
"The irony," I say pleasantly, "of you finding that uncomfortable."
She elbows me in the ribs. My ribs are roughly the width of a wagon but she finds the gap anyway, same spot every time, which I suspect is intentional.
"I was nothing like that," she says.
"You tried to set me on fire with your eyes the entire first two weeks I knew you."
"I wasassessingyou."
"You called me a hazard to public safety."
She pauses. "Youarea hazard to public safety. That's not relevant." But she's fighting a smile. I can see it pulling at the corner of her mouth, at the scar there that has faded to a thin white line. I can read her face now the same way I read weather — the small shifts, the subtle tells, the difference between the smile she gives strangers and the one she gives me.
I steer her right, off the path toward the training yard.
She notices immediately. "Training's that way."
"I know."
"You've turned us the wrong way."
"Have I?" I keep walking. I can feel her looking at me — the full weight of the Aislin assessment, suspicious and sharp — but I don't look back.
"Ursik."
"Almost there."
She stops walking. I turn to find her standing with her arms crossed, eyes narrowed to slits, her whole posture radiating the specific energy of a woman who has spent six months learning exactly which of my expressions mean trouble.
"I am not walking into an ambush," she says. "Not even for you."
"It's not an ambush." I hold out my hand. She looks at it. She looks at my face. The look goes back and forth twice, the calculation running, and then something in her shoulders drops a fraction and she takes it.
Her hand in mine still does something to me. Every time. I'm not above admitting that.
I lead her through the pines, down the narrow path toward our new clearing — the one we found by accident three months ago when she'd dragged me away from a particularly tedious supply inventory to walk off her restlessness, and we'd ended up here where the trees opened to a wide flat space with a view down the valley, and she'd gone quiet in the way she only does when something strikes her as genuinely beautiful.
We step through the tree line and I feel her hand tighten on mine.
The clearing is full.
Kerra sees us first and her grin splits wide, the obnoxiously pleased grin she's been wearing every time I've looked at her for the past four days because she cannot keep a secret if it is physically killing her.
