I haven't seen Kerra again. I refuse to admit why I've even thought of that.
And I absolutely will not question if he goes to see her after he leaves me.
The morning he asks me about the Trial of the Hare, we've just finished and I'm working the ache out of my right wrist — he'd gotten the reversal on me twice and I'd been pressing harder than I should to compensate — and he's not even slightly winded, which is one of the more aggravating things about him.
"You're going to the trial," he says. Not a question.
"I wasn't planning on it."
"Change your plans. I'm going to be the fastest." He says it with the same tone he'd use to report on weather. Absolute. Untroubled by the possibility of argument. "In the whole clan."
"Kerra will be there," I say, because Ressa mentioned it two days ago while checking in on Idris's ankle, and my mouth apparently stores information independently of my permission.
He grins at that. It does what it always does, which is take up more space than a grin should. "Is that a reason to come watch me beat her?"
Something in the way he says it —come watch me— lodges somewhere unhelpful. The goading is transparent. I know it's transparent. He knows I know. That particular layer of the thing is completely legible to both of us, and he does it anyway because that's who he is, and I'm starting to understand that it's not a tactic so much as a fact of his nature.
"It might be," I say.
He doesn't make a performance of it. He just nods, easy, like he'd expected nothing less, and walks toward the base, and I stand in the clearing for a moment looking at the place he was standing.
Tactical, I tell myself.You want to see what the course looks like. You want to know the terrain.
But Wren looks at me like she sees through every layer of that argument when I tell them I'm going.
She doesn't say anything. That's worse. She just does the thing with her face where her expression goes very still and attentive in a way that communicates clearly that she has understood exactly what's happening and has chosen, generously, not to make it into something I'd have to defend myself against.
Pell is less reserved about her happiness. "You'recoming?"
"To watch," I say.
"Of course." Pell is already reaching for her coat. "We'll come too."
Idris, whose ankle has graduated from bad to manageable, declares she's capable of standing in one place for the length of a competition, and that's how there are four of us walking toward the training yard instead of one, which was not the morning I'd planned, but it is the morning I have.
The yard is loud when we get there. Loud in a Frostfang way, which is to say the baseline volume is already enough to rattle a window, and several people haven't yet reached their full contributions. Drogath is standing on a wooden platform at the near end of the course with his ceremonial robes doing something dramatic in the wind, consulting a piece of parchment like it contains military intelligence.
I take in the course before I take in anything else. It runs the length of the yard and then some — log jumps set at varying heights, a balance beam stretch that's been elevated and slicked,what looks like a rope pull across a pit of sodden leaves, a sprint finish through a gate of hanging hides you have to push through. Someone has built this with genuine consideration for being difficult. There are three puddles that I don't think are accidental.
Practical part of my brain: I could do this.
Other part: I should find where we're standing and stop looking at the course like I'm already mapping my approach.
I find where we're standing, which turns out to be not far from Saela and Ressa, who are on the edge of the gathering next to Kai and Falla. Ressa spots me and lifts her chin in that particular nod that she uses as a greeting, which I appreciate about her — no performance, no warmth she hasn't earned the right to give yet. Just acknowledgment. I can work with acknowledgment.
Saela says something to Kai that makes him look at me with that assessing quiet he carries everywhere, and then he looks back at her and whatever he says makes her roll her eyes, which I find I like about her.
Ursik is there, beside Kerra, and I see them before he sees me.
She's got her head tilted back laughing at something, and his arms are folded but the set of his shoulders is loose and relaxed in the way that's particular to him when he's not thinking about how he's presenting himself, which is the version of him I've been watching across mornings in the clearing. He's shaking his head. Grinning. His long hair is tied back and he's in a sleeveless training wrap that I'd have something to say about in this temperature if I were going to say anything.
There's a thing that happens in my chest. I don't like it. I examine it anyway, the way you'd probe a bruise to measure its edges: it's not jealousy, exactly. It's more adjacent to the thing I'd felt in the clearing when I'd learned he and Kerrawere nothing, that same unhelpful rearrangement of something I hadn't consciously arranged in the first place.
And then I make myself look at him the way I'd look at anyone.
He's handsome. It's not a complicated observation — it's just accurate, the way the course layout was accurate, information my eyes collected and delivered without asking first. The line of his jaw, the way he moves when he's comfortable, the size of him that I've stopped reading as a threat over mornings of learning exactly what he does and doesn't do with it. My body has apparently filed all of that away into a category I hadn't labelled yet.
He sees me.
