Kerra has the look she gets when she's had a thought she's been building to, and has decided the fight is a good time to deploy it. "If she wants to protect her people. If that's what she'sdoing — standing in front of them, taking stock of everything, working out who the threat is —" She rolls her wrist once, easy, a gesture that saysyou've already seen this."Give her the tools."
I stay still with it.
Kerra drops her stance a fraction, not conceding — just pausing. "You can't make someone feel safe by proving you're harmless. She's not looking for harmless." She tips her head. "She's looking forcapable.So show her capable."
I think about Aislin at the front of the group, that first morning. Thin. Split lip, already healed yellow at the edges. Green eyes doing inventory on every orc in the yard. The way she'd moved — not backward, not tucking herself small — butforward,two steps forward into the gap between us and the others, like she'd made a calculation and the calculation had saidput yourself here.
And the sling. Somewhere on her person, this whole week. The whole week she's been watching me come through the trees with a crate of bread and broth, she's had a river stone and a strip of leather and an entirely sincere set of shoulders.
She wants to fight for them. She'sbeenfighting for them, with whatever she has. And what she has, she's taught herself.
The thought arrives whole, the way the good ones do. Not built up piece by piece but just —there,complete.
I want to teach her to fight properly.
3
AISLIN
The path around the back of the second cabin is forty-two steps. I know this because I've walked it every morning since the second day, when I'd decided that waiting inside for something to happen was a strategy that worked well for people who'd never had something happen to them.
Forty-two steps. I know where the ground dips near the third pine, where the frost doesn't clear until midmorning and the footing turns unreliable. I know the gap in the treeline that gives a clear sightline to the main settlement path — the one the big one, Ursik, uses when he comes through with the crates. I know the blind spot behind the woodpile where you can stand without being visible from either cabin window, and I know the smell of the air when someone's been through the trees recently, pine sap disturbed, needles turned up from the soft layer underneath.
I've been mapping this place since we arrived. Not because anyone asked me to. Because someone has to.
Pell thinks I'm being excessive. She'd said so on day three, not unkindly, watching me come back in from the first circuit of the morning with frozen fingers and mud on my boots.You're allowed to stop, Ais.I'd looked at her for a long moment — longenough that she'd dropped it — and then I'd gone out again the following morning.
We'd been in the Stonevein camp for three months. I'd learned the layout from listening in the first week. I'd known which guards rotated which posts, which ones had bad knees, where the supply routes came in. I'd spent three months building a map in my head that I never got to use because the orcs here had come first and killed the Stonevein chieftain. And then they dumped us in the woods and left us to die out of fear of retaliation before I'd had the chance to try anything I'd planned.
I'm not making the same mistake again.
The morning is cold and pale, the kind of early spring cold that looks like winter when the sun hasn't climbed above the trees yet. My breath makes small clouds. The ground crunches under my boots where the frost is still holding. I'm on the back stretch of the circuit — past the second cabin, angling toward the treeline — when I hear footsteps on the main path.
I stop.
Not panic. Assessment. Two sets of footsteps, which means two people, which is already different from the usual morning pattern. Ursik comes alone with the crate. He's been coming alone with the crate every morning for a week, and I've watched him from the gap in the treeline every single morning, cataloguing: how fast he moves, how much of the path he takes up, whether he looks toward the windows or the doors, whether he changes his approach. He hasn't changed his approach. He brings the crate, he speaks in a low voice, he smiles with the terrible friendliness of someone who has decided smiling is a project, and he leaves.
Two sets of footsteps is not the pattern.
I move to the gap in the treeline. Slowly, because slow and deliberate is quieter than cautious-and-rushed. The gap gives me a clean line of sight to the main path where it bends towardthe cabins, and I get there just as the two figures come around the bend.
One of them is Ursik. He has the crate under one arm and a loop of something — rope, maybe — over his shoulder that he didn't have yesterday. The other one is smaller. Much smaller. Human-shaped, human-sized, red hair visible even at distance with a braid over one shoulder, moving beside him with her arms crossed against the cold.
I've seen her before. Ressa. Falla's human. I listened to her talk about having been brought here after the Stonevein, too. Listened to her talk about the orcs.
I remember thinking: she trusts them. Or she's decided to trust them, which isn't quite the same thing.
I don't know what's worse.
She's talking to Ursik now, and something in the set of her shoulders — even from here, even at distance — has the quality of a person delivering a message they've been tasked with. Her chin is up. Ursik turns toward her with an expression that, even from fifty feet away, reads assurprised she's here.He says something. She says something back, gesturing once with a hand. He opens his mouth. She cuts him off.
I move closer. Not stepping onto the path — I stay in the treeline, one hand on the nearest trunk, moving heel-to-toe over the pine needles until I'm close enough to hear.
"— Falla sent you," Ursik is saying. He doesn't sound offended. More like he's encountered a development he finds mildly entertaining.
"Falla sent me." Ressa's voice is dry. "He said, and I'm quoting directly:go make sure he doesn't do anything with more confidence than sense."
"That's very specific."
