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"I was helping."

"You were not helping."

"I was helping," I said again, with the absolute conviction of someone three drinks past being right about anything, and Corian's mouth curved, the kind of smile he usually saved for when nobody official was watching.

He steered me gently by the shoulder toward the blanket where Halver and Alex sat waiting, both of them wearing matching expressions of barely restrained amusement.

Ashter lifted his head from Corian's chair long enough to track me across the yard, ember eyes half-lidded rather than sharp, no tension in the line of his back at all. He'd watched every hand that touched me tonight with the same loose, unbothered ease, the particular quiet of something that already knew exactly whose hands those were and had stopped needing to check.

Halver sat on a blanket near the edge of the firelight with Alex beside him, both of them watching the stone game. I crossed the grass toward them and dropped down onto the blanket between them.

"You smell like Taren's poison," Alex said.

"I was made to drink it."

"Nobody makes you do anything."

"Liora made me do it."

I poked his arm, testing, and found considerably less give than I expected. "You're squishy."

"I am not squishy. This is muscle."

"It's squishy muscle."

"There is no such thing as squishy muscle."

"There is when I've had multiple drinks and I'm the one deciding."

"That's not how muscle works."

"It's exactly how muscles work tonight."

Alex looked at Halver like he expected backup and got none, just the corner of Halver's mouth moving. The fire had gone low and orange, throwing soft light across everyone's faces, and the noise around us had settled into the kind of easy chaos I used to find unbearable and now mostly just found warm. Someone laughed too loud near the stone game. Someone else argued about whether that counted as cheating. The night smelled like woodsmoke and roasted meat and the last of the garlic Elira had somehow gotten onto everything we'd cooked.

My head felt heavier than it should have, the world tilting gently at the edges in a way that wasn't unpleasant so much as unfamiliar, and I leaned sideways without deciding to do that either.

I landed in Halver's lap.

"Stay there," he said his voice low and quiet, before I could gather the coordination to sit back up.

I stayed.

"You're warm," I told him, which felt like important information to tell him.

"I run hot."

"It's very nice."

"Glad to be of use."

His hand found my hair a moment later, careful fingers working the braid loose one section at a time until it fell open across his knee, dark strands catching what was left of the firelight. He didn't say anything else. He didn't need to. His fingers moved slow and steady through my hair, untangling nothing in particular.

Alex reached over without asking and pulled my feet into his lap, working one boot off and then the other, setting them aside like that had always been part of the plan.

I should have found all of it strange. Weeks ago I would have. Someone touching my hair without permission, someone else handling my feet like it was nothing, four different people treating my body like something they were allowed to be near without asking first.

I didn't find it strange.