Chapter 102. I Had Never Listened to My Own Heartbeat Until a Rabbit Asked Me To

Chapter 102: 102. I Had Never Listened to My Own Heartbeat Until a Rabbit Asked Me To

The next morning, I taught Eveline how to fall.

It wasn’t planned... We’d stopped at midday on a flat saddle between two peaks to give the horses a rest and the humans a handful of dried fruit.

Sharon was lying on her back with her hat over her face. And Laura was drawing a map.

Alicia was somewhere off to one side, talking to Holt in low, serious tones. And Eveline was sitting by herself on a flat rock, glaring at her left foot.

"It betrayed me," she said, as I sat down beside her.

"What did?"

"My boot... It caught on the cairn." She pointed at a pile of stones about two feet high. "I didn’t even see it because I was looking at the sky."

"What was in the sky?"

"A hawk."

"That’s fair..." I then thought of a dark joke but didn’t dare to spit it. ’Hawks do prey on rabbits, if I remember.’

She gave me a miserable look. "I fall over things every single day, and I’m so sick of it."

"Every time I do, I think... this is the time that someone’s going to get hurt."

"This is the time that I take down the wrong wall... I’ve been trying not to fall for six years, and it hasn’t worked once."

I looked at her for a moment. Then I looked at the flat patch of springy mountain turf in front of us, and I had an idea, which is usually a dangerous thing for me.

"Maybe that’s the wrong goal," I said.

"What do you mean?"

"Stop trying not to fall, but... Learn how to do it well."

She stared at me. I stood up, brushed off my knees, and walked to the middle of the grass.

"I spent fifteen years getting knocked down by people who were better than me," I said. "And I’m actually an expert at that kind of thing."

I pointed at myself with my thumb. "Watch and learn."

I tucked my chin against my chest, crossed my arms over my body, and dropped sideways.

I let my shoulder take the first impact, rolled across the curve of my back, and came up on one knee with my hand on the turf.

It wasn’t elegant, and my ribs twanged, because they’d mostly healed but not entirely. I stifled the noise and got back to my feet like a man doing something perfectly reasonable.

"Chin tucked," I said. "Arms crossed..."

"Roll over the meat of the shoulder, never the bone!"

"If you hit the ground flat, you’re finished, but if you roll, a fall is just a transition... It’s a part of the move." I nodded. "You can commit to it."

Eveline’s ears had risen about an inch.

"I’ll show you again."

I did it a second time. A stone I hadn’t seen dug into my hip, and I couldn’t stop a grunt, which I tried to turn into a cough, and then into a very dignified sigh.

I got up with my face perfectly serious.

"See? Easy."

"You made a noise..."

"That was educational."

"It was an ow."

"It was a teaching show."

She giggled, and the sound was so bright and so sudden that Sharon lifted her hat to see what was happening, then dropped it again with a grunt.

I held out a hand to Eveline and pulled her to her feet.

"Try it," I said.

The first attempt was a disaster.

She dropped without tucking her chin, landed flat on her stomach, and lay there with her ears sprawled beside her head.

The second time, she crossed her arms the wrong way and rolled over her elbow.

On the third, she forgot to stop and kept going, rolled right off the edge of the grass and down a shallow bank into a thornbush, and came up with a leaf in her hair and an outraged expression that I will treasure for the rest of my life.

"I’m fine," she said before I could ask.

"I didn’t say anything."

"You were about to."

"I was about to say ’great form.’"

"You were not."

"Again," I said. "Just once more!"

"Chin down! Arms in! And make sure to think about the shoulder."

She took a breath. She said something under her breath that sounded like "four, two, six, and she stepped out onto the turf.

This time, when she dropped, she folded like a leaf.

I can see her chin tucked. And her arms crossed.

She hit the grass with one shoulder, rolled across her back in one smooth curve, and came up on her feet in a single flowing motion, with her sword hand hovering at her belt.

I’d stopped breathing again, apparently.

"Did I... do it?" she whispered.

"You did it perfectly."

"I did it perfectly?"

"It’s the best fall I’ve ever seen."

Her face lit up like a window. She shot a look toward Sharon, who had very definitely not been watching, and then she turned back to me, with her ears standing straight up and a smile that lit every corner of her face.

I realized I’d never seen her look like that, not once, as if she had just done something extraordinary and wanted to tell the whole mountain.

"Now you," she said.

"I just did mine."

"No, I mean something else." She tugged me down onto the grass, sat cross-legged in front of me, and held up a finger. "Close your eyes."

"Why?"

"Just do it... Close your eyes, and tell me what you hear."

I closed them.

For a moment, there was nothing but dark.

Then, slowly, the world assembled itself around me, a piece at a time.

The wind in the thin mountain grass.

The far-off cry of a hawk.

A horse blowing through its nose.

Laura’s pencil is scratching on paper.

Somebody’s boot scraping on a stone. And under all of it, a soft, steady sound, a small quick pulse, like a hand tapping a table.

It took me a second to realize that it was me.

I’d never listened to my own heartbeat in my life... It was faster than I’d thought and louder, and it sounded very much like somebody who’d been running for two lifetimes and had only just noticed that they could stop.

I opened my eyes. Eveline was watching me, with her head tilted and her amber eyes warm.

"See?" she said softly. "You’ve got a lot to hear."

I didn’t answer... I couldn’t think of anything clever.

I just nodded, and she smiled and looked away, and we both pretended very hard that nothing had happened.

...

That night, Eveline fell asleep on my shoulder.

She hadn’t meant to... We were on watch again, because Alicia’s schedule had somehow produced the same two names for the second night in a row, and I’d stopped pretending to be surprised.

Being the wingwomen that she is... as usual.

We’d been sitting on a ledge above a deep ravine, passing a waterskin back and forth and trading ridiculous stories about our worst moments as recruits.

She’d gotten to the part about the bishop’s hat, and I’d been laughing too hard to speak, and at some point her sentences had gotten slower and softer, and then her head had slid sideways and landed against my arm.

I didn’t move.

It was an odd feeling... She weighed almost nothing, even though I saw her carry a whole goddamn horse by herself.

Her hair smelled like the pines, and one of her ears had flopped over and was resting on my sleeve like a warm gray scarf. Her breathing had gone slow and even.

A small, contented sound came out of her, something halfway between a sigh and a hum, and every muscle in my body went quiet.

’Careful,’ I thought. ’You’re enjoying this a lot.’

Which was when I noticed that I’d opened the panel.

I hadn’t meant to. It had just happened, the way you reach for your phone without thinking.

The blue glow hung in the air in front of my eyes, and I’d already navigated to a section I recognized, a small card with a name at the top.

Eveline Whitehare.

Under it, in neat bracketed lines, were all the numbers.

Compatibility.

Trust Level.

Romantic Affinity.

A small meter is slowly filling.

I stared at it, and a cold feeling went through me.

I’d been looking at her numbers. Not on purpose, and not for any reason, but I’d been checking them in the same casual way I checked my own Lust.

I’d been sitting here with her sleeping on my arm, and some part of me had been running a quiet inventory. ’How is it going? Is the trust up? Is the affinity rising?’

It was the most disgusting thing I’d ever caught myself doing.

I closed the panel. I sat for a long time, with the stars wheeling overhead and Eveline breathing against my sleeve, and thought about the kind of person who looks at a sleeping girl and checks a meter.

’I don’t want to know,’ I thought. ’I want to find out on my own.’

’The normal way... The slow, scary, stupid way where you just have to guess.’

I opened the panel again, this time deliberately.

’Hey,’ I thought. ’I want to ask you something.’

[Query acknowledged.]

’Can you hide Eveline’s data from me?’

’The compatibility, the trust level, the affinity... All of it. Until we’ve both decided what we want.’

There was a brief pause. I’d never seen the panel pause before.

[Request Accepted.]

[Eveline Whitehare’s data is now hidden until a mutual bond is established or declined.]

[Warning: This may make you worse at strategy.]

[Also noted: this is the most romantic thing anyone has asked me to do.]