#aswritings

The sand had worked its way under his nails hours ago, and he had not moved enough to shake it loose.

That was the thing he kept coming back to. His mind would drift out over the dark water and snag on nothing and slide home again, and every time it landed it landed there — the grit packed in fine dark lines beneath each nail, the bite of it against the backs of his bare legs where he sat folded on the wet edge of the shore. He had been down here long enough that the beach had made itself a part of him, ground its small sharp pieces into his skin until he could not have said where the shore ended and he began. It did not hurt. It was just there, the way everything was just there tonight, insistent and granular and refusing both to be ignored and to mean anything at all.

The tide came up under his ankles and went back. Came up, went back. It was not doing anything to him. It was just being the sea, the way it had been the sea before any of them, the way it would go on being the sea after. The light was the wrong colour. It was the hour Awa'atlu went soft and violet and forgiving, the hour the water forgot the day, and it lay over everything like a mercy that had not been meant for him.

Weeks. It had been weeks.

That was the part he could not make sit right. The battle was over, the worst of it done. He had been told the bad thing was over, and he had believed it, the way you believe a tide chart — and then the weeks had come and gone and the relief that was supposed to ride in on one of them had simply never arrived. Everyone else had stepped across into the after. He could see them doing it, day by day, the family closing back over the wound of the war like water over a dropped stone. He stood on the near bank of it and watched them go and could not make his feet follow.

He had sat at the fire tonight and done it all correctly. He had laughed in the places laughter went. He had let Tuk haul him sideways by the elbow and lean her whole small weight against him and he had held still for it the way you hold still for something precious. He had kept his face in the shape a face was supposed to hold when the bad thing was over. Good, he had been ready to say, if anyone asked him how he was. Good. Better. The word had been sitting in his mouth all evening, the right shape, the right size, and it had never once come up his throat the way it was meant to.

The Colonel was dead.

Quaritch was dead.

His father was dead.

He pressed the heels of his hands flat against the sand and made himself breathe. He had said the words to himself a hundred times, weeks of times, the way you press on a bruise to find out if it still answers. It still answered. The Colonel had been dead before, and Spider had said good then too, and the word had been a lie then in a different direction. The Colonel was the worst man he had known. The Colonel had carried him out of the woods on his back, once, the boy's cheek against the wet collar of a man who did not have one soft thing in him and had still, that day, walked careful over the roots so the ride would not jar. Both of those were true. They lived in him side by side and would not braid into a single thing he could hold, and there was nowhere in the world — not at the Sully fire, not anywhere — a person could set down a grief shaped like that.

So he had come down here to be alone with it, where it would not have to be a face.

He reached up and gathered his hair back in his hands.

He did not know, fully, why he wanted it braided. Only that his neck felt bare and his head felt loud and somewhere underneath both was the idea that if he could just put the one thing in order, the small thing, the thing that was his to do, then maybe the rest of it would follow. He divided the hair and crossed the first strands, and his fingers were shaking — he had not noticed until now, the fine helpless tremor of a body that had held itself shut too long, that had kept the lid down through the fire and the laughing and Tuk's weight against his side and could not, now, quite stop. They fumbled the cross. Lost the tension. The whole thing slithered loose against his palm.

He started again.

He started again.

Stupid. The strands skidded apart. Stupid, stupid. But it was not the shaking, not really; even steady, his hands would not have known the way of it. No one had ever sat behind him when he was small and folded his fingers into the weave until it lived in them without thought. That was the thing that set him apart, in the end — not his blood, not the colour of him, nothing he could find in a stretch of still water — only that he had come to all of this too late, and his hands had never been taught, and untaught hands were the one part of him that could never quite pass for one of the people.

He had watched Kiri do this a thousand times, fast and careless, fingers flickering, not even looking — her hands had known the weave since before she could remember being taught it. He could go to her now. She was up there in the longhouse light and she would do it for him in the time it took him to breathe, and she would not ask him a single question while she did. She would just be glad. She had been so glad, these last weeks — so plainly, openly glad that he was one of the people now, that the family had closed around him and held — that her whole face lit when she looked at him sideways, like he was proof of something good.

He could not, tonight, ask her to set aside her happiness to come sit in his sadness with him.

He bent his head over his own stupid, shaking hands and tried, a fourth time, to make them do a thing no one had ever taught them.

And then the half-made braid came undone against his palm — just slid apart, soft and final, the way the day had — and something in him came undone with it.

It was not a sob. It was a breaking, low and torn and not his. His shoulders went. His breath broke into pieces in his chest. He folded down over his own knees, hands still tangled uselessly in his hair, and he pressed his face into the wet salt of his own legs and he broke, quietly, completely, the way you can only break when no one is watching.

He did not hear her.

That was the first thing — that there was no warning. No shift of sand, no soft chatter of the beads at her hip, none of the small announcements a body makes crossing a beach. The Metkayina moved over water like it was an idea they had once had about ground; Neytiri moved the same way when she chose to. The first thing he knew was the air. The air at the back of his shoulders changed — warmed, thickened, took on the specific weight of being attended to — and his whole body knew it was not alone before his mind could catch up and tell him who.

Then the touch. Her fingers, light, at the curve of his shoulder. An arrival. I am here.

He flinched.

He could not help it and he hated it and he could not help it. The flinch came up out of years — out of every time that voice had cut at him across a clearing or a deck, out of every time those eyes had found him and gone flat and hard, out of all the long seasons of being the thing she could not stand the sight of. His body remembered before he did. It jerked away from her hand like the hand might be the start of something.

She stilled.

She did not pull back. She did not say sorry, did not soften her voice at him, did not do any of the things that would have asked him to manage her in return. She simply went still, and let his flinch finish itself against the quiet of her, and waited. And then — slow, deliberate, so he could watch it happen, so there could be no question of where she was — she set both her hands on his shoulders. Both. Settled them there with weight, the way you set your hands on something to tell it the ground is still the ground. Here. Both of them. You can find me. I am not going anywhere you cannot see.

They were a mother's hands. He knew that without deciding to know it — hands that had held terrified children through worse dark than this, that knew exactly how much to weigh so the weight read as anchor and not as cage. They were also a hunter's hands, and they knew precisely how a frightened thing moved and how not to chase it. Both of those things were in the hands at once, and neither of them was anything she would ever say.

He did not look at her.

He looked at the water. He looked at the packed dark sand. He looked at his own hands fallen open and useless in his lap. He did all of his looking everywhere she was not, which was its own kind of looking, the kind that is only ever about one person.

Her hands moved from his shoulders to his hair.

She found the ruined braid first — the snarled, half-crossed, abandoned thing he had made — and she took it apart. Gently. Without judgement, without a sound, without the smallest huff of a person fixing another person's mistake. She did not build on what he had done. She unmade it all the way down, every clumsy cross of it, until there was nothing of his failure left in his hair, and only then did she begin.

Her fingers combed the knots out one at a time. Slow. Patient. Warm where the night had gone cool. She worked up from the ends the way you do when you mean not to hurt, taking each tangle on its own terms, and her knuckles grazed his scalp now and then with a steadiness that had no hurry in it anywhere. She worked close — close to the place high at the back of his head where the queue rooted, the most secret seam of him, the seat of every bond he had or might ever have — close enough that he braced, somewhere under his held breath, for her to reach it.

She did not.

Her fingers worked all around it and never once at it. They honoured the place by leaving it be, moved in careful orbit around the one thing that was not theirs to handle, and the not-touching was louder than any touch. She knew what it was. She knew exactly what it was and exactly what it would mean to lay a hand on it, and she did not.

That was what undid him again. Not the unkindness he had braced a lifetime for — the gentleness. He had thought he was done. He had stopped, up there at the breaking, had wrung it out and gone empty. He was not done. His eyes stung hot and full and he jammed the heels of his hands up against them to grind the water back down, furious — and it did not work, it never worked, and the tears came anyway, sliding hot over the salt already dried on his face.

And as he folded smaller — knees to chest, face down, shoulders shaking — she worked. Every knot she loosed, every strand she smoothed and gathered and drew back into order, opened by exactly as much as he closed. He curled in around the hollow inside himself; her hands spread him back out, patient, plaiting him into something that held. He contracted. She made him whole.

She began to plait.

He felt it — the deep old logic of it, two strands carried forward and two behind, the weave coming under itself and under itself again, even and unhurried. His hair, which had refused him all night, which had slithered out of his own clumsy, untaught fingers like it wanted nothing to do with what he was, lay down for her without complaint and did the thing hair was supposed to do. Of course it did. Her hands had been making this shape since before he was born.

And somewhere down in the rhythm of it, where the pull of her fingers set the time, the other braid happened too — the one he could not lay down. Jake. The clearing. The knife and the boy at the end of it. The face above the blade that had not been anger and had not even been hate, that had been worse than both — wet-eyed and breaking, the face of a man who loved him and had lifted the knife anyway. I love you, it had said, the tears standing in it, the blade still in its hand. That was the part his body could not put down: not cruelty, never cruelty, only a love that had made its terrible arithmetic and very nearly come out on the wrong side of it. Did not. His body still held the half-second where it had known the blade was coming. Did not. It had braced to be opened and it had not been, and the not-being could not unwrite the bracing. Did not. He loved Jake. He could not, tonight, walk up that path to him. The love and the wound were the same length, the exact same length, twisting where they crossed, and no amount of pulling would tease them into two clean strands he could hold one without the other.

Neytiri's hands kept their time over all of it. And under her breath, so low it was barely outside her, she began to hum.

It was nothing. A few notes, turning back on themselves, a tune with no name and no occasion — the kind of half-song a body makes when its hands are busy and its mind is somewhere kind.

He felt her fingers do something small and deft, high in the braid, behind where he could see. A pause in the rhythm. A tuck. He did not understand it and did not turn to look, and her hands moved on past it and carried the weave down to its end.

She drew the braid together at the base and held it there — one firm closing pressure, a full stop made in the body — and then she laid it down against his back the way you set down a thing you have just finished making and are content with. It settled between his shoulder blades, salt-damp and even and heavier than hair had any right to be.

She stood.

Her hand came to his shoulder once more and rested, and lifted.

Then she spoke.

"Za'u, yom."

That was all. Come, eat. The same two words she had thrown over her shoulder at Lo'ak ten thousand times, at Tuk halfway up a tree, at Kiri dawdling over some shell — the most worn, most ordinary, most unceremonious words in the whole of her language. She did not make them gentle. She did not make them mean more than they meant. She set them down plain, the way you only ever speak to your own, and that was how he knew. Not the braid, in the end. It was that she had called him to dinner like she had forgotten he had ever been anything other than family.

Her shadow went over him once as she passed, long in the wrong-coloured light, and then she was walking back up the shore toward the lamps and the smell of the fire.

He swallowed. He nodded — to no one, to the water, to the space she had left. And he reached up to touch the braid she had made him.

His fingers found it warm and tight and right. They followed it up, and high near the root they stilled.

Something hard. Small, smooth, threaded through and bound fast where his own hands could never have reached without a mirror and an hour. A bead.

She had woven a bead into his hair.

It was in him before he let himself name it. He knew what it meant the way you know the ground is under you — without looking, without proof, in the body. The braid would come out tonight when he slept; the bead would not, not without someone's deliberate hands. She had made something in him that would still be there in the morning, and the morning after, and she had not said one word about doing it. She had just done it, in the dark, where he could not stop her or thank her or be unmade by it to her face.

He pressed two fingers against it and held them there and did not let himself think the whole shape of the thing. If he thought it all the way out he would go down again, and he had only just got the braid.

His eyes lifted after her without his asking them to — the body still turned toward where she had gone.

And caught on Jake.

He was standing in the mouth of the marui, up the path, leaning on his good leg. He had been watching his wife come up out of the dark. He had not moved to meet Spider, had not come down, was not coming down. He had nothing tonight he had earned and nothing he had the right to ask for, and his body knew it and kept its distance. But he had seen — Spider felt the moment Jake's eyes found the new weight at the back of his neck, and understood, all at once and without a word, what his wife had walked down into the dark to do.

Jake smiled. It was a small thing, closed-mouthed, and it did not reach his eyes, and it was not meant to; nothing had been made right between the two of them, and the smile did not pretend it had. It was not warmth. It was a door left ajar.

Then he nodded. Once. No words came with it, and none needed to, because the words were already in Spider's head in another voice — I see you. I am here when you are ready. — the thing Neytiri had said in the clearing with the relief plain on her face that the boy had lived. The words belonged to her now. Jake could only borrow them. He gave Spider the nod and let her words stand behind it, and did not lay claim to them himself.

Spider nodded back. His hand stayed on the bead while he did it. That was what made it possible — the small hard certainty under his fingers, the proof that he was one of hers — she has made me one of hers, so I can look at him — that let him hold Jake's eyes for the length of a breath without coming apart in the holding. It was not forgiveness. He did not have that to give yet, and maybe would not for a long time. It was only this: I see that you are there. That much, tonight, he could do.

Jake turned, and limped back inside the marui, and was gone.

For a moment Spider stayed where he was, alone again with the water. The tide came up under his ankles and went back. Came up, went back. The light was still the wrong colour. None of it had moved.

And none of it had been undone. He made himself count it honestly, because he would not let the braid lie to him. The Colonel was still dead, and still unmournable, and still his. The clearing was still the clearing, and the half-second sat in his body where it would likely always be. Nothing had been fixed. Nothing had been taken back. The wave he had been promised had not come, after all these weeks, and he understood now in some wordless place that it was not going to — that there was no single tide that would carry any of this out to sea and leave him clean.

What had changed was smaller than that, and heavier. It sat at the back of his neck, salt-damp and even, and it weighed exactly enough to be felt.

His shoulders came down. They had been up around his ears since he had sat himself on the sand, and now, without his telling them to, they dropped — the one place in the whole long night his body let go of something it had been holding. He did not name what. He only felt the room it made.

He pushed himself up off the shore. His knees unfolded and he stood, and the grit fell from the backs of his legs, and he turned away from the water and toward the path.

He could hear them before he could see them. The family was already at the meal — the clatter and overlap of them, Tuk's voice climbing over everyone's, the low rumble that was Lo'ak, the bright thread that was Kiri being glad of something. They had not waited for him, and that was the mercy of it: they were already being a family, already in motion, a thing happening that he did not have to be whole to walk into. He only had to walk toward it.

He went up the path. At the mouth of the marui he stopped, one breath, and reached back and touched the bead once more — just to know it was there, just to be sure he had not made it out of wanting it.

It was there.

The boy had been watching him for three mornings before he said anything.

Not openly. Spider was eight and already knew how to want a thing without asking for it — a trick you learned fast, living in a clan that wasn't yours, in skin that didn't match anybody's. So he watched from the lip of the marui pod, knees drawn up, while Jake sat at the edge of the platform and worked the night's tangles out of his hair.

It was a slow job. Jake did it the same way every morning, the way Neytiri had taught him years back, before he'd had the hands for it. Section. Twist. Roll the new growth tight against the old so it locked. His fingers knew it now without his head. He could do it half-asleep, watching the mist come off the water, thinking about nothing, which was the only time of day he got to think about nothing.

He felt the kid's eyes the whole time. Didn't say anything. Figured if he left a thing alone long enough it usually went away.

On the third morning it didn't.

"I want mine like that."

Jake looked over. Spider had crept down off the pod and was standing too close, the way he always stood too close, like proximity was a thing he could bank against later. His own hair was a disaster — a pale, sun-bleached mess of curls knotted with sleep and forest and whatever he'd been into the day before.

He was small for eight. That was the thing that got at Jake, every time, before anything else did — built like a held breath, all knobbed wrists and shoulder blades, the heavy brow and stubborn jaw still too big for the rest of him. The head rode a neck Jake could've circled with one hand and had room left over. He knew it without trying because some animal part of him had already measured it, the way the kid measured hurts: how little there was of him. How easy he'd be to break. How nothing out here — not the clan, not the forest, not Jake — had been built to keep him from it. His hand wanted to close around the back of that head just to feel the size of him, to know how much of him still fit under one palm. He didn't let it — he already knew the size of him would scare him.

"Like what?" Jake said.

"Like yours." Spider reached up and grabbed a fistful of his own hair and yanked it straight out from his head, like he meant to show Jake what was wrong with it. "Not — not all floppy. Like yours. So it stays."

"Your hair's fine."

"Kehe." The boy's chin did a thing — no, flat and certain, the same way Neytiri said it, like he'd caught the word off her the way you catch a cold, without anybody meaning to give him anything. "Norm cut his. Yours stays. I want it to stay."

Jake went back to his own hair. Twist. Roll. "Ask Neytiri."

The boy's face pulled down at the corners — slow, like something folding in on itself.

"No." It came out small and fast, like he'd had it ready the whole time. "I don't want to ask her." His eyes dropped — to his own feet, to the platform, anywhere but the water Neytiri had gone off across. "She says no to me. Always. Always."

Then he stepped closer.

"I asked you."

Jake kept his eyes on the water. He knew the shape of the kid's face without looking. Knew it too well. The heavy brow that was going to come in hard one day. The jaw. He'd spent a long time not naming whose jaw it was. Some mornings the not-naming worked. This was not going to be one of those mornings, with the boy standing there breathing through his mouth, waiting on him like Jake was the fixed point the whole world turned on.

He should've sent him to Neytiri. He knew that. Or better yet, sent him home.

"Sit down," he said. "In front. And quit squirming before you even start."

Spider dropped between his knees so fast he nearly went off the edge of the platform.

It was harder than Jake remembered. His own hair was coarse and thick and forgave a clumsy hand. Spider's was fine as spider-silk — and wasn't that a joke nobody was ever going to let the kid live down — and it slipped out of every section he tried to hold. Twice he got a twist halfway locked and watched it unravel the second he let go.

"Hold still."

"I am."

"You're talking. Talking's moving."

The boy went still. For about nine seconds.

"Does it hurt when it stays?"

"No."

"Did it hurt you?"

"No." Jake parted off another section, rolled it against his thumb. "Stop asking if things hurt."

A pause. Then, smaller: "Okay."

And Jake heard the okay the way you hear a thing in the dark — the shape of it more than the word. The kid asked if everything hurt because the kid had a running list, somewhere behind that heavy little brow, of all the things that could. Eight years old and already taking inventory. Jake's hands slowed without his say-so. Got gentler. He told them not to and they did it anyway.

This isn't yours, he reminded himself. He did it the way you press on a bad tooth, just to make sure it still went off. This one isn't yours. This was the other thing's blood. The face he'd spent a war learning to hate was sitting between his knees humming a tuneless little song and trusting him with the back of its skull.

He rolled the twist tight and it held.

"There," he said. "That's one."

Spider's hand flew up to feel it.

"Don't touch it," Jake said, and the hand froze, hovering, like the boy was checking a held breath was still there. Then it came down.

"How many's it gonna be."

"A lot. You're gonna sit here till your legs go to sleep."

"Okay," he said like that was the best news anybody had ever given him.

His small hands settled back into his lap and he continued humming, and Jake felt something in his chest fracture.

The sun came up over the water proper. Neytiri passed once, a bowl of something in her hands, and stopped. Jake felt her stop. Felt her look at the two of them — the man and the small pale boy folded into the cage of his legs, half a head of new knots and half a head of mess — and this time he made himself look up, because not looking was its own kind of answer.

Her face had gone still. Not cruel. Neytiri was never cruel about it; cruel would've been easier to fight. It just closed, the way a hand closes, the way it always closed when the boy came inside the circle of her home. She looked at the knots Jake had made. She looked at the soft human hair caught up in his Na'vi hands.

She set the bowl down by his knee — one bowl, for him — and said it low, in Na'vi, fast, so the boy wouldn't catch the shape of it. He is not ours, ma Jake. Not a fight. Not even new. A thing she set down between them most days now, the way you put down something heavy you've carried too far.

He didn't answer. She didn't wait for one. On her way past she ran a hand over Lo'ak's head where he hung off a pod-rope nearby — her own boy, the gesture easy, unthinking — and not the other one, never the other one, and then she was gone.

Spider had gone quiet. He didn't ask what she'd said. He didn't have to; he knew that tone in every language he had one in. He just sat very small inside the cage of Jake's knees and added it, Jake figured, to the list. Jake's thumb moved against the back of the boy's skull, once, before he'd decided to. Easy, the touch said, where his mouth wouldn't. I got you. Hold still.

The boy ate one-handed without being told he could, and kept his head where Jake's hands needed it, and that was its own small astonishment — that the kid who never held still for anybody would sit like a stone for hours, just to be the one Jake's hands were busy with. To be a boy getting his hair done by his dad, like any other kid, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world and he was owed it.

"Tuk's gonna want hers done too," Spider said, around a mouthful. "When she's big."

"Maybe."

"And Lo'ak."

"Lo'ak won't sit still."

"I'm sitting still."

"Yeah," Jake said, a smile tugging at his lips. "You are."

He hadn't meant for it to come out like that. Quiet. Surprised by itself. He felt the kid go very alert under his hands, the way an animal goes alert at a sound it's been hoping for, and Jake cleared his throat and split off another section before the boy could turn it into anything.

Too late.

"When it stays," Spider said — slow, working it out, laying the stone down careful so it wouldn't roll away from him — "when it stays, I'll look like you. Right?"

Jake's hands kept moving. Twist. Roll. "A little."

"And then people'll know."

"Know what."

The boy was quiet a second. When it came it came plain, and that was the worst of it — he knew exactly what the word weighed, and he set it down anyway.

"That I'm yours." A beat. Then smaller, laid down careful, the way you test ice with one toe, ready to snatch it back: "...Sempul?"

Father.

The word every other kid in the clan threw around like it cost nothing, like it weighed nothing, like there was an endless supply of it.

Jake stopped, his hands going still over the boy's head, his throat suddenly very tight.

He could feel the boy not breathing. Waiting to find out if he'd just wrecked it. Eight years old and already braced for the answer, shoulders up to his ears, fingers wringing in his lap.

Jake thought about all the true things he could say. That he had a face that came from somewhere Jake had bled to be rid of. That there were men, somewhere up past the sky, who'd made this kid on purpose and then left him in the dirt like a dropped tool. That yours was a word with a cost on it Jake hadn't decided he was willing to pay — not to this one, not with what this one was going to grow into, not with Neytiri's voice still hanging in the morning air saying the boy wasn't theirs.

All of it true. None of it was going to come out of his mouth with the boy sitting there holding his breath.

"Hold still," Jake said. His voice came out rough. "I'm not done."

And he started the twist again. Rolled it tight against the others. Felt it lock.

The boy let his breath out slow. He didn't ask again. Smart kid — smart enough to know he'd been given something, even if it wasn't the thing he'd asked for. He leaned back, just slightly, until the small warm weight of him settled against the inside of Jake's knee, and he stayed there.

Jake worked on through the morning. His hands kept being gentle. He'd long since stopped telling them not to.

It took most of the day, with breaks, and the kid did finally fall asleep — sometime in the afternoon, mid-sentence, slumped sideways against Jake's leg with his mouth open and one fist closed around nothing.

Jake didn't move him. He had maybe a dozen left to do and he did them slow, in the long gold light, the boy dead asleep and breathing against his shin, the new knots dark and tight and staying under his hands.

When he was done he sat there a while longer than he needed to.

The kid wasn't his. Not by blood, not by any law that would've held up anywhere Jake had ever lived. He knew that. He'd go on knowing it — through everything that was coming, the years and the war that wasn't finished and the day this small face would wear the other one over it like a mask. None of that had changed.

What had changed was smaller, and worse. Somewhere in the long gold afternoon he'd quit being able to feel the seam between this and what he felt for the ones who were his. He loved the boy like a son. He hadn't asked to. He wasn't going to say it out loud — not with Neytiri's face the way it had been, not with whose blood it was. But the wanting had set in like a lock, tight against the old growth, and it wasn't coming undone now.

He put his hand on the back of the boy's head, over the new work. Light. The way you'd touch a thing to see if it would hold. The way a father would. The way nobody else in this house was going to.

It stayed.

"Yeah," Jake said, to no one, to the water. "Okay."

In all her long years, Neytiri had never once let herself be resentful.

To be resentful would mean being ungrateful and ingratitude was a kind of blindness — a turning-away from all the ways Eywa had held her, all the hands that had carried her this far. So she had built gratitude into herself the way the body builds callus over a wound it means to keep using, plate by plate, season by season, until it was not a thing she reached for but a thing she was made of.

She was grateful. She said it to herself the way her mother said the old words over the clan, until the saying and the truth of it wore down into the same smooth stone.

She was grateful for her people, who had not broken, though the sky kept falling on them.

She was grateful for Mo'at, her mother, whose voice was the voice of Eywa, whose hands had caught more newborns and closed more dead eyes than any other living hands among the Omaticaya.

She was grateful for Eytukan, her father, who stood between the People and the dark, never letting them see what the standing cost him.

She was grateful for every day the Sky People came no nearer to Hometree than they had the day before, and for every evening she walked the branch-roads home with the kill heavy across her shoulders, laid it down, watched it become a meal in the mouths of people she loved. These were not small things. She knew that they were not. A whole life could be built of them — a good life — and she meant to be grateful for all of it.

And if, folded down inside the gratitude, there were heavier things — she had taught herself to be grateful for those too.

She was grateful, she told herself, even for the years she had had of Sylwanin before the light went out of her sister's eyes; grateful that she had been there at the end, that Sylwanin had not gone into the dark alone. She did not let herself feel the rest of that morning. She was grateful for the part of it she could carry.

She was grateful, she told herself, even for her mother's flat palm against her chest in the days after and the words that had come with it. You are the next Tsahìk. Not an asking. A naming. A door swinging quietly shut on the girl who might have done otherwise with her life. It was an honour. She knew it was an honour. She was grateful for the honour. She did not look too long at the door.

She was grateful, she told herself, even for Tsu'tey — strong, loyal, the finest bow of his generation, who would lead the People well — Tsu'tey, who had been promised first to her sister and then, when her sister was gone, to her: handed down through her family's grief like a bow that had outlived the hand that strung it. He was a good man. She had only ever been able to see him as a brother; she was grateful, she told herself, that her mate would at least be someone she could respect. She laid the hunter's freedom down. She laid down, beside her sister, the girl's old dreams of a mate chosen out of shared wanting, not out of duty. And she laid down, too, without ever quite letting herself look at it, the thing kept lowest and most quietly of all — her own first night, her body's first giving, set aside in trust for a man she had not chosen, counted into a bride-price, promised over her, spent, in all the ways that mattered, before it had ever been hers to spend. She was grateful for what was left.

She had built it all into armor, worn it so long she had forgotten it was armor. She had forgotten that a person could stand any other way.

And then Jake came.

He had crashed into her steady, well-defended life the way an angtsìk crashes through the low-brush — graceless, enormous, impossible to plan around. She had not planned to fall. She had not planned to want anything again so badly that the wanting could cost her the gratitude she had made herself out of. She had not planned, that was all. She, who planned everything.

She led him in beneath the lantern-flowers of the Utraya Mokri as they were waking; the light came to her skin the way it always had — violet, pink, the pale white of Eywa's own breath — settling along her forearms, the backs of her hands, the line of her throat. She did not turn to see whether it had found him too. It had. Knowing it frightened her more than the not-knowing could have.

She had told herself, on the path down, that she was bringing him here because it was the place a taronyu was brought when the clan had made him one of its own. That was the reason she would give if anyone asked. It was even partly true. The rest of the truth lived lower than reasons, in the feet that had carried her past the turning to her own hammock, down the root-path her sister used to walk. She did not look at the rest of the truth directly, the way she did not look at the sun.

Sylwanin had loved this place.

Her sister had been the one with the open hands — the one who laughed first and chose first, who would have taken a mate in her own time, in her own way, because she had been born to nothing but herself. This had been Sylwanin's path. Neytiri had walked it tonight without deciding to, the way grief walks a person to a grave. Somewhere in the years since the morning her mother's palm had closed the world around her like a fist, she had stopped expecting any door to open again. She had stopped expecting, had called the not-expecting peace, had been grateful, even, for the peace.

The last of the path was steep; she went ahead of him the way she always had, sure-footed where he was still learning. Then, more a pressure at her spine than a sound, he bridged the gap at her back and his hand closed around her tail with a playful tug.

She turned with a shocked laugh; he was already grinning, that wide, graceless, shameless grin that she had only ever seen on him, the tip of her tail still caught loose between his fingers.

"Do not," she said, not meaning it; he knew she did not mean it, tugged again. She swatted at him; he caught her wrist; she twisted free the way she had taught him to, turned the move back on him, and for a breath they were only that — two bodies that had spent a season learning each other so well that they moved like two parts of the same whole, shoving and circling under the waking light, his low rough laugh and hers coming up out of her before she could decide whether to allow it.

She laughed until it loosened something behind her ribs, laughed the way she only laughed when she was with him.

And underneath the laughing, the grief rose to meet it — quiet, certain, the way the cold comes up off a river at dusk. Because she was keeping count, even now, even here. After tonight she would have no claim to him. Not as his teacher, his learning was finished, there was nothing left that she was permitted to teach him. When the teaching was done and the choosing belonged to him, what remained to her was the smallest of all the things she had been to him.

A friend. She would be his friend. She made herself hold the word, made herself be grateful for it, the way she had made herself grateful for everything else she had not been allowed to keep. The laughter was still on her mouth, but the grief had already begun to sour her tongue, like biting a fruit gone off.

She brought him to the centre, where the willow-strands of the tree hung down like the loosened hair of someone sleeping. She stopped.

For a moment — just a breath of one — it stretched out like an eternity: the months behind her that she had spent at his side, and the single step ahead that would take all of it from her.

"This is a place for prayers to be heard," she said.

She smiled at him then, brought the end of her queue up in one hand; with the other she gathered a few of the tree's pale strands and drew them together toward it.

"And sometimes answered."

She made the bond, and for a moment there was only the wash of them — the voices, the whole chorus of her ancestors moving over her and through her and inside her, every soul the clan had ever given the tree to keep. She had come down here for this as much as for anything she would say to him.

For a second she thought a small prayer, just for strength, to get through the next moments without breaking, without destroying the fragile grateful peace she had spent so long building.

He had not said anything.

She opened her eyes to him, went on. "We call this tree Utraya Mokri." She looked at him again, and this time the look was an urging, an asking-him-to. "The tree of voices."

He raised his own queue, slow, his eyes unsure as they came back to her — asking, the way he still asked, whether he was allowed. Then he made the connection.

And that look took his face. The one she had no defence against: wonder, open and unguarded, a child finding something it had not known the world could hold. It reminded her, the way it reminded her every time, how far and how wholly she had already fallen for that exact look on him — that she could spend the whole of her life finding new ways to draw it out of him, and call it well spent.

"I can hear them." The words came out of him with a disbelief that undid her, as though some part of him had believed himself exempt — that the gifts Eywa gave her people would not be given to him.

She drew close, laid her hand over his where it had risen to the cord and smiled.

"They live, Jake," she breathed. "Within Eywa."

She held his eyes a moment longer than she had any right to. And the grief came up bitter beneath the wonder, because she understood that this was it: she had brought him to the last gift she had to give; now she stood at the very door she had carried him here to open, and on the far side of it there was nothing left of him that would still be hers.

She dragged in a breath, let the strands slip from her queue, the chorus ebbing back into the dark until there were only the two of them again. She set both her hands flat against his chest, let the warmth of him steady her, and tried to summon, from somewhere, the strength for the next words.

"You are Omaticaya now," she said, the words like ash in her mouth. "You may make your bow from the wood of Hometree."

She looked at him one last time — held the moment, stretched it as far as it would go — then turned from him, so that he could not see what was in her eyes.

"And you may choose a woman."

She kept her chin level. She kept her hands still at her sides, though one of them wanted, with a sharpness that shamed her, to reach towards him. She did not. Her breath would not draw all the way clean. She let it go shallow rather than let him hear it catch.

"We have many fine women," she forced the words out, "Ninat is the best singer."

"I don't want Ninat."

It came out of him plainly, with no weight; she could not bite back the relieved smile that tugged at her mouth, as treacherous as it was.

"Beyral," she said. "She is a good hunter."

Jake hummed in agreement.

"She is a good hunter."

She could not hold it. Before she could stop herself she turned back to him, and her face gave way — hid nothing of the thing breaking open in her chest, the pain of it, the hurt, and worse than either the treachery of feeling any of it when she had no right to.

He had not moved. He was only looking at her; she wished he would not — wished he would get it over with, name his woman and be done, so that she could step back behind the bars she knew, go on building her wall in the quiet, where no one would have to see her do it.

He shook his head.

"I have already chosen," he said.

He stepped closer. For a moment the words would not connect; she had to turn them over slowly, the way she would turn over a broken blade or arrow. He was watching her with that same warm look — but his eyes were reaching further now and all at once the meaning of it landed in her, made her chest ache, tugged her mouth, helpless, into the smallest and most hopeful of smiles.

"But this woman must also choose me," he finished, leaning down, close, until his breath was against her nose, the clean scent of him close enough to catch.

She could not help the smile that came then, at the sheer absurdity of it — as though it had ever been in question, what she would choose; as though there had been a single moment, since the angtsìk of him crashed through her careful life, that she had wanted anything else.

It was as though he stood on the far side of the door, holding it open, waiting. And everything that had ever caged her rose up screaming that she should say no — step back, go home, put the distance between them where it belonged. This was not right. This was not the plan. This was not the way.

But she did not want to.

She wanted him. She had never wanted something so much until him.

She looked up at him. Without hesitation — for the first time in longer than she could name, without weighing what it would cost her — she stepped through the door, out of the cage, and into him.

"She already has," she said.

And the fist behind her ribs did not so much open as break. He chose me. The thought did not feel like being kept. It felt like being finally let out.

Everything that had been promised over her, every claim and every closed door, went quiet then, stayed quiet. There was no roof. There was only the open dark, and the tree, and him.

His hands rose, closed around her face, so gently — cradling her, as though she were something that might startle and bolt — and drew her in, the whole of him closing into her vision, nearer and nearer, until her eyes fluttered shut and his mouth pressed soft against hers.

He doesn’t fight back, doesn’t move, and that just makes the anger inside her hotter.

”You left me.” She snarled, “You left our children.”

The words come out like poison thats been seeping inside her too long.

”You left!” Her voice is starting to wobble, on the edge of falling and breaking, she tries to steady it.

”Have I not lost enough?” She spat at him, pushing his chest, her palms landing with a loud, “my forest, my people, my father, my son! Have I not lost enough already, that you would take my husband from me as well?”

The tears come before she can stop them, falling from the corner of her eyes in thick, blinding streams, her breath growing unsteady as the realisation lands, had she been even a moment late, he would be dead, he would be gone, and she would’ve lost him all over again.

”You—” The word dies as a sob breaks up out of her throat, and she bursts into tears.

His hands come around her immedietly, her head pressing into his neck as she sobs. All the grief and fear and anger spiral inside her like a pool overfilling, and come out of her in violent, angry sobs.

”You left me.” She sobs. “You left me again.”