Page 1

1

AUDREY

The snow soaked through the knees of my pants an hour ago, and I have stopped noticing, because noticing the cold is a luxury I gave up somewhere around Leo's second winter. I lie flat against the crusted drift behind a fallen highway sign, my elbows braced on the cracked asphalt beneath it, and I walk my breath out slow through my nose the way I taught myself: In for four, hold for two, out for six, so the rifle doesn't rise and fall with my ribs. Through the scope, a doe picks her way between the skeletons of what used to be an orchard, her ribs showing even under her winter coat, and I think, distantly, that we are not so different, she and I. Both of us scraping the last of ourselves together to get through to spring.

I settle the crosshair against the soft place behind her shoulder. My finger finds the trigger guard, not the trigger, not yet, because my father taught me that discipline before he taught me anything else, back when there was still a father to teach me things, back when the world still had roads that led somewhere other than ruin. I am three seconds from a clean shot and two weeks of meat when Leo coughs.

It is not a loud cough. It is a small, wet, strangled sound that he tries to swallow before it escapes him, and I feel more than hear it, because his shoulder is pressed against my side where I made him lie flat beside me in the snow. But the doe's head snaps up anyway, ears swiveling, and for one suspended heartbeat, I think she might not have placed the sound, might mistake it for wind through the dead branches. Then she bolts, a flash of dun-brown streaking between the black trunks, and she is gone before I can even lift my head off the sight to track her. I lower the rifle into the snow and close my eyes for one breath, because if I open my mouth right now, I will say something sharp, and Leo is five years old and shivering, and it is not his fault that his lungs have never known clean air. When I do look at him, his face is turned up to mine, guilt already sitting heavy in his green eyes, so much like an apology that it undoes whatever anger I had been building.

"I'm sorry, Mama," he whispers, and his breath fogs white between us. "I tried to hold it."

"I know you did." I reach over and pull his hood tighter around his face, tucking a strand of chestnut hair back beneath the wool. "That wasn't your fault. Deer spook at anything. We'll find another one." I say it because he needs to hear it, not because I believe it. We have not seen a deer with meat worth taking in six days, and the rabbit snares I checked this morning were empty for the third morning running; the wire chewed through by something hungrier and more desperate than us. I look down at my son, at the small curved points beginning to peek above his lower lip, points that no other child in our settlement has ever had, and something tears through my chest. He is mine down to the freckles scattered across his nose, but that jaw, that stubborn set to his mouth even when he is trying to look sorry, belongs to someone else entirely.

I have not let myself think his name in daylight for a long time. But lying here in the ruin of an orchard with an empty rifle and a coughing child, I let the memory surface anyway, because I am too tired to fight it off. Rogg. The scar cutting through his left eyebrow, pale against green-gray skin, earned in some battle he never explained to me during the one night I had him. The weight of his hands, so much larger than mine that my wrist looked like a child's inside his grip, and yet so careful in a way I had not expected from something built like a war engine. He is out there somewhere behind the walls of a war camp I have spent years refusing to think about, and he does not know that the single night we shared gave him a son with his jaw and my eyes.

"Are we going home?" Leo asks, and the word “home” nearly makes me laugh, because home is three sheets of scavenged tin lashed to a half-collapsed garage, and calling it that feels like a small, private lie we tell each other to make the nights bearable.

"We're going to try the traps by the creek first," I say, gathering the rifle and getting to my knees, my joints protesting the cold the way they have started to more and more this winter. "Then home." He nods and takes my offered hand, and we start the walk back through snow that comes up past his boots in the drifts, his small fingers curled tight around mine. I watch the tree line as we go out of habit more than fear, though fear has never fully left me, either, not since the world ended and started over as something crueler. By the time the garage comes into view, gray smoke thinning from the chimney pipe Hayden rigged for us last winter, Leo's breath has gone from a cough to a thin, reedy wheeze that makes my stomach drop straight through the frozen ground.

Hayden is outside when we reach the lean-to, crouched over the fire pit feeding it the last of our dry kindling, and she is on her feet the instant she sees Leo's face. She has been a doctor since before the Collapse took the word “doctor” and made it into something rarer than gold, and I have watched her patch bullet wounds and broken bones with steadier hands than I will ever have, but it is the look on her face now, the way her mouth goes tight and flat, that frightens me more than any of that ever has.

"How long has he been wheezing like that?" she asks, already reaching for him, already pressing the back of her hand to his forehead in the gesture I have watched her make numerous times.

"Since the walk back. It wasn't that bad an hour ago." I hear the thin edge of panic creeping into my own voice and hate it. "Hayden, tell me." She straightens up slowly, and when she looks at me, there's an apology already forming in the set of her shoulders, the same look she gets before she tells a mother that a broken leg has gone septic, that a fever has burned too long, that there is nothing left in her bag to fix what is wrong.

"His lungs aren't strong enough for another winter like this one, Audrey. Not on what we've got here. No proper shelter, barely enough calories, and now this cough sitting on his chest for the third time this month." She pauses, and I can see her weighing every word before she lets it out. "There's no more time to wait and see if it clears on its own."

"So what do I do?" It isn't really a question. It's a demand, thrown at the only person left in my life who might have an answer I can use. Hayden's eyes jump toward the horizon, east, toward the low gray smear of hills where the ruins of the old city give way to the war camp everyone in a 50-mile radius knows better than to approach uninvited.

"You take him to Ashfall Post." The name lands in my chest like a stone dropped down a well, all the way to the bottom, stirring up everything I buried there.

"No."

"Audrey." She says my name the way she says it when she's already decided the argument is over and is only waiting for me to catch up. "They have a real infirmary. Real medicine, real heat, real food that isn't rationed down to a mouthful of jerky and hope. I can't fix what's wrong with him out here with willow bark tea and a hot compress. He needs more than I can give him."

"They're orcs, Hayden — war-camp orcs. You know what they do to humans who show up uninvited." Even as I say it, I know the words are only half true anymore: that the stories of orcs driving humans underground belong to an older, harsher decade, that trade routes run between Ashfall and the human settlements now. But knowing something and trusting it with your child's life are not the same thing at all.

"I spend most of my days there among them, Audrey. I know they've been taking in humans for at least two years. I know Samara trades with them every month and leaves with both hands and better boots than she left in." Hayden crouches back down to press her stethoscope to Leo's chest, listening with her eyes closed, and whatever she hears there makes the line of her mouth go even tighter.

"I also know that if we don't get him somewhere warm and fed within the week, I won't be the one deciding whether he lives to see spring." I look down at my son, who has gone very quiet and still in the way he does when the adults around him are frightened and trying not to show it, and I see the small ridges of his emerging tusks pressing white against his lower lip where he's biting down on his own fear. That's the piece of this I haven't said out loud, not even to Hayden. It isn't only that Ashfall Post is orc territory; it's that Ashfall Post is Rogg's territory, and the moment anyone there gets a good look at my son's face, the secret I've kept stops being a secret at all.

"Okay," I hear myself say, and the word costs me more than anything I've spent in years. "Okay. We'll go to Ashfall Post." Hayden's shoulders drop half an inch, relief and worry tangled together in the same breath. "I'll pack what medicine I can spare for the walk. It's two days if the weather holds." I nod, already running the numbers in my head — the ammunition I have left, the distance, the risk of the open road versus the risk of staying here and watching my son's lungs fail one wet, rattling breath at a time. None of it is a real choice. It never was. I crouch down in front of Leo and brush the hair back from his forehead, and he looks up at me with those green eyes that are entirely mine and that stubborn little jaw that is entirely someone else's, and I make myself smile like this is an adventure and not the thing I have been running from.

"We're going somewhere warm," I tell him. "Somewhere with a real fire and real food."

"Will there be orcs there?" he asks, and the question is so plain, so without the weight I'm carrying, that it almost breaks something open in my chest.

"Yes," I say. "There will be orcs there." He considers this with the grave seriousness only a 5-year-old can manage, then nods once, decisively, the way he does when he's made up his mind about something and doesn't intend to revisit it. I wish I could borrow some of that certainty. All I have is the taste of a name I haven't let myself speak, sitting bitter and unavoidable on the back of my tongue, and two days of frozen road standing between the man I never told about our son.

2

ROGG

The map on my table has been marked and re-marked so many times that the charcoal has worn a shine into the salvaged paper, and every new mark tells me the same thing the last one did: The Iron Tusks are closer than they were a month ago. I trace the line of red dashes Throk drew last night, the ones that show Grol's scouts moving along the old rail line less than three miles from our eastern wall, and I feel the old, familiar tightness settle into my shoulders, the one that never fully leaves anymore, no matter how many winters I have carried this command.

It has been a full day since a border patrol reported smoke from a lone fire two ridgelines to the west — probably a hunter's camp, nothing more, but Throk wants eyes on it before fresh snow buries the trail. One more thread to watch, among a hundred others. I set my palm flat against the table and let my weight rest there, studying the terrain the way I have studied it a thousand times before, searching for whatever weakness Grol thinks he has found this time. The door behind me opens without a knock, which tells me who it is before I even turn my head.

"You wanted the patrol reports," Vorka says, dropping a stack of tally sheets onto the corner of my table hard enough that dust lifts off the wood. His shaved scalp catches the lamplight, the old tattoos of defeated beasts rippling across it as he leans in to study the map beside me, uninvited as always. "And I want a word about the human woman in the infirmary."