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A short, surprised rumble moves through his chest. “You should. And you likely will regardless of what I say.” His arm tightens once. “Tonight I am too weak to argue it.”

Leo sleeps on, the wooden bird still under his hand. I watch the rise and fall of his small chest until my own eyes close. For the first time since I walked through Ashfall’s gate, the quiet does not feel like something I have to guard alone.

I doubt, lying there in the dark, whether the argument is truly finished or only postponed until morning finds us both stubborn again in the cold light of day. Some part of me suspects it is the second, that come sunrise he will watch me sling the rifle over my shoulder with a jaw set hard enough to crack, and I will go to the lowlands anyway, or I will not, and either way neither of us will call it losing. That is, I am coming to understand, the particular shape his love takes: not a soft thing, not the kind I would have recognized five years ago in the version of him that left before he knew Leo existed, but something forged how everything in this camp is forged, out of necessity and cost and the refusal to be the one who buries someone he could have kept safe.

The fire settles lower. Somewhere beyond the stone walls a sentry calls the hour, his voice thin against the wind, and I think of the three warriors carried off today, of the empty space they will leave on the roster tomorrow, of how very easily any one of us could be the next name spoken like that. And still, here, with his arm heavy across my waist and our son’s breathing steady in the dark, the fear does not win. It has not won in five years of doing this alone, and it will not win tonight either, not with him beside me instead of a thousand miles and a decision he can’t take back standing between us.

16

ROGG

Iwake before the light does, the way I always wake, some old soldier's instinct that never learned how to sleep past danger, even when the danger in question is a woman asleep against my ribs instead of an enemy at the gate. The fire has burned down to a low bed of orange embers, casting just enough light to pick out the shapes of the room — the stacked crates of salvage along the far wall, the worn map pinned above the cold hearth stones, the shadow of my own greataxe leaning where I left it last night, near enough to reach in three strides if the horn ever sounds. The stone holds the particular cold of the hour before dawn, the cold that settles into a man's joints and reminds him, however many decades he has lived, that his body is still mortal and still capable of failing him. None of that matters right now. What matters is the weight of her, warm and solid along my side, her chestnut hair loose and spilling dark over my forearm where last night she pulled the tie free herself, somewhere between the argument and everything that came after it, and let it fall.

I do not move. I lie still and I let myself have this a while longer than is strictly wise, because I know already that the moment I rise, the dwelling will go back to being what it has been — a command post that happens, for now, to have a woman and a child sleeping inside it — instead of what it became sometime after midnight, which was closer to a home. I have slept in this room a thousand nights. I have never, in all that time, woken to this particular stillness, this particular warmth, and some old, wary part of me keeps waiting for it to prove itself a trick of exhaustion rather than a fact of my life now.

Her scent has gotten into everything. Woodsmoke and clean snow, and beneath that, something I could not discern if the War God himself demanded it of me — something that is hers, the way the smell of pine pitch is simply Leo's when he's been fletching arrows at my elbow, the way old leather and cold iron are simply mine. It is in the furs now. It will be in the collar of the leathers I put on this morning, and probably in the stone itself before the winter is out, and I find, turning the thought over slowly in the gray half-light, that I am not troubled by it the way I expected to be troubled by it days ago, when she first walked back into my life with a boy behind her legs I never knew existed.

I have trained myself not to want this, telling myself, in the flat, disciplined voice I use to end council arguments, that a commander does not have the luxury of a mate who was not orc-born, that a chieftain's second — and I meant to be chieftain, once, before duty and guilt reshaped my ambitions into something narrower and more useful — cannot afford a weakness that walks on two soft feet, cannot see well in the dark, and bleeds if you so much as look at her wrong in a bad season. I built that wall stone by stone over five long winters, the same patient way I have built every other defense this camp relies on, and she pulled it down inside of a week without seeming to try particularly hard at all.

I lift my hand and trace the line of her shoulder, slow, careful not to wake her, the way I might run a thumb along the edge of a blade to test whether it still holds its temper after a hard fight. Her skin is warm and soft under my palm, fair like no orc's skin has ever been, marked here and there with the small brown freckles scattered like something a careless hand let fall across her arms and the tops of her shoulders. I remember the weight of her hips under mine last night, the sound she made low against my mouth when I stopped arguing with her about the roster and started proving something different instead, and I feel the truth of it settle into my chest like a stone dropped into still, deep water, sending ripples outward that will not stop for some time yet. I have crossed a line. There is no walking this back, whatever face I choose to put on for the council in a few hours. Whatever I tell myself in the cold light of day, whatever careful distance I try to maintain in front of Throk and the warriors who watch me the way young wolves watch an aging leader for the first sign of weakness, this — her, breathing slow and even against my side, trusting me enough to sleep unguarded in a war-camp full of orcs who scorn her kind — this is not a thing a man simply undoes because it becomes inconvenient.

Good, something in me says, low and certain. Let it be undone, then, if that is truly what this is. Let her stay undone, and let me be undone alongside her. But even as I think it, I hear Vorka's voice in my head the way I have heard it nearly every day, low and mocking, running his thumb along that polished predator's tooth he wears like it proves something about his own worth. The commander, tangled with a human. Proving her a weakness Grol will exploit before the season turns. He would say it just like that, flat and certain, as though he had rehearsed the exact shape of the sentence long before he ever had cause to speak it, and half the council would nod along with him, because half the council remembers what it cost the clan the last time a chieftain let his guard down over a woman who could not lift an axe to defend herself against a raiding party. I know precisely what they will say once they learn — and they will learn soon, if they have not half-guessed it already; the whole yard saw me claim her and the boy the day she walked in. I have made myself soft, they will say. I have made Ashfall Post soft, weakened its command at the exact moment Grol's Iron Tusks press hardest against our borders.

Let him come, then. I have buried enough of my own warriors in this frozen ground over the years to know that softness and strength are not the opposites Vorka believes them to be. A man who has nothing left worth protecting fights like a man with nothing left to lose — wild, unanchored, reckless in ways that get himself and everyone around him killed faster than any enemy blade could manage alone. A man who has this — a woman worth the trouble of loving, a boy who watches me across the hearth with my own eyes set into his mother's face — that man fights like something with roots sunk deep into ground worth defending. I have spent too long, I think, being the first kind of man. I intend, starting this morning, to be the second.

I ease myself away from her by slow degrees, careful the way I would be careful lifting a wounded man off a battlefield, so as not to wake either her or the boy curled in the furs by the dying hearth with his small wooden bird still clutched in one fist even in sleep. Leo sleeps the deep, unguarded sleep of a child who does not yet know how much this broken world can take from him if he is not careful, and I stand over him a moment before I straighten, feeling something in my chest that has no clean name in my own tongue and none in hers either. Mine is the closest I can come to it, turning the word over the way Borl turns over an unfamiliar herb before he decides whether it heals or poisons. Blood of my blood, and I did not even know he existed until ten days ago, and already I cannot imagine this camp, this life, without the shape of him in it.

The cold bites harder once I am fully on my feet and out from under the furs. I dress in the dark by feel, the way I have dressed every morning of my adult life since before this camp existed, leather over linen, the buckles at my shoulders pulled snug, the familiar drag of my baldric settling into its worn groove across my chest like it was made for no other purpose. I strap my greataxe on last, the weight of it a kind of anchor the way it has always been an anchor, the one thing in this room that has not changed in the last day and will not change tomorrow no matter what else shifts beneath my feet before the season turns. A commander who cannot trust his own axe has already lost more of himself than he knows, whatever else he may have gained.

Before I leave, I crouch by the hearth and lay another split log across the embers, banking it carefully so the fire will hold through what remains of the dark hour. It is a small thing. It is the kind of small thing I have done a thousand times for warriors under my command, for the wounded laid out in Hayden's infirmary, for anyone whose survival I have taken as my burden to carry through hard winters like this one. It hasn't felt the way it feels now, crouched here with her sleeping three strides away and the boy's slow, even breath filling the quiet room, like the log and the fire and the stone walls themselves are no longer simple duties owed to the camp. They are choices, made freely, by a man who has remembered what it feels like to choose something for himself. I am choosing, this morning and every morning after it for however long this winter and this war allow me, to keep them warm.

At the door, Zog straightens off the wall where he has been standing watch through the last stretch of the night, his young face caught somewhere between the exhaustion of a long cold shift and the eagerness that never seems to leave him entirely, no matter how many hours he stands out here in the dark.

"Quiet night, Commander," he says, low, glancing past my shoulder toward the banked fire and the two shapes asleep beside it before he catches himself and looks properly ahead again. "No movement past the eastern watch. Throk sent a runner an hour back — nothing new to report, though he wanted you to know the frost's cracked two more panels on the granary roof. Says it'll need shoring before the next heavy snow or we lose part of the grain stores."

"Noted." I glance up at the pale gray sky, judging the hour by the thin light beginning to bleed across the wall. "Tell him to pull a work detail together after the midday meal. It waits that long."

"Yes, Commander." Zog shifts his weight, the cold clearly starting to work into his boots after a full night's watch, but he does not move off toward the mess fires yet, and I recognize the particular hesitation in him — a young warrior working up the nerve to ask something he isn't certain he's owed an answer to. "Commander," he says, "is it true, what they're saying? That she's — that the woman's your mate now, proper, not just claimed?"

"It will be settled when it is settled, and the whole camp will know it the moment it is," I say, not unkindly, because Zog has earned better from me than a curt dismissal after standing watch outside my door half the night in the cold, but firmly enough that he understands the conversation ends there for now. "You're relieved. Get food and get warm before Throk finds something else for your hands to do." Zog grins at that, quick and easy.

"Yes, Commander." He nods once and moves off toward the mess fires at a jog meant to warm his blood, and I am left alone in the gray half-light of the yard with my breath fogging in front of me and the whole weight of the day still to come. I stand there longer than I mean to, looking back at the stone dwelling with its single log now catching properly against the embers inside, casting a faint orange glow against the shuttered window, and I think about what it means to be a man who has something worth losing again, after arranging his whole life so there would be nothing left that could be taken from him. I think about the challenge-brands scarred into my forearm, each one a debt paid in someone else's blood as much as my own, and I think about Vorka's sneer and Grol's patient, grinding ambition and the long, hungry winter still stretched out ahead of us all like a blade laid flat across the camp's exposed throat.

She is not a weakness, I tell the cold gray air, the way I might tell it to a council that has yet to convene to argue the point with me across a war table. She is the reason I intend to win this winter, and every hard season that comes after it.

It is not a comfortable thought to carry into a day that will demand every ounce of discipline I have. It is not the thought of a man who sleeps easy, and I have not in my life mistaken comfort for strength, so I am not about to start now, not with her scent still caught faint in the collar of my tunic and her son's small, emerging tusks catching the first gray light through the crack under my own door. I settle the greataxe higher on my shoulder, roll the stiffness of a short night out of my neck, and I go to find Throk, because whatever softness has taken root in my chest overnight, the camp still needs its commander sharp by the time the sun fully clears the wall, and I intend to be exactly that — sharp on the outside, and something softer underneath, where only she and the boy asleep in my furs will ever know precisely where to look for it.

17

AUDREY

Iwake to cold stone and a space beside me, and for one disoriented moment, caught somewhere between sleep and the sharp morning air, I do not understand why my whole body aches like I hiked 20 miles through fresh snow instead of what I actually did last night, which was considerably less strenuous on my legs and considerably more devastating everywhere else that matters.

The furs where Rogg slept are still faintly warm under my palm when I reach across the space he left, which tells me he has not been gone long, but the absence of him is its own kind of loud in a room this quiet, this cold, this newly unfamiliar after everything that changed inside it overnight. I lie there, staring up at the low stone ceiling of his dwelling — our dwelling, some traitor part of my brain corrects without permission, and I shove that thought down hard before it can put down roots I'm not ready to defend — and I let myself feel, fully and without flinching, exactly how exposed I am this morning, in every sense of the word a person can be exposed.

My body remembers things my mind is still busy arguing with. The scrape of his stubble along my jaw when he stopped holding himself back. The low sound he made against my throat that I felt more than heard, a vibration like distant thunder rolling up slowly through his chest into mine. The way he said my name once, just once, in the deepest part of the dark, like it cost him something significant to say it aloud and he'd decided, in that moment, to pay the price anyway rather than swallow it back down. I press the heel of my hand flat against my sternum, as if I can hold the memory in by force before it slips away with the last of the night's warmth, and I tell myself very firmly, the way I've told myself hard truths over years of surviving on wit and tenacity, that this changes nothing about the plan. Earn our keep. Protect Leo. Do not become anyone's prisoner, gilded cage or otherwise, however warm and however tempting that cage might turn out to be in the dark.

It was, I remind myself, a good plan. It was a genuinely good plan for exactly the 11 hours it survived before I let him crowd me against a stone wall and kiss the argument straight out of my mouth as if it had never mattered at all.