Page 2

"Which human woman?" I do not look up from the map, because there have been three this season, and I already suspect I know which one has put that particular curl into his lip.

"The doctor's assistant. The one who eats our rations and stitches wounds and contributes nothing a blade or an axe couldn't do faster." Vorka crosses his thick arms over his chest, and I can hear the argument building in him the way I have heard it build time and time again, always the same shape no matter which human sparks it. "We are feeding mouths that cannot fight, Rogg, while Grol sharpens his knives three miles from our wall. I do not see the wisdom in it." I straighten and give him my full attention, because if I let this argument slide past me unanswered, it will grow teeth by morning and spread through the barracks like rot through green wood.

"Three of our warriors are alive tonight because that woman knew how to close a belly wound that would have killed them by dawn. Zog is one of them. Ask him how little wisdom he sees in it." Vorka's jaw works, the muscle jumping beneath old scar tissue, but he does not have a reply for that, because he never does when I put a living warrior's name against his complaint.

"One skilled hand does not excuse feeding an entire settlement's worth of stragglers who wander in behind her."

"Then it is fortunate," I say, letting my voice drop into the flat, unhurried register that ends most arguments before they can properly begin, "that I did not ask for your opinion on who eats at my table. I asked for patrol reports. You have delivered half of what I need and twice what I wanted to hear." I let the silence spread a beat longer than comfortable, watching him decide whether tonight is the night he pushes further. It is not. I see the moment he chooses to swallow it, the way his shoulders drop half an inch, the fight banked but not extinguished.

"Double the watch on the eastern perimeter tonight. If Grol's scouts are as close as Throk says, I want eyes on every approach before the moon is fully up." It is, I have found, a cheaper way to manage him than silence would be — give Vorka just enough real authority that failure reflects on him and not on me, and little enough that failure costs the camp nothing it cannot afford to lose. He has never once noticed the shape of the leash. I intend to keep it that way.

"As you command." The words come out of him clipped and correct and entirely without warmth, and he turns on his heel and leaves before I can decide whether to say anything more. I let him go. There will be another argument tomorrow, and the one after that, because Vorka hasn't ever, in the 15 years since I took this command, accepted losing the chieftaincy with any grace, and every human who walks through our gates gives him one more reason to remind the clan that he thinks I am steering us wrong.

Alone in the room, I let out a breath I had not realized I was holding and drop into the chair behind my table, the wood groaning under my weight. My gaze drifts to my own forearm, to the row of pale, raised scars that mark it from wrist to elbow, each one a record of a challenge I fought and won on my way to this seat. I earned every inch of this command with an axe and with blood, mine and other orcs', and there are nights I still cannot decide whether it was worth the cost. Tonight is one of those nights.

I press my thumb into the center of my palm, an old habit, and think about what it actually means to hold Ashfall Post together through a winter this hard. It means rationing meat that is already too scarce. It means burying two more warriors than I would like every time Grol tests our wall. It means standing in this room at the end of every long day and finding that the victory I fought for feels less like triumph and more like a weight I agreed to carry for the rest of my life, one I cannot set down even for a single night without the whole structure beginning to list.

I reach into the pouch at my belt and draw out the small carved totem that has sat there since I was young enough to still believe the War God listened closely to every orc who called on him. It is worn smooth from years of my thumb tracing the same groove across its surface, the shape of a raised axe barely visible anymore beneath all that handling. I do not pray with words tonight. I simply hold it, the way I have held it through every siege and every challenge and every long, cold watch since I first took command, and I let the familiar weight of it steady something in my chest that has been unsteady since the last patrol report crossed my table.

It is in that quiet, unguarded moment that the memory finds me, the way it does when my guard is down, and my mind has nowhere else productive to go. Green eyes, sharp and unflinching even when I expected them to waver; chestnut hair loose from its braid, spread across a bedroll in a ruined building far from these walls. Half a decade and a lifetime ago. Audrey. I have not let myself say her name aloud since the night I left her, but it sits in my chest anyway, an old wound that never quite finished healing, a weakness I told myself I had buried under 15 years of command and duty and the slow, grinding work of holding a clan together in a world that offers no mercy to anything soft.

I press the totem back into its pouch and force my mind back onto the map, onto Grol's scouts and the thinning line of our supplies and the eastern watch I have doubled against a threat that will not wait for me to finish grieving a choice I made half a decade ago. It does not work, not entirely. It never does. Some nights the memory only surfaces and recedes like a tide, and I have learned there is no fighting it, only outlasting it until exhaustion drags me down into sleep. I wonder what became of her after I left. Whether she found somewhere safe. Whether she ever forgave me for vanishing the way I did, without explanation, without so much as a note scratched into the dirt to tell her I had been recalled to defend my claim to this very seat I now sit in. I told myself at the time that leaving her ignorant was a mercy, that a woman with no ties to me could not be used against me. I still believe that was the right decision. Throk's heavy knock interrupts before the memory can pull me any further under, and I am almost grateful for it.

"Come," I call, and he ducks through the doorway with the formal efficiency he has always had, a warrior who has never wasted a gesture in his life.

"Eastern watch is doubled," he reports, dropping into the chair across from mine without waiting for permission, a familiarity years of fighting beside each other have earned him. "Vorka is grumbling in the mess hall about human strays and wasted rations. Same song as always."

"Let him grumble. A grumbling warrior is a warrior who still thinks the argument is worth having." I rub a hand across my jaw, feeling the day's exhaustion settle into my bones. "It is the silent ones I would worry about," Throk grunts something that might be agreement, then studies me for longer than the report requires, his dark eyes narrowing slightly the way they do when he suspects there is more sitting behind my expression than I have said aloud. "You have that look again."

"What look?"

"The one you get when you think no one else remembers you had a life before this chair." He says it without judgment, only the flat observation of one who has known me since we were young enough to still believe glory was a simple thing to want. "Whatever it is, it will keep until morning. Grol will not." He is right, and I know he is right, and I push back from the table and reach for my axe where it leans against the wall, because Throk hasn't been wrong about what deserves my attention on a given night. Whatever ghost the memory of green eyes and chestnut hair has stirred loose in me will have to wait its turn behind Grol's scouts and a doubled watch and years of duty stretching out ahead of me, unbroken, the way it always has. I follow Throk out into the cold, and if some small, stubborn part of me keeps circling back to a woman I have not seen in five winters, I do not let it show on my face. That, at least, is a discipline I mastered a long time before I ever earned this command.

3

AUDREY

Ashfall Post announces itself long before we reach it, a dark smear against the gray horizon that slowly resolves into something too large and too deliberate to be anything but built by hands that meant to keep the world out. By the time Leo and I crest the last rise of broken highway, the wall is close enough that I have to tip my head back to see the top of it, welded scrap metal and slabs of reinforced concrete stacked three times the height of a man, studded here and there with the dark shapes of watch platforms.

I have seen the wall from a distance before, years ago, back when I still let myself draw near enough to look. It is different, standing this near to it. It makes me feel very small, and very human, like the two days of frozen walking already had. Leo's fingers tighten around mine, and when I glance down, he has gone very quiet, his whole small body pressed as close to my leg as he can manage without tripping us.

"It's big," he whispers, and there is nothing casual in the word, no 5-year-old wonder, only the flat statement of a child doing math on how much bigger than him this place truly is.

"It is," I agree, because there is no use lying to him about that. "But big doesn't mean dangerous. It just means they built it to last." He doesn't answer, only presses his face briefly against my hip the way he used to when he was smaller, before he decided he was too old for that kind of comfort in front of strangers. I let him have the moment. There is no one close enough yet to see it, and I suspect we are both going to need whatever courage we can scrape together before this day is done.

I make myself walk the last stretch at a steady pace, not fast enough to look desperate, not slow enough to look like I am creeping up on the place with something to hide, though of course I am. The gate itself is a monstrous thing: Two slabs of scrap metal fused with a seam of rust and weld-scar running down the center, wide enough to march a dozen warriors through shoulder to shoulder. There is no handle, no visible mechanism, nothing that suggests it opens for anyone who simply asks. I stop a careful distance from it and tip my head back toward the catwalk that runs along the top of the wall, where I can make out the shape of a helmeted figure watching us with the particular stillness of this exact appraisal a hundred times before.

"State your name and your business," the guard calls down, his voice a low rasp that carries easily across the open ground between us, made rougher by what I can now see is a nose that has been broken and reset more than once. Even from here, I can tell he is an orc by the breadth of his shoulders alone — twice the width mine are — and by the way his silhouette against the pale sky is simply wrong for a human frame; too tall, too dense, built for a different kind of survival than the one I have spent learning. I plant my feet the way I do before I take a shot, steadying myself, and lift my chin so my voice carries without shaking.

"My name is Audrey Riemer. I'm a hunter. I've got a boy with me who needs a doctor, and I've got a rifle and two hands that know how to track and kill for meat. I'm not here to beg. I'm here to trade what I can do for a place to shelter through the winter." It is not the whole truth. It is not even most of the truth. But it is the truth I can afford to give a stranger on a catwalk, and I hold his gaze, or what I can see of it beneath the helmet, and refuse to let my eyes drop the way every instinct in me wants them to. Beside me, Leo has gone utterly silent, his face turned down and half hidden in the folds of my coat, and I feel a fresh stab of guilt at how thoroughly I have trained him to make himself small in front of strangers. It has kept him alive this long. I hate that it has also made him this good at disappearing.

The guard's gaze moves from me down to the small shape huddled against my side, and I hold my breath, because this is the moment I have been dreading since Hayden first said the name of this place. Leo's hood is pulled low, his face is angled away, and from the distance of the catwalk, there is nothing to see but a frightened child clinging to his mother, no different from any of the other human strays who have come through this gate looking for the same things we are. The guard's attention returns to me, weighing, unreadable behind the helmet, and I make myself hold still under it the way I would hold still under a predator's gaze, no sudden movement, no flinch that might read as prey.

There is a long period where nothing happens at all, where the only sound is the wind cutting across the open ground and, somewhere behind the wall, the distant ring of metal on metal, someone sparring or someone working; I cannot tell which. I think about every name I could invoke right now to make this faster. I think about a scar slashing through an eyebrow and the particular weight of a hand that once rested against the small of my back like it belonged there, and I do not say his name, because the moment I say it, I stop being Audrey Riemer the hunter who earns her own place, and I become someone else's problem, someone else's obligation, someone else's secret walking through the front gate on legs that suddenly do not feel steady enough to hold me.

The cold works its way deeper into my boots the longer we stand there, and I shift my weight from foot to foot to keep the blood moving, all the while keeping my expression as neutral as I can manage for whoever might still be watching from some hidden vantage along that wall. I think about turning back more than once in those long minutes, about the two days of frozen road behind us and whatever waits at the end of two more days if this gate never opens again. But Leo's cough rattles softly against my hip, a small, wet reminder of exactly why turning back was never truly an option, and I plant my feet a little deeper into the snow and wait the way I have learned to wait for everything else this world has ever demanded of me, without flinching and without any outward sign of how loudly my pulse is hammering beneath my ribs.

Somewhere above us, I imagine the guard relaying my name to someone with the authority to decide whether two more strangers are worth the risk of an open gate in the middle of a hard winter, and I find myself hoping, in some small and unguarded corner of my mind, that whoever makes that decision has never heard the name Riemer attached to anything worth remembering. It would be easier that way. It would let us walk in as nobody, earn our place on the strength of my rifle alone, and disappear into the ordinary rhythm of camp life without ever having to explain why my son's profile looks the way it does in the right light.