Page 3

"Wait here," the guard says, and disappears from the catwalk without further explanation, leaving us standing in the lengthening cold with nothing to do but wait and hope the answer that comes back is the one we need. I use the silence to crouch down in front of Leo, tucking his hood a fraction lower, smoothing my thumb once across his cheek where the cold has turned it red and raw.

"Whatever happens in there," I tell him quietly, "you stay close to me. You don't wander off, you don't talk to strangers unless I say it's all right, and if I tell you to run, you run. Do you understand?" He nods solemnly, his eyes huge in his small face, and I feel the familiar, useless wish I could have kept him somewhere this never had to be a conversation we needed to have.

"Are you scared?" he asks, and the question catches me off guard, because I have spent his life making very sure he never has to ask me that.

"A little," I admit, as lying to him about it feels wrong standing this close to a wall built to keep out everything I have ever feared. "But being a little scared and doing the smart thing anyway is what being brave actually means. That's something I need you to remember." He considers this the way he considers everything, slow and serious, and then nods again, apparently satisfied enough to file it away for later use. I stand as a low groan of metal announces the gate beginning to move, the two massive slabs grinding apart along their rusted track by enough width to let two people through if they walk close together. I take Leo's hand, feel the small, cold press of his fingers against mine, and step forward into the gap before anyone on the other side can change their mind.

The moment we pass through, the temperature seems to drop another degree, the wind cutting differently in the shadow of the wall, and I get my first real look at the war-camp that has lived in the back of my mind, unexamined. It is bigger inside than I expected, a sprawl of stone dwellings and salvaged shelters arranged with more order than I anticipated from a people I had half convinced myself were pure chaos and violence. Warriors move between the buildings on errands I cannot guess at, and more than a few heads turn toward us as we walk deeper into the yard, the appraisal in their eyes not unlike the guard's had been, sizing us up, deciding what use or threat we represent.

Leo's hand tightens in mine again, and I squeeze back, my eyes already scanning the open ground out of the same habit that has kept us both alive this long, marking exits, marking the tallest structure at the center of the camp that I already suspect belongs to someone whose name I have not let myself think of in daylight, marking the distance back to the gate that has already begun grinding shut behind us. There is no retreat now. Whatever waits for us in the heart of Ashfall Post, we have walked ourselves directly into its path, and all I can do is keep my chin up and my son's hand in mine and hope that the version of Rogg I remember still has enough mercy left in him for the two of us.

4

ROGG

Istand on the steps of the command center with my arms crossed and watch the morning's sparring matches without truly seeing them, my mind still half-occupied with the supply tallies Throk left on my table before dawn. Below me in the yard, two young warriors circle each other with practice axes, their breath fogging in short, sharp bursts, and somewhere off to the side Zog's laugh carries over the clash of wood on wood, too loud and too easy the way it always is when he thinks no one important is watching. I let my gaze drift over the familiar choreography of it, the same drills I ran before I ever earned the right to stand where I am standing now, and for a brief moment, the morning feels almost ordinary, almost like a day that will pass the way every other day this winter has passed, one careful ration and one doubled watch at a time.

Then the gate begins to grind open at the far end of the yard, and I turn my head toward it out of habit more than urgency, because gate traffic this early usually means a returning patrol or a trader too impatient to wait for full light. What I see instead is a woman and a small child, slipping through the gap before it has fully opened, the kind of careful, economical movement that speaks of someone who's learned not to waste an opportunity once it presents itself. Another stray, I think, another mouth for a winter that already has too many to feed, and I feel the old, tired weight of that land on my shoulders before I have even seen her face clearly.

She lifts her head as she clears the gate, scanning the yard, and a loose strand of chestnut hair slips free of her braid and catches the pale morning light. My breath catches somewhere in my throat before my mind has even finished processing what I am looking at, some older, more animal part of me recognizing her before the rest of me has caught up. It cannot be. I have told myself it would never be, that whatever I felt in that ruined building a lifetime ago was a single night's weakness and nothing more, easily buried under command and duty and the relentless grind of holding this camp together against everything that wants to tear it down.

But it is her — Audrey. She does not cower like most newcomers, but she looks hesitant and small, even with her shoulders back and eyes focused straight ahead. Half a decade has sharpened something in her that was already sharp to begin with, hollowed her cheeks slightly, but the woman standing in my yard right now is unmistakably the one who has lived at the edge of my mind since the night I left her without a word of explanation. The shock of it rolls through me first, hot and disorienting, and on its heels comes something colder and far more dangerous, a possessive fury I have no ready name for, aimed at every day that kept her out of my reach and every unknown danger that might have touched her in all that time without me there to stand between it and her. I take one step down from the command center steps before I have consciously decided to move at all, my whole body already answering a call in my mind. That is when the boy steps out from behind her legs.

He is small, perhaps five winters by the look of him, with the same chestnut hair. He wraps one arm around his mother’s thigh and looks toward the walls, taking in his surroundings with more curiosity than fear. I try not to jump to conclusions as I quietly do the math in my head while staring at this child standing beside a woman I have not touched save one night long ago, but the sight of them hits me with the force of an axe blow to the chest, driving the breath clean out of me in such a way no opponent has managed in longer than I can remember. I jump anyway.

A son. My son. She kept him from me, carried him, bore him, and raised him for five winters in a world that shows no mercy to anything soft, and I never knew, never had the chance to stand between him and a single one of those hard winters the way I have spent every day of my command standing between this clan and whatever threatens it. The fury and the possessiveness that had already been building in me since the moment I recognized her now have a second target, sharper and more immediate than the first, because whatever grievance I might hold against fate for keeping this knowledge from me, none of it changes what stands in my yard right now, needing protection I am uniquely built to give.

I am moving before I have finished the thought, crossing the open ground in long, hard strides that scatter the sparring warriors out of my path without my having to say a word, my whole focus narrowed down to the woman and the child standing inside my gate like the rest of the camp has simply ceased to exist around them. Audrey's eyes find mine as I close the distance, and I watch a dozen things move across her face in the span of a few heartbeats: Recognition, wariness, and something that might be fear, though whether it is fear of me or fear of what I might do with the knowledge I now carry, I cannot yet tell.

"Rogg…" My name from her mouth lands low in my chest. One word undoes all of my careful discipline to forget her — one syllable. I do not answer her directly. My gaze has already dropped to the boy, who has gone very still beside her, his small hand tightening around her leg. His green eyes, her eyes, are wide and wary as he takes in my size, my scars, the axe strapped across my back that I have not thought to leave behind. I crouch to bring my face closer to his level, and I study him the way I have studied every report and every map that has crossed my table in 15 years of command, noting every detail, searching for confirmation I already know I do not need. I see two small white points pushing up through his lower lip when he turns his face toward me. Tusks. Small, new, unmistakably orc, on a child.

Her breath goes short and shallow beside me, one hand gripping the boy's shoulder tighter even though I have not moved to touch him — the reflex of someone bracing to run despite already knowing there is nowhere left to run to. For one unguarded second, before she can mask it, I see plainly what coming here is costing her: Not pride — fear.

"What is your name?" I ask him, and it comes out rough, thickened by something I have not felt in a long time.

"Leo," he says, barely above a whisper, pressing himself closer against his mother's leg. Leo. I let the name settle into me, filing it away alongside every other fact I have absorbed in the space of a few breaths, and when I straighten back to my full height, I find Audrey watching me with a wariness that has hardened into defiance, as though she expects me to reach for the boy and take him from her on the spot. The thought that she might believe me capable of that sends a fresh, unwelcome twist of something through me, but there is no time to untangle it, not with half the camp's eyes now turned toward us, not with Vorka's faction already watching this unfold and drawing their own conclusions about a human woman and a half-orc child appearing at my gate.

"They are mine," I say, and I do not raise my voice, because I have never needed to raise it to be heard, but I let every warrior within earshot feel the weight of the words regardless. "Take them to my dwelling. Now." The command lands on the other side of the yard, and I watch it ripple outward — warriors pausing mid-motion to track the sudden shift in the morning's business, Throk already moving toward me from the barracks with the alertness he gets when he senses something has changed the shape of the day.

Audrey's spine goes rigid beside me, and I can feel the argument building in her even before she opens her mouth, hard-won independence rising to meet a command she has no intention of simply accepting. I do not wait for it. There will be time for that argument behind the closed door of my dwelling, away from Vorka's watching eyes and the rest of the camp's speculation. Right now, there is only the fact of them, standing in my yard, alive and cold and entirely unprotected in a world that isn't ever gentle with anything it could take by force, and every instinct I have built across years of holding this command is screaming at me to close that gap before anything, or anyone, has the chance to.

I turn and signal Throk with a short, sharp gesture, and he falls into step beside Audrey without a word, already understanding without being told that whatever has just happened in this yard is not a matter for questions. I fall in on Audrey's other side, matching my stride to hers and the boy's shorter one, and she throws me a look sharp enough to cut steel as we cross the yard together, but I do not let it slow me. I’ve told myself the weakness she represented had been buried deep enough to never surface again. It took less than the length of this yard to prove exactly how wrong I was.

Behind us, I am aware of the yard slowly resuming its motion, axes clashing again, voices picking back up in low, speculative murmurs that will have traveled the length of the camp before the noon meal. I do not look back to see whose faces have gone hard with disapproval and whose have merely gone curious, though I already know Vorka will count himself among the former before he has even heard the full account of what happened at the gate. Let him. Whatever storm his faction wishes to raise over a woman and her child can wait behind the far more immediate work of getting them both warm, fed, and settled somewhere no one can reach them without going through me first.

5

AUDREY

The inside of Rogg's dwelling smells like cold stone and cured leather and something underneath both of those things that I remember more than I want to, a warmth not attributable to the banked embers in the hearth. I stand inside the doorway with my rifle still slung across my back and my whole body strung as tight as a drawn bowstring. The fear finally catches up with everything I outran to get here — the old stories of what orcs do to strays, the years of steering wide around this exact wall. It passes through me like a current, and I let it, because pretending it isn't there has never once made me safer. Then I do what I have always done with fear: I put it down where I can reach it again later, and I pick up something I can actually use instead. I scan the space out of the same old habit that has kept me alive this long.

One door, the one behind me. No windows I can see, only narrow slits high in the stone walls that let in thin blades of daylight. A hearth against the far wall, cold storage along another, furs piled thick enough to sleep an entire family in the corner nearest the fire. It is sparse. It is functional. It is, in its own hard-edged way, exactly what I would have expected of him if I had ever let myself imagine what kind of space a man like Rogg would carve out for himself in a place like this.

Leo moves past me on quiet feet and settles himself onto the fur nearest the cold hearth, drawing his knees up to his chest and pulling the small wooden bird I carved him last winter out from inside his coat, turning it over and over in his hands the way he does when he needs something familiar to hold onto. I watch him settle and feel my chest ache with how quickly he has learned to make himself small and quiet in unfamiliar places, a skill no child his age should have needed to master this thoroughly.

Rogg fills the doorway behind me before I have finished taking stock of the room, and the space that had felt merely sparse a moment ago suddenly feels a great deal smaller with the whole considerable width of him blocking the only way out. I turn to face him because turning my back on anything this large has not once struck me as wise, and I find his dark red-brown eyes fixed on me with an intensity that presses against my skin like a physical weight, the same intensity I remember, except now it carries something sharper underneath it, something that looks a great deal like a claim already being staked.

I make myself hold still under that gaze rather than retreat from it, though every instinct honed by winters of scarcity is telling me to put more distance between us, to find the angle that keeps both him and the door in view at once. He has not moved to touch me, has not so much as reached out to us since the yard, and yet the sheer presence of him fills the room to the extent that it makes the life I have built for myself feel suddenly, infuriatingly fragile. I refuse to let that show on my face. Whatever else has changed about him over the years, I doubt his ability to read weakness has dulled with time, and I am not about to hand him that advantage before we have even finished the first conversation.