Page 5

"Good." I glance toward my own dwelling, where a thin line of firelight still glows beneath the door despite the hour, evidence that Audrey didn’t allow herself to sleep in a place she does not yet trust. "Make sure whoever you rotate in understands the difference between guarding and watching. She will know the difference immediately, and I would rather not spend tomorrow undoing tonight's good intentions." Throk's mouth twitches, the closest thing to amusement he allows himself most nights.

"You've known her one day, and you already sound like a man defending his mate's honor to his own war-commander."

"I have known her longer than one day," I say, and the admission costs me something I am not entirely prepared to examine standing here in the cold with the fire dying down behind us. "Five years is a long time to spend telling yourself a single night meant nothing." He does not press further, because he hasn't ever needed to, and we walk the rest of the way in the kind of comfortable silence only years of shared battles can build between two men. When we reach the door to my dwelling, I pause with my hand against the cold stone frame, listening to the murmur of Audrey's voice from within, low and steady, reading something aloud to a son who should have been asleep an hour ago by the sound of his sleepy protests. I do not go in immediately.

I stand there a bit longer than I need to, letting the sound settle into me, and think that whatever storm Vorka intends to raise over this, whatever cost the clan extracts from me for choosing a human mate and a half-orc heir, I have already decided it is a price I will pay without hesitation. It is done, I told him, and unlike when I made that declaration in the firelight, I let myself believe it fully rather than simply state it as fact.

I think, too, of the years still ahead of us, of a boy who will grow up measuring his worth against a father built like a siege engine, and of a woman who has spent five winters convincing herself she needs no one's protection to survive. Neither of them will make this easy. I suspect, standing here in the cold with the fire dying at my back, that I would not want it any other way. Ease didn't build anything in this camp worth keeping, and I do not expect my own family to be the first exception to that hard-won rule.

7

AUDREY

Iwake before the dawn has fully broken, some internal clock tuned to the exact moment the dark starts thinning enough to move safely. Leo is still asleep on the fur beside the cold hearth, one hand curled loosely around the wooden bird even in sleep, his breathing steadier this morning than it has been in weeks, and I let myself hold onto that small mercy before I ease myself up off the furs Rogg's dwelling apparently keeps in greater supply than food.

I dress quietly in the near-dark, layering what warmth I have against the bitter cold that has settled into the stone walls overnight, and I check my rifle by feel before I check it by sight, running my fingers along the barrel and the action out of a habit so deep it no longer requires conscious thought. The dwelling is empty of its second occupant. Rogg left before I woke, some warrior's instinct in him apparently pulling him out into the dark hours before dawn for reasons I have not yet learned to predict, and I am grateful for the space, because slipping past him unnoticed would have required an argument I lack the patience for this early in the morning.

There is a guard posted outside the door when I open it, a younger orc I do not recognize, his bright green skin catching the first gray light of dawn, and I brace myself for the confrontation I expect from anyone tasked with keeping me contained. Instead, he only straightens, nods once in a manner that carries more deference than suspicion, and steps aside to let me pass without a single word of challenge.

"I'm hunting," I tell him anyway, because I have learned the hard way that offering information before it is demanded sometimes buys more goodwill than withholding it. "I'll be back before midday."

"Understood," he says, and something in the easy way he says it, without any of the resistance I braced for, makes me wonder exactly what instructions Rogg gave him before dawn. I decide I do not carry the energy to interrogate a gift horse this early in the morning, and I move past him into the waking camp, my rifle slung across my back and my boots crunching in the frost-hardened snow. The woods beyond Ashfall's walls are a different kind of quiet than the camp behind me, an older, deeper silence borne of a world that has learned to hold its breath through winter. I pick my way through the skeletal remains of what was once, judging by the collapsed fencing and rusted equipment scattered under the drifts, farmland of some kind, generations gone now, reclaimed by frost and ruin the way everything eventually is out here. My breath fogs in front of me in slow, even bursts, and I let the rhythm of the walk settle the noise still rattling around in my head from yesterday's argument.

I do not want to think about him. I tell myself this with every step, and with every step the thought proves itself a lie, because Rogg's voice keeps surfacing anyway, low and immovable, the word protection sitting in my chest like a stone I cannot quite swallow or spit back out. I understand, somewhere beneath the anger, that he means it as a kindness, that the years of holding a war-camp together against every threat this ruined world can throw at it has taught him that protection is the only currency he knows how to offer freely. I understand it, and it still does not sit right, because I have learned that the moment you let someone else stand between you and the world, you hand them the power to decide how much of the world you are allowed to face at all.

I push the thought aside deliberately, the way I have learned to push aside everything that threatens to slow my hands when they need to be steady, and I let the hunt take over instead, my senses sharpening into the narrow, focused awareness that has kept Leo and me fed through five brutal winters. I read the snow for tracks, noting the shallow, splayed prints of a rabbit crossing here, the deeper, more purposeful trail of something larger moving through the tree line to my left, and I follow the second set without hesitation, my pulse settling into the same unhurried rhythm I use for everything that matters.

The trail leads me deeper into a stand of dead pines, their bare branches clacking faintly against each other in the thin wind, and I move between them with the same careful, silent economy I have practiced since Leo was still small enough to carry on my hip while I hunted. It takes the biggest part of an hour, my fingers going numb inside my gloves despite the layers, before the trail opens into a small clearing ringed by fallen trunks, and there, cropping at a patch of frost-browned grass poking through the snow, stands a buck heavier and healthier than anything I have seen in months, his antlers a heavy rack that speaks of good grazing somewhere this hard winter never reached.

I sink slowly behind a fallen trunk, easing the rifle off my shoulder with movements so gradual they would look, to anyone watching, like no movement at all. My breath goes still, in for four, hold for two, out for six, the same rhythm I taught myself years ago and didn't have reason to abandon. The buck lifts his head once, ears swiveling toward some sound I cannot place, and I hold utterly motionless until he lowers it again, satisfied that whatever caught his attention has passed.

I settle the crosshair behind his shoulder, exactly where I was aiming at the doe before Leo's cough sent her bolting into the trees, and this time nothing interrupts me. My finger moves from the guard to the trigger in one smooth, practiced motion, and the shot cracks out across the clearing loud enough to send a flock of startled ravens scattering up out of the dead pines, their harsh cries the only protest the winter offers before the buck drops where he stands, clean and quick, exactly the way I have trained myself to make it happen every time I can manage it.

The silence that follows is the particular, satisfied silence of a hunt well finished, and I allow myself one long breath before I rise from behind the trunk and cross the clearing to the kill, already running through the work ahead of me, the field dressing, the long, grueling drag back to camp through snow that will fight me every step of the way. It is hard work, the kind that leaves my shoulders screaming and my hands raw despite the gloves, but it is my work, chosen and executed entirely by my own hands, and there is a fierce, quiet satisfaction in that which no amount of stone dwellings or posted guards can replicate.

I work quickly despite the cold, my knife moving through the familiar motions of field dressing with an efficiency of necessity carved into muscle memory, and by the time I finish, the light has shifted from the thin gray of early dawn into full morning, pale and cold but unmistakably day. I rig a rough harness from cord I carry for exactly this purpose, loop it around the buck's forelegs, and set my shoulders into the drag, the weight of the kill fighting me with every foot of ground between the clearing and the distant gray smear of Ashfall's wall.

The walk back is long and punishing, my breath ragged by the time the wall comes into view, my arms and back burning with an ache that feels, in its own strange way, more honest than anything that happened in Rogg's dwelling yesterday. This ache I understand. This ache I chose, earned, and will collect the reward for with my own two hands, and there is a clarity in that which the tangled argument over protection and control never quite managed to offer me. Whatever Rogg believes he is doing by posting guards and issuing declarations in front of his warriors, I intend to walk back exactly the way I walked out of it, under my own power, dragging proof behind me that I am not, and never intend to become, something that needs to be kept rather than someone who provides.

I think about Leo waking to find me gone, and I hope Rogg had the sense to tell him where I had gone before the boy could work himself into a fright over an empty fur where his mother should have been. It is a strange thing, trusting even that small a task to a man I spent years refusing to think about, and stranger still to notice that some quiet, unguarded part of me already assumes he managed it without being asked. I do not examine that thought too closely. I will have time later to untangle what I do and do not trust about Rogg Greataxe. Right now, there is only the last stretch of frozen ground between me and the gate, and the satisfying, familiar weight of a kill large enough to answer at least one of the questions this camp seems determined to keep asking about whether a human woman belongs inside these walls.

The gate guard spots me while I am still a good distance out, and I watch him call something back over his shoulder before the massive slabs of scrap metal begin their slow grinding retreat, opening wide enough this time to let both me and my kill through without the careful, narrow gap they allowed for a stranger four days ago. Whatever else remains unresolved between Rogg and me, it seems the camp itself has already decided, on the strength of a single successful hunt, that I have earned at least this much welcome. I set my shoulders, adjust my grip on the harness, and drag the buck through the widened gate and into the yard, ready to let the weight of the kill speak for itself in a language I suspect this entire camp understands a great deal better than any argument I could make with words alone.

8

ROGG

Iam standing near the communal fire, half listening to Throk's report on the morning's patrol rotation, when a shift in the noise of the yard pulls my attention toward the gate. It is not loud, not at first, only a change in the register of the voices near the wall, curiosity bleeding into something sharper, and I turn in time to see the massive slabs of scrap metal grinding open wider than the narrow gap they allowed two mornings ago, wide enough for a kill considerably larger than anything that has come through those gates in weeks.

Audrey comes through it dragging a buck behind her on a harness of knotted cord, her shoulders set with the particular hard-won posture, on nothing but will and momentum. Frost clings to the loose strands of hair that have escaped her braid, and her face is flushed with cold and exertion, which should make her look diminished against the size of the animal she is hauling, and instead does the opposite entirely. I watch her cross the yard without slowing, without so much as glancing toward the growing knot of warriors already gathering to see what has drawn the gate open this wide, and I am hit with a sudden feeling of pride I have no immediate context for feeling.

The murmur that runs through the assembled warriors as she draws closer to the communal fire is not the polite acknowledgement they might give a competent trader or a useful scout. It is the low, surprised appreciation reserved for a genuinely impressive kill, the kind of buck that would have taken two seasoned hunters working together to bring down and drag this far, and I watch more than one warrior's expression shift from idle curiosity into reassessment as she hauls it the final distance and lets the harness fall from her raw, gloved hands.

"That's the biggest thing to come through since the autumn slaughter," Zog says beside me, his voice carrying the particular awe of a young warrior who needs to learn to hide his enthusiasm behind a more seasoned indifference. "She dragged that the whole way herself?"

"It would appear so," I say, and I don't let my voice carry the full weight of what I am feeling, though I suspect it shows regardless in the way I have not looked away from her since she crossed through the gate. Near the edge of the gathering crowd, I catch sight of Vorka and two of his usual shadows, their arms crossed, their expressions carrying none of the surprised appreciation moving through the rest of the yard. Vorka's jaw is set in the particular hard line I have learned to recognize as the look of a man watching an argument he has been making for days quietly lose ground in front of the very witnesses he needed to keep convinced. I do not go out of my way to catch his eye. There is no need to. He will draw his own conclusions from what is happening in front of him whether I acknowledge him or not, and those conclusions will not favor the position he staked out at the fire two nights ago.

Audrey straightens from where she has been catching her breath over the carcass, and her gaze finds mine across the gathering crowd with a directness that never wavered in the handful of times I have seen her look at me since she walked back through my gate. There is no plea in it, no request for approval dressed up as a simple glance. It is a challenge, plain and unmistakable, daring me to deny amongst the entire camp what her own two hands have proven beyond any argument Vorka or anyone else might raise.