"Can you hear me?" I keep my voice low, unthreatening. "I'm going to try to help, but I need you to wake up. Need you to drink something."
No response. His breathing doesn't change, doesn't acknowledge my presence in any way. But when I touch his forehead, checking the fever's progress, his eyes snap open.
Blue-gray irises focus on mine with startling intensity. For a moment, neither of us moves. I see the exact instant he catalogs my humanity, my vulnerability, the fact that I'm close enough for him to snap my neck without effort. See him register Eira gathering pine boughs just beyond his reach.
And I see him choose to remain still.
"You should run." His voice comes out as a rasp, barely audible above the wind through branches. "Whatever clan you escaped from... I can't protect you."
"I'm not asking you to." I settle back on my heels, hands moving to my coat pockets in search of the small knife I always carry. "I'm asking you to drink willow bark tea and try not to die while I figure out how to keep us all from freezing."
Confusion flickers across his features—the kind of genuine bewilderment that suggests he's not accustomed to humans offering aid rather than fleeing in terror.
"The poison?—"
"Nightshade family. Probably belladonna or something similar." I begin stripping bark from a nearby willow, movements efficient despite the tremor in my hands. "Survivable if we can get your fever down and keep you hydrated. Though I should mention that if you try to hurt my daughter, I'll finish what your enemies started."
That earns me a look that might be respect. "Your daughter?"
I glance toward Eira, who's created an impressive pile of pine boughs and begun weaving them into a rough shelter framework as she's learned to do since she can walk. "She's the one that saw you. She's got…magic." I'm not sure if it's dangerous for him to know when this world has so little left.
Understanding dawns in his fever-bright eyes. "She saw..."
"Everything. The betrayal. The abandonment. The fact that you crawled off the path to die with some semblance of dignity." I focus on my work, using the knife to scrape inner bark into strips. "Admirable, in its way. Stupid, but admirable."
"Stupid?"
"Dying serves no one. Living means the chance to make your enemies regret their choices."
A sound escapes him that might be laughter or simply pain. "Revenge?"
"Justice. There's a difference." I pause in my bark-stripping to meet his gaze directly. "Though I suppose that depends on what you choose to do with a second chance."
Snow continues to fall around us, accumulating faster now as the storm gathers strength. Soon the temperature will drop enough to make survival questionable for all three of us. But for now, in this small clearing beneath ancient pines, something unprecedented is taking shape.
A human woman, an orc, and a half-blood child who sees too much, bound together by circumstance and the strange mercy that sometimes blooms in the spaces between enemies.
Whether it will kill us all remains to be seen.
4
NELRISH
The world exists in fragments—scattered pieces of sensation that drift through the fever-haze like snow through pine boughs. Cold seeps through my leathers despite the fire burning in my blood. Each breath scrapes raw against my throat, tasting of copper and the bitter dregs of whatever Sareen fed me in that cursed water skin.
Footsteps. Light ones, careful on the forest floor. Not the heavy tread of orc warriors or the desperate crash of fleeing prey. Something else entirely.
A voice cuts through the static filling my skull—woman's voice, low and measured. Counting. Numbers that rise and fall with a rhythm I can't quite place until understanding surfaces like a bubble breaking water.
My breathing. She's counting my breaths.
The realization should trigger alarm, should force my body into the defensive alertness that's kept me alive through two decades of clan warfare. Instead, I find myself listening to the cadence of her voice, the way each number carries a weight of concentration rather than threat. Seven. Eight. Nine. As if my survival matters to her in some way that makes no sense.
Human voices aren't supposed to sound like that when addressing orcs. Fear, yes. Hatred, certainly. Resignation, when circumstances leave no other choice. But this clinical focus, this careful attention to my body's rhythms—it speaks of someone who's chosen to invest effort in keeping me alive.
The question is why.
Movement beside me draws what little focus I can muster. Something small and warm settles near my head, and I catch the scent of a child—sweet milk-breath and that indefinable innocence that clings to the very young. Impossible. No human would bring a child this close to a dying orc, regardless of circumstances.
