The girl nodded approvingly and picked up a rabbit. "Navi-shen."
I repeated it dutifully, earning another smile. Bear shifter. We'd been at this for maybe an hour, sitting in the weak spring sunlight outside Daska's shelter while he worked nearby. I could hear him moving inside, the quiet sounds of pestle against stone as he ground something medicinal. Comforting sounds. Familiar, now. I liked to listen to him.
Two more children joined us, a boy maybe seven and his younger sister. They dumped an entire collection of carved animals between us and the lesson devolved into cheerful chaos, everyone pointing and naming and correcting my pronunciation with increasing hilarity.
I laughed more in that hour than I had in months. Maybe longer.
When was the last time I had laughed? Really laughed, not the polite chuckle you gave when your boyfriend made an insensitive joke at the faculty mixer?
Stop comparing everything to Nathan. He's not the measuring stick for your entire life.
But he'd been my life for three years. It was hard to just stop.
I didn't notice Daska had emerged from the shelter until his shadow fell across us.
The children looked up and immediately scattered with laughing shrieks, as if they'd been caught doing something forbidden. But Daska was smiling warmly, and he said something to their retreating backs that sounded fond.
Then he looked at me.
"You learn fast," he said in his language, speaking slowly enough for me to follow.
"Children good teachers," I replied, picking through my limited vocabulary carefully.
He settled onto the ground beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating from him. Not touching, but close. He seemed to like sitting close to me, and honestly, I liked it too. It should have felt strange. Instead it felt like the most natural thing in the world.
He picked up a carved bear and turned it over in his hands. "You good pups," he said after a moment. Then, quieter: "You pups?"
The question caught me off guard.
"No," I said. "No cubs."
He let out a breath and set the bear down carefully and asked, even more quietly, "You ... mate?"
My heart stuttered. Without even thinking, I glanced across the camp to where Nathan sat next to a flat stone in the sunlight, Megan as always by his side. He’d been spending his time trying to fix the scanner, but he was limited only to daylight hours and it still wasn’t working. It was just a glance. A fraction of a second.
But Daska saw it.
His smile faded, and his eyes seemed to dim, like a door closing softly.
"Understand," he said, and rose to his feet in one fluid motion.
"Wait, Daska, I—"
But he was already turning away, already moving toward the other side of camp, his shoulders tight and his hands clenched briefly before he forced them to relax.
Oh no.
"Daska!" I tried to stand too quickly and my healing leg protested, sending a spike of pain up my thigh that made me gasp. I steadied myself on a nearby post, but when I looked up again, Daska had disappeared.
Fuck.
Filled with the sudden need to talk to someone where I could actually use words to make myself understood, I moved across to where Dev was sitting outside his shelter. His leg was propped on a folded hide, a large staff propped nearby that he was using to practise walking again.
"You look like someone kicked your puppy," he observed as I collapsed beside him with decidedly less grace than Daska's exit.
"I think I just accidentally told someone I'm taken when I'm not."
Dev's eyebrows rose. "The healer guy?"
