The wild thing now had two choices. It could either fight me for the fish skin—and I would love to see it try—or it could just fuck off and hopefully learn that it should never steal from me again.
But the wild thing did something I didn’t expect at all.
When it saw my boot on top of the fish skin, the poor thing’s bottom lip trembled. A tear rolled down its cheek, leaving a pale streak in the dirt that coated its skin. With a soft sob, its legs folded, and it crouched by my boot, crying.
I stared at it, feeling utterly lost about what to do.
It was the same creature that had tried to steal the sausage last night. I recognized it by the scruffy bearskin it wore tied around its scrawny body. Its black hair was braided into a long messy plait, which surprised me. I didn’t know that apemen braided their hair. I thought they just let it grow wild.
Crouched at my feet like that, the wild thing looked sad and small like a kid. After a couple of pitiful sobs and one loud hiccup from it, my heart couldn’t take it anymore.
Fully aware of the huge mistake I was making by encouraging theft, I moved my boot away.
“Fine,” I drawled. “You can keep it. Just this once.”
The wild thing looked at the fish skin that had been burned by the coals and crushed into the dirt by my boot. Wiping its tears off with its forearm, it got up and looked me straight in the eye.
It wasn’t a kid, I realized, but a grown woman. Not an elderly one, but an adult for sure. Her face had lost all the softness of childhood and had already gained some lines of experience around her eyes and in the corners of her mouth.
The defiance of indignation burning in her blue eyes was not something I expected from her kind.
“No, thank you,” she said loud and clear, stunning me into silence.
No one had ever told me that wild things could talk.
Spinning on the heel of her soggy, worn boot, she marched off into the trees with the proud posture of a tribe chiefess, leaving the charred fish skin in the dirt.
CHAPTER 4
KHALA
How low I had fallen.
Hunger and desperation pushed me to the limit, changing everything about who and what I had ever been. I managed to keep my freedom. But at what cost? I no longer had my dignity.
I would’ve eaten that fish skin in any condition it was—dirty, charred, and stomped into the ground. I would’ve dug it out from the dirt and devoured it like an animal, tearing it with my teeth and choking on it while swallowing without chewing.
What stopped me was the sight of the orc’s boot. Not because it was pressing down on the food that I would’ve given my soul to eat. But because the orc would’ve been the witness of my degradation.
Judging by the way he’d treated me, the orc must’ve already thought I was some kind of animal, and I couldn’t stand him watching me degrade myself even more.
That was the realization that had finally sent me up to my feet and away from his cabin. I wished I could stay away from it, too, but as the sun had set and the darkness had fallen over theforest, sitting alone in my oak tree was making me increasingly more miserable. Sleep wasn’t coming. Fear and hunger kept me awake.
The piece of the sausage that I stole the day before had been incredibly delicious but also criminally small. It did little against the hunger gnawing at my insides. Getting a taste of real food had only made me crave it more intensely.
Shortly after sunset, I climbed down the old oak tree that had become my shelter and trudged to the only place in the Wetlands I knew that smelled like food—to the bog orc’s cabin.
I didn’t expect to find anything to eat here. The orc had put huge padlocks everywhere, locking away all his possessions from thieves like me, as was his right of course.
The cabin’s windows were closed. Not a sliver of light shone through the cracks in the wooden shutters, meaning the orc must’ve gone to bed already, and I was free to roam his domain.
I searched the stairs, then tugged at the padlock on the door of the dug-out cellar. I even searched the oven, hoping he’d be negligent enough to accidentally leave some food in there.
No such luck. For the unsophisticated, primitive creatures like the bog orcs were thought to be, this orc proved too diligent and impeccably organized.
I even dug through the dirt in the spot where I’d dropped the fish skin, but the skin was also gone. The orc had probably burned it in his strife to keep this place clean and tidy.
I circled the oven with the tub, unsure what else to do or where to go now.
