He doesn't knock loudly or announce himself from a distance the way some of the others do — a well-meaning performance that always reads to me aslook, I'm safe, look, I'm harmless,which is precisely what you'd say if you weren't. Falla simply comes to the door of the larger cabin and waits, and if someone comes to meet him, he talks to them, and if no one comes, he leaves whatever he's brought and goes.
Today I meet him at the door before he can knock.
He looks at me the way he has every morning: like he's cataloguing the split lip, the shadows under my eyes, the precise tension in my shoulders, and filing it away undernot quite healed yetin whatever mental ledger he keeps. He has blue-green eyes that are uncomfortably direct and the kind of face that doesn't default to pleasantness for social reasons. I find that I don't hate it.
"Deva." I say it before he can speak.
"I'll look at her after I check Idris's ankle." He holds up the bag over one shoulder. "I've also got more of the willowbark tincture for Maret's headaches."
"She says they're getting better."
"They'll get better faster if she takes the tincture."
"I'll tell her that." I hold the door for him, which I've decided is purely strategic — I can see the whole cabin from the doorway, which means I can track exactly where he is the entire time he's inside. Falla doesn't comment on this arrangement. Either he hasn't noticed, or he has and doesn't think it worth addressing. I'm undecided on which.
Saela cameby on the second day, which I'd been half-expecting. She has the look of someone who survived something bad and kept going — not untouched by it, but not crushed by it either, which I find the sort of thing worth noting. She brought a woman named Shae, deep green skin and long black hair and warm eyes that took us all in without flinching, and a second load of supplies: more blankets, bread still warm from wherever it had come from, a collection of small clay pots that turned out to be salves.
Shae didn't crowd anyone. She set things down, asked names, answered questions, and left space for silence. When Deva pressed herself against the wall and wouldn't look up, Shae simply moved to the other side of the room and talked to Wren instead, which was exactly the correct thing to do.
I noticed, and I filed it underpractical womanrather thansafe,because practical and safe are not the same category.
Ressa came once, a day later, on her own. I'd heard Saela mention her — Falla's woman, a human, which had arranged itself in my mind as eitherreassuringora very specific kind of bait,depending on my mood. She's tall and red-haired andholds herself like someone who spent time learning how not to be afraid of her own space. She'd brought more salve — Falla's recipe, she said — and she'd stayed long enough to sit with Corrie, who'd been quiet since we arrived in the way that worries me more than crying does.
I watched Ressa the whole time she was there. She didn't seem to notice, or if she did, she didn't make it uncomfortable. When she left she'd said,"I'm just down the path, if anyone needs anything,"simply, without pushing it into an invitation.
I haven't decided how I feel about any of it.
By middayI've completed a sixth circuit of the perimeter and my feet are starting to ache through the thin soles of my boots. I stop at the east edge of the tree line, hands in my pockets, and look at the two cabins from a distance.
Smoke. Voices. Idris and Pell have come outside to sit in the weak morning sun, close enough to the door that they can be back inside in three seconds. Wren has moved off the step and is standing near them, still holding her cup even though the broth must be long cold. In the larger cabin window, a shadow moves: Deva, up at last, drifting past the glass.
Eight women. Six weeks minimum before anyone is walking properly long distances. Maret's headaches, Deva's nights, Corrie's silence, Idris's ankle, and the half-dozen smaller injuries I'm still working through the list of — a wrist, two sets of badly healed fingers, one woman whose ribs hadn't been set right and are going to need Falla's attention whether she'll allow it yet or not.
The Frostfang have been consistent. Food, firewood, medicine, space. No pressure. No extraction of anything in exchange.
I don't trust it.
Not because the evidence points toward danger — I'm too precise for that kind of lazy thinking. I distrust it because consistency is exactly what you'd maintain if you were waiting. Because Oliver had been consistent too, right up until the morning he wasn't, and I'd stood there in the cold and tried to understand how someone could bewarmat dinner and sell you to orcs by dawn, and the answer I'd arrived at was simply:people do what serves them.Warmth is not proof. Kindness is not proof. Patience is not proof.
What I know is this: these eight women are not yet well. They are not yet ready to run. Until they are, we stay. We accept what's offered — food, medicine, firewood — and I keep walking the perimeter, and I stay ready, and I do not let myself mistake shelter for safety.
I turn away from the tree line and walk back toward the cabins.
Four minutes. Every morning.
When I'm not prowling the self-imposed perimeter, I'm making weapons.
I have three of them, if you're being generous with the term: a length of fire-hardened wood I'd found in the kindling pile and sharpened against a rough stone over two nights, a knotted strip of leather I'd wound around a river stone until it held its shape, and a short piece of iron I'd worked loose from one of the cabin's window hinges when nobody was looking. The window still closes. It just doesn't latch quite the same. I'd decided that was an acceptable trade.
Falla had seen me doing something with the stone. He hadn't asked.
I hadn't offered.
The weapons are crude. I know that. Against a human man who wasn't expecting them, any one of the three would do real damage. Against an orc — against any orc, regardless of clan,regardless of intent — I have no convincing story about what they would accomplish.
The physics of it don't favor me. I know the physics. I've spent a considerable amount of time with the physics, lying awake on that pallet and running the calculations the way a person runs a tongue over a loose tooth, returning to it not because they expect a different answer but because the repetition is its own kind of control.
An orc stands a foot and a half taller than me on a bad day. Two feet on a good one. The smallest I've seen in this camp — and I've catalogued them all, noted height and build and which hand they favor and how they move when they're not thinking about being watched — would still have triple my arm reach and a bone density I don't want to think about. The sling could do something, if I had distance and good aim. The sharpened stick is mostly psychological.
