I keep them anyway.
I keep them because the alternative is lying there with nothing, and I did that already, and I'm not doing it again.
Sleep has become a negotiation. Two, maybe three hours at the front end of the night when my body overrules my brain by sheer exhaustion, and then I'm awake again, and the darkness in the cabin is a different kind of darkness than the one I want to be in, and I'm counting sounds until grey light starts to show under the door.
The other women have started sleeping better. I've noticed it the way I notice everything — clinically, as information. Pell slept through an entire night two days ago. Maret's headaches are less frequent since she started actually taking Falla's tincture. Even Deva, who'd been the most fragile of us, is beginning to surface from her worst nights with more color in her face.
I am glad for them. I am genuinely glad for them.
I sleep worse every night, which I believe is because they're sleeping better, because the part of my brain that decided someone had to be awake has not been issued the memo that we are not in immediate mortal danger. Or perhaps it has the memo and finds it unconvincing.
What I know about being captured — what I know in the particular way that you know things that happen to your body — is that the danger had a texture. A consistency. The same boots on the same floor. The same voices at the same hours. You learned the patterns because learning the patterns was the difference between anticipating a blow and receiving one without warning, and one of those was survivable and the other wasn't. You got so good at the patterns that you started to find a terrible kind of order in them.
The Frostfang camp has no pattern I've been hurt by yet.
And that is the problem, because my body doesn't know what to do with that. The watchtowers are the wrong shape. The footsteps outside are unfamiliar. Every orc voice that carries across the settlement at a volume these people seem to consider normal conversation hits the back of my neck like a bucket of cold water, and I'm upright and cataloguing exits before I've finished the thought.
I am so tired.
I am also not going to sleep more than I'm sleeping, because the part of me that is tired is losing badly to the part of me that is standing in a doorway somewhere, waiting.
The morning circuit takes longer today.
I don't notice I've drifted until the trees change.
There's a particular birch, split at the base into two trunks, that marks where I turn east on my usual path — I've used it as a fixed point since day two. I'm looking for it when I realize I haven't seen the boulder that comes before it, the lichen-covered one with the flat top. I slow. Stop. Reassess.
The light is thinner here, filtered through denser growth. The ground underfoot is softer, more disturbed, as if more feet have passed this way more regularly than the quiet edges I usually keep to. I've come further into the settlement than I intended, pulled off my path by something — my own head, most likely, running its usual monologue too loud to notice the turn I'd missed.
Distraction is how you get killed.I think it with the same flat affect I use on myself for most things, because scolding doesn't help and neither does panic. I take stock. I'm not lost — I can see the line of the longhouses between the trees, smoke still rising from the central fire, the familiar shape of the watchtower at the south corner. I know exactly where I am. I simply came here by accident, and now I need to?—
The footsteps come from my left.
Heavy. Fast. Not trying to be quiet — nothing about the Frostfang orcs tries to be quiet, which I've decided is either genuine thoughtlessness or the confidence of something that doesn't believe it needs to be quiet — but the direction is wrong. I'd been watching right. I'd been watching forward. The sound arrives already close, already too close, and my body does what it does: drops, spins, hand going to the knotted sling at my belt.
I have it raised before I have a face.
Then I have a face.
Ursik.
He's far too tall, which is something my brain offers me every single time and remains unhelpful. Deep green skin, grey eyes that have gone wide in a way I've never seen on him — I've seen him amused, I've seen him loud, I've seen him with that rough open grin he turns on everything like it's a personal affront — but not wide. Not stopped.
He's holding a crate. Both arms full of it, supplies stacked to his chin, and he's stopped dead three feet from me with hishead tipped slightly back to look down the line of my arm at the weighted leather in my fist.
I pull the swing before it leaves my hand.
Not smoothly. My fingers are already through the motion, the stone already weighted and arcing, and stopping it costs me something in the wrist that I'll feel later. The sling drops loose. I grip it instead of letting it go, because letting it go means it's not in my hand.
We are both very still.
"What are you doing?" he asks.
"You came from the wrong direction." My voice comes out level. I'm taking moderate credit for that.
"I—" He looks down at the crate, then back at me, then at the sling hanging from my fist. "That's a weapon."
"It's a length of leather and a rock."
