I go inside.
Chapter Eighteen
Kragen
The gathering isn’t something I can explain well over text, which is why I almost don’t mention it.
We’ve been seeing each other for three weeks by now, four if you count the Tuesday she called about a commission question and we talked for an hour without either of us referencing the commission after the first five minutes. I’ve learned the creak in her kitchen chair, the one she sits in when she’s actually thinking rather than working. I know she drinks her coffee before it’s cooled enough and that she has opinions about Missouri two-lane roads that she’ll share unprompted. Three weeks. Four. Long enough that when she asks about the last eight years, she’s asking about the real shape of them, not the version I give to rooms full of people who only know my name.
We’re on her porch when she asks it. Late afternoon, the heat easing off, the coneflowers along the fence going pale in the low light. She wants to know what an orc community actually looks like, not the compound she’s read about, not the big community center she’s driven past on the edge of town. What it actually is. Day to day. Where people go. What they do.
I tell her about the cultural center where the big clan celebrations happen: First Frost, the Emergence anniversary. And the HearthHouse, smaller, where the day-to-day community gathers, the kind of place Grulk treats as his personal stage. I tell her about the smaller clan clusters. HammerFall tends to gather at a place off Miller Road with a covered outdoor kitchen that Grulk helped build and never stops mentioning. WarmHearth rotates through clan members’ houses.
“And StillWater?” she says.
“StillWater doesn’t have an indoor place,” I say. “We use a wooded area near the southeast boundary of the compound. There’s a clearing back there: fire ring, enough open sky, quieter than near the structures. It’s been that way since the first year.”
She nods at that. Takes it in.
“There’s a gathering this Sunday,” I say. “In the clearing.” I hear what I’ve just said and pick up my coffee to hide my surprise.
She says, “Can I come?” I wasn’t ready for the question. That’s not the same as not wanting it.
What I know is this: bringing someone to a StillWater gathering is not a small thing. There’s no ceremony around it. Nobody would say anything, that’s not the StillWater way. But they would know what it meant, and I would know that they knew, and she would be the only human there, and I would be the one who brought her.
“I’d like to take you,” I say. “But I want to tell you what you’re walking into first.”
She looks at me.
“You’ll be the only human there. Probably thirty, forty StillWater orcs. Nobody will pepper you with questions or perform welcome at you, but they’ll be paying attention in a way that can feel like weight if you’re not expecting it.” I turn my coffee mug in a slow circle. “And they’ll draw conclusions about what it means that I brought you. Those conclusions won’t be wrong. I just want you to know that going in.”
She looks out at the property for a moment. The coneflowers. The oaks going dark at the edge.
“What time?” she says.
The clearing sits at the southeast edge of the compound, back where the tree line thickens and the land drops slightly toward a natural bowl. By the time we arrive, Honey in the car beside me, guitar in the back, the fire is already built, and the drum has been going for a while. I can hear it from the gravel road. Onelarge drum, six orcs around it with their hands and beaters in the slow rhythm that StillWater uses when it isn’t ceremony, when it’s just… this. Being. Sound moving through a group of people who know how to make room for it.
Honey doesn’t say anything when she hears it. She just goes quiet in a way that has substance to it.
I park along the fence. When Honey gets out of the car, the ground is uneven; the grass has been walked down, but the clearing sits in a natural bowl and the edges aren’t level. I offer my arm without making a thing of it, and she takes it, which is the right call because the dark out here past the compound is a different order of dark than her property. No porch light. No workshop lamp. Just the fire at the center of the clearing and thirty or more orcs between us and it. I feel her hand close on my forearm. I’m fully aware of what she’s walking into. She is five feet tall and the only human here, and she came anyway because while we were on her porch, I mentioned a Sunday gathering, and she askedwhat time?
I keep us to the edge of the clearing as we walk in, the drum louder with every step, the fire burning orange against the purple-dark tree line. The orcs register our arrival the way StillWater registers most things: without show. A few heads turn. Gazes move to Honey, then to me, then away. No one speaks. No one approaches. I feel the attention like a collective held breath. Then it releases, and they go back to what they were doing, which is the StillWater version of welcome.
Aldren is the first one I see clearly. He’s big through the chest even by our standards, hair gone gray at the temples, the male who has been tending this fire ring since the first year after theEmergence. He sees us come in and holds my gaze for a moment. That’s all. With Aldren that’s enough.
My cousin Kessa is across the fire. She nods.
She’s twenty-six, came through at eighteen, and she has never once struggled with what she is the way I have. Her nature is StillWater through and through. She found it immediately and stayed inside it, and I don’t think it has ever felt like a cage to her. Unlike most people here, she knows what I was before the bar, before the Friday nights, before I learned to fill every silence with noise. She’s known me my whole life and never called me on anything, because that is not how we work. In the StillWater way, she understood that I would make peace with my own nature or I wouldn’t, and that her having an opinion about it wouldn’t change which way it went.
She looks at Honey.
Then she looks at me.
I don’t examine what’s in that look. Not yet.
Honey and I find a place near the fire, not too close. She settles onto the blanket I brought without being told to, which tells me a great deal about her reading of the situation. I sit beside her. The drum is across the fire with the rest of the orcs sitting or standing in loose groups around the clearing. Some are talking quietly, some not talking at all. A low vocalization has started from the drum group, not singing, not speech, a sound that lives underneath language. It rises and falls with the drum.
Honey sits with it.
