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A wheel. That idea was much easier to understand, somehow.

Ewan, meanwhile, hadn’t comprehended the importance of the exchange. Well, why would he? He was too young to understand debt. Now he waved his spoon in my direction.

“Brannok says I’ll never have tusks.”

I blinked at the abrupt change of subject. “I should hope not. You are not an orc.”

Ewan heaved what sounded like a disappointed sigh.

“That’s what Brannok said.”

“Who is Brannok?”

“My friend.” He took another enormous bite, chewed, then added, “And Kaldun. He doesn’t talk as much as me.”

“Few people do,” I muttered.

Maardok coughed suspiciously into his fist, but I was still staring at my son. He’d made two friends, then? After only a few hours, while I was still trying to accept what I’d thought of as charity, he’d been making friends.

“Brannok says his claws didn’t get hard until he was four, but Kaldun says Brannok lies all the time, so I don’t know if that’s true. And Kaldun showed me how to find the warm rocks by the loch”—he had to pause to take a gasping breath—“and Brannok says kitlings can swim there even when it’s cold because orcs don’t freeze as fast as humans and Maardok says he’ll teach me to swim there.”

I quirked a brow at the big man who seemed amused by the whole exchange.

“Not in the winter.”

He immediately nodded at Ewan. “No’ in the winter, son. Ye will freeze, like we spoke of on the boat, aye?”

The lad nodded agreeably, then launched into another long-winded story about what he’d done with these two other boys. Ewan had never made friends easily because he had been the widow’s strange little boy in a town that had never quite known what to do with either of us, and children learned their parents’ judgments quickly.

Here, two orc boys had apparently taken one look at him and decided he needed to know where the best rocks were. Rather the same way Issa shared her stories of new parenthood with me, or Ammal had brought us dinner.

I smiled despite myself as Ewan launched into a complicated explanation of why Brannok believed human fingernails were unfortunate. He was already learning this place, absorbing rules and knowledge I could never have taught him—where the children played, which rocks stayed warm, when orc claws hardened, when tusks grew, and whatever other information five-year-old boys considered essential to survival.

He was adapting faster than I was. That thought should have pleased me, but, watching him gesture wildly with his spoon while Maardok corrected some outrageous claim attributed to Brannok, I was worried for some reason.

Later, when Ewan was tucked into his new bed in the loft and Edan had finally fallen asleep after feeding, I lay beneath my quilt and watched the firelight move across the cottage. Maardok sat near the hearth repairing a leather strap, and the chair I’d moved that afternoon remained exactly where I’d left it.

He hadn’t moved it back.

Outside, the village had gone mostly quiet, although voices occasionally drifted past the cottage and somewhere in the distance someone laughed. There was nothing extraordinary about any of it, and that was what frightened me most.

Not the orcs. Not the strange village or the impossible child sleeping in the little basket beside the bed. Not even the way everyone here seemed to know things I couldn’t understand.

Nay, ‘twas the ordinary things that threatened me.

Boots left at the door for Ewan. A chief sitting on the floor to listen to a child’s stories. A cloak I didn’t have to earn, a bed built for my son, stew from a stranger who wouldn’t take my coin. A chair I was apparently allowed to move.

You could become accustomed to this.

Nay, I had been here two days and two days was not enough to know a place. It certainly wasn’t enough to trust one.

Spring would come. The veil would open once a month and, if I wished, I could leave. Maardok had promised me that.

I turned my face against the pillow and listened to the faint scrape of leather beneath his hands, Edan’s soft breaths beside me, and the occasional creak from the loft when Ewan shifted in his sleep.

For the first time in months, there was nothing I needed to do before I closed my eyes. No wood to ration, no dwindling food stores to count, no cold creeping beneath the door and no fear that the next knock might be John. There was only warmth, my sons, and the male who had brought us here.

It felt far too much like safety, and I could not trust it.