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And I was surprised to realize I was relieved that the deadline had come and gone, with me firmly in the orc world for at least another month.

Would this cycle of confusion and irritability continue?

Until you choose your place, aye, ‘twill.

I scowled and continued to scrub the stew pot.

Three days later, Maardok came home bleeding.

I heard him before I saw him, because Ewan shrieked from the doorway in a pitch usually reserved for finding something dead. I got to my feet with Edan against my shoulder and my heart somewhere near my teeth, and my great green male ducked through the door with his left sleeve gone entirely and a strip of linen bound around his forearm, dark and stiff with dried blood.

“Maardok!”

“‘Tis naught,” he said.

“‘Tis not naught, that is your arm⁠—”

“Aye, and ‘tis still attached.” He smiled teasingly at me as he crossed to the table and dropped a sack of oats onto it, entirely unbothered, as if this happened often. Oh God, did this happen often?

“Matthias sewed it near two hours ago,” he told me nonchalantly. “He’s gone home to his supper.”

Two hours? Nobody had come to tell me. No one had run for me, no one had sent a kitling with a message, and Maardok himself had apparently finished out his afternoon and stopped somewhere to collect a sack of oats on his way home, not caring I would be distraught.

Mayhap he did not realize you would be distraught. You have never told him so.

I stood there with our son drooling on my collarbone and waited for the terror to arrive.

It did not, quite. Because Maardok settled himself into my chair—my chair, thank you, which he had never once moved back—and stretched his legs toward the fire like a male for whom sparring practice and sewn shut arms were a normal occurrence.

He was not being brave for my benefit. He simply did not consider himself worth the fuss. Which meant that if it had been worth the fuss, he would have said so.

I found that steadied me more than any amount of reassurance would have.

“How,” I said carefully, “did that happen?”

“Mormmit’s grip slipped.” He shrugged the shoulder that wasn’t covered in blood. “Green blade, and an untested warrior,” he sighed. “My fault as much as his. I was slow coming out of the turn.”

“Slow.” I repeated it flatly. “This was during sparring practice?”

“Aye. I’m getting auld.”

Ewan, who had been vibrating at my elbow for the length of this conversation, could contain himself no longer.

“Can I see it?”

“Ewan—”

“Aye,” Maardok said, as if this fact of life was something he assumed Ewan would need to know, and shifted forward in his chair.

Maardok unwound the linen with his good hand, and the pair of them bent over the wound with their heads together—one dark and shaggy, one enormous and scarred—while my son counted the stitches aloud and got to nine and then started over because he had lost his place.

“Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen,” Maardok supplied.

“Nine-fourteen!” Ewan announced proudly. “Will it scar? Like the others?”

Ewan poked, very gently, at the old white seam running along Maardok’s forearm, then looked up at the ruin of his face with the frank interest only a five-year-old can manage without giving offense.

“Like those ones?”