My back is one solid ache from the pallet—the walk, the day before, the day before that. Everything.
Mouth tastes stale.
Dehydration headache already starting behind my eyes.
The waterskin has a swallow left, maybe two, and the stream's at the bottom of the ridge.
I pull on my spare clothes—the only spare, which means laundry, which means the stream, which means a bucket I don't have—and tip the last mouthful onto my palm. Splash it on my face.
Cold. Good.
Awake now. Mostly.
"Stay here," I tell Nugget. "Don't eat anythingstructural."
She ignores me and goes back to the corner where she found the beetle last night.
Outside, the clearing is already moving. Fire pits, benches, structures at the edges. People everywhere—eating, talking, carrying things. Everything mud and stone and drab fabric, the whole place washed in brown. A man tears into something cold from a wooden bowl. Another gnaws on what might be dried meat or might be leather.
Hard to tell.
Nobody's cooking.
Nobody. In this whole clearing full of people, not a single fire has food on it.
I stare at the cold fire pits for a long count. Then I start walking toward them.
Fire on the third try. Grain in the larger pot, root vegetables chopped rough with a dull knife I'll sharpen later, smoked meat in the second pot with thyme and rosemary from the bundle in my bag.
Good thing I packed herbs.
I always pack herbs.
Herbs and paste and Nugget—the essentials.
"Come on. Thicken." I stir. "I don't have all day. I have—actually, I do have all day, I live here now, that's a thing that happened—"
My hands stop. The hearth at the cottage was better. Deeper, stone-lined, I carried those stones from the river when I was fourteen and my back hurt for a week and—
Stir the pot.
The smell drifts and heads turn. Nobody comes close, though.
"Food's ready! Help yourselves."
Nobody moves.
Rhen steps forward and picks up a bowl. "Porridge."
"Porridge."
I fill it. He finds a stump near the fire and sits. A fewothers follow—wolves I've treated, recognizable by their scars. Five bowls, then six.
Most of the pack doesn't move.
"Is it decent?" I ask Rhen. "I didn't have much to work with."
He chews. Swallows. "Better than anything we've had recently"
