1
AISLIN
The perimeter takes me four minutes to walk.
I know because I've counted it every morning for seven days — pacing the tree line behind the two cabins we've been given, marking the gaps in the undergrowth where someone could approach unseen, logging the blind spots where the Frostfang watchtowers don't reach. Four minutes at a steady walk. Two and a half if I'm running. Not fast enough if there are horses, but there aren't horses here, so I tuck that particular anxiety away and keep moving.
The morning is pale and cold, frost still thick on the grass between the cabins, the kind of chill that gets under your collar and stays there. I pull my borrowed coat tighter — orc-made, which means it's sized for someone twice my width and drags along the ground at my heels. I've belted it at the waist with a strip of leather to keep from tripping over myself. Practical. Undignified. I don't particularly care.
Seven days.
Seven days since a group of Frostfang orcs found us shivering in the eastern wood like something the winter spat back out, andbrought us here instead of somewhere worse. That's the most generous framing I can manage:instead of somewhere worse.
I stop at the northeast corner where a gap in the tree line opens onto a slope of grey rock, and I look out the way I've looked out every morning, cataloguing the distance, the sight lines, the places a body might hide. Behind me, smoke curls from the chimney of the larger cabin where most of the girls sleep. I listen until I can hear the sounds of movement inside — voices, the scrape of a pot — and only then do I continue walking.
The Stonevein held us for three months.
I let myself think it plainly, the way you press a bruise to make sure it's still real:three months. Six of the eight women who came out of that camp with me are still sleeping poorly and flinching at loud noises. Two of them — Maret and young Deva — can barely look at an orc face-on without going white around the mouth. I understand it. I don't blame them. I've catalogued that too.
What I've decided, and what I hold onto every morning when I walk this perimeter, is that understanding a problem is not the same as allowing it to kill you. We got out. We stay out. That means paying attention, even when your eyes are gritty from bad sleep and your split lip still pulls when you talk too fast.
I round the south corner and nearly walk into Wren, who is sitting on the cabin step with her knees drawn up and a cup of something steaming balanced in both hands.
"You're doing the walk again." She doesn't phrase it as a question.
"I do it every morning."
"You do it three times every morning." She tracks me over the rim of her cup, the look she gives me patient and slightly too perceptive for this hour. Wren is nineteen and small and does not miss much. "The orcs have watchtowers."
"The watchtowers face outward. They're watching the tree line, not the camp. If something went wronginsidethe camp, the first person who would know is whoever was already looking." I say it evenly, not arguing, just stating. "Drink your tea."
"It's broth." She wraps her fingers tighter around the cup. "Falla brought it."
I slow without quite stopping. "Did you sleep?"
"Some." A pause. "Deva had another bad night."
"I heard." I'd been awake anyway, lying flat on the narrow bed they'd given me, staring at ceiling beams and listening to the settlement breathe the way a hunter listens to a forest, measuring whether any sound was wrong. Deva's crying hadn't been wrong, exactly. It had been expected. I'd waited to see if she settled on her own — she had — and then I'd gone on listening.
Wren watches me restart my circuit without comment. I appreciate that about her.
Inside the smaller cabin,I find Maret awake and sitting at the table with a strip of linen she's been picking apart into threads for the last three days — not anxiously, she says, but occupationally. Something to do with her hands. I believe her. Beside the hearth, two of the younger women, Pell and Idris, are sharing a blanket and talking in low voices that drop when I come in, then resume when they recognize my footsteps.
"Morning," Pell says.
"How's the ankle?" I direct this at Idris, who sprained it badly two days into the journey here.
"Better." She rotates it to demonstrate, winces, then straightens her expression. "Better than yesterday."
"Falla looked at it again?"
"Yesterday. I'm sure he will again today." A slight defensive edge. I don't take it personally. I've noticed the way she watchesthe healer — not with fear, particularly, but with the cautious interest of someone deciding whether a thing is safe to touch.
"Good." I glance around the cabin, counting: Maret, Pell, Idris. Three of the eight. I run the rest through my head — Wren on the step, Deva and Corrie still sleeping in the larger cabin, and Niobe, who rises early and has taken to sitting near the central fire. Which means I need to do a pass through the central camp to account for Niobe, which I dislike, but Niobe is not interested in my preferences about where she positions herself.
I check the woodpile by the hearth: nearly full. Falla, or one of the other orcs whose names I'm still sorting out, has been restocking it each evening. I note this without deciding how I feel about it.
Falla himself appears mid-morning,same as he has every day.
