Page 69 of Feral Keep

Not the rut-visits—him carrying me, knotted, picking flowers one-handed while his cock held me sealed and his tail wrapped my waist. This time I walk beside him. The path from the warren through the root structure to the clearing is longer than the rut let on. During the rut, the distance was swallowed by his stride. On my own legs, it takes time. Every step comes with weight now, the new strength in my calves from the venom-rebuilt muscle, the hips heavier, the belly rounding forward, the center of gravity shifting week by week as whatever is growing inside me grows.

The canopy is quiet this morning. Overcast sky visible through the breaks in the leaves, the light flat and grey. The air is cool and wet against my face, thick with last night’s rain still caught in the moss, a green mineral smell that clings to the back of my throat with every breath. Red walks beside me, not behind me. His stride shortened to match mine. Three of his steps for every four of mine, the automatic adjustment of a body that knows how to accommodate a smaller one. His tail brushes ferns as we walk, the white tip sweeping back and forth in the idle rhythm that means he’s calm.

The clearing is smaller than I thought. A break in the canopy where the roots pull back and the sky shows through. The mound sits at the center. Wildflowers arranged with the careful hand that I’ve watched tend me for weeks—the same care, like his hands only know one way to hold a thing. Dried petals from previous visits scatter around the base, faded to brown, dissolving into the earth.

He stands at the mound. His hands hang at his sides. He’s quiet in a way that’s different from his other silences. This is old quiet. Worn into him. The quiet of a man who has stood in this exact spot hundreds of times and still doesn’t have the right thing to say. His fingers open and close at his sides. The small movement of hands that want to fix something unfixable.

“She came from fences,” he says, speaking to the mound instead of to me. “Somewhere with fences. I smelled it on her—rust, wire, old smoke. The feral knew that much and no more.” He stops. His jaw works, the muscle twitching under the crimson skin. “I couldn’t ask. She couldn’t answer. She was here. Then she wasn’t.”

“The camps,” I say. “Or the Cages.”

He looks at me, and I lay the world out for him—the world he never got to ask her about. “The Ordained keep women in both. The Cages are where they put the ones they think a Shade will take. The camps are for the rest of us, the used-up ones, the ones too scarred to sell. Women run from both. When running is all that’s left, the fence you climbed stops mattering.”

“I never learned which.”

“You couldn’t have.” Not cruel. Camp-true, the kind of truth you hand someone because carrying a question forever is worse than an answer. “Wherever it was, she got out. She made it all the way to you. That’s more than most of us manage.”

I look at the mound. The earth is packed smooth from years of his hands pressing it, keeping the shape. No marker. No name carved into wood. Just a slight rise in the clearing, wildflowers on top, and eight years of a man who couldn’t remember his own name coming back to tend a grave he couldn’t mark.

He kneels. His knees hit the earth with a heaviness that has nothing to do with his weight. His hands find the flowers, adjusting, replacing the wilted stems with fresh ones he picked on the walk. White blossoms from a vine that grows at the base of the mutated oaks, a thin sweetness rising off the petals that the wet air carries straight to me, underneath it the sour green bite of broken stems. He picks them every time. His fingers work with the same care they use on everything else, the same care that fed me, that traced letters on bark.

I kneel beside him.

The earth is cool under my knees. Damp from yesterday’s rain. The smell of it—clean, dark, rich—is nothing like the camp dirt, which was packed hard and stank of chemicals and the sweat of women who worked it until their hands bled. This is real earth. The kind of dirt things come back from.

I don’t leave flowers. I don’t have flowers. What I have is a strip of cloth I’ve been carrying since the escape, knotted into the waistband of the furs Red gave me, transferred from the rags I was wearing when he found me. A headband. Blue, faded, the weave coming loose at one end. It belonged to a woman named Dara. She was three bunks down in the barracks. She disappeared one night—pulled for transfer, maybe, or pulled for something worse—and the headband was the only thing left on her pallet in the morning. I took it. I don’t know why. The camps didn’t allow keeping things. Possessions were risk. Attachment was risk. I kept it anyway, knotted into my waistband, the thin strip of blue against my skin for months.

The cloth still carries a ghost of the barracks in it, old sweat gone dry and faint, the flat dust smell of a pallet that never quite aired out. Four years knotted against my skin haven’t scrubbed it out.

I set it on the earth beside Red’s flowers.

My chest goes tight setting it down, tighter than I expect for a strip of cloth that isn’t even mine to grieve. Dara’s face comes back for a second, thin, tired, laughing once at something I don’t remember anymore, and then it’s gone, the way most camp faces go, quick and complete, because holding onto them too long cost you something, out there.

He looks at it. At me. The gold eyes with quiet devastation in them meeting mine.

“There was a woman,” I say. “Dara. She—” I stop, because the end of Dara’s story isn’t mine to finish. Nobody ever told me how it ended. “She’s gone. I don’t know where.”

He looks at the headband on the grave. He looks at the flowers. His hand comes down and adjusts the cloth, settling it beside the stems. The placement is deliberate, as if the headband of a woman he never met deserves the same care as the flowers he’s been bringing for eight years.

The grave isn’t just for her anymore. It’s for Dara and the woman who hummed at night and every woman the camps consumed without writing it down. The mound is small. The grief it holds is enormous. Two people kneel on either side of it, each carrying their own dead.

His hand is already on the earth, fingers buried near the flower stems, pressing into the dirt. I set mine beside his. Dark skin and crimson skin on the same ground, the grave between our fingers.

“I didn’t save her,” he says. Quiet. The words coming slow. “The bond—it wasn’t right. Something in the—she was sick. Her body couldn’t⁠—”

“I know,” I say. I don’t know the details. I don’t need them yet. He’ll tell me when he’s ready, and I’ll sit across the fire and stay, the way camp women learned to stay for each other. For now: she was too sick, and the bond couldn’t take hold in a body that far gone. His body tried to keep her alive the way it kept me alive. Cum, venom, food, heat. The sickness was faster.

The distance between her death and my survival was nothing. I know this because my body remembers the first days. The claiming. The force of him entering a body that was already breaking. The venom saved me. The bond saved me. Another week on the run, one bad fever, a little further gone—I’d be under a mound somewhere too.

The look on his face says he knows it.

I squeeze the earth. His pinkie finds mine—the same gesture from the night he said his sons’ names. One point of contact, quiet, present. This close, the warm animal smell of his skin cuts through the wet earth and the sweetness of the blossoms, familiar now in a way that used to terrify me and doesn’t anymore.

We kneel at the grave until the light starts to change. The overcast thinning, the grey brightening to white. The flowers on the mound catch the new light. The blue headband darkens with the damp earth seeping into the fabric. His pinkie stays on mine the whole time.

29

RED