Page 73 of Feral Keep

31

MAEVE

The lie breaks slow.

In accumulations, the days stacking into weeks. The weight of daily evidence presses against the structure of everything the camps told me until the structure can’t hold.

He cooks for me in the morning. Not the rut-feeding—the food pressed to my mouth, the flat command of eat. This is different. He stands at the cooking surface with his back to me, working the fire, stirring the pot, tasting from the bone spoon with a frown that means he’s adjusting something. He adds a green I don’t recognize. Sets the bowl near me and watches from across the warren with his arms folded over his chest.

“Good?” he asks, the word genuine, wanting to know.

Steam rises off the bowl, carrying the smell of roasted meat and something bitter and green underneath, sharp enough to make my mouth water before the spoon reaches my lips. I taste it. The broth is rich, warm, the green giving it a sharp bite that cuts through the meat. My body drinks it in. Strong teeth. Throat that swallows without pain.

“Good,” I say.

Something settles in his body—the food going down, the confirmation reaching him, the massive frame loosening by one degree. A man who wants to know if the meal is right.

This is the monster the camps said would rape me to death.

He reads by the fire. Haltingly. His lips moving, his crimson finger tracing the bark-strips, sounding out words he lost thirteen years ago. When he gets stuck, he looks at me, expectant, the way a student looks at a teacher. The way his students must have looked at him, once, in a classroom with desks and walls and a world that made sense.

“Survived,” I tell him. “Sur-vived. Two parts.”

“Survived.” He nods. Goes back to the strip. His finger moves. His lips shape the next word silently, testing it before committing.

This is the beast the Ordained said would tear me apart.

He’s mending a wing membrane, tearing it on the jagged rocks near the warren entrance, the kind of wear that happens when you’re still learning to navigate a body that’s half-feral. He sits by the fire, his wing stretched across his lap, and his talons work with a care that shouldn’t exist in something the camps said was an animal. The membrane is gossamer-thin, and he works by firelight, using a bone needle and thread made from sinew, the faint smell of tanned hide rising off the thread each time he pulls it taut. His eyes track every stitch. His tail curls around the base of his wing, holding it steady, and the tip of it moves in small circles as he works.

He doesn’t notice me watching until he’s finished tying off the last stitch. Then his eyes lift, and his tail’s movement stills. The intimacy of it—watching him tend his own body with the care of someone who understands that his body is the only home he has left—sits heavy in my chest.

“Done,” he says, to himself, a quiet affirmation.

This is what the camps sent me out to be afraid of.

He shakes when he says his sons’ names. The tremor that starts in his chest and radiates outward, the grief coming out through the body because thirteen years of feral silence gave it nowhere else to go. The smoke from the fire thickens between us, catching in my throat, mixing with something sour that rises off his skin when the shaking gets bad, the smell of a body working too hard to hold something in. He doesn’t hide it. He doesn’t try to stop it. He sits in the furs and shakes. The names come out, one at a time, and the fire burns. I sit beside him, and neither of us pretends the trembling is anything other than what it is.

A father, mourning his children thirteen years late, because the mutation stole his ability to mourn and the rut kept the grief in a sealed room. Now the door is open and everything is coming through at once.

This is what Shayla said I should fear.

The lie has a voice. Shayla’s voice. Calm, measured. The voice of a woman who ran a camp with the certainty of someone who believed she was saving lives by caging them.

The Shades are animals. They can’t speak. They can’t think. They will use your body until it breaks and then they will discard you. At least in the camps, you’re alive. At least in the camps, you know what the pain is.

I sit in the warren with my hand on my belly, feeling the twins move—faint, barely there, the first flutters of something becoming someone—and I hear Shayla’s voice, and I measure it against what’s in front of me.

The man who can’t speak? He’s reading. Slowly, badly, sounding out words like a child relearning language. But reading. The marks on the wall, thirteen years of his hands holding onto literacy. The letters coming back as his mind surfaces. Yesterday he read a full sentence. His face when he finished it was the face of a teacher. Not a Shade, not a monster, not a feral predator. A man who taught people to understand things, remembering what comprehension feels like.

The animal who can’t think? He built this warren—the root walls braced and reinforced, the cooking surface designed for heat retention, the sleeping hollows shaped for bodies, the furs layered for warmth. He built utensils from bone and wood, each one fitted to a purpose. He carved letters into a wall because even the feral brain couldn’t stop the teacher’s hands from trying. That’s not an animal. That’s a man trapped in an animal’s body, building what his hands remembered even when his mind forgot.

The thing that will use my body until it breaks? He fed me. Bite by bite, his hand at my mouth, the patient insistence of a man who understood that my body was failing and decided to reverse the failure. He pressed venom into my cracked bones. He regrew my teeth. He tended the scars the camps put on me with a focus that makes the camp’s medics look like amateurs. He rebuilt every broken part of me because something in his body decided I was worth rebuilding, and he did it while the rut was running at full force, while every instinct in his body was screaming at him to fuck and breed and fill. He held back. For weeks. Because I was too fragile. He fed me and waited for my body to be strong enough before he let himself have what the rut was demanding.

At least in the camps, I knew what the pain was.

Yes. I did. The pain was starvation. The pain was cracked ribs. The pain was a dislocated shoulder that no one set. The pain was teeth knocked out and bleeding into the dirt. The pain was sleeping on hard ground in a barracks so crowded the bodies touched and none of the touching was kind. The pain was clearing lines, hauling lines, the backbreaking labor of maintaining a camp that maintained itself by breaking us.

I knew what the pain was. Shayla’s right about that.