Page 90 of Feral Keep

He holds me. One arm around my back, the injured side braced against the tree. The massive body curved around mine, the wings folding forward to block the wind and the night. I cry against his chest. It’s the kind of crying that happens when you stop moving, when the adrenaline is gone and the walking is done and the only thing left is the weight of what happened.

When it stops, I wipe my face on the fur over my belly. He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t tell me it’s okay. Doesn’t promise it gets better. He holds me. That’s enough.

We reach the territory the next evening.

The warren rises from the canopy like a body surfacing from water, the root walls catching the last light, the reinforced structure solid and familiar against the mutated trees. Home. The word still startles me. Three months ago this was a prison. The place a monster dragged me. The cage where the rut happened.

Now it’s where the food is. Where the furs are warm. Where the fire burns and the man reads by its light and the walls he carved with letters catch the morning sun. Even from the clearing I catch it, the smell of home—smoke and fur and roasted meat—and my whole body loosens toward it before I’ve taken another step.

Red carries Gretchen up to the warren. Sets her in the sleeping hollow with furs piled around her. His movements are stiff, the cracked rib protesting every step, every lift. He doesn’t stop. He builds a fire. Heats water. Puts food on the cooking surface. The need to feed the people in his territory overrides the pain.

The other women—thirteen of them, scattered below in the clearing—stand in the fading light and stare. At the warren. At the trees. At the territory of a Shade who just tore open their cage and is now making dinner.

Lisa takes charge. Of course she does. She walks the perimeter, counts the women, identifies the ones who need immediate attention, four, the worst of it. Malnutrition, infections, injuries from years of clearing work. She finds the secondary shelters Red built—the structures he made years ago. She assigns sleeping spaces. She lights fires. She makes a schedule.

From the warren, I watch her work, my hands on the root wall. Below, Lisa moves through the clearing with the efficiency of a woman who has been organizing survival her entire adult life. The camp women follow her. Not because they trust her more than they trust me—because Lisa speaks their language. The language of structure. Of schedules. Of knowing what happens next.

Something in me loosens watching it happen, a tightness I didn’t know I was still carrying since the gate. I don’t have to be the one holding all of it. Camp-brain doesn’t believe that until it sees the help working with its own eyes, and even then it takes a minute to trust the ground under it.

Red comes up behind me. His good arm around my waist. His jaw settles into my hair, heavy and warm against my scalp.

“She’s good,” he says. About Lisa.

“She kept us alive.”

“She’ll keep them alive too.”

I lean back against him, his heartbeat through my spine, the twins shifting. The canopy darkens over a clearing that used to hold one man and one woman and now holds seventeen.

Pride and grief sit in my chest at the same time, close enough to feel like the same thing. Seventeen people are alive tonight who wouldn’t be if I’d stayed quiet. Twenty-five are still behind a door I couldn’t open fast enough. I don’t know how to hold both numbers without one of them winning.

“How long?” I ask. “Before you can fight.”

He’s quiet. Working through it. What’s broken, what’s healing, what needs time. “Five days. Maybe—four if⁠—”

“Five,” I say. “You take five.”

He doesn’t argue. He presses his mouth to my hair and holds me and we watch Lisa build a settlement in the clearing below.

Five days. Five days to heal. Five days before we go back for the twenty-five women still behind Shayla’s door.

I start counting.

38

MAEVE

On the third night, I tend his wounds.

The bruise is fading, shade healing faster than human, the dark discoloration retreating from his hip, the swelling going down in stages. He moves easier now. Still hitches on the right side, still breathes carefully when he lifts the heavy braces for the shelters he can’t stop building even when I tell him to rest. But the worst is past. The cracked rib is knitting. The gash on his cheek is a pink seam, new skin growing over it. Even the wound smells different now—the raw copper edge gone, just warm skin and the faint green bite of whatever grows in his spit that closes flesh faster than it should.

Three days, and the territory has changed.

The shelters have doubled. Red builds them the way he builds everything, obsessively, carefully, with the attention of hands that know what a home is supposed to feel like. The new ones are smaller than the warren but solid. Root-braced frames, woven walls, raised sleeping platforms that keep the women off the damp ground. The clearing smells like split wood now, sharp and green, sap bleeding from the fresh cuts and drying sticky in the sun. He built the first one in silence while the women slept. They woke to a new structure and the massive Shade already working on the second one, his injured side hitched, his tail curling and uncurling with the rhythm of work.

Lisa took over after that. She directed him, pointing to locations, specifying sizes.

“Water-catch goes there,” she told him, tapping the spot with her foot. “Fire pit moves ten feet that way, downwind of the shelters. Latrine’s past that ridge—count it out, twenty paces, not less.” Red followed her instructions with the patient focus of a man who recognizes a good teacher when he hears one. Lisa’s voice carried across the clearing while a nine-foot Shade built what she described—the partnership that was never supposed to happen.