Page 70 of Feral Keep

The fire’s burned to embers by the time we’re back in the warren, the furs soft under both of us, the day still sitting heavy between us—the grave, the headband, a stranger’s name I’ll carry now alongside my own dead. I lie beside her. Not touching yet. Close.

I lie on my back, gold eyes on the roof, the carved letters catching what’s left of the firelight. The A. The backward B. My hands taught themselves those shapes when I had nothing else left in me to teach.

I need to check her.

I always need to check her—the same pull that sent me to the grave every day for eight years, except this pull moves toward something living. My head comes down past her mouth, past her throat, until my ear finds the curve of her belly. My palm settles on the other side, cupping her between my ear and my hand.

One heartbeat. Steady. I know this beat now the way I know the weight of my own wings.

Then—under it. Behind it, off the same rhythm. A second beat, quicker, ducking in and out from behind the first like it’s hiding there.

I go still.

My ear moves left. Right. Back to left. My palm presses harder against the right side of her, my frown deepening past anything I’ve worn sounding out letters on bark. Two rhythms. Two hearts.

I lift my head.

“Two.”

Her spine locks under my palm before I’ve said anything else. The fear climbs her skin, sharp and sudden, and some old animal part of me wants to chase it off her the way I’d chase a threat from the territory. I can’t. This one belongs to her, not mine to fight.

Billy first. Then Sam. Then Dickie, two winters after him. I held each one new and small against this same chest, and the asteroid took all three inside one bad season, no warning, no mercy, nothing my hands could fix no matter how many nights I tried since.

Three gone. Two coming. My chest won’t let two feel safe.

“Two heartbeats,” I say again, because saying it steadies something in my own throat as much as it answers her.

“Okay,” she says. Small. Certain in the way she gets certain when she’s holding something together by force alone. I know that voice. I’ve heard it stretch thin and hold anyway more times than I can count since I found her.

I put my ear back to her skin. Both drums still there, insistent, refusing to be only one.

My mouth finds the curve of her belly. My lips against her skin, nothing sexual in it, nothing possessive—the thing I never got to do for three others before the ground took them from me too fast to press anything but dirt over their names.

My throat works. Nothing comes out of it. Nothing needs to.

Her hand finds my hair. My horns. She holds my head against her the way I’ve held hers a hundred nights running, and something in that trade settles the tremor climbing my spine.

I stay down there long after the fire dies to nothing, listening past the point where listening tells me anything new, because some part of me won’t trust the sound until I’ve heard it a thousand more times. Both hearts keep going. Mine to guard, both of them.

When sleep finally takes me, it’s with her belly still warm under my ear and two small drums keeping time against the dark.

30

MAEVE

He tells me the rest.

We’re in the warren. Evening. The fire low, the light orange and shifting, woodsmoke curling thin toward the root ceiling and catching in my nose, sharp and dry. He’s sitting against the root wall with his legs stretched out, his silver hair loose around his shoulders, his tail resting in a long curve across the furs. I’m across from him with my back against the opposite wall, the space between us deliberate, because what he’s about to say needs room.

The root walls rise around us like ribs. The air is thick with the smell of the canopy—green rot, the animal sweetness of his skin when he’s been hunting. The fire pops. Sparks rise and die.

“She was already dying when I found her.”

His voice is steady. The words come slower than they would from a human mouth, each one tested before release, the sentence built piece by piece. But they come.

“At the border. Like you.” His eyes drop to his hands. “Not—not like you. She was—walking. Barely. Whatever she ran from had already—” He stops. The jaw works. “The sickness was in her scent. Deep. Old. It started long before she reached me.”

Sick and walking anyway. I know what that looks like. Sometimes, when a woman stopped being worth feeding, the Eunuchs just opened the fence at night and let her walk into the canopy—a disposal dressed up as mercy. Maybe that was her. Maybe she climbed the wire herself. The fence she came from went into the ground with her, and no one is ever getting it back out.