Page 78 of Feral Keep

I wait.

“Sam.” Quieter. His thumb stills. “Dickie.”

Three dead boys. I already know them. He gave them to me in the firelight days ago, pulled them out of thirteen years of feral silence and laid them on the furs between us like offerings. Billy, eight. Sam, almost reading. Dickie, too little. The tremor that came with each name, the grief pouring out of a body that held it too long.

His hand presses gently against my belly. The twin on the left kicks, a sharp, definite thump against his palm. He makes a low sound, wordless, the sound a male makes when something inside him cracks open.

“I want—” He stops. His jaw works. The frustration of a man with more thought than language, the gap between what he means and what his mouth can do with it. He tries again. “The names. I want to—give them.”

I turn in his arm. Face him. His gold eyes are close, inches away, the firelight caught in them, the steady warmth that replaced the feral flatness. His silver hair falls across his forehead. I push it back. My fingers against his scalp, the hair thick and cool between them.

“Which ones?” I ask.

He blinks. Like he expected a different response. Resistance, maybe. Or the camp-silence I still fall into when something lands too heavy.

“Billy,” he says. “And Sam.”

Billy and Sam. The oldest and the middle. Not Dickie—Dickie was four, too little to have settled into his name. I can hear that in the way he says them. Billy is solid in his mouth. Sam is tender. Dickie is a wound he hasn’t found the bottom of yet.

“Billy was the reader,” I say.

His eyes close. A nod. Small. The grief still comes in waves, not the tidal crash of the first night, but the slow swells that rise without warning. A word, a memory, the kick of an unborn child hitting the spot where a dead child used to rest.

“And the climber,” he says. He opens his eyes. “Everything. Trees. Fences. My—” A pause. The ghost of something that might be a smile if his face remembered how. “My desk. In class. I’d turn around and—there he was. Standing on it. Grinning.”

I laugh. Short, surprised. The sound startles both of us. Laughter is so rare in this warren that it echoes off the root walls like something foreign. His eyes widen slightly. Then the corner of his mouth moves. The almost-smile I’ve seen once before—wrong on the crimson features, right on the man underneath.

“Climbed your desk,” I repeat.

“Every day.” His voice is rough but the words come easier when he’s remembering them. The teacher’s voice surfacing through the rubble. “Sam never would. Sam sat in the corner after school and drew on the backs of my papers, quiet as a held breath. But he watched Billy up there like he was watching the sun come up.”

The twins shift inside me. A roll, a nudge, the two of them rearranging themselves the way they do at night when my body is still and warm and they have room to move. His hand follows the motion, his palm tracking the movement like he’s reading a sentence—left to right, the twin on the left pushing, the twin on the right responding.

“Billy and Sam,” I say.

His eyes come to mine. Searching. Waiting.

“Yes.”

One word. He hears it the way he heard the change in me during the rut—the moment I stopped fighting the furs and started answering him instead. This “Yes” is different. Quieter. But it carries the same weight. I’m giving him something he can’t take. The names are his to offer. The decision to accept them is mine.

My chest goes tight taking them. Two dead boys’ names, sliding onto two living ones like a coat handed down before it’s even been worn. I don’t know if it’s right, giving unborn children the names of children who climbed desks and read early and died before they got the chance to grow past eight. But it feels like the only right thing in a room full of things that aren’t simple, and I say yes anyway.

He presses his forehead against mine. The horns frame my face, white bone curving past my temples. His breath on my lips. The size of him curled around me, the massive crimson body shaped into a question mark with me at the center, his hand on my belly where Billy and Sam are turning in the dark.

“Thank you.” Rough. Broken in the middle.

My palm settles over his, barely covering his knuckles, dark brown skin on crimson. The fire pops. The twins kick.

Later. The fire has rebuilt to flame, the chill pushed back, the light climbing brighter up the root walls and throwing his shadow huge and horned across the ceiling. He’s sitting up against the wall of the sleeping hollow, and I’m between his legs, my back against his chest, his arms loose around me, his jaw settled against my temple, his heartbeat steady against my spine.

“Tell me about the warren,” I say.

He’s quiet for a moment. Then his hand lifts, gestures at the walls. The smooth root surfaces, the reinforced joints where the ceiling braces meet.

“Was a den first. A hole in the roots.” His hand drops. “The rest—after she died.” The pause. He doesn’t say her name because he doesn’t know it. “The feral—the feral built. Couldn’t stop.” His hand opens and closes. The motion of a man describing his own hands working without permission. “Walls. Floor. Cooking. The—fire surface.” He means the raised stone platform he cooks on. The one designed to hold heat, to radiate it into the warren long after the flames die.

“All of this? By yourself?”