Page 91 of Feral Keep

The freed women watch him. The watching has evolved. On the first day it was from inside the shelters—eyes through the woven walls, faces turning away when he looked in their direction. The propaganda is still louder than the evidence. Shades will rape you to death. Shayla’s voice was in their ears, the last voice some of them heard at the barracks door.

On the second day, two of them stood at the edge of the clearing. Close enough to see him work. Far enough to run.

Now, on the third day, three of them came to the cooking surface while he was turning the meat. The fat drips and hisses on the hot stone, and the smell of it—rich, charred at the edges, better than anything the barracks ever fed us—pulls them closer whether they mean to come or not. They stood ten feet away and watched his hands—the massive crimson hands that can tear cattle fencing, turning a spit with the same care they use to hold bark-strips for reading lessons. One woman, young, brown-haired, with a scar from her ear to her jaw, tilted her head, studying his hands, the gentleness of the rotation, the finger that checked the temperature of the stone, the adjustment so careful it was almost tender.

She stayed ten minutes, left, then came back five minutes later and stayed longer.

Watching her watch him lodges somewhere under my ribs, a feeling I can’t put a clean word to. I know that ten feet exactly—the precise distance where close enough to see meets far enough to run. I used to stand at that distance from everything. My throat closes. It isn’t the fire smoke. I want to call it nothing. It isn’t nothing. It’s a girl measuring the same careful gap I used to keep, and my hands want to cross the clearing and tell her it comes out even, it comes out safe, except I don’t know that for certain either. I only know it did for me.

Marta, the older woman with the limp, sits on a stone ten feet from the fire every evening and watches Red read. She hasn’t spoken to him. But she’s getting closer. The distance shrinking by a foot each day, the way trust arrives in camp—not all at once, not with words. In inches. In the slow closing of space between a body that expects violence and a body that isn’t providing it.

He’s sitting by the fire now. The bark-strip in his hands. The reading lessons keep going through the raid, the cracked rib, the fifteen women who flinch at his shadow. He reads every morning and every evening, his massive frame hunched by the fire, his crimson finger tracing words, his lips moving. He reads faster now. Still slow compared to a child learning. But the sentences come whole instead of broken.

I take the bark-strip from his hands.

He looks up. Gold eyes, firelight, the question on his face.

“I need to see the side,” I say.

He lifts his arm. The obedience of a man who has learned that arguing with me about his own injuries is a fight he won’t win. I run my fingers along the bruise. Pressing gently. Testing. The swelling has reduced by half. The muscle underneath is looser, the rigid guarding giving way to the slow uncoil of tissue that’s healing.

“Better,” I say.

“Told you.”

“You told me you were fine three days ago when you could barely breathe. Your opinion on your own body is not trusted.”

The almost-smile again, the corner of his mouth moving, the expression that looks wrong on the crimson face and exactly right on the man underneath. It’s happening more often now, the man’s face learning to do what the feral’s face couldn’t—the small movements of humor, of warmth, of the quiet pleasure of being argued with by someone who cares enough to argue.

I dip the cloth in warm water. Wring it. The water carries the smell of the herbs Lisa boiled into it, bitter and green, cutting through the woodsmoke that’s soaked into everything at this fire. Press it against the bruise—the heat spreading into the tissue, the slow seep that helps muscle relax. He exhales. His eyes close. The tension in his shoulders easing, the guard dropping for the first time in three days. He guards all day. He guards all night. He lets me tend him like this, by the fire, when the women are in the shelters and Lisa is running the perimeter check and it’s just us.

I’ve been guarding too. I didn’t clock it until right now, my shoulders coming down an inch under my own hands as I move the cloth, the ache in them that’s been there so long I stopped counting it as pain. Camp-brain says vigilance is just how a body stays alive, nothing to make a fuss over. But sitting here with his heartbeat under my palm and no fence in sight, some coiled thing in my spine finally, finally lets go, and it comes loose so suddenly it almost hurts worse than holding it did.

“The women,” he says. Eyes still closed.

“Lisa has them. Lisa always has them.”

“Three of them came—to the cooking surface today. While I was—” He opens his eyes. “They didn’t run.”

“They’re learning.” I move the cloth higher. Along his ribs, the broad curve of a chest built to hold a body three times my size. The skin smooth under the cloth, the heat of him radiating through the wet fabric. “Marta sat closer today. Did you notice?”

“I noticed.”

“Give them time.”

He nods. His eyes close again. The fire pops, the canopy shifts outside, and the sounds of women drift up from the shelters—murmuring, the occasional laugh that startles everyone who hears it. Gretchen hums—the tuneless sound she makes when she’s braiding, her scarred hands already working again. She started on the second day, her palms still raw, the blisters still healing, but her fingers finding hair the way Red’s hands find wood, the compulsion to tend, the thing the camps couldn’t break.

I set the cloth down.

This isn’t tending, or cleaning, not anymore. I settle my palms flat against his chest, the crimson skin warm under them, the heartbeat steady beneath, the muscle that held an Unmade and tore a fence apart and carried Gretchen through miles of canopy with a cracked rib.

His eyes open.

“Maeve.”

“I want you,” I say. The same three words as the first chosen night. But quieter now. Slower. Deeper. I almost lost him three days ago. I need to feel him alive under my hands.

The memory of it comes up fast and ugly for a second, the sound the Unmade’s blow made when it landed, the way he went down, the way my whole chest turned to stone before I’d even decided to be scared. The blood smell from that night comes back with it, sudden and metallic on my tongue like it’s happening again. I shove it back down. It doesn’t want to stay down. It never fully does. But his skin is warm under my palms and his heart is beating steady and stupid and alive, and I hold onto that instead.