Chapter 7
Nugget is staring at me.
I open my eyes and she's right there, pink face inches from mine, beady eyes fixed on me with the intensity of someone who has been personally wronged.
She clucks once. Sharp.
"I'm awake."
She pecks my nose.
"Ow! Fine. Up. I'm up."
My back is one solid ache from the pallet—the walk, the day before, the day before that. Everything.
Mouth tastes stale.
Dehydration headache already starting behind my eyes.
The waterskin has a swallow left, maybe two, and the stream's at the bottom of the ridge.
I pull on my spare clothes—the only spare, which means laundry, which means the stream, which means a bucket I don't have—and tip the last mouthful onto my palm. Splash it on my face.
Cold. Good.
Awake now. Mostly.
"Stay here," I tell Nugget. "Don't eat anything structural."
She ignores me and goes back to the corner where she found the beetle last night.
Outside, the clearing is already moving.
Fire pits, benches, structures at the edges.
People everywhere—eating, talking, carrying things.
Everything mud and stone and drab fabric, the whole place washed in brown.
A man tears into something cold from a wooden bowl.
Another gnaws on what might be dried meat or might be leather.
Hard to tell.
Nobody's cooking.
Nobody. In this whole clearing full of people, not a single fire has food on it.
I stare at the cold fire pits for a long count. Then I start walking toward them.
Fire on the third try. Grain in the larger pot, root vegetables chopped rough with a dull knife I'll sharpen later, smoked meat in the second pot with thyme and rosemary from the bundle in my bag.
Good thing I packed herbs.
I always pack herbs.
Herbs and paste and Nugget—the essentials.
"Come on. Thicken." I stir. "I don't have all day. I have—actually, I do have all day, I live here now, that's a thing that happened—"
My hands stop. The hearth at the cottage was better. Deeper, stone-lined, I carried those stones from the river when I was fourteen and my back hurt for a week and—
Stir the pot.
The smell drifts and heads turn. Nobody comes close, though.
"Food's ready! Help yourselves."
Nobody moves.
Rhen steps forward and picks up a bowl. "Porridge."
"Porridge."
I fill it. He finds a stump near the fire and sits. A few others follow—wolves I've treated, recognizable by their scars. Five bowls, then six.
Most of the pack doesn't move.
"Is it decent?" I ask Rhen. "I didn't have much to work with."
He chews. Swallows. "Better than anything we've had recently"
"That's a low bar."
"It is." His mouth curves.
"Human."
Tovar. Big one from yesterday. Arms folded, permanent scowl. "Nobody asked you to do this."
"Nobody was doing it."
"We feed ourselves fine."
"You eat raw meat and stale bread. That's not fine, that's giving up."
His weight shifts forward. "How do we know you haven't put something in it?"
"I've been eating it for the last ten minutes. Still alive. Want me to prove it again or can I get back to serving people who are actually hungry?"
Dara appears beside me, holding out a bowl. "Stew."
I fill it. She settles onto a stump. Tovar stares at me. Stares at Rhen, who's on his second bowl. Turns and walks away.
Kestria appears from the larger dwellings. Still pale, but grinning. "You made breakfast?"
"Everyone needs to eat."
"You've been here one night and you've already taken over the food area."
"There was no kitchen. There were cold fire pits and despair."
She laughs—grabs her ribs. "Don't—ow."
"Eat. Then go back to resting."
"Yes, mother." But she takes the bowl.
My neck goes warm. Keer is standing near one of the larger structures, not approaching, not eating. His eye on the fire. On me.
I stir the porridge with aggressive focus because porridge is fascinating and the thyme ratio is very important and did I add salt, I don't think I added salt—
"She just started cooking?" Axan's voice carries, amused.
"Apparently."
"Food's good, though."
No response.
The morning burns off. People drift through the clearing—eating, working, talking. I scrub the pots. Reorganize the cooking area because whoever set it up put the woodpile downwind of the fire, which means sparks, which means burned firewood, which means—
I stop.
The food storage catches my eye on my way back.
Stone-lined, partially underground, cool.
Someone built this right. Someone thought about temperature.
Someone cared—and then apparently left, because from the doorway I can see grain in open bins with no lids, root vegetables piled on the dirt floor, and in the corner, three bushels turning soft and dark.
Oh no.
I step inside. The spoiling grain first—salvage what I can, toss the rest, and who leaves grain uncovered, rodents are a thing, moisture is a thing, the whole point of oh this is containment—the vegetables need to come off the floor, a rack would fix it, scrap wood and four stones would fix it, this is a fifteen-minute problem that's been a fifteen-minute problem for weeks—
"You can't touch that."
I turn. A man in the doorway. Broad, young.
"I'm just—"
"That's the Alpha's cache. Pack resources. His authority." Another person behind him. Then a third. "You can't just walk in here."
"It's food storage. It's disorganized."
"It doesn't matter. You don't have the right."
Three of them. Filling the doorway. Jaws set, shoulders squared, feet planted.
"Okay." I step back. Hands up. "I didn't know. I'm sorry."
"You should have asked."
"You're right."
I walk past them. My heart is going and it won't stop. Nobody threatened me, nobody touched me, but my hands are shaking—
My dwelling. I sink onto the stump outside. Nugget waddles over and pecks at my boot. I pick her up. Hold her against my chest. She makes a grumpy sound but stays, her half-bare tail end warm against my wrist where the feathers haven't grown back yet.
Okay. Think.
I reorganized the entire cooking area and nobody blinked. Cooked their food. Nobody intervened. But this—this got people in a doorway in seconds.
I go inside. Start stripping comfrey from the drying bundle—leaf from stem, good from brown.
The light from the doorway disappears.
Keer. Shoulders angled in the doorway. The dwelling shrinks with him standing there. Pine and warm salt and my hands fumble the comfrey and I'm angry at my hands.
I set the stems down. Pull in a breath. Face him.
I already know why he's here. The cache.
This is the part where the Alpha tells the human she overstepped.
Fine. I can do this.
You got this, Mel.
Beat him to it.
"I know about the cache." I meet his eye. "I shouldn't have gone in without asking."
He stops. Whatever he was going to open with, that wasn't it. His eye narrows.
"You don't need to do any of this."
"Do what?"
"Cook. Organize." He steps inside. "You're not part of this."
"People were hungry. Your cooking area was a disaster." My voice comes out chirpy—every firm point I make ends up sounding like a picnic invitation. "I fixed it."
"This isn't your responsibility."
"Someone has to do it."
"You tried to access pack stores."
"I tried to organize a pile of rotting food so it stopped rotting."
"That's not your call."
"Bushels of grain were spoiling. That's not hierarchy, that's waste."
"It's both."
My mouth opens. Closes.
He's—that's actually—
That's annoyingly correct.
"Fine! It's both. I overstepped. I know that now."
His face sharpens.
"You don't know any of the rules."
"No. I don't." I look at him straight on. "So tell me."
The dwelling is very small. I'm aware of this because he's standing in it, which makes it smaller, and the comfrey I was stripping is on the table between us, and the distance from the edge of the pallet to where he's standing is about two feet, which is not enough feet.
I could count the stitching on his shirt from here. I'm not going to count the stitching on his shirt.
I'm going to listen to the rules. Because rules are important. Rules are what keep people from doing stupid things in small dwellings that smell like pine and—
"The cache is mine. Stores, supplies, resource decisions. Through me or Axan."
"Through you or Axan. Done."
"The cooking area isn't restricted."
"Good. That's the one I need."
"The forge is Axan's. The weapons cache."
"I have zero interest in the weapons cache."
"The den boundaries. The ridge path is open but the eastern border isn't."
"Eastern border. Don't go there. Got it. What else?"
He's watching me. I'm listening. Every rule is a door. I'm counting them.
"That's enough for now."
"Enough for now implies there's more."
"There's always more."
"Then I'll keep asking."
"You will." Not a question.
"Better than guessing."
His eye—
My hand reaches for a bandage from the shelf. Between us now—cotton and air and the fact that his breathing changed just now, I heard it, I definitely heard it, and I need to think about something else immediately.
Comfrey storage.
Did I leave the bundle loose enough for air circulation? If I tied it too tight the center will mold and I'll lose the whole batch and—
I roll the bandage tight. "Thank you. For the rules."
"You're thanking me for telling you what you can't do."
"I'm thanking you for telling me what I can do. The can't part I figured out." My fingers are steady. I'm very proud of them. "Just elevate the grain. It's the stone floor—moisture's getting through. That's the whole problem."
"I know."
"Then fix it."
His eye drops to my hands. To my mouth. Then he's looking at the doorway and my face is on fire and I'm rolling the bandage with enough force to wring water from it.
I salute. "Yes, sir."
His eye closes, fingers press against his temple. Then he's gone.
I sit on the pallet.
Nugget clucks.
"That was a negotiation," I tell her. "I negotiated with the Alpha."
She pecks at a crack in the floor.