She’s Just My Type… Feral

Aislin

The perimeter takes me four minutes to walk.

I know because I've counted it every morning for seven days — pacing the tree line behind the two cabins we've been given, marking the gaps in the undergrowth where someone could approach unseen, logging the blind spots where the Frostfang watchtowers don't reach.

Four minutes at a steady walk. Two and a half if I'm running.

Not fast enough if there are horses, but there aren't horses here, so I tuck that particular anxiety away and keep moving.

The morning is pale and cold, frost still thick on the grass between the cabins, the kind of chill that gets under your collar and stays there.

I pull my borrowed coat tighter — orc-made, which means it's sized for someone twice my width and drags along the ground at my heels.

I've belted it at the waist with a strip of leather to keep from tripping over myself.

Practical. Undignified. I don't particularly care.

Seven days.

Seven days since a group of Frostfang orcs found us shivering in the eastern wood like something the winter spat back out, and brought us here instead of somewhere worse. That's the most generous framing I can manage: instead of somewhere worse.

I stop at the northeast corner where a gap in the tree line opens onto a slope of grey rock, and I look out the way I've looked out every morning, cataloguing the distance, the sight lines, the places a body might hide.

Behind me, smoke curls from the chimney of the larger cabin where most of the girls sleep.

I listen until I can hear the sounds of movement inside — voices, the scrape of a pot — and only then do I continue walking.

The Stonevein held us for three months.

I let myself think it plainly, the way you press a bruise to make sure it's still real: three months.

Six of the eight women who came out of that camp with me are still sleeping poorly and flinching at loud noises.

Two of them — Maret and young Deva — can barely look at an orc face-on without going white around the mouth.

I understand it. I don't blame them. I've catalogued that too.

What I've decided, and what I hold onto every morning when I walk this perimeter, is that understanding a problem is not the same as allowing it to kill you.

We got out. We stay out. That means paying attention, even when your eyes are gritty from bad sleep and your split lip still pulls when you talk too fast.

I round the south corner and nearly walk into Wren, who is sitting on the cabin step with her knees drawn up and a cup of something steaming balanced in both hands.

"You're doing the walk again." She doesn't phrase it as a question.

"I do it every morning."

"You do it three times every morning." She tracks me over the rim of her cup, the look she gives me patient and slightly too perceptive for this hour. Wren is nineteen and small and does not miss much. "The orcs have watchtowers."

"The watchtowers face outward. They're watching the tree line, not the camp. If something went wrong inside the camp, the first person who would know is whoever was already looking." I say it evenly, not arguing, just stating. "Drink your tea."

"It's broth." She wraps her fingers tighter around the cup. "Falla brought it."

I slow without quite stopping. "Did you sleep?"

"Some." A pause. "Deva had another bad night."

"I heard." I'd been awake anyway, lying flat on the narrow bed they'd given me, staring at ceiling beams and listening to the settlement breathe the way a hunter listens to a forest, measuring whether any sound was wrong.

Deva's crying hadn't been wrong, exactly.

It had been expected. I'd waited to see if she settled on her own — she had — and then I'd gone on listening.

Wren watches me restart my circuit without comment. I appreciate that about her.

Inside the smaller cabin, I find Maret awake and sitting at the table with a strip of linen she's been picking apart into threads for the last three days — not anxiously, she says, but occupationally.

Something to do with her hands. I believe her.

Beside the hearth, two of the younger women, Pell and Idris, are sharing a blanket and talking in low voices that drop when I come in, then resume when they recognize my footsteps.

"Morning," Pell says.

"How's the ankle?" I direct this at Idris, who sprained it badly two days into the journey here.

"Better." She rotates it to demonstrate, winces, then straightens her expression. "Better than yesterday."

"Falla looked at it again?"

"Yesterday. I'm sure he will again today." A slight defensive edge. I don't take it personally. I've noticed the way she watches the healer — not with fear, particularly, but with the cautious interest of someone deciding whether a thing is safe to touch.

"Good." I glance around the cabin, counting: Maret, Pell, Idris.

Three of the eight. I run the rest through my head — Wren on the step, Deva and Corrie still sleeping in the larger cabin, and Niobe, who rises early and has taken to sitting near the central fire.

Which means I need to do a pass through the central camp to account for Niobe, which I dislike, but Niobe is not interested in my preferences about where she positions herself.

I check the woodpile by the hearth: nearly full. Falla, or one of the other orcs whose names I'm still sorting out, has been restocking it each evening. I note this without deciding how I feel about it.

Falla himself appears mid-morning, same as he has every day.

He doesn't knock loudly or announce himself from a distance the way some of the others do — a well-meaning performance that always reads to me as look, I'm safe, look, I'm harmless, which is precisely what you'd say if you weren't. Falla simply comes to the door of the larger cabin and waits, and if someone comes to meet him, he talks to them, and if no one comes, he leaves whatever he's brought and goes.

Today I meet him at the door before he can knock.

He looks at me the way he has every morning: like he's cataloguing the split lip, the shadows under my eyes, the precise tension in my shoulders, and filing it away under not quite healed yet in whatever mental ledger he keeps.

He has blue-green eyes that are uncomfortably direct and the kind of face that doesn't default to pleasantness for social reasons. I find that I don't hate it.

"Deva." I say it before he can speak.

"I'll look at her after I check Idris's ankle." He holds up the bag over one shoulder. "I've also got more of the willowbark tincture for Maret's headaches."

"She says they're getting better."

"They'll get better faster if she takes the tincture."

"I'll tell her that." I hold the door for him, which I've decided is purely strategic — I can see the whole cabin from the doorway, which means I can track exactly where he is the entire time he's inside.

Falla doesn't comment on this arrangement.

Either he hasn't noticed, or he has and doesn't think it worth addressing. I'm undecided on which.

Saela came by on the second day, which I'd been half-expecting.

She has the look of someone who survived something bad and kept going — not untouched by it, but not crushed by it either, which I find the sort of thing worth noting.

She brought a woman named Shae, deep green skin and long black hair and warm eyes that took us all in without flinching, and a second load of supplies: more blankets, bread still warm from wherever it had come from, a collection of small clay pots that turned out to be salves.

Shae didn't crowd anyone. She set things down, asked names, answered questions, and left space for silence. When Deva pressed herself against the wall and wouldn't look up, Shae simply moved to the other side of the room and talked to Wren instead, which was exactly the correct thing to do.

I noticed, and I filed it under practical woman rather than safe, because practical and safe are not the same category.

Ressa came once, a day later, on her own.

I'd heard Saela mention her — Falla's woman, a human, which had arranged itself in my mind as either reassuring or a very specific kind of bait, depending on my mood.

She's tall and red-haired and holds herself like someone who spent time learning how not to be afraid of her own space.

She'd brought more salve — Falla's recipe, she said — and she'd stayed long enough to sit with Corrie, who'd been quiet since we arrived in the way that worries me more than crying does.

I watched Ressa the whole time she was there. She didn't seem to notice, or if she did, she didn't make it uncomfortable. When she left she'd said, "I'm just down the path, if anyone needs anything," simply, without pushing it into an invitation.

I haven't decided how I feel about any of it.

By midday I've completed a sixth circuit of the perimeter and my feet are starting to ache through the thin soles of my boots. I stop at the east edge of the tree line, hands in my pockets, and look at the two cabins from a distance.

Smoke. Voices. Idris and Pell have come outside to sit in the weak morning sun, close enough to the door that they can be back inside in three seconds.

Wren has moved off the step and is standing near them, still holding her cup even though the broth must be long cold.

In the larger cabin window, a shadow moves: Deva, up at last, drifting past the glass.

Eight women. Six weeks minimum before anyone is walking properly long distances.

Maret's headaches, Deva's nights, Corrie's silence, Idris's ankle, and the half-dozen smaller injuries I'm still working through the list of — a wrist, two sets of badly healed fingers, one woman whose ribs hadn't been set right and are going to need Falla's attention whether she'll allow it yet or not.

The Frostfang have been consistent. Food, firewood, medicine, space. No pressure. No extraction of anything in exchange.

I don't trust it.