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. De eper, 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 st eps 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 st ep 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 st ep 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 overst epped. 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 st eps 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 overst epped. 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 ke ep 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 ke ep 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. "He gave me the cooking area. The ridge path." I'm counting on my fingers. "I gave him the cache. The eastern border. The forge. And asking permission for the rest." Nugget finds something in the crack and eats it. "That's a good deal. That's a fair deal. He gets authority over the things that matter to him and I get—" I wave my hand at the dwelling. "Everything I actually need."
She blinks at me. "Stop looking at me like that." She ke eps looking. "I'm talking about the deal, Nugget. The deal was good. The deal is what matters. Not the—not the other—the deal." I cook through the afternoon. Bigger pots this time—the hunt from yesterday left two good-sized rabbits and a haunch of something larger, venison maybe. I've got dried sage in my bag and wild garlic from the ridge path. The stew takes time, which is fine, because time is what I have while the clearing fills up with voices and the smell of cooking pulls people closer. More than breakfast. Word spread, or stomachs did. Fourteen bowls. Fifteen. Rhen is back on his stump. Dara takes hers without comment. Kestria eats sitting cross-legged near the fire, color better than this morning—whatever the tonic's doing, it's doing it fast. She's talking to a woman I don't know yet. Two young wolves hover at the edge of the group—not eating, not leaving. Watching. "There's enough," I tell them. They look at each other. One st eps forward. The other follows. Seventeen. I'm scraping the bottom of the pot, checking if there's enough for the ones who haven't come yet—there isn't, I'll need to stretch the grain tomorrow, maybe start the porridge earlier—when I see him. Not at the fire. Not near the food. At the far edge of the clearing, where the trees start and the last dwelling sits apart from the others. Keer. On the ground. With a child. The kid is maybe eight, nine. Sitting in the dirt with his knees pulled up and his face buried in them. Shaking hard enough I can see it from here. Keer is beside him. Not touching. Not talking. Just sitting. His back against the wall of the dwelling, one knee drawn up, hands loose at his sides. Close enough that the kid could reach for him. Far enough that there's no pressure to. I stop stirring. The boy's shoulders heave. A ragged sound carries across the clearing—not a word. Just air. One of the older women near the fire glances over. Looks away. Deliberate. Giving them space. Keer doesn't move. He doesn't lean in. Doesn't put a hand on the kid's back. Doesn't say whatever Alpha thing an Alpha is supposed to say to make it better. I'm standing at the fire with a ladle in my hand and the bottom of the pot is burning. He's just sitting there. The boy's breathing changes. Still ragged. But the spaces between the sobs are getting longer. He unfolds, just a fraction. His head lifts. He looks at Keer. Keer says something. Low. I can't hear it. Two words, maybe three.
My hand tightens on the ladle. The kid nods. Wipes his face with the back of his hand. Gets up. Walks toward the central fire. Slow, embarrassed, but walking. Keer stays. He doesn't watch the kid go. Just stays sitting, back against the wall, looking at the trees. Alone. "You're burning the stew." I jerk back. Dara, beside me. "What? No I'm—" I look at the pot. "Okay. Yes. That's burning." I pull it off the heat. Scrape the bottom. Salvageable. Mostly. "The kid. What happened?" Dara follows my gaze. "Soren. He's nine. Shifts are bad for him." "Bad how?" "Painful. His body fights it. Happens with some of the young ones." She takes the ladle from me and starts transferring what's left into a serving bowl. "Tomorrow's the new moon. He knows what's coming." "And Keer—" "Sits with him. Before every new moon. Doesn't say much. Just sits." My throat goes tight. "Does anyone else know that?" "The pack knows. Nobody talks about it." She sets the empty pot aside. "He'd hate it if they did." She walks away. Every new moon. He does this every new moon. Just—sits there. Doesn't fix it. The Alpha sits in the dirt with a scared kid and doesn't— I look at the empty ladle in my hand. The pot is burned. I should be scraping the pot. I should— Every new moon. Keer is at the edge of the clearing. He hasn't moved. He didn't eat. This morning he didn't eat. He stood by the big structure and watched me cook and didn't come near the fire. And now—seventeen bowls and he's not one of them. The Alpha of this pack just gave his entire evening to a kid who was scared of the moon, and nobody brought him food, and he's sitting alone against a wall. I look at the fire. The last of the haunch is still on the spit. Well, someone has to. I pull the best cut. The piece I was saving for stock—thick, fatty at the edge—falls apart when it's cooked right. I set it in the last clean pan with wild garlic and sage and a little rendered fat and hold it over the coals. "What are you doing?" Kestria, at my elbow. "Cooking." "You just finished cooking." "This is different cooking."
She looks at the meat. At the clearing edge where Keer is sitting alone. Back at me. "Mel." "Don't." "You're cooking for Keer" "I'm cooking for someone who didn't eat. There's a difference." "Is there?" "Yes. One is personal and the other is—practical. This is practical. People need to eat. He's a person. Therefore." "Therefore." "Shut up." "I didn't say anything." "Your face said plenty." "My face is a neutral instrument of—" "Your face is judging me and I'd like it to stop." She grins. I hate her grin. I love her grin. I turn the meat over because the sear on the bottom is perfect and the garlic is crisping at the edges and the sage smell is cutting through the smoke and this is going to be really good, actually. The sear is right. The garlic is right. And I'm putting it on a plate and walking it across the clearing to— The garlic. Focus on the garlic. Kestria drifts away. The meat finishes. I put it on a clean wooden plate—where's a knife, he'll need a knife—find one, add it to the plate. The wild garlic has gone golden. The sage is dark, fragrant, warm. I pick up the plate and walk across the clearing. Nobody's watching. Everybody is watching. One of those. Packed dirt under my boots, warm plate in my hands, and the clearing is way bigger than it was thirty seconds ago. By the time I reach the edge, my pulse is loud in my neck. He sees me coming. "You didn't eat." His eye moves from my face to the plate. Back to my face. "That's not—" "If you say 'not my responsibility' I'm going to stand here until you take this plate and it's going to be very awkward for both of us." He looks at me for a long moment. "I don't doubt it." Then he takes the plate. I sit down. Not beside him—a few feet away, against the same wall, close enough to talk without raising my voice. The wood is rough through my shirt. The ground is cold. He turns the plate. "You seasoned this." "I season everything. That's what herbs are for."
"With what?" "Wild garlic. Sage. A little fat for the sear." I pull my knees up. "The garlic was growing on the ridge path, by the way. Just sitting there. Has nobody picked it?" "No." "There's enough for weeks. I'll gather more tomorrow. Also there's wood sorrel by the stream that would make a decent sauce if I had vinegar, which I don't, so that's a project for later, and the—" I stop. "Eat." He cuts a piece. Puts it in his mouth. Chews. I should look at the trees. Swallows. I'm going to look at the trees. In a second. "Good?" I ask. "Yes." "How good? Scale of one to ten. One being raw meat, which is apparently the standard around here. Ten being—I don't know, food that's been pr epared with any thought at all." He cuts another piece. "It's good." "That's not a number." "I don't rank food." "Everyone ranks food. You just ranked it. You said 'good.' That's at least a seven." A sound in his throat—not quite a laugh, not quite anything, really. We sit. It should be uncomfortable but it's not, which is maybe worse, because uncomfortable I can handle. "The boy." I lean back against the wall. "Soren." His hand pauses. "Do you do that every month?" "He needs it." "That's not what I asked." He doesn't answer. "How long has he been struggling with shifts?" "Since his first. A year ago." "That's a long time to be scared of the moon." "He's not scared." The knife scrapes the plate. "His body fights the change. The bones don't—" He stops and sets the knife down. "It hurts him more than it should." My hands are in my lap. They want to be doing something— sorting, stacking, rolling. I find a stick near my boot and start stripping bark.
"And you sit with him." "Someone has to." I look at him. "That's my line." His eye meets mine and there's something in it that wasn't there a minute ago, something amused, and I watch him just sit with the fact that he stole my words. "I know," he says. "You know." I stare at him. "Keer. Did you just—are you teasing me right now? Because that is what that felt like and I need to know if I'm having a stroke or if the Alpha of this pack just made a joke at my expense, and I honestly don't know which would be more alarming." "Both can be true." "That is NOT a comforting answer." He cuts another piece of meat, calm as anything, like he hasn't just rearranged my entire understanding of what this man is capable of in polite conversation. "You just did it AGAIN," I say. "That was another one. That was a follow-up joke. Who are you." "Someone who enjoys his dinner." "That is a NON-ANSWER." "It's accurate." He cuts another piece of meat with that same calm steadiness, and I'm about to accuse him of stalling when I see it happen—the corner of his mouth lifts, actually lifts, into something that is unmistakably a small private smile, and it stays there for a full second before he even tries to smooth it out, and I almost fall off the wall because Keer is smiling and it's at me and I am not pr epared for any of it. I'm sitting here on cold ground with a half-stripped stick in my hand realizing that Keer has been funny this entire time and has just been quietly ke eping it to himself like some kind of monastic deadpan hermit, which is honestly rude, and also that his face does that when he smiles, which is information I did not have two seconds ago and can never un-have, and I'm going to have to think about that later because right now I'm too busy trying not to grin like an idiot at a man who I'm now learning has a smile and uses it sparingly, apparently as a weapon. The plate is half-empty between us and the garlic smell is still in the air and the cold is coming up through the ground and I swear to god if he does it a third time I'm going to lose it. "Who cooks for you?" "What?" "Normally. Before I showed up and started assaulting your fire pits with seasoning. Who makes your food?" "I eat what the pack eats." "Today that was raw dried meat and stale bread." "It's sufficient."
"Sufficient." The stick is getting thin, so I find a new one to strip naked. "Sufficient is the saddest word in any language. Sufficient means 'I stopped expecting better and I'd like everyone to stop asking.'" His shoulders drop by a fraction. "You have opinions about everything." "I do. It's a condition. Kestria says it's terminal." "She would know." "She would. She's been listening to me have opinions for years. About herbs, about chickens, about the structural integrity of my roof, about the correct way to smoke venison—Kestria knows more about venison preservation than anyone should and she's never once asked me to stop talking about it, which either means she's a very patient person or I've worn her down to the point where my voice is just background noise, which is—" I catch myself. The stick is bare. I'm holding a naked twig. "I'm doing it right now, aren't I." "Yes." "You could tell me to stop." He shrugs and ke eps eating. He could have. He's the Alpha. People stop talking when he enters a space. I know this because I watched it happen. And I'm sitting here babbling and he's letting me. I snap the twig. "Nobody sits with you." His hand goes still on the plate. "Soren has you. Before every new moon. You sit with a kid who's scared and you don't fix it, you just—stay. And that's—" My voice is climbing and I can hear it and I can't stop it. "But who does that for you? Who sits with the person who sits with everyone?" Don't look at me. Don't look at me with that— He's looking at me. I look at the trees. Very interesting trees. Many branches. Some of them have leaves. "The pack doesn't work that way,” he says, so quiet I almost don’t hear him. "Maybe it should." "The Alpha is—" "Alone. Yeah, yeah. I noticed. You live at the edge of your own territory, Keer. You eat standing up. Everyone watches you and nobody—" I wave the broken twig at nothing."Nobody brings you dinner." "You did." Heat crawls up my neck. "That was practical." "Was it." "Yes. You need to eat. Eating is a biological requirement. I was being—medically responsible." "You seasoned it with sage."
"I season everything with sage. That's not special. That's default herb protocol." "You picked wild garlic from the ridge." "It was right there. On the path. Growing. For free. Anyone could have picked it." "No one did." "Well—" My mouth opens and shuts three times and nothing useful comes out because he's just sitting there looking at me and the plate is almost empty and the garlic smell has mixed with cedar and pine and the cold air off the trees and I am in so much trouble, "—okay fine, maybe I didn't want you to eat alone tonight because I watched you sit in the dirt with a kid for an hour and nobody came near you and nobody brought you so much as a piece of bread and that felt wrong, it felt really wrong, like everybody in this clearing loves you and nobody actually feeds you, and I don't know how a whole pack of wolves manages to look after each other without looking after the one person who looks after all of them, but apparently that's what's happening, and I couldn't just stand there scraping a pot and pretending I hadn't seen it, so yes, I seasoned the meat and yes, I picked the garlic on purpose because when you make food for someone you make it good, you don't just shove calories at them, you actually—" I stop. Because I hear what I'm saying roughly half a second after he does, and his eye has not left my face, and I am abruptly very aware that I just said when you make food for someone like he is a someone I am making food for, which, technically, yes, but also— "—which is a general statement. About cooking. In general. For anyone. A known fact about food and effort." The words are coming out faster than I can steer them. "You're welcome. For the food. Which was practical." His mouth curves up and the skin around his eye softens into a crease. "I should go." My voice comes out higher than I want. "The fire pits need banking before morning. And I should check the—there are things. To check." I stand up. My knees pop. Embarrassing. Very dignified exit. He's still sitting against the wall. Plate empty. Knife across it. "Eat tomorrow too." He looks up at me. "That's not a request." I don't look away. "That's—I'm telling you. Eat breakfast. Come to the fire. Get a bowl." "Is the human giving orders now?" "The human is telling you that sufficient isn't good enough." I hold his gaze. "Goodnight, Keer." His eye holds mine and he dips his chin, and that is the closest thing to a goodnight I'm going to get.