Page 35 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

Just that. No pause in front of it. No inventory. She has it already, complete, ready to hand over, and she has had it for some time.

"Since when."

"Since Day Five." She takes a breath. "Since the card."

"Which card."

She looks at me and there is a thing behind her eyes moving very fast, and then she takes it out and puts it down between us, which is a thing she has been doing more of and which costs her something every single time.

"They asked me if you had ever frightened me," she says.

The rain does the sideways thing.

"I called the card wrong," she says. "I'd called every card for two days, and I called that one as what is it like to be carried, because I had six days of evidence that they were building me into a woman who can't do anything. And they were. They were doing that. But that was never the show." Her jaw works. "The show is you. I'm the reason they get to point at you."

"You have carried this since Day Five."

"Yes."

"Alone."

"Yes."

"Why."

And she does not answer for long enough that the answer arrives on its own, which is that she was managing me. That a person who reads a room for a living looked at a large man who has spent twenty-three years being careful in doorways, and made a judgment about how much he could carry, and carried the rest herself.

Everybody does this. Everybody has always done this. It is the whole grammar of my life, and it is meant kindly every single time.

"I would rather have it," I say.

"Ghorlan."

"Whatever it is. However heavy. I would rather have it than be spared it." I pick up the whetstone and put it back down. "Being spared things is what I get handed instead of being understood."

Something goes across her face that I have no name for.

And here is the part I do not tell her.

At two in the afternoon I go to split the rest of the alder, and Bear comes off the tripod the way he does, low and left, and I get the axe up over my shoulder and I stop.

I stop at the top of the swing.

And I bring it down slower than the wood needs, and softer than the wood needs, with my shoulders in, and my elbows in, and my whole body doing the thing it does in a doorway, and it takes me three strokes to break a round that should take one.

That is new.

Thirty-seven years of managing how much room I take up in a room, and today is the first day I have ever managed how much room I take up in a frame, and I do not have anywhere to put that.

At one in the afternoon I take the flint out of my kit and walk down to the creek site.

It is fifty minutes each way and I have not eaten since the trout.

Wes Trell is on his knees in the mud in front of a fire lay that has been rebuilt four times, working a bow drill he made this morning out of a bootlace and a piece of alder, and Danna is holding a strip of bark over the top of it to keep the rain off, and neither of them has a spindle that is dry enough to matter.

"We are not allowed to accept aid," Wes says, before I am fully into the site.

"Read page twenty-two."