'If You Survive My Test, I'm Yours' Orc Huntress Challenged — He Survived and She…

If you survive my test, I'm yours. Orc Huntress challenged. He survived. And she survive my test, human, and I am yours. She did not say it as a joke. Saurin had been crouched over a patch of shadow route at the base of the ridge, fingers gentle on the stems, the way the old medicine woman had taught him. When the orcwoman stepped onto the path and blocked his entire view of the morning, she was not injured. She was not lost. She was standing with the deliberate stillness of someone who had chosen this exact moment at this

exact location. After thinking about it carefully, she had been watching him for 3 days. She said she had made a decision. The test would begin at nightfall. If he completed it, she would consider herself his. Those were her exact words delivered with the flat certainty of someone issuing a formal declaration, not a romantic offer. Saurin looked down At his herb basket, then back up at the orcw woman standing before him, and felt the particular dizziness of a man whose ordinary Tuesday had just collapsed underneath him. He did not notice the iron black ring on her

thumb, the kind stamped with a warlord's seal. He did not notice the way she held herself, like someone accustomed to being obeyed without repetition. He only noticed that she was waiting for his answer with complete patience, as if his refusal was Not a possibility she had seriously considered. He swallowed hard and asked what the test was. Her eyes said she had been hoping he would ask that. If you were standing in Sa's boots right now, would you accept or walk away? Tell me in the comments and drop what time it is where you are watching

this. Now, let's get into it. The village of Ashen sat at the bottom of a valley that the rest of the world had largely forgotten about. It was not a bad place. Exactly. The Hills around it were green in summer and silver in winter, and the forest that climbed the eastern ridge was old enough that the trees had grown into each other overhead, making tunnels of root and branch that blocked wind and held moisture long into dry months. There was a river to the west, shallow enough to wade, but cold enough to ache. And on

clear mornings the mist that came off it hung in the low fields like something alive. But Ashen was poor. Had always Been poor. The kind of poor that was not dramatic. No single disaster. No great crime. Just the slow grinding kind that came from thin soil and bad luck and too many hard winters stacked one on top of the other. The houses were patched. The fences were patched. The people had the careful measured way of moving that came from knowing resources were limited and waste was something you could not afford. Saurin Male had lived on

the edge of Ashen for 6 years in a cottage That was more accurately a large shed with ambitions. The roof held mostly. The walls kept wind out mostly. He had a hearth that drew well, a single window with oiled cloth instead of glass, and shelves along every wall lined with dried bundles of herbs, root bark strips, and small clay jars of pressed oils and ground powders. The place smelled of earth and green things, and faintly of smoke, and it was in its way the most organized space in the entire Valley. He was 29 years old

and had the hands of someone much older, not damaged hands, skilled ones. The kind that came from years of careful, precise work, cutting stems at exactly the right angle, grinding roots without bruising the fibers, sorting leaves by texture and vein pattern in low light. He worked for the village medicine woman, Old Petra, who was past the age of climbing hills herself. He gathered what she needed, prepared what she asked, and Received in return a small wage. his cottage rentree and the occasional meal that was better than anything he could cook himself. It was not a

large life. He knew that on evenings when the work was done and the fire was low and the cottage was very quiet. He knew it clearly. He had come to Ashen after leaving his hometown three provinces north. Left after his mother died, after the woman he had planned to marry chose someone with better prospects, after the Life he had imagined for himself had quietly failed to appear. He had not left in anger, just in the tired, clear eyed way of someone who understood that staying somewhere that reminded you constantly of what you had lost was

its own kind of damage. He had found Petra, and Petra had found a use for him, and the years had gone by. He was not unhappy. That was the honest answer on most days. He had the hills and the forest and work that required genuine Attention. He had a good knife and a basket that balanced well on his shoulder, and the particular satisfaction of finding exactly the plant he was looking for in exactly the place he had expected it to be. He did not have much else, but he had stopped expecting much else. That morning,

the morning she appeared, he had been up since before dawn, moving along the eastern ridge in the gray pre light, following the line of old oaks toward The patch of shadowroot that grew near the broken stones of what had once, centuries ago, been a wall of some kind. Shadowroot was difficult. It bruised easily, lost its properties within hours of being cut, if not handled correctly, and only grew in specific combinations of shade and drainage that made it rare enough to be worth the early start. He had found his patch. He had been working carefully, basket

already half full with the morning's other collections when he Heard the footstep behind him. Not an animal, too even. He had turned, still crouched, and she had been standing there. He put her at just under 6 ft, tall for an orc woman, he would later learn, but not unusually so for her particular people. She was lean rather than broadly muscular, built like someone who moved fast rather than someone who moved heavy things. Her skin was a deep muted green gray, her hair black and pulled back severely, her eyes A shade of amber that caught light

strangely in the early morning. She wore traveling clothes, well-made, he noticed even then the leather worked finely, the stitching too precise for common wear, but they were road dirty and had clearly been slept in more than once. She was not wearing anything that announced who she was, but she was watching him with the focused, unhurried attention of someone who had already decided what they were going to do next and was Simply waiting for the right moment to do it. She told him she had been watching him for three mornings, that she had seen something, that

she had made a decision because of it, and she was not a person who made decisions lightly or changed them once made," he asked, because he could not think of anything else to say. "What she had seen?" "She said she would explain during the test. There was half hidden beneath the collar of her traveling Coat, a cord around her neck. He could not see what hung from it. He did not think much about it. He thought about it later. By then, everything was already different. Like travelers from distant lands who carry stories of orcs without

ever meeting one, Saurin had grown up on tales, fearsome, exaggerated, mostly wrong. He had never imagined standing on a hillside at dawn being studied by one like a particularly interesting plant specimen. If you want to understand how This morning changed two lives and eventually two worlds, stay with us through what comes next. Saurin had not always been the kind of person who accepted strange situations quietly. There had been a version of him years ago who asked more questions, pushed back harder, expected more from the world. That version had grown up in a town called Vthmar

three provinces north, the son of a woman who sold cloth, and a father who had left before Saurin was old enough to remember his face. not a tragic childhood. His mother was capable and practical and raised him with the particular toughness of someone who had already made peace with doing everything herself. He had been a curious boy, quick with his hands, good at noticing things other people walked past. The medicine woman in Vthmark had taken an interest in him when he was 12. Not a formal apprenticeship, she was too old and too set in her

habits for that, But she let him watch, and watching was enough. He learned which plants grew where and what they were good for, and how to handle them without destroying what made them useful. He learned that most of what healing actually required was patience and attention, and the willingness to be present with someone while they hurt. He had been good at that, naturally, unhurriedly good at it. He had been 22 when his mother died. Fever, fast winter. He had done Everything right. The right herbs, the right timing, the right careful watching, and it had not

been enough. That was the thing about illness that no amount of knowledge fully prepared you for. Sometimes you did everything correctly, and it still went the wrong way. He had understood that intellectually. Understanding it while sitting beside her in the gray morning light, watching her breathing stop, was different. He had stayed in Vthmark Another year, long enough to watch the woman he had been quietly, carefully, hopefully spending time with, a Fletcher's daughter named Meera, kind-faced, practical, someone who laughed at his habit of narrating herb properties out loud. Choose a merchant who could offer her a

house with a real roof and a future that did not depend on what happened to grow on hillsides. She had not been cruel about it. She had been honest, which was its own kind of Pain. He had left after that, not running, just going in the way you go when the place you're in has become mostly made of things you're trying not to think about. He had found Ashen, found Petra, found a life that fit him, even if it was smaller than he had once imagined. What he carried from all of it was not bitterness.

It was something quieter, a certain carefulness around hoping for things, a habit of keeping his expectations low, and his attention On the work directly in front of him, and a deep, almost involuntary response to suffering whenever he encountered it in any form. His body simply moved toward it before his mind had finished deciding. His mother had been like that. He supposed he had inherited it. It was why he had not walked away from the orc woman on the ridge. He was afraid of her. He was honest enough with himself to admit that she was a

stranger. She was visibly capable of doing him serious Harm. And she had said something that made no logical sense. But she had also been standing there with that look in her amber eyes contained controlled. But underneath it something that had been waiting a long time to say exactly those words. And some part of him had recognized that look. The look of someone who had made a very difficult decision and needed the other person to just say yes. He had said yes. He was still not entirely sure why. Jacqua had Been born to make decisions. That

was not a romantic way of putting it. It was simply accurate. She was the only surviving child of Clan Morvox chieftain, a man of moderate power and enormous pride who had raised her after her mother's death when Jaka was nine, with the specific intention of producing an hair capable of holding the clan together when he was gone. She had learned to track before she learned to read. She had completed her first solo Hunt at 14 and her first diplomatic negotiation at 16 and her first battle command at 20. And she had done all three well

enough that people had stopped being surprised by her competence and simply expected it. She was 31 now. Chieftain's daughter officially. Her father still lived, but his health had been failing for 2 years, and in practice the clan's decisions moved through her. She had learned to carry that weight without letting it Show. She was good at that, too. What she was not good at, had never learned, had been specifically untrained for was this. Sitting with the fact that she was lonely, not alone. That was different. She was surrounded always by people who needed things from her,

advisers, warriors, supplicants, rivals. The clan's inner circle was large and loud and perpetually in motion, and she was at its center, and she was so thoroughly surrounded that the loneliness inside it Had taken years to even identify. She had been engaged twice. The first man had died in a border skirmish three weeks before their planned binding ceremony, a loss she had grieved properly, formally, and then packed away because there was no time. The second had been a political match that fell apart when the other clan's political situation changed, and the alliance was no longer advantageous.

She had not grieved that one. She had felt, if she Was honest, mostly relieved. What she wanted, and she had only recently admitted this to herself, alone on this road, far from everyone who expected things from her, was someone who looked at her and saw Jarker. Not the chieftain's daughter, not the clan's future, not a political asset or a powerful match or a problem to be solved, just her. She had been traveling with a small escort when the escort had been called back by an emergency 3 days Ago. She had chosen to continue alone. She

was capable of it, and she had needed badly a few days of simply being no one in particular. She had been moving through the forest above Ashen when she first noticed the man below her on the ridge. The way he worked, unhurried, precise, handling each plant like it mattered, had made her stop. She had watched him for a long time. Something about his presence was very quiet, not weak, just settled, in a way She rarely encountered. She had watched him three mornings before she understood what she was going to do. The test had been in

her mind since she was a girl. Her mother had described it once, an old tradition nearly forgotten from the early days of the clan when partnerships were chosen through demonstrated character rather than political arrangement. You set someone a challenge that revealed who they truly were. If they met it honestly, they had earned The right to stand beside you. She had never expected to use it. She had not been able to stop thinking about it since the third morning. The test, she explained, would take 3 days. She said this, that first morning on the ridge, with

the same calm, directness she used for everything, as if three-day tests offered to strangers before breakfast were a normal feature of daily life, which Saurin would come to understand in her world they more or Less were. She told him the rules simply. For 3 days she would remain with him in his space, his routine, his life as it actually was. She would observe. She would participate. She would ask questions and expect honest answers. At the end of the third day, she would make her judgment. He was not to perform, not to pretend, not to try

to impress her. She would know if he was performing. She was, she said, very good at knowing. He asked where she would stay. She looked At him steadily and said wherever he offered. He brought her back to the cottage. He was not sure what else to do. The first hour was the most uncomfortable of his recent memory. She was too large for his single chair, not dramatically, but enough that she sat on the floor instead, back against the wall, watching him move around the small space with that focused amber attention while he tried to remember

how to do ordinary things like hang up his herb Basket and start a fire while being watched. His hands, which were usually very steady, kept doing slightly wrong things. He dropped his flint twice. She did not comment on this. She simply watched. He made tea, the only social ritual he had that felt automatic, and offered her a cup. She took it, examined it, smelled it with the careful attention of someone assessing something unfamiliar, and then drank it slowly. Her expression was neutral. He could not Tell if she liked it. He asked because silence felt increasingly

impossible. If she was hungry, she said she had not eaten since the previous morning. He had bread, dried fish, a handful of late season apples, and a soft cheese Petra had given him two days ago. He put all of it on the table. She looked at the spread for a moment. He had the impression she was doing some kind of mental calculation and then ate with the controlled economical movements of Someone who was very hungry and was not going to let that be obvious. He pretended not to notice. He ate his own portion without looking

at her that he would learn later was the first thing she recorded in her judgment. Not the food itself. The not looking. The days fell into a shape, as days do when two people are occupying the same small space, and there is work to be done, regardless of personal awkwardness. He went out each morning to gather. She Came with him, silent at first, watching how he moved through the forest, what he looked for, how he decided, the small decisions that were too habitual to explain unless asked, she asked. She asked good questions, precise ones, the

kind that came from genuine curiosity rather than politeness. what made one patch of moss useful and another not, how he knew which roots to leave and which to take so the plant would grow back, whether the patterns were Consistent, or whether he was always guessing. He answered honestly, including the times the answer was, "I'm usually guessing," she told him on the second morning that orc herbalists, they called them ground walkers, worked differently. They harvested in rounds entire patches at once and replanted at specific lunar intervals based on clan tradition. He said that sounded like it

would work well for common plants, but might be hard on the rare ones. She Considered this for a while and then said he was probably right. That was the first moment that felt like a conversation rather than an assessment. At the cottage, she gradually almost invisibly stopped simply watching and started doing things. She sharpened his knife without asking. He came back from washing his hands to find her running the blade along a wet stone with practice deficiency. He stood in the doorway for a moment, not sure whether To say thank you or ask why. He

said thank you. She nodded once, handed the knife back, and returned to her place by the wall. The second evening, she helped him sort the day's harvest. He talked her through the categories, what was for pain, what was for fever, what needed drying versus pressing, and she organized with the same focused precision. She brought to everything. Her hands were larger than his, but not clumsy. She handled the dried leaves Carefully. He noticed toward the end of the sorting that she was humming something very quietly under her breath. A low rhythmic sound almost below hearing. When

she realized he had noticed, she stopped. He said it sounded like a working song. She said it was orc tradition. Certain tasks had specific rhythms to keep the work even. She had not realized she was doing it. He asked if she would teach him the rhythm. She looked at him for a moment. That Considering look she had the one that seemed to weigh things carefully and then hummed it again slowly. He tried to follow. He was off by half a beat. And she corrected him with a tap on the table twice and he tried again

and got it approximately right. and she made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was something in that family. That was the second thing she recorded in her judgment. The language that grew between them over those three days was not Formal. It was made of the small vocabulary that assembles itself when two people are working alongside each other and need to communicate without having to stop and explain everything. She learned his words for the plants, their common names, and their properties. He learned her words for a few things. the orc term for the

quality of morning light that meant good tracking conditions. The word their clan used for the particular satisfaction of A task completed correctly. The sound more of a short exhale through the nose. That meant yes, I already knew that, but I appreciate that you said it. He used that last one at the wrong moment on the second afternoon, and she actually laughed. A real laugh, brief and surprised, not performed for his benefit. He felt something shift when she laughed. something that had been sitting carefully behind his ribs moved slightly out of place. He did not Examine

this. He had work to do. She had nightmares. He had not expected that. The second night he woke to a sharp sound from the corner of the cottage where she was sleeping. A word in orc, short and hard, like something bitten off. Then silence. He lay still in the dark, listening, and heard her breathing slowly reconstruct itself into steadiness. She did not make another sound. In the morning she was as composed as always. He did not mention It. But he found himself that day making sure she ate well and brewing the chamomile and valyan blend

he usually made for Petra's patients who slept badly and leaving it on the table in the evening without comment. She looked at it then at him. He was already looking at his herb notes. She drank it. He did not say anything. That was the third thing. The third day was different in a way he could not entirely explain. The awkwardness had gone, not replaced by Ease exactly, but by something more interesting than ease, a quality of attention between them that had stopped being about caution, and started being about something else. He was aware of her

in the room in a way that was no longer about woriness. She moved differently, too, less like someone observing and more like someone present. They were sitting by the fire that third evening, the work done, the cottage quiet. When she asked him about his Past, not intrusively, just directly, the way she did everything, she said she had noticed he lived entirely without attachment to anything outside this valley. And she wanted to understand why he told her. Not everything, not the detailed version, but the true version, the mother, the leaving, the smaller thanex expected life. He

said it plainly without self-pity. the way you describe something that happened a long time ago and has been examined enough that it no Longer cuts. She was quiet for a while after. Then she said that she understood that particular kind of tired, the kind that came not from hardship but from carrying weight that nobody around you could see. He looked at her then really looked not the careful sideways glance he had been managing for 3 days. She was staring at the fire. The amber light made her face look less guarded than usual. There was something

in her expression, behind the composure, behind The assessing calm, that was genuinely, straightforwardly sad. He did not ask what she meant. He thought he understood. They sat there until the fire went low, and neither of them moved to rebuild it, and the silence between them was not uncomfortable. He was, he realized, going to miss her when the test was over. He shoved the thought aside firmly and went to sleep. The morning of the judgment came gray and cold with a thin rain that turned the Path outside the cottage into mud and made the forest smell

of wet bark and iron. She was already awake when he rose. He had a feeling she had been awake for some time. She was sitting by the dead fire, straight backed, hands on her knees, wearing an expression he had not seen on her before, not the assessing calm of the past 3 days, something more formal, like she had put a different version of herself on this morning. He started the fire without Speaking and put water on. The morning routine had become familiar enough that they moved through it without collision. She stepped to the side when

he needed the shelf. He passed her the cup without being asked. She moved to the table when he needed the hearth side. Three days had made them oddly fluent in each other's space. When the tea was ready, and they were both sitting, she told him the test was complete. She said he had done three things that mattered. He had Fed her without making her feel like a burden. He had corrected her without making her feel inferior. And he had heard her pain without trying to fix it or minimize it. She said that by the reckoning

of her clan's oldest tradition, these three things constituted the foundation of a partnership worth having. He was still processing this when she reached inside her collar and pulled out the cord around her neck. What hung from it was Not what he had expected. He had not been thinking about it specifically, but he had vaguely imagined something clan related, a token of some kind. What she placed on the table between them was a seal, iron, black, thumb-sized, carved with a device he did not recognize, a pattern of interlocking lines that his eye kept trying to resolve

into a shape and could not quite manage. She told him what it was. She was Jarka, daughter of Chieftain Morvak of the Iron Peak clan. In the current arrangement of her clan's governance, with her father's illness progressing, she held the authority of clan leadership in practical terms. She had a territory the size of a small province, three subordinate settlements, a standing force of 400 warriors, and more political obligations than she could count. She had left all of it three weeks ago with a small escort for a diplomatic journey. When the escort was recalled, she had

continued. She had Needed to be no one in particular for a while. She had found Ashfen. She had found him. He looked at the seal on the table for a long time. Then he looked up at her and asked why she had not told him from the beginning. She said that if she had told him, he would have treated her differently. He would have been afraid or respectful in the wrong way or trying to be impressive and she would have learned nothing true about him. She needed to see who he was when he did not

Know who she was. That was the only way the test was honest. He understood the logic. He even on some level respected it. What he felt beneath the logic was harder to name. Something that was not quite betrayal. She had not lied exactly, but was close to it in feeling. He had spent three days being entirely unguardedly himself in front of her. He had told her about his mother. He had let her hear his plainest, most ordinary life, and she had been watching with Full knowledge of the enormous distance between their worlds without telling him.

and he had not known enough to even be self-conscious. He stood up. He said he needed some air. He walked outside into the rain. He stood at the edge of his small mud and stone path and looked at the forest and breathed slowly. The rain was cold. He did not go back inside immediately. The thing was, and he worked through this carefully, standing in the wet. He was not certain his Feeling of exposure was unfair. She had not deceived him for cruelty or gain. She had been trying to find something real. He understood that impulse.

He had spent 6 years trying to find something real in a life that kept offering him small, manageable, insufficient things. But there was still the matter of what came next. She was a chieftain's hair. He was a man who gathered plants for an aging medicine woman in a village the rest of the world had forgotten. The Distance between those two facts was not metaphorical. It was practical and enormous and not going away. He went back inside. She was sitting exactly where he had left her, hands still on her knees, watching the door. She had the

careful stillness of someone who was not sure what was going to come back through it. He sat down across from her. He said that he was not angry. He said he understood why she had done it the way she had done it. He said he needed Her to understand that for him the past 3 days had not been a performance. He had been genuinely entirely himself without any awareness that it mattered in the way it apparently had. She said she knew. She said that was exactly why it mattered. He looked at her. She looked back.

Before either of them could say anything else, there was a sound outside. Horses, multiple moving fast on the valley road, then voices. Then a knock on his door, hard and official. In The way of people who were used to doors opening before they finished knocking, he opened it. Three orc warriors stood in the rain, armored, serious. The one at the front had the particular bearing of someone senior. He was looking past Saurin at Darka, and the expression on his face was the specific expression of a person who has been genuinely worried and is now experiencing

relief so intense it was coming out as controlled anger. Zarka stood, her posture changed Entirely, not into someone different, but into a larger version of herself. The informality of the past 3 days folded away like cloth. She spoke to the warrior in their language quickly, in a tone that indicated she was in charge of this conversation, and he should understand that clearly, the warrior answered. There was, it emerged through the exchange, a problem, a faction within a neighboring clan, one the Morv clan was in complicated diplomatic Relationship with, had learned of Jarka's unescorted travel. They

had sent a representative to Ashfen ahead of her guard with the intention of creating an incident of making it appear that the chieftain's hair had spent three days in compromising circumstances with a human commoner for political use. Clan Morvak's internal rivals would use such a story to argue she was unfit for leadership. The representative was already in the village. Jacqua turned to Saurin. Her face was composed, but her eyes were asking something. He said before she could speak that he would come with her. She said that was not his problem to solve. He said that

whatever happened in that village square in the next hour was going to involve his name and his cottage and 3 days of his actual life and he was going to be present for that. She looked at him for a moment with something in her expression that was new. Not the assessing amber Attention of the test, but something more direct, more personal, like someone recognizing a thing they had hoped for but not expected. She said, "Fine." She said, "Stay close." The village square was muddy and cold, and by the time they arrived, the representative, a lean

orc male with the look of someone very pleased with himself, had gathered an audience. Ashvin's residents watched from doorways and fence lines with the wary, uncertain look of people who were Aware something significant was happening, but were not sure what the correct position on it was. The representative spoke first loudly for the audience's benefit as much as Jarkers. He laid out his version of events in the elaborate, pointed way of someone who had rehearsed it. The chieftain's hair alone 3 days in a human's home, unaccounted for, a guard dismissed. He let the implication build without

stating it directly, which was Saurin recognized the cleverer way to do it. Direct accusations can be refuted. Implications spread differently. Saurin stood next to Jarka in the mud and the rain. He thought about what he knew. Then he did something that surprised everyone, including himself. He spoke not loudly, not dramatically, but clearly enough that the square could hear. He addressed the audience, not the representative. He described the past three days, the herb gathering, the Sorting, the cooking, the fire, the tea. He described it in the plain specific language of someone reporting actual events. No interpretation,

no argument, just what had happened in order, including the parts that were mundane and the parts that were not. He finished by saying that if the question was whether Jacqua of Clan Morvak had conducted herself with honor during three days in Ashen, he could answer that without hesitation. she had more Thoroughly and consistently than most people he had encountered in his life. The square was quiet. The representative started to respond, but Jarka spoke over him in the common tongue, which he had not expected, which meant she was addressing both audiences at once. She confirmed what

Saurin had said. She named the purpose of her stay the old tradition, the test, her decision. She said the test had been conducted honestly, and its result was her own Business. She said anyone who wished to argue otherwise was welcome to do so formally in front of her father's council. The representative had come prepared for scandal. He had not come prepared for transparency. He left. The square dispersed slowly. A few of Ashfin's residents lingered. Old Petra wrapped in a heavy shawl at the edge of the gathering. Caught Saun's eye across the mud and gave him

a look that was difficult to interpret but not Unfriendly. Jarka's guard waited at the edge of the square. patient ready, she and Saurin walked back toward the cottage without speaking. They stood in the cottage doorway while her guard waited at a respectful distance, and the rain came down on the valley, and the morning worked slowly toward afternoon. She was fully herself now, in a way she had not been for 3 days, or rather, she was both versions at once, which was something he had not seen before. The Formal authority was present, real and solid. But

underneath it, the person he had learned over 3 days was also still there, not hidden, just quieter. She told him what she wanted to say directly as she did everything. She said that in her tradition, the test was a beginning, not an ending. When someone passed the test, it opened a question. She was asking the question now. She wanted him to come with her. Not as a servant, not as a token, not as a curiosity. She used The word the orc tradition had for it. The closest translation in common tongue was something like chosen partner

with a weight behind it that the translation did not fully carry. She said that in practical terms it meant standing beside her being part of her household and her world having standing in her clan structure being someone whose opinion she valued and whose presence she wanted. She said it was not a small thing she was asking. She knew what his World was and she was asking him to leave it. She said she would understand if he refused. She said she would not hold the refusal against him. She said she wanted to be clear that she

was asking because she wanted to ask, not because the tradition required it or because she felt she owed him something. The test had been her idea, her choice. Her tradition. The asking was also her choice. Then she stopped talking and waited. He looked at the herbs on the Shelves, the patched roof, the oiled clo, the three clay jars Petra had given him last winter, lined up exactly as they always were because he always put them back in the same order. He thought about his mother and mirror, and the life that had been smaller than he

imagined, and the six years in Ashfen that had been adequate and honest, and genuinely not enough. He thought about her laugh on the second day, the surprised one, the real one, when he had Used the wrong orc word at the wrong moment. He thought about her sitting by the fire with sadness in her face, and saying she understood that particular kind of tired. He thought about how she had drunk his chamomile tea without comment, and how that small thing, for reasons he couldn't entirely explain, had felt like being known. He thought about the square this

morning, about standing in the mud and speaking plainly about the past 3 days, and how it had Not felt like defending her so much as simply telling the truth about something worth telling the truth about. He thought about the word she had used, chosen partner. The weight she had said was behind it that translation didn't carry. He said he was afraid. She said she knew. He said he had no idea how to exist in her world. He would be wrong about things constantly. He would misread customs and offend people and require explanations for things everyone

Around him would consider obvious. He would be the one who did not belong always and he did not know if he had the he paused looking for the right word, the stamina for that. She said that was a fair concern. She said she could not promise it would be easy. She said her clan would have opinions and some of those opinions would be expressed directly in the orc way. She said there would be days when the distance between their worlds felt very large. She said That the day before when he had spoken in the village

square, she had watched him choose something difficult because it was the right thing to do. She had been watching for 3 days before that. She did not think he lacked stamina. He was quiet for a while. Then he said he was not interested in her territory or her title or any of the things that came with her position. She said she knew that too. He said he was interested in her. The person who had sat across from Him for 3 days and asked real questions and learned the working song and drank the chamomile tea and

told him she understood being tired in a way nobody else could see. She was still very still. Her amber eyes were doing something he could not name. He said yes. The word was small for what it was agreeing to. She seemed to understand that. She did not make the moment large or ceremonial. She held out her hand, not the formal gesture she had used in The square, something simpler, more personal, and he took it, and they stood in the cottage doorway while the rain came down, and it was not nothing. Her guard had the professional

tack to look at the middle distance. The journey to Iron Peak Territory took 8 days. He spent most of it learning things. The horses, he was a competent, but not elegant rider, and her guard moved at a pace that assumed equestrian skill he did not quite have. the protocols. There Were specific ways things were done in her world, specific orders of address and difference and acknowledgement that were second nature to everyone around him and entirely new to him. The language he worked at it in every spare moment, and she corrected him without impatience, and by

the fourth day he had approximately 40 reliable words, and could follow simple conversations if people spoke slowly. He was exhausted by the time they arrived. He was also Underneath the exhaustion, more alert than he had been in years. There was something about being genuinely new at everything that was counterintuitively energizing. He had no habits here. Everything required attention. He paid attention. Iron Peak was not what he had expected, though he was not sure what he had expected. It was large, a settlement more than a village, built into the base of a mountain range, with the

particular solidity of something that had been Added to over generations rather than planned. The buildings were stone, low and wide, the interiors larger than human architecture to accommodate or proportions. The population moved with the purposeful, unhurried energy of a community that had its own rhythms and was not adjusting them for visitors. They looked at him. He had expected that. He had not quite expected the range. Some were simply curious the frank open staring of people who had not Seen many humans up close and were not embarrassed about looking. Some were skeptical, the kind of skepticism

that was waiting to be proven right. A few were actively cold, turning away when Jarka brought him into communal spaces with the visible disapproval of people who had opinions about this and intended them to be known. A very few were something he had not expected, quietly interested in the specific way of people who had been wondering if something was Possible and were now watching to see if it was. The hardest part was not the staring. The hardest part was the council. Her father's advisers, four of them, ranging from ancient to merely old, all carrying the

weight of people who had been running things for a long time, convened a formal meeting within 2 days of their arrival. He was present. Jacqua had insisted on that, and insisting in her world he was learning looked like a calm statement delivered In a tone that left no space for argument. The challenge came from advisor Grath, the oldest, whose face had the texture of someone who had survived by being willing to say the things other people wouldn't. He addressed Saurin directly in the common tongue, and he was not unkind, but he was not soft either.

He said that his concern was not the human's character. He had heard the account of the test and he had no objection to the individual. His concern was what the choice meant for the clan. Zarka was its future leader. Her decisions, her relationships, her household, all of it was also the clan's business because her stability was the clan's stability. He wanted to understand what did this human offer that served the clan's interests. It was, Saurin understood, a fair question, not a hostile one, a practical one asked by someone whose job was to think in terms

of collective welfare. Saurin thought for a moment. Then he said that he was a herbalist and a careful observer who had worked with medicinal plants for 15 years and that Iron Peaks ground walkers used a harvesting cycle he had noticed on the journey here that he thought was depleting their rarer species faster than the plants could recover and that he would be glad to share what he knew about the problem if the ground walkers were interested in a conversation. Grath Looked at him. He looked back. Grath said that was an interesting answer. He said most

people in Saurin's position would have talked about loyalty or love. Saurin said those things were also true. But the adviser had asked what he offered and he was answering that question specifically. There was a pause in the council room. Then one of the other advisers, a middle-aged woman named Varker, who had not yet spoken, made a short sound through her nose. It Was the orc sound for yes. I already knew that, but I appreciate that you said it. He had learned that sound. He recognized it now. He did not smile because the moment was not

quite right for smiling. But something in his chest settled slightly. The rival was harder. His name was Dunic, and he was a warrior of genuine standing. The kind of man who took up significant space in any room and was aware of it. He had, it became clear through the first week, expected To be the person standing next to Jarka. Not because he loved her, as far as Saurin could tell, but because it was the obvious next step in a pattern of accumulating the best things available, and she was the best thing available. He challenged Saurin

in the traditional way, formerly in front of witnesses, which Saurin had been warned about by Jacqua's guard, captain, a stocky matter, a fat woman named Heska, who had taken it upon herself to brief him on Clan protocols with the brisk efficiency of someone who had decided he needed managing. The traditional challenge was not, she explained, necessarily a combat challenge. It could be, but tradition also allowed for other forms. The challenger named the test. Saurin, as the challenged, had the right to name the category. He named healing knowledge. Dun had not expected that. His expression in

the moment of Saurin naming it was something between Surprised and annoyed. They were given identical plants, three species, all mildly medicinal, and asked in front of the assembled witnesses to correctly identify each one and describe its uses. Dunic got one right. Saurin got all three, including the third one, which turned out to be a species specific to this region that he had never encountered before, but had correctly identified by category bark texture, vein pattern, smell, and described General likely properties based on those indicators, noting he was estimating rather than certain. The witnesses were quiet for

a moment. Then Heska made the nose exial sound, and then, in a ripple that moved through the crowd like something softening, several other people made it, too. Dunick left, not gracefully, but he left. The doubt was his own. There was an evening, perhaps 3 weeks into his time at Iron Peak, when he sat outside the building Jarka had Given him as his workspace, a small stone room that he was gradually filling with drying herbs and sorted jars, and looked at the mountain range against the late sky, and felt very clearly how far he was from

Ashen, not homesick exactly, but aware of distance, aware that the particular smallness of his old life had also been a kind of safety, that he would never again be someone whose days were simply his own. Unmarked by consequence, turning without being Watched. He sat with that for a while. Jarka found him there. She often seemed to know where he was, a spatial awareness he had noticed and found quietly remarkable. She sat beside him without asking, which she had done from the first days in the cottage, and had never stopped. He told her what he was

feeling. Not performing the feeling, not smoothing it into something more manageable, just describing it honestly, the way he had described things to her From the beginning. She listened. When he was done, she said she knew that feeling. She said she had felt it the entire time she held the clam's weight alone. The difference between the life that was yours and the life that was required of you. He said he was not leaving. He wanted her to understand that he was not building toward a departure. He was just being honest about the feeling. She said she

knew. She said that was why she trusted him. They sat there while the light went off the mountains, and the quiet between them was the same quality of quiet it had been in the cottage by the dying fire, and he thought that this at least had not changed with the distance. 6 months later, the herb garden was his. Not literally. Technically, it was clan land. Everything was clan land, but the strip of earth along the south wall of the inner settlement that had previously been used for storage had been cleared, Turned, and was now organized

according to a system he had designed with input from Iron Peak's three ground walkers, who had been once the initial territorial caution had passed, genuinely interested in the conversation he had promised adviser Groth. He was not a ground walker himself. The role had its own history and standing in the clan's structure, and he had no intention of claiming it. But he had become something adjacent, an outside Perspective that the ground walkers consulted, argued with, occasionally followed, and increasingly seemed to value. Hesa had told him, with her characteristic bluntness, that he was becoming useful. He had

taken this as the significant compliment it was intended to be. The mornings were his favorite part. He still rose early, old habit impossible to change, and in the early light before the settlement was fully awake. The garden was quiet and Cold, and smelled of the same combination of earth and green that his cottage had smelled of, which was the smell of work he understood and was good at. He had found a patch of shadowroot growing wild on the north slope two months ago, which had felt like being recognized. Jarka found him there most mornings somewhere

between his first and second rounds of the beds. She was an early riser too from a lifetime of pre-dawn training and she had developed The habit of collecting him from the garden before the day's obligations began. She brought tea she had learned to make it which he had not asked for and which had moved him more than he could straightforwardly explain. She made it slightly too strong, which he had not told her and would probably never tell her, because the slightly too strong tea she brought him was its own thing now, separate from the tea.

They walked the settlement boundary together In the early mornings, which was her security routine, and which had become, through repetition, also a kind of thinking time for both of them. She talked through the day's politics. He had found somewhat to his surprise that he was useful here, too. Not because he understood orclan politics, which he still navigated largely by instinct and occasional disaster, but because he understood people, and people were the substrate that politics ran on. She had Started asking his opinion on specific individuals, specific situations, and then actually using the opinions which had surprised

him until it didn't. He still made mistakes. He still misread customs. There had been a formal dinner two months ago where he had responded to a toast in the wrong register. too casual for the occasion, and the silence that had followed had been the specific silence of everyone in the room deciding at once how to react. Hesa had leaned Over and murmured the correct response, and he had repeated it, and the moment had passed, but he had lain awake that night, going over it. Jacqua had found him awake and told him with the flat certainty

she brought to accurate statements that she had attended 40 formal dinners before she stopped making mistakes at them and she had been doing it her whole life and he had been doing it for 2 months. He had gone to sleep. Some of her clan still did not accept It. He was honest with himself about that. The disapproval had moved from active to ambient, present but not dominant, a low persistent weather system rather than a storm. He thought it might always be there in some form. He had made his peace with that or was making it,

which was the more accurate thing to say. What had shifted in the six months was harder to articulate than a list of what had changed. It was something in the quality of being where He was. He had spent 6 years in Ashfen in a life that was adequate, that fit him the way worn shoes fit, functional, familiar, but not really chosen. This was chosen. Every complicated, occasionally humiliating, perpetually instructive day of it was something he had walked into with his eyes open, and that made the difficulty different in kind from the difficulty of simply living

in a small life that had not managed to be enough. He was, in the Particular way that took him a long time to recognize, because he was not used to it, happy. On a morning in early winter, with frost on the garden beds and the mountains white above the settlement and the slightly too strong tea warm in his hands, Jacqua walked beside him along the south wall and said without any particular preamble that her father's council had formerly recognized their partnership in the clan record. He looked at her. She looked forward at the Frost silvered

garden with an expression that was trying to be neutral and was not quite managing it. He asked what that meant formally. She said it meant that in terms of clan standing, he was hers and she was his recorded and witnessed. It meant their household was recognized. It meant their decisions were joint decisions in the ways that mattered. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said he thought they had been doing that anyway. She said yes. She Said the record was the clan's way of catching up to what was already true. He looked at the

garden, the shadowroot beds, the careful rose, the particular work of six months of mornings. He looked at the mountains. He thought about a cottage on the edge of a forgotten valley, and a man who had stopped expecting things, and a morning on a ridge, when a woman had stepped out of the trees, and said four words that had taken everything he had been, and Pointed it somewhere new. He said, "Remember when you told me you had been watching for 3 days before you decided?" She said she remembered. He asked what she had seen specifically. She

had always said she would explain during the test and then the test had happened and the explained part had gotten somewhat lost in everything else. She was quiet for a moment. Then she said she had seen him on the second morning find a plant he needed in a location that was on the Edge of a steep drop. She said he had stood there for a full minute before deciding whether to take it. She said he could easily have taken it. The risk was not large, but he had looked at it for a long time, and

then he had walked away and moved to a safer patch further along. She said, "Most people, when they want something they can reach, take it." She said, "The willingness to walk away from something you want because the risk to yourself is not worth. It was rarer Than people believed." He thought about that. He said he had not realized he was being observed. She said that was the point. They walked on along the frost white garden in the early light, and the mountains were very white above them, and the tea was slightly too strong, and neither

of them said anything else for a while. They had earned the silence, both of them. Separately, and then together, in all the ways that had been required, two worlds, one choice, and against Everything that had said it shouldn't work, it did. That was in the end enough more than enough