"Because I don't know anything," he said finally. "About this world. About how it works, what matters, who holds power. You do. And I need to learn."

  "So I'm useful." No heat in her voice. Just observation.

  "Yes."

  She almost smiled. Almost. "At least you're honest."

  "I can offer you the same. Use… protection… whatever I can do, I'll do it in exchange for teaching me what I don't know."

  "That's not much of a trade. You're still figuring out what you can do."

  "Then you get me at the beginning, before anyone else shapes what I could become."

  That made her pause... Her eyes narrowed, studying him the way he'd been studying her.

  "You're not from here," she said. "Not from any settlement I know. You don't talk like a soldier, or a farmer, or a tradesman. You don't know the gods, don't know what blue blood means, don't know basic etiquette about not approaching women when they're pissing in the woods."

  Skuggi said nothing.

  "Where are you from?" she asked.

  "Somewhere that doesn't exist anymore."

  "That's not an answer."

  "It's the only one I have."

  She looked away, back toward where the firelight flickered through the trees. Voices carried on the night air, muffled by distance and foliage. Someone laughed. Probably Aionel.

  "Freia Feyrdottir," she said quietly. "Daughter of Feyr, last of the Feyrdottir line. My family held land in the northern territories for six generations. We had a hall, farms, people who worked our fields and paid us tribute."

  She picked at a piece of bark on the root beneath her.

  "The war came. Not the big one everyone talks about in songs, the glorious battles and heroic last stands. The small one. The grinding, stupid one that eats through resources until there's nothing left. Our tenants couldn't pay tribute because they had nothing to give. We were unable to protect them because we had no soldiers left. Raiders came, burned what they wanted, and took what they could carry."

  The bark came loose in her fingers. She dropped it.

  "My father tried to negotiate. Tried to buy them off with what little we had left. They killed him anyway. My mother and brother... they were in the hall when it burned."

  Her voice stayed level. Factual. Like she was reciting someone else's story.

  "I got out because I was in the grain stores. Underground. I heard the screaming and smelled the smoke; I was even poked with a pitchfork, leaving a nasty wound near my ribs. By the time I made it up, there was nothing to save… the only memory I had was the wound that healed a few months before I got taken prisoner."

  Skuggi watched her hands with a bit of water he brought from a vase. They weren't shaking. Weren't moving at all even though water was really cold.

  "So yes," she said. "I had refinement. Education. A name that meant something then. Now I have none of those things. The name is just sounds. Feyrdottir, daughter of a dead man from a dead house. In times like these, when people are starving and cities are closing their gates, nobility means nothing if you can't back it up with gold or soldiers or land."

  She finally looked at him again.

  "I have none of those. So for you, I'm just Freia. That's all you need to know, because that's all there is now."

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  Skuggi absorbed this. Nobility... A concept he understood only in abstract terms from things he'd overheard in the lab. People with power who inherited it rather than earned it. People who had status because of who their parents were.

  Freia had been one of those people. Now she was sitting in the dirt with refugees, eating berries he brought her because she gave half her food to a child that wasn't even her kin.

  "I don't know how this world works," he said. "I don't know what a noble is supposed to do, or what 'blue blood' means, or why people worship gods I've never heard of. I don't know the difference between settlements and villages and cities, or what happens in them, or how to navigate them without getting killed or thrown out."

  He met her eyes.

  "You know all of that. You were raised in it. Even if you don't have the title or the land anymore, you have the knowledge. That's what I need."

  "And what do I get?" The question was sharp. "You said you'd offer yourself. What does that mean?"

  Skuggi thought about what he could do. What he'd learned from himself in the lab, what he was still discovering about the modifications they'd made to his body. He healed faster than normal people. He could go days without food. He was strong enough to break bones with his hands, fast enough that most people couldn't track his movements when he wanted to be quick.

  He could kill efficiently and without hesitation. That had been the point of him.

  But that wasn't what Freia needed. She needed safety, yes, but she also needed... what? He tried to think like Aionel would think, reading what people wanted beneath what they said.

  She'd lost everything. Her family, her home, her status. She'd been thrown into a group of refugees who hated her for being born into something they'd never have. She was isolated, suspected, treated like a threat.

  She needed someone who didn't care about any of that. Someone who saw her as useful rather than dangerous. Someone who wouldn't try to tear her down for having been something greater than they were.

  "I'll keep you alive," he said. "I'll make sure you're fed, protected, and not thrown to the populace like the others would be if they tried to enter a city alone. And when I learn how this world works, when I figure out what I'm going to do with whatever I'm becoming, you'll have a place in it."

  "You're promising me something you don't have yet."

  "Yes."

  "That's a terrible trade."

  "It's the only one I can offer."

  She was quiet for a long time. The wind picked up, sent her loose hair across her face. She didn't brush it away.

  "You're strange," she said finally. "You don't think like anyone I've ever met."

  "Is that good or bad?"

  "I don't know yet." She stood, brushed dirt off her pants. "But I'll teach you what I know. Not because I trust you. Because staying with this group is my best chance of surviving until I can figure out what to do next, and if you're going to lead them, you need not to be completely ignorant."

  She walked past him, back toward camp. Then stopped.

  "Skuggi."

  He looked up at her.

  "Don't make promises you can't keep. I've had enough of those already."

  "I won't."

  She studied his face for a moment, searching for something. Whatever she found or didn't find, she nodded once and kept walking.

  Skuggi stayed where he was for a few minutes longer. Let the night sounds wash over him. Let his mind process what he'd learned.

  Freia Feyrdottir. Noble blood with nothing left but knowledge and the weight of a dead family.

  She'd teach him. He'd keep her alive. It was transactional, practical, clean.

  But when he thought about the way she sat with Myn An earlier, offering silent company to a girl who'd been attacked for her faith… that hadn't been transactional. That had been something else.

  Maybe Freia was more than just useful knowledge. Maybe she was someone who understood what it meant to be broken and remade into something different.

  He stood and walked back to camp. Aionel was laughing with Torsten about something, keeping morale up the way he'd promised. Materlyn was organizing the morning meal schedule with Hilde. Jurgen was showing Kalf more signs by the firelight.

  Freia sat on the edge of it all, watching.

  Skuggi sat beside her. Not speaking, just present.

  After a moment, she shifted slightly and sighed. They were not closer, exactly. Just... less deliberately distant.

  It was a start.

  “???????? ??? ???????... ?????? ???? ?? ???????? ?? ?????? ?? ??? ?? ?????????...”

  “Monsters are mirrors... showing only the darkness we refuse to see in ourselves...”

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