He'd made his peace with the edge.

  That was the thing he was thinking about the next morning, sitting at his spot with his back against the rock and his herbs laid out in their usual order, working through the day's small tasks. He'd made his peace with it. The edge of the fire's warmth. The edge of the tribe's orbit. Close enough to hear laughter, far enough to understand he hadn't yet earned the right to sit inside it. It wasn't cruel. It was just honest, and Theron had always preferred honesty to comfort.

  He'd told himself: be useful. Be patient. Don't push. Let them decide.

  So he'd done that. He'd treated the cough and the fisherman's leg and the small things that came to him quietly, at the edges of things, mothers who approached when no one was watching and hunters who pretended they weren't limping. He'd learned words from Dorn. He'd let Sora stare at him. He'd drunk Mora's tea and accepted her silence.

  He wasn't unhappy. He was useful. There was a whole life to be built from that.

  He was re-wrapping a bundle of feverbark when the shadow fell over him.

  He looked up.

  Korr stood at the edge of his spot.

  Not Dorn. Not a messenger. The chief himself — stocky, still, the kind of quiet that had weight to it. He was looking at Theron with those observing eyes that Theron had seen many times from a distance and never quite this close. Two of his fingers were missing, Theron noticed again. Old injury, well healed, the stumps smooth. Someone had done decent work, once. Not Mora — too clean.

  Theron stood. Slowly, because sudden movements still made people tense. He didn't know what the right posture was for this — head down? Eye contact? Something in between? He settled on the same thing he'd settled on every time he didn't know: be still and honest and let the other person lead.

  Korr looked at him for a long moment.

  Then he turned and walked toward the main camp.

  He didn't look back. But he didn't have to.

  Come, it meant. Obviously. Come.

  Theron set down the feverbark and followed.

  It was a short walk. Thirty feet, maybe forty. He'd made it a thousand times in the weeks he'd been here — fetching water, returning from the forest, trailing after Dorn. He knew every stone in it.

  It felt nothing like those other times.

  People noticed immediately. That was the thing about a small camp — nothing happened in private. A woman carrying hides paused and watched. Two men sharpening tools looked up and didn't look away. A group of children, including the small girl from yesterday who had watched the whole fishbone incident from the bank with wide careful eyes, stopped what they were doing and went still.

  Theron kept his eyes on Korr's back and kept walking.

  The main fire was low this time of morning — banked down to deep red coals, a slow column of smoke going straight up in the still air. The ground around it was worn smooth by years of feet, generations of people sitting in the same place. There were carved marks on the rock face nearby that he'd noticed before but couldn't read. He'd asked Dorn about them once. Dorn had said something that translated roughly to old words and left it at that.

  Korr stopped at the edge of the fire's circle. He said something — short, even for Korr — and gestured to the ground beside him.

  Sit.

  Theron sat.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Korr stood and looked at the fire, and Theron sat and tried to look like a man who was comfortable and not in any way acutely aware that half the camp was now watching him with various degrees of suspicion and curiosity and something that might have been hope.

  Then Korr turned to the camp and spoke.

  Theron didn't understand a word of it. His vocabulary was coming along — he had maybe seventy words now, enough to ask for water and name plants and understand simple directions — but Korr spoke the way leaders spoke everywhere, in the full cadence of his language, and it went over Theron's head like water over stone.

  But he understood the shape of it.

  It wasn't a question. Korr wasn't asking the tribe anything. He was telling them something, in the tone of a man who had observed enough and decided. There was a passage that gestured toward the river — yesterday, probably. Another that seemed to take in Theron directly, not unkindly. Then something shorter, at the end, that had the feeling of a period at the end of a sentence.

  Done. Decided.

  People nodded. Not all of them — a few of the older hunters kept their faces carefully neutral, which Theron filed away as watch those ones, they'll need more time. But most of them nodded. Some murmured agreement. One of the women said something that made two people near her laugh quietly.

  He'd have to ask Dorn what that was.

  Korr looked down at him. His expression hadn't changed — he had a face built for patience, not display. But he made a small gesture: you're here now. This is your place.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Theron looked at the ground under him. The smooth worn earth of the main fire's circle. The warmth from the coals, much closer now. The smell of woodsmoke and cookfire and morning.

  He'd been thirty feet away for weeks. He hadn't known it would feel so different.

  Dorn appeared from somewhere, grinning in the specific way he grinned when things went the way he'd wanted them to. He sat beside Theron without being invited, which was entirely typical.

  "Good," he said, with the satisfied nod of a man whose plan had come together, even though as far as Theron knew Dorn hadn't had a plan.

  "Good," Theron agreed.

  People drifted back to their work. Not all at once — some lingered, watching, a natural repositioning of the camp's attention. Two women came and tended the fire, adding wood, sending it back up to proper flame. One of them glanced at Theron on her way past. Not hostile. Just noting.

  Lena came.

  He recognized her from yesterday — Tira's mother, the one who had held her daughter in the shallows with that particular grip people used when they weren't sure they'd ever have to let go. Tira was with her now, small and healthy and apparently completely recovered from the terror of the previous day, which was one of the gifts of being six years old. She was pulling at her mother's hand and looking at a dog across the camp.

  Lena stopped in front of Theron.

  She had a clay bowl. She held it out to him, and the gesture said more than her words could have — this was from her stores, from her portion, from the food she kept for herself and her daughter and any other children she might have. She was giving it to him.

  He took it carefully. Warm. Something that smelled like good fat and dried meat and a herb he didn't know yet.

  He looked up at her. She was watching him with an expression that he'd learned to read by now — the plain, uncomplicated gratitude of someone who had been helped at the moment they most needed it and didn't know how to say so in any language.

  He nodded. He hoped it communicated what he meant: I know. You're welcome. She's going to be fine.

  Lena nodded back. Then she let Tira drag her away toward the dog.

  "Lena," Dorn said, after she'd gone. He touched his heart briefly. "Good woman."

  "Yes," Theron said. He looked at the bowl. Then he ate, because it was there and he was hungry and eating the food that was given to you was its own kind of language.

  From across the fire, he felt eyes.

  He looked up. Sora was on the other side, sitting close to one of the older women — her mother, probably, from the way she leaned. She'd been watching him the whole time, he realized. She had the particular quality of stillness she put on when she was paying close attention to something.

  He'd caught her eye.

  She didn't run.

  She looked at him for one long moment, that same extra beat she always held before bolting. Then she looked at the fire between them. Then back at him.

  Then she looked away, deliberately, as if she'd decided she'd given him enough for one day.

  He almost smiled. He turned back to his bowl.

  Dorn had followed the whole exchange with mild interest. "Sora," he said.

  "I know," Theron said.

  "She will—" Dorn made a gesture Theron had started to understand as follow, attach, become difficult to get rid of. He used it mostly when talking about hunting dogs.

  "I know," Theron said again.

  Dorn considered this. "You do not mind?"

  Theron thought about it. A twelve-year-old who stared at him like he was a puzzle she intended to solve. Who'd stood at the edge of a river yesterday watching him fish a bone out of a child's throat and filed it away in whatever system she used for organizing important information.

  "No," he said. "I don't mind."

  Korr sat by the fire in the evening.

  Theron hadn't been sure where to put himself when the day wound down and the tribe gathered — whether to return to his old spot out of habit, whether the morning's arrangement still held. He'd stayed near the fire, carefully occupying no more space than necessary, watching to see if anyone moved him.

  No one moved him.

  Korr sat at his usual place, and there was a spot that people left clear to Theron's left, and when the evening settled in and the fire built up, that was simply where he was. He ate what was passed to him. He listened to conversation he mostly couldn't follow. He watched sparks drift upward into the dark.

  Someone told a story. An older man, gray-bearded, with the easy rhythm of someone who'd done this many times. The tribe listened. Laughed at one part. Went quiet at another. Theron followed the shapes of it without the words.

  Then someone looked at him and said something with a question at the end.

  He glanced at Dorn.

  "They ask," Dorn said, looking like he was going to enjoy this, "you have thanks? Words of thanks. For Korr."

  Oh.

  Theron looked at Korr, who waited with the patience of a man who had time.

  He had words. He'd been collecting them. He arranged what he had and tried to build something that meant: I am grateful. I will not waste this. I will earn it.

  What came out was approximately: "Korr give fire-place. Theron... Theron heart full. Theron make good work. For tribe."

  A pause.

  Then Dorn, helpfully: "He say 'heart full.'"

  "He knows what I said," Theron said.

  "Yes," Dorn said. "But 'heart full' in our words means also... very eaten. Too much food."

  Another pause.

  Then the gray-bearded storyteller laughed — the real kind, the sudden kind, the kind that surprised even him. And then several others, and then Dorn himself, and then even Korr's expression shifted into something that wasn't quite a smile but was closely related to one.

  Theron looked around at all of them, and then he laughed too, because there was nothing else to do, and because it was actually funny, and because this was his first real joke with these people even if it was entirely by accident.

  "Heart full," he said again.

  More laughter. The fire crackled.

  Korr said something. Short.

  Dorn wiped his eyes. "He say: then we will feed you less."

  The fire burned down slow.

  One by one, people drifted to sleep where they were or moved to their tents, the camp quieting in the way it did each night — not all at once, but in layers, like light leaving a room. The children went first, carried or stumbling. The women followed. The hunters sat longer, talking in the low voices men used when they were tired enough to be honest.

  Then they went too.

  Theron stayed where he was.

  The fire was mostly coals now, the same deep red it had been when he arrived this morning. The camp breathed around him — the specific sound of people sleeping, of skin shelters settling in the night air, of a dog shifting somewhere at the edge of things.

  He was in the center of it.

  Not at the edge. In the center. He could feel the difference in the warmth alone.

  He looked at the sky. The same strange stars he'd been looking at since the first night, constellations he'd never learn the names of, the sky of a world that had never been his. The same sky from his spot on the edge. But different from here.

  He thought about Claire. Not with the sharp grief of the first weeks — that had dulled, the way grief did when you kept moving, when you gave it no purchase. Just a thought. The way she'd looked on an ordinary Tuesday, probably. Getting ready for work. Wondering where her keys were.

  I'm okay, he thought, not at her but in her direction. I found people. I have a fire.

  The coals shifted, settled, glowed a little brighter.

  He lay back on the worn earth and looked at the sky and felt the warmth from his left side where the fire was, and the small sounds of the camp all around him, and he stayed there until his eyes closed.

  The last thing he thought was not profound. He was too tired for profound.

  Just: I have people now.

  Then he slept.