Page 58 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

She lays it out. She does it fast and in order and without one wasted word, the two stories two days apart, the direction of the cut, the left-handed shavings by his boot, Marisol reaching past the pot handle with the wrong hand. She does not tell me what to conclude. She hands me the pieces in the sequence a person would need them and lets the structure stand up on its own.

It is very good work. I say so.

"That is very good work."

"Thank you." She rubs her hands together. "So here is what we do with it."

"We tell him."

"No," she says. "We trade it."

The fire wants feeding. I feed it. Wet alder, which is a poor choice and the only choice, and it sulks and hisses and puts out a rope of white smoke that goes straight up because the air has stopped moving entirely, the way it does before cold.

"Their cache is on the east side of the hemlock draw," she says. "Marisol goes down there every second evening and comes back with her jacket zipped to the collar. They are sitting on a store. Deet gives us half of it and a location and we keep his sister on this mountain, and everybody eats, and nobody goes home in the dark."

"And when he says no."

"He won't."

"When he does."

"Then I put it in front of Neve and the whole thing burns and we are exactly where we are standing now." She holds her hands over the sulking fire. "There is no version of this where holding it costs us anything."

"There is."

"Name it."

"It costs him nothing." I put the second piece of alder on. "He cut our water. He did it so we would be sick on the eighteenth, and he did it carefully, and if we trade with him then the only thing he pays is food he was already going to eat. He never has to stand in front of what he did. He goes down this mountain in nine days with his sister and his placing and a thing in his hands that nobody ever made him hold."

"That's not a cost. That's a moral."

"It is a joint."

She turns around fully. "It's a what."

"A joint you will not admit to." The alder catches, finally, with a crack. "Is a joint nobody checks."

"Ghorlan."

"You have the words."

"I have the words. You have said the words every night for twelve nights." She is smiling and there is nothing warm in it. "The words are for us. The words are a thing your grandmother's people do at the end of a build. They are not a strategy for a game with a hundred thousand dollars a person on it and my ledger and your grandmother's sill work in the pot."

The sill work. She has been listening. I go on stacking wood for a moment because a man should have something in his hands when he is being handled well.

"Say the rest of it," I say.

"There is no rest."

"There is. You have had it since before I woke up." I straighten. "Say it plainly and I will answer it plainly, and then we will do one or the other."

She takes a breath and she says it plainly, and it is worse than I expected, in the way that true things are.

"If we hand it to him, he owns it," she says. "If we hold it, we own it. That's the entire difference. That's the trade. I have spent my adult life making sure that the thing I have on you is bigger than the thing you have on me, and it has kept me warm and it has kept me fed and it has kept me from being taken apart by anybody, and it is the only skill I brought up this mountain that actually works. And you want me to spend it. In one sentence. On a man who tried to give us dysentery."

"Yes."

"Because it is a joint."