They gave Derrick a place in the longhouse for the first night, near the end where smoke from the central hearth thinned but never fully left. The mat smelled of old reeds and damp wool. He slept in pieces. Each time someone shifted in the dark, his hands searched for a door beam that was not there. Each time the fire popped, he woke with his teeth sunk into his lip.
At dawn, Mara nudged his foot with the toe of her boot.
"If you can stand, you can carry."
Derrick sat up too fast and nearly blacked out. He gripped the edge of the mat until the longhouse stopped swaying. Mara watched without softening.
"Can you stand?"
"Yes."
"Then prove it slowly."
The village did not wake all at once. It unfolded by habit. Ash stirred from banked coals. A child coughed. Someone outside cursed a frozen latch though the morning was not cold. Buckets knocked together near the well. A horn sounded from the smoke platform, two low notes that made everyone pause.
"Clear east," Rynn said from the doorway.
Derrick recognized him as the older boy from the well. He was not much taller than Derrick, but he held himself like height could be forced through discipline. A coil of rope hung over one shoulder. His hair was tied back badly, with loose strands falling into his face. He noticed Derrick looking and frowned.
"Smoke watcher saw nothing," Rynn said. "That does not mean the woods are empty."
"He knows," Mara said.
Halen popped his head around Rynn's side. "Do burned villages smell different from burned dinner?"
Rynn grabbed the back of his tunic. "Do not ask that."
"I want to know."
Derrick's hands tightened on the mat. He saw Mara glance at them.
"Burned dinner still has someone yelling about it," Derrick said.
Halen's mouth stayed open, the next question caught behind his teeth. Rynn looked away first.
Mara handed Derrick a wooden yoke. "Well. Two buckets. If you spill half, you carry four."
Work became the shape of his days.
Water first, always. The well rope was rough enough to skin the palm if pulled carelessly. Rynn showed him how to brace one foot against the stone lip and lean back with the weight instead of hauling by arm alone. Halen tried to show him a faster way, slipped in mud, and got his ear twisted by Mara before he finished laughing.
After water came fences. The palisade was not one wall but many repairs pretending to be one wall. Old logs blackened by weather leaned beside newer stakes. Gaps were stuffed with woven brush. Where roots had loosened posts, men drove wedges with stone mallets. Derrick held posts straight while a fence mender named Jorren pounded earth around them.
"Hands lower," Jorren said. "If the mallet slips, you keep fingers. If a Leyoki hits this wall, you lose more than fingers, but start where you can."
Derrick moved his hands.
The fields lay outside the wall on the sunniest side, which meant the most exposed side. No one crossed the gate alone unless desperation overruled sense. The grain was thin, more stem than head, but the villagers weeded it like treasure. Children collected beetles in clay jars. Older women checked the leaves for bite marks. A smoke watcher stood on a raised platform and turned slowly, scanning the tree line with a polished shard of dark glass to cut glare.
Derrick had weeded fields before. His body knew the rhythm: bend, pull, shake dirt from roots, toss aside. That almost made it worse. The motion belonged to mornings before ash. He worked until his lower back burned, then kept working because every time he slowed, someone might decide he was only another mouth.
By noon, his hands shook so badly he pulled grain instead of weed.
Rynn caught his wrist. "Not that."
Derrick stared at the torn stalk in his hand.
"I know."
"Then look before you pull."
"I said I know."
Rynn's face closed. He released him. "Knowing after does not feed anyone."
Derrick looked down. Heat climbed his neck, part shame, part anger at having shame left in him. A shadow fell across both boys.
Mara took the ruined stalk from Derrick and tucked it into her belt. "One stalk is a lesson. Ten is waste. Drink, then come back slower."
Rynn opened his mouth.
"You too," Mara said. "Discipline is not the same as being useful until you drop."
Rynn shut his mouth.
Derrick drank from the field skin and tasted clay, warm water, and the salt of his own cracked lip. It was the first time since the fire that someone had corrected him like he would still be alive tomorrow.
The Leyoki pens stood between the fields and the inner huts, close enough to guard, far enough that panic would not begin inside a doorway.
The Coustel were the easiest to understand. Brown-furred, beaked, quick-eyed, they filled low cages near the storage huts. They scratched straw with delicate paws and snapped up seed husks when Halen tossed them through the slats. Their beaks clicked constantly. Derrick knew the smell: bedding, fur, sour droppings, warm animal meat not yet meat. His old village had kept two pens. These people kept six.
"They breed fast," Halen said. "Unless Braynex get in. Or rot gets in. Or old Sana forgets the latch, but she says it was a wind spirit."
"It was not a wind spirit," Rynn said.
"That is what a wind spirit would want you to think."
A sharp click came from above. Derrick looked up.
Something long and dark watched from the roof beam of the storage hut. It had a lizard head, a weasel body, and scales that caught light like wet stones. Its tail curled around the beam. A strip of Coustel meat hung from its narrow jaws.
Derrick stepped back.
Halen grinned. "Braynex. That one is Hooktail because his tail bends wrong. He steals, but he eats worse thieves."
"He is not tame," Rynn said. "Do not feed him from your hand. Last boy who tried kept eight fingers."
The Braynex swallowed, blinked once, and vanished along the roof line with a scrape of claws.
Past the Coustel pens, the Tuftest yard fluttered with nerves. Small feathered bodies hopped on single spindly legs through straw nests and shallow dust bowls. Their feathers puffed at every sound. One startled when Derrick sneezed, sprang straight up, and landed sideways against another. The whole flock erupted in shrill calls, bouncing and flapping until an egg keeper hissed through her teeth.
"Slow near them," she said. Her name was Vessa, thin as a fence rail, with a basket hooked over one arm. "A frightened Tuftest lays no egg. No egg means less batter, less trade, less broth for the sick. People think teeth kill villages. Empty nests kill them quiet."
She lifted a pale speckled egg from the straw and set it into the basket like a sacred object.
Derrick moved slower.
The Fedall corral was built from whole trunks sunk deep and bound with rope thicker than Derrick's wrist. Two massive Leyoki stood inside, gray hides wet from trough water, birdlike beaks grinding soaked reeds. They were lower than the Burshemark had been but wider, heavier, made of muscle and temper. Harness scars marked their shoulders. One shifted its weight and the packed earth trembled under Derrick's feet.
Derrick stopped with his hand still on the rail.
The Elder stood beside him, watching the animal chew.
"Fear that one properly," he said without looking at Derrick.
Derrick forced his fingers loose from the fence. "I am."
"No. You are remembering something else. Proper fear sees what is here." The Elder tapped the rail with his staff. The nearest Fedall flicked one round ear. "This one pulls a plow through soil too stubborn for ten men. Gives milk thick enough to keep a fevered child breathing. Dies, and we eat for days. Spooks, and it crushes Vessa's nests, breaks the wall, and maybe kills three before it tires. Same creature. Same hide. Same beak. Remember that when you start calling Leyoki good or evil."
Derrick looked at the Fedall. It chewed, slow and blank-eyed, while flies gathered near its nostrils.
"Then what are they?" he asked.
The Elder's mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "Alive. That is trouble enough."
At dusk, the village pulled inward.
The gates were barred before the last red left the sky. Tools were counted. Children were counted twice. Smoke was banked low so it did not advertise too far. People gathered in pockets of firelight, bowls balanced on knees, shoulders hunched toward heat. Derrick sat outside Mara's hut with a bowl of Coustel stew, root mash, and a heel of dark bread so hard he had to soak it before biting.
He ate too fast. Mara noticed and thumped the side of his bowl with her spoon.
"Slow, or you will waste it on the ground."
"Sorry."
"Do not apologize to stew. Just keep it down."
Halen laughed through a mouthful and nearly choked. Rynn pounded his back harder than necessary.
Mara's husband sat near the door, mending a Fedall harness. He was broad, quiet, and had hands that looked built for knots too stubborn for rope. Derrick did not know his name. No one had offered it, and Derrick had not asked. The man worked an awl through layered hide, pulled sinew tight, and checked each stitch with his thumb.
"Harness fails under a Fedall," he said, eyes on the work, "you do not get time to regret lazy stitching."
Derrick watched his hands. Thumb over loop. Pull flat. Test it.
The old ache opened in his chest, but it did not swallow him. Not while Mara scraped the pot. Not while Halen tried to convince Rynn that Hooktail the Braynex understood insults. Not while the Elder moved from fire to fire, listening more than speaking.
Rules came with the dark.
No one announced them. They surfaced in talk the way stones surfaced in a field, old obstacles every hand learned to work around.
"No whistling after sundown," Vessa snapped when a child put fingers to his lips.
Halen leaned toward Derrick. "Because it calls what answers whistles."
"Because it makes fools easy to find," Rynn said.
From the next fire, a spear carrier lifted his bowl. "Both."
Laughter moved through the adults, low and brief. It died when something cried from the woods. The sound rose thin, broke into a wet clicking call, then stopped.
No one spoke until the Elder did.
"If you hear a cry you cannot name, you do not name it by walking closer."
A little girl pressed into her mother's side.
Mara added, "If you are outside the wall and someone calls your name from the trees, you come home by the shortest path. You do not answer."
"What if it is someone hurt?" Halen asked, quieter than his usual mischief.
Mara looked at him. "Then you bring adults. You do not feed the woods one child because it borrowed a voice."
Derrick held the bowl with both hands. The stew had gone lukewarm. Around the fires, the village kept eating because rules were not stories here. They were scars given words so children might keep their skin.
Later, on the mat by Mara's hearth, Derrick listened to the family breathing. Halen snored in little catches. Rynn turned over twice, restless. Mara banked the fire until only a red eye glowed beneath ash.
Derrick should have felt safer indoors.
Instead, the roof seemed too easy to burn.