The old orc stood over his patient, staff planted firmly in the dirt, a faint smile creasing his weathered face.

  “You seem to be all right. How are you feeling?”

  Knez blinked up at him, caught off guard by the sudden gentleness.

  “I’m still alive,” he answered, meeting the shaman’s gaze with a flicker of wary curiosity.

  “That much is enough for now,” the old orc replied. He kept his body angled toward Knez, unhurried. After a long, quiet moment he asked, “How did you know Grak would hurt himself while whipping you?”

  Knez heard this and couldn't hold back a mischievous grin that had threatened to spread across his lips "Has your god hidden that even from you?".

  The shaman shook his head slowly.

  “I only know what the heavens will.” His eyes drifted briefly to Anna before he turned toward a smooth, flat rock in the corner of the tent. Dried green paste clung to its surface. He squatted, reached into his pouch, and began pulling out handfuls of freshly foraged herbs. One by one he stripped their leaves, dropping them onto the stone. He picked up a smaller grinding rock next to his feet. Soon the tent was filled with the rhythmic scrape of stone on stone and a low, absent-minded whistle.

  Knez remained on the thick fur bed, too weak to rise, but his mind was clear enough to think. For the moment, that felt like a small victory. Beside him, Anna had grown quiet. She turned the pages of her most treasured possession slowly, as though she was seeing the pictures for the first time. A soft light brightened her face each time she lingered on a page.

  The tent and everything around it seemed to fall silent as the sun climbed high. At least, everyone except Knez believed it had.

  The words of the human child looped endlessly in his head:

  'If I see them moving in the wrong direction and still do nothing… how am I different from them?'. He bared his teeth in a silent snarl.

  'I need to get out of here first. Then maybe I can try to convince others.'

  He quickly shook his head, already dismissing the thought.

  'That won't work. Orcs don’t see the way I do. They only understand aggression. Strength.' A slow, dangerous grin spread across his face.

  'Why do I need their permission?. I don’t need to ask. I don’t need to explain. I can just Subjugate them. Control them. To lead them in the right path.

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  The conclusion settled over him like another layer of green skin. He relaxed against the furs, satisfied.

  He had been so deep in his thoughts that he hadn’t noticed the shaman slip out again. Sensing the opportunity, Knez slowly picking himself off the ground but by a struck of luck, a gust of wind blew west wards, slightly raising the flips of the tent, revealing two warriors standing outside, axes in hand. He dropped back down instantly, heart thudding. His mind had already analyzed and predicted the failure: too weak, too watched, too soon.

  The small movements drew Anna’s attention. When their eyes met, he offered her a careful smile. The angle of his tusk would have lead any other human to read his expression as a threat but some how the child understood.

  “Do you want to join me?” she whispered. “I can teach you how to read it.”

  Knez stared.

  “You… could do that?”

  She beamed. “Yes. Anna is brilliant.”

  He didn’t know the meaning of the word brilliant, but he didn’t need to. The promise of learning to read struck up something deep inside him, a spark no orc tradition had ever kindled. Orcs had no use for letters. They learned only to fight. To kill.

  With every quiet conversation he shared with the little girl, the invisible threads that once bound him so tightly to his kind seemed to loosen. He felt himself drifting closer to her world—and further from his own. This realization troubled him, but it wasn’t enough to dull his enthusiasm to learn

  Anna set the book down between them. Sitting up slowly, she traced strange shapes in the dirt with her finger and sounded them out—softly, careful not to strain her fragile lungs. Knez followed, clumsy at first. The letters felt weird rolling off his thick tongue, sharp and wrong. But he persisted, and Anna corrected him patiently. It didn’t take long before the sounds began to feel less foreign.

  She sped up, turning the sequence into a little song:

  “A B C D… E F G… H I—J K…”

  Knez hesitated at first, but his mind was quickly catching up with the exercise, registering every alphabet, subconsciously detecting and isolating some of the sounds in the words he spoke, this prompted him to shed any shame he still felt, joining on in the singing.

  Outside, the two warriors guarding the tent peeked through the flap and snorted.

  “An orc singing with a human. Grak must have whipped his head.”

  “His mind is broken,” the other laughed.

  Knez heard them. But kept singing, with all of his heart.

  'Fools. If only they understood what was happening right in front of them, they would freeze in terror.'

  Then Anna began to cough—hard and violently. Knez stopped at once, one large hand patting her back with surprising gentleness.

  “That’s enough,” he murmured, easing her back down onto the furs.

  His mind was already playing a new, private game: catching letter sounds inside every word he spoke or heard.

  Anna was visibly exhausted, but just before her eyes blinked shut, she whispered,

  “Mister… could you let my parents go? Grandma is waiting for us at home.”

  Knez looked down at her, throat tight. He couldn’t even promise his own escape, let alone three humans’. Not yet.

  Anna lifted the storybook weakly.

  “Anna would give you Billy”.

  Knez stared at book, before pushing it back slowly, towards Anna's chest.

  'The child has given me something priceless. The least I can do is try to repay her.'

  'If I cannot save three humans,” he thought, “how can I ever hope to save entire tribes?”

  He leaned closer.

  “I will take you home,” he promised quietly. “But for now—rest.”

  She smiled up at him—a smile so bright it seemed to push light into every shadowed corner of the tent. Knez held her gaze until her eyes fluttered closed. For the first time in a long while, she looked safe. Peaceful.