FIFTEEN
FOR ONCE, THE FAMILY shelter was nearly empty. The sounds of the camp at work infiltrated from the outside, but everything Trei should’ve been hearing in his own home—the rattle of various hands engaging in assorted tasks, the breathing of the relatives closest to him—was absent. The space that should have contained the rest of his family, that should have been filled with the comfort of company, pressed on him with its silence. It only made the heft of what his mother had told him greater to bear.
His mother put another log in the fire, before sitting next to Deanis and Auris. Saig and her father were a few paces away, standing opposite Mikail and Enge. That was all. The rest of the family was conspicuously absent. Trei chose to move next to his cousin, disturbed by how alone th
