Leon opened his eyes.
Dirt floor. The smell of wood smoke and something cooking — root vegetables and whatever the season allowed. Morning light came through a single window cut directly into the wall, no glass, just an opening with a cloth hung over it that moved in the breeze.
He sat up from a straw mattress and looked at his hands.
Small. The hands of a child, eight years old at most, the knuckles unformed, the palms soft. He turned them over and back, and felt nothing unusual about doing so, because he was Kaen, and he had always been Kaen, and these were simply his hands.
His mother called from the other room.
He got up, ate breakfast, and went outside for chores.
The village was forty people on the edge of a forest that nobody entered after dark. That was simply a fact of life, like hard winters and short summers. You didn't discuss it because discussing it made the days harder to get through.
