He ate sitting in the middle of the wrecked camp, surrounded by smoking canvas and the dead, and did not think twice about it.
The bag held more than he'd realized when he'd packed it, dried meat from three months of stores stacked in with the coin and the daggers and the crystal Rordan had pressed into his hand, and he tore into it the way he always tore into food after using the lightning, methodical, relentless, his body demanding fuel the way it always demanded fuel after he'd spent that particular reserve. He ate what would have fed the whole camp for a week. He ate all of it, strip after strip, barely pausing to breathe between them, and did not stop until the hollow feeling behind his ribs had finally gone quiet.
Mikaela watched him from where she lay in the dirt, too broken to do anything else.
He got up once he'd eaten his fill and walked the camp in slow circuits, kicking through the wreckage, checking tents that hadn't caught, pulling anything worth keeping out of the ash and the mud. A whetstone. A coil of good rope. A second belt, better made than the one he already wore. A small clay jar of something that smelled like oil for leather. He put all of it in the bag without much thought, the way he'd once picked through a kill for every usable scrap, the habit too deep in him now to question.
"Please," Mikaela said, from where she lay. "Help me."
He did not answer her. He kept walking the camp, kept checking, kept filling the bag.
When he was satisfied there was nothing left worth taking, he walked back to her and crouched down.
"Where is people," he said.
She looked up at him, her face still streaked with dirt and dried tears, pain written plain across it. "I can lead you to the nearest town. But I cannot walk. Not like this."
He studied her a moment. "You speak Khoekhoegowab," he said.
"Yes." She said it carefully, testing each word before it left her mouth. "I speak ten languages."
She shifted where she lay and winced, and something in her expression cracked open into something closer to indignation than pain. "You know, you could have been gentle. That was my first time." She glared up at him. "How can you do that all night, my first time? What if I never find a husband who is not as big as you? How can I love a normal man now?"
Eto turned to look at her through the tangle of his beard, the mess of his hair hanging past his jaw, and something in his chest that had been quiet for a long time moved.
He smiled.
"Then be mine," he said.
Her eyes went wide. "What? You can't just ask me something like that. Especially after I tried to kill you less than a day ago."
"It is decided," Eto said, like the matter had never been open to discussion in the first place. "You mine now." He pointed at himself. "Me, Eto." He pointed at her. "You are?"
"I'm Mikaela." Her voice climbed with frustration. "But you can't just decide that on your own. There are traditions. Customs. You must speak with my father. My family, in Ronta Vro."
"Mikaela." He said it slow, turning the shape of it over in his mouth. "Good name."
He laughed, short and rough, then straightened back to business. "Now, where people."
She let out a breath, some of the fight going out of her, and adjusted herself carefully against the dirt where she lay. "Listen. My home village, Ronta Vro, is about two days walk west of here. Torak is about a day's journey northwest, on foot."
She pointed as she said each one, her arm shaking with the effort.
Eto stood and turned to look in both directions, the tall grass rolling gold under the wind in one and something darker, distant hills, in the other. He thought about what he knew of this world, the pieces he'd been collecting since the wolves brought him a woman with black hair. Keth, he had worked out from Freya, was what this world called English. The native tongue Freya spoke, the one he still couldn't understand, was something else entirely. And now this one, Mikaela, had said Khoekhoegowab, and the shape of the word had stopped him cold, because that was not English. That was his mother's tongue, or something close enough to it that he had to know.
He turned back to her.
"Ma tis /on ha?" he said.
"I told you," she said, in Keth, confused. "Mikaela."
Her eyes sharpened. "Wait. Khoekhoe ba tsa !khoa //kha?" she asked, slower this time, careful.
Eto smiled, wide, his teeth showing dark and stained through the thick mess of his beard.
She flinched so hard she nearly gagged, one hand flying up over her mouth.
"//A am!nas ga tsi //oa te hana?" she managed, once she'd recovered.
His smile faded, replaced by something more thoughtful. It was the same language. Close enough, at least, that he was sure of it now, some drift in it he couldn't place, but close.
"Speak Keth," he said.
She switched back, relief plain on her face. "You speak Keth and Khoekhoe. Do you know how rare those languages are? Especially Khoekhoe. You could be a translator to the King of Rostalio, like I was. Until you translate for the wrong person and end up on the blacklist, like me, working around with weirdos like this." She gestured at the ruined camp, the burned tents, the bodies still scattered where they'd fallen.
Eto didn't answer.
He knelt down instead and pulled her clothes back into some order, working around the injuries with more care than his hands had shown anyone in seven months, then lifted her carefully and settled her over one shoulder, the bag already heavy on the other.
He started walking northwest, toward Torak.