Thrask always knocked on my door the same way when one of them left him. Three slow knocks, with a long pause before the third, as if he’d thought about turning round and going home.

I heard them just after midnight, over the rain. I put down my pestle, wiped the comfrey off my hands, and went to let him in.

He filled the doorway. He always did. Seven and a half feet of grey-green orc, shoulders like a yoke of oxen, rain running off his shaved scalp and down the thick braids at the back of his neck. His tusks glinted in the lamplight. He had a cask of ale under one arm and a face like a kicked dog.

“Maren,” he said.

“Thrask.” I stepped back. “Mind the—”

He ducked under the lintel. Not far enough. Crack.

“—beam,” I finished, as he swore and clutched his forehead. “Ten years. Ten years you’ve been coming through that door.”

“It moves,” he muttered. “I swear to every god, it moves.”

“It’s a witch’s cottage. It might.” I took the cask off him before he dropped it and pushed him towards the fire. “Sit down before you bring the roof in.”

He sat on the hearth. The chairs had stopped being an option years ago, after the third one went to kindling. He stretched his huge hands towards the flames, and I saw his knuckles. Split and bloody, all four of them.

I didn’t ask. I just fetched the salve.

I’d known Thrask for ten years. Since the spring he’d come to the village as a journeyman smith, all tusks and silence, and the whole place had gone quiet whenever he walked down the high street. Mothers had pulled their children indoors. The baker had refused to sell him bread. I’d been the village witch for three years by then, and I knew exactly what it was like to be the thing people crossed the road to avoid.

So I’d bought him a loaf and taken it to the forge myself. He’d looked at me like I was mad. Then he’d mended my cauldron for free.

We’d been friends ever since.

I knelt in front of him and took his right hand in both of mine. It was bigger than my head. I always forgot that until I was holding it. He went still when I did, the way he always did, and fixed his eyes on a point somewhere over my head.

“Anvil?” I asked.

“Anvil,” he agreed.

“Did you win?”

“The anvil won.” He watched me dab the salve onto his split knuckles. He didn’t flinch. He never did. “Elsie’s gone.”

I’d guessed. Elsie Marsh, the miller’s youngest. Plump and pretty and sweet, with a laugh you could hear from across the market. She’d been his for four months, and the whole village had been placing bets on how long it would last.

I’d bet against. I always bet against. I’d never lost.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I meant it, and I hated that I also didn’t.

He shrugged. It moved a great deal of orc. “She was kind about it. She cried.” A pause. “She said it wasn’t me. She said she loved being with me. Loved how I held her. But she couldn’t—” He stopped. His jaw worked around his tusks. “She said she was sorry she was too small.”

I kept my eyes on his knuckles.

This was the part I knew about. The part nobody said out loud in the village, but everyone knew anyway. Thrask liked humans. Small, soft, round ones, who fit against him like a child’s doll against a bear. And they liked him, at first — his gentleness, his size, the way he looked at them like they were the most precious things he’d ever held.

And then they went to bed with him. And it hurt them.

Not because he was rough. Thrask had never been rough with anything that couldn’t hit back. It hurt because he was an orc, and a big one even for an orc, and they were human women, and there was simply too much of him and not enough of them.

I knew because I was the witch. Because three of them had come to my back door, red-faced and miserable, asking for something to ease the soreness. Because I’d brewed it for them without asking questions, and listened when they cried, and never once told Thrask.

“It’s always the same,” he said. His voice was very low. “They try. Gods, they try. And I try. I go slow, I go careful, I do everything they tell me. And it’s never enough. I can see it on their faces. They’re hurting and pretending not to.”

He pulled his hand out of mine and stared at the fire.

“Maybe I should find an orc,” he said. “That’s what my mother says. Find a nice orc girl, Thrask, someone your own size.” He laughed, short and bitter. “But I don’t want someone my own size. Gods help me. I like that they’re small. I like how they fit in my arms. I like that I could pick them up with one hand. I like how soft they are.”

He said the last part almost too quietly to hear.

“And then they don’t fit,” he said. “And it’s my fault. And they go.”

The fire crackled. The rain drummed on the thatch.

I looked at him. At the broad hunched shoulders, the bowed head, the huge hands hanging empty between his knees. Ten years I’d known him. Ten years of ale and arguments and mended cauldrons. Five years of loving him, quietly and hopelessly, while he brought me the broken pieces of one small, soft, unsuitable woman after another.

I was small. Smaller than any of them — a full head shorter than Elsie, and soft and round with it, with a belly I’d long since stopped apologising for and hips that had never once fit a shop-bought dress. Everything he liked, and more of it, in less space. And in ten years, he’d never once looked at me the way he looked at them. Whenever I leant too close, he found something fascinating in the fire. Whenever I hugged him goodbye, he let go first.

I’d stopped hoping years ago. I’d decided it was kinder that way. If he didn’t want me, at least I’d never have to watch him try and fail and leave.

But I was everything he liked.

And I was a witch.

I got up. I went to the shelf above my workbench and took down a thick leather notebook. The one I’d been filling for the last eight months, every night after he went home. Pages of rune-sketches. Sigil-work. Old binding charms adapted and re-adapted, notes in the margin and crossings-out and cramped, furious calculations.

I’d told myself it was an interesting problem. Nothing more.

I’d always been a terrible liar.

I sat down on the hearth beside him, with the notebook in my lap.

“Thrask,” I said. “It’s not your fault. And it’s not theirs either.”

He looked at me sidelong. “Then whose is it?”

“Nobody’s. It’s just bodies. Yours is the shape it is, and theirs are the shapes they are, and they don’t match.” I opened the notebook. My heart had started to pound, hard enough that I was sure he could hear it. “But bodies can be persuaded. That’s half of what witchcraft is.”

He frowned at the page. At the rune drawn in the middle of it, in red ink, encircled three times. A spiral of interlocking sigils, wide and low, shaped to sit across the curve of a woman’s belly just above the bone.

“What’s that?”

I took a breath.

“That,” I said, “is eight months of work. And I think it might fix you.”