Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
“You could run, you know,” Tess said around a mouthful of the flatbread Cera had left them. “Right now. Nobody’s watching. The door’s open.”
“I don’t want to run.”
“That’s what they train you to say.”
Polly set down the small comb she’d been carving to keep her hands busy. For three days now, she’d come to the healer’s cave every morning, and for three days Tess had circled the same ground like a wary animal pacing the edge of a snare.
“Nobody trained me to say anything,” she said.
“Try it, if you don’t believe me. Get up and walk out.
Cera won’t stop you. Njkall won’t. I won’t.
” She picked the comb back up. “It’s at least a one-day walk to Port Eyeja through the snow, though, and your feet are still wrapped, so I wouldn’t recommend it today. ”
A quick, involuntary flash of fear crossed Tess’s face, gone almost before it showed.
That was the thing she had worked out on the first day.
It wasn’t the Hothians that kept Tess in this warm stone cave with the crystals glowing in their sconces.
It was the memory of the ship that had put down on the northern field.
Better a cave full of yetis than a port full of alien males.
She understood that fear all too well.
“One day.” Tess snorted and set the cup down.
She’d stopped hiding the metal bar under her blanket yesterday.
That was progress, she supposed, even if Tess still slept furthest from the door with her back against the wall and jumped every time a shadow crossed the entrance. “So it’s just a nicer cell.”
“It’s not a cell.”
“Everywhere is a cell if you can’t leave.”
“I already told you that you can leave,” she snapped, then sighed and softened her voice. “That’s what makes it not one. Cera showed you the passage to the main cave yesterday. You walked to the garden. Remember? You touched the plants and you came back on your own and nobody came after you.”
Tess didn’t answer that. She pulled her knees up under the fur and wrapped her arms around them, and for a while the only sound was the scrape of Polly’s knife against bone and the far-off drip of meltwater somewhere in the rock.
“How long were you there?” Tess suddenly asked and Polly’s knife jerked. “In the mines.”
Tess looked at her, fixed and unblinking, and there was nothing cruel in her eyes, just a terrible, hungry need to measure herself against someone. To find out if her own thing had been as bad as it felt, or worse, or survivable. “Cera let it slip. That you were in the mines. Before.”
“I don’t talk about that.”
“How long, though?”
“Tess.”
“Was it years? It was years, wasn’t it. You’ve got that—” Tess made a small gesture at Polly’s body and the way she was sitting, and she felt herself trying to shrink and hated that she still knew how.
“That way of sitting. Where you take up as little room as you can. You only get that after years.”
She looked down at the half-made comb in her hands. The teeth were uneven. She’d have to sand them flat, or start again.
“I got here about a year ago,” she said.
Her voice came out very level, the way it did when level was the only thing holding the rest of it down.
“I don’t know how long I was in the other place.
I stopped counting on purpose. When I got here I decided the counting starts from the day I left it behind.
That’s the only number I keep.” She turned the comb over.
“So. About a year. That’s the answer you get. ”
For once, Tess didn’t push. Maybe she understood. Maybe she had a number of her own she refused to say aloud.
“Sorry,” Tess muttered, and it sounded like it hurt her to say it.
“I do that. I poke. It’s… I need to know things.
Where I stand. What’s real. I can’t sit in a place and not understand it.
It makes me want to—” She stopped and took a deep breath.
“On the ship. The one I got off. You didn’t ask, but…
I need to say it once and then I don’t want to say it again.
Is that all right? Can I just tell you once? ”
“Yes,” she said, even though she knew it was going to cost her. “Say it once. I’ll listen. You won’t have to say it again.”
And Tess told her. Not all of it—Polly could hear the parts she stepped around, the way you’d walk around a hole in the ice—but enough.
The expensive linens and the soft carpet, which she said was the thing she hated most, that they’d made it nice.
The others who’d been on the ship with her, and the weight of not knowing what had happened to them.
The stop at Hothrest, the confusion of it, the way it had felt when the metal bar had cracked the guard’s skull, and the running.
The cold that had nearly finished what the ship had started.
She listened to all of it, the way she’d promised.
She didn’t flinch and she didn’t cry, because she’d learned that crying made the other person feel they had to stop and take care of you, and this wasn’t a moment for that.
She just held Tess’s gaze and listened and, when it was over, she slowly reached across the small space between them for Tess’s hand, slowly enough that she could pull away if she needed to.
Tess didn’t pull away. Her whole body was shaking.
“Once,” Polly said softly. “And now it’s done. You did it.”
Tess wiped her face hard with the back of her wrist, angry at her own tears, and for a while neither of them said anything, and it was a good silence, the kind that had weight to it instead of threat.
Then Tess ruined it.
“So what’s the big male to you?”
Polly blinked. “What?”
“The big male. Njkall.” Tess said the name carefully, like she’d been saving it up.
Her eyes had gone sharp again, but there was something underneath the sharpness now that hadn’t been there before—not suspicion of Polly, exactly, but fear for her, which was somehow more difficult to answer.
“You live with him. Cera mentioned it like it was nothing. Like it’s just the arrangement.
” Her jaw worked. “So I have to ask. And you have to not lie to me, because you’re the only one here I’ve decided to believe. Is he your owner?”
Polly was on her feet before she knew she’d moved. The half-made comb fell from her lap and skittered across the stone floor and she didn’t look at it.
“No,” she said fiercely, her voice loud, in a way her voice almost never was, and it rang off the rock. “No. Absolutely not. Don’t—don’t ever say that. Not about him.”
Tess had gone very still, watching her.
“No. I’m not owned. Not by anyone. Not ever again.” Her heart slammed against her chest, the same way it slammed on the bad nights, except this wasn’t a bad night, this was rage, clean and clear, and it felt so foreign in her body that it almost frightened her. “He’s not my owner. Take it back.”
“Okay.” Tess held up both hands, palms out, and there was something almost gentle in her gaze now, something searching. “Okay. I hear you. I take it back.”
Tess hesitated, watched her stand there shaking with a fury neither of them had known she had in her.
“Then what is he?” Tess asked again, more quietly. “Why do you live with him? Why does he let you sleep in his bed? Because males like that, they always want—”
The sudden image of Njkall’s arousal pressing against her, of his big body straining to stay still under her touch, flashed into her mind, and heat rushed through her at the same time as a fierce, protective anger.
“Don’t.” She kept her voice low, but it had turned to iron. “You don’t get to say things like that about him. He would never, ever force me to do anything I didn’t want to do.”
Tess searched her face again.
“Then why do you sleep with him?”
Polly opened her mouth, but nothing came.
Because there was no small safe explanation.
She couldn’t say it was because she was afraid of the dark, because that wasn’t it, not really, not anymore.
She couldn’t say he was just a friend, because he wasn’t.
He was her anchor. He was the wall that held the world back.
He was the only reason she ever felt like she could close her eyes and let go, even just a little.
She could say all of that, but it was too big, and she had no words for it.
So she said the only true thing she had.
“Because he’s Njkall.”
Tess frowned. “That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got.”
“Oh,” Tess said. “Oh, shit.”
Polly couldn’t tell if it was horror or amusement in the other woman’s voice, and she didn’t care. She crossed her arms over her chest and glared down at her.
“Stop,” she said. “Don’t say anything else about him. And don’t ever ask me again.”
And Tess, mercifully, let it go. Polly went back to her seat, picked up her abandoned comb, and started carving again. For once, the silence wasn’t good. It was sharp around the edges.
She didn’t stay long after that. She had already pushed past her usual limit, and the comb wouldn’t come out right, and Tess’s eyes were still on her, thoughtful in a way she didn’t like at all.
But the answer stayed with her.
It stayed with her while she walked the cold bright passage back towards Njkall’s quarters, and it stayed with her through the rest of the afternoon, while she sanded the comb teeth flat.
Because he’s Njkall. As though his name were a whole argument.
As though it explained the year of nights, and the word love he’d let slip in the cave and then set carefully aside, and the way she’d asked him to hold her on purpose and he had, gathering her against him as if he’d been starving to hold her and refusing himself.
Because he’s Njkall. She’d meant it as a barrier to shut down the question. But she heard it now the way Tess must have heard it—not as a wall at all, but a door, standing wide open, with the whole answer just past it, plain as anything, if she’d only turn her head and look.
She’d said it the way Yasmin talked about her mate. She’d said it the way people said because I love him when they were too shy to use the word.
She sat alone in his quarters, her heart thudding against her chest. All at once and far too late, she understood what she’d told a near-stranger about her own foolish heart—and worse, what she’d refused to tell herself for a year.