Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The last three feet of stone nearly broke Njkall.
He’d spent the whole crawl down that corridor holding himself to a discipline that cost more than any wound he’d ever taken.
Every instinct in his massive frame screamed to tear, to smash, to hurry, and he had killed each impulse the moment it was born, because a rushed male brought the ceiling down on the very thing he came to save.
So he had breathed. He had tested each handhold.
He had made his warriors wait behind him so they couldn’t add their weight to unstable ground.
Patience, he’d told himself, over and over, patience is the only thing that saves her now.
Then he came around the final broken slab and saw her, and patience nearly abandoned him entirely.
“Polly.”
She sat in the corner where two solid walls met—she’d found the solid walls, some part of his mind noted, dazed with relief, she’d read the stone and found the safe place—and she had her arms around Tess, sheltering her, one small pale hand still gripping Tess’s like she’d sooner let the mountain fall than let go.
Her head came up at the sound of his voice. In the thin grey light leaking from above, her face was streaked with grime and her eyes were huge and glassy with the aftershock of terror, and she was, unmistakably, exhausted past the edge of what any small body should survive.
And she smiled at him.
“You came,” she said. Her voice shook, but it held. “I knew you would. I told her you would.”
He crossed the ruined chamber in three strides, testing nothing now, caring nothing for the dust that sifted down, and dropped to his knees in front of her, and gathered her into his chest, and could not for a moment do anything else at all.
He was shaking. He felt it the way you feel a thing happening to someone else.
His whole enormous body was trembling like a sapling in a gale, and he could not stop it.
He had his arms around her. He had his hands on her.
Her scent, buried under stone-dust and fear but undeniably hers, filled his lungs, and still some animal part of him refused to believe it, kept expecting to open his eyes to a body gone cold.
He buried his face in her hair and held her and shook and could not speak.
“Njkall.” Her small hand came up against his cheek. “Njkall, I’m all right. I’m here. Feel me—I’m right here. I’m not hurt.”
“I heard the ground go.” The words tore out of him, low and wrecked, his usual measured calm completely gone. “I heard it, and I could not—” His arms tightened. “I could not reach you. I stood up there and I could not reach you.”
“But you came. You didn’t come the fast way.
” She drew back just far enough to look up into his face, and there was something in her steady grey gaze that stopped his breath—understanding, complete and unafraid.
“You came the safe way. Even though it took longer. Even though it must have been—” Her voice caught.
“You waited, and it was killing you, and you did it anyway. Because rushing would have brought it down on me.”
“Yes.” He could barely get it out.
“That’s why I knew we’d be okay.” She pressed her hand against his face, and her thumb moved across his cheekbone in a slow, soothing stroke, and he understood with a lurch of his heart that she was steadying him.
“Because you’d rather ache for an hour than risk me for a second.
” A shaky little laugh. “Stop shaking, you great furred mountain. I’ve got you. ”
He shut his eyes and let himself be held by her, for one breath, then another, and the trembling in his frame eased under her small hand the way nothing else in the world could have eased it.
“Um,” came a rough voice from beside them. Tess. “Not to interrupt whatever this is. But I would very much like to not die in a hole.”
A laugh cracked out of him, ragged and real, and he felt Polly shake with her own against his chest.
“No one dies in the hole,” he said, and his voice came back to him then, deep and level, the clan leader returning to a body that had been, for a moment, only a terrified male.
He set Polly gently from him and turned to Tess, and although every part of Tess flinched at the sheer size of him leaning close, she held her ground—for Polly’s sake, he suspected. “Can you climb?”
“I can climb better than I can lie here and think about it,” Tess said.
“Good.” He rose, filling the small space, and lifted his voice towards the corridor.
“Rjmar. We bring them up the way I came. No one hurries. No one.” He looked down at the two females, the small dark-haired one and the ragged red-haired one, huddled together in the wreck of dead offworld cruelty, and something in his chest that had been clenched to breaking finally, fractionally, loosened. “We’re going home now.”
The trip back was a long agony of patience.
He would not permit speed, and speed was the only thing his heart wanted.
The route up out of the collapsed laboratory was narrow and half-choked and treacherous with new fracture-lines; every stone had to be trusted before they put any weight on it and every handhold tested.
He carried her because he could not bear to put her down, her small hands fisted in his fur, her face buried against his throat, and he moved up through the crumbling dark one careful hold at a time with his precious burden pressed to his heart.
Rjmar and Doren brought Tess up with them, as gentle as they could be with a female who couldn’t bear to be touched, coaxing rather than carrying.
“Rjmar.” Doren’s voice came quietly from behind him. “What’s that?”
Njkall looked back.
A section of the wall had split open when the chamber collapsed, exposing a narrow cavity behind it. Something gleamed inside, reflecting the torchlight in an odd shifting pattern. A small dark object, half-buried beneath the rubble.
Rjmar stared at it.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
“Leave it,” he ordered.
“Njkall—”
“My mate is freezing.”
Rjmar’s gaze lingered on the object for another heartbeat. Then he nodded. “I’ll come back for it.”
He didn’t waste breath objecting. They kept climbing.
When they came out into the open at last—into cold, clean air, and the vast grey sky over the mountains—Polly turned her face up to it and breathed like she’d been drowning, and he felt her small body go loose against him with a relief so total it frightened him nearly as much as the fall had.
“I’ve got you, little one,” he murmured into her hair. “I’ve got you. We’re out. It’s over.”
He would not let her walk. He carried her the whole way, while they bundled Tess in furs and pulled her in a makeshift sleigh, bruised and silent but alive.
Polly slept for most of the journey back to the caves, but every so often her hand would tighten in his fur, as if to check he was still there, and he would press his palm over her small cold fingers, and she would ease again.
He handed Tess into Cera’s keeping the moment they reached the healer’s cave. The clan healer took one look at her, at the grey exhaustion, the shaking hands, the eyes that hadn’t fully come back from wherever terror had sent them, and began issuing quiet orders.
“And this one?” Cera turned her practical, compassionate gaze on Polly, still cradled in his arms. He kept her there while the healer did a quick examination, then grunted. “Bruised. Cold. Exhausted. Nothing broken.”
“I’m all right,” Polly said. “Really. I just want to get warm.”
Cera studied her face for another moment, then looked at him. “Then go get her warm. Go.”
He carried her all the way to the hot springs.
The clan’s caves ran deep and warm around the heated pools, the walls slick and dark and glistening, the air thick with steam and the faint mineral tang of the water that came up boiling from the heart of the world.
The pool where he took her was set apart, screened by a curtain of falling water that hushed the rest of the caves to a distant murmur.
Steam curled up off the surface into the golden light of the bioluminescent lichen covering the rock overhead.
He set her down at the water’s edge only long enough to strip the ruined, filthy clothes from her chilled body.
She let him, her arms lifting when he needed them lifted, docile with exhaustion.
Then he shed his own harness and gear and lifted her again and carried her down the smooth worn steps into the water.
She made a small sound of pure animal relief as the heat closed over her.
Her body shuddered once, and then she went boneless in his arms. He settled onto the submerged ledge with her cradled in his lap, her side against his chest, the hot water lapping up around her shoulders, and for a long while neither of them said anything at all.
He simply held her in the heat and watched the grey disappear from her skin and the shivering slowly stop, and let his own galloping heart, at long last, begin to slow.
“You went down into it,” he said finally, his voice low and rough. “The dark. The buried place. After what was done to you, you climbed straight down into it. For her.”
“I didn’t climb. I fell.” A tired ghost of humor. “But I didn’t fall apart,” she added quietly. “I was terrified, but Tess needed me, and somehow I knew what to do.”
Her fingers traced his forearm beneath the water.
“I knew because of all the things you taught me when I was the frightened one.”
He pressed his mouth to the top of her head and held it there, breathing her in, and when he spoke again his voice was not quite steady.
“I have known warriors three times your size who could not have done what you did today.” His arms tightened around her small frame.
“A year ago you could not cross the mouth of this cave without my hand in yours. Today you went into the dark, and you kept your head, and you helped her and you brought her back with you.” A breath.
“Little one, I am so proud of you I do not have the words for it. And I am a male who always has words.” He shook his head against her hair. “But for this, there are none.”
She was quiet for a moment. And then she turned slowly in his lap, the hot water sheeting off her shoulders, until she could look up into his face, and what he saw there stopped his breath for the third time that day.
Not the old wary flicker. Not the reflexive dismissal of praise she’d worn like armor for a year, the oh, it was nothing, anyone would have. None of it.
“Thank you,” she said, and she held his gaze, steady as the stone surrounding them. Her small hand came up out of the water and rested flat against his broad chest, over the place where his heart still hadn’t quite slowed. “But Njkall, I need to tell you something.”
“Tell me.”
“I’m proud of myself too.” Her chin lifted, just slightly, her eyes shining.
“You’ve been proud of me for a year. I loved it, and sometimes it was the only thing that got me out of bed.
But it wasn’t mine. It was yours, and you gave it to me until I could find my own. ” Her smile trembled. “Today I did.”
She tapped her chest, water dripping from her fingers. “This is mine. This I get to keep.”
For a long, long moment, the male who had faced blades and beasts and forty hard years without flinching, could not have spoken to save his own life.
Then he drew her against him, into the heat and the steam and the hush of falling water, and held her—not fragile, not broken, but simply and wholly her own. And he found that after all his careful patience, there was exactly one thing left in him that still needed saying.