Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“That one.” Baralt jerked his chin towards the far end of the landing field, where a squat, weathered freighter sat with its cargo ramp lowered into the churned grey snow.
“Glasach’s boat. I’ve flown with her twice.
She’s honest, which is rarer than sothiti out here, and she does the Sherae run every third cycle.
” He hesitated. “The male you were worried about shipped out two days ago on a Verix hauler. Gone. Off-world. I checked myself.”
Njkall watched Tess’s shoulders come down half a hand’s width at that news, though her jaw stayed tight and her wary brown eyes kept sweeping the crowd the way they always did, cataloguing every threat, trusting nothing. He understood that. He’d stopped taking it personally weeks ago.
“You’re certain,” Tess said.
“I don’t say things I’m not certain of.” Baralt’s fangs showed in the faint dry curve that passed for his smile. “Costs too much to be wrong in my line of work. I would have hauled him in but he was already gone.”
Beside Njkall, Polly stood close the way a mate stood, her shoulder brushing his arm, her small hand tucked warm into his where their fingers had laced somewhere back near the market braziers and never come apart.
He felt the bond between them like a low steady hum under everything, a warmth in his chest that had not once stopped glowing since the night she’d chosen him.
He kept expecting it to fade into ordinariness. It hadn’t. He suspected it never would.
“Come on,” Polly said gently. “It’s cold standing still.”
They crossed the field together, the three of them, past a knot of Vhal traders haggling over crates and a spindly grey mechanic cursing at a fuel line, and the noise and stink and chaos of the port broke around Polly like water around a stone.
A year ago this place had reduced her to a shaking, wordless wreck pressed into his side.
He remembered it too clearly. Now she walked through it with her chin up and her eyes open, and if her grip on his hand tightened when a shuttle screamed overhead, neither of them pretended it was anything to be ashamed of.
A short, plump female in a crisp blue-and-white uniform came bustling down the freighter’s ramp to meet them, blue fur bristling in the wind, a datapad tucked under one arm.
She was barely taller than Polly, round as a well-fed pikka, and she looked the three of them over with shrewd eyes that missed nothing.
“You’ll be my passenger, then.” She addressed this to Tess directly rather than Njkall as the largest and most obviously dangerous person present, which earned her a mark of approval in his estimation.
“Glasach. This heap is mine. You’ve paid through the Hothian, so we’re square on credits, and I run a clean boat.
No cargo I can’t name on the manifest, no passengers I can’t vouch for, and nobody touches anybody who doesn’t want touching. That understood?”
“Understood,” Tess said warily.
“Good.” Glasach turned and bellowed up the ramp in a voice far too large for her body. “Kamat! Come meet the human!”
A second female appeared at the top of the ramp and came down it with loose unhurried grace, thin as a reed and a full head taller than Glasach, her skin marbled in flowing patterns of blue and white like frost spreading across dark water.
She moved to stand at the captain’s shoulder and rested one long-fingered hand there with an easy familiarity that told him everything he needed to know about the two of them.
“My partner,” Glasach said, and the word carried a warmth that had nothing to do with business. “Kamat handles navigation, medical, and keeping me from throwing paying customers out the airlock. She’s better company than me. Most people are.”
“Welcome aboard,” Kamat said. Her voice was soft and musical.
Her pale eyes settled on Tess with a gentleness that seemed to catch the human female off guard.
“You’ll have your own cabin, with a lock only you hold.
I promise you that first, because I think it may be the thing you most want to hear. ”
Tess’s throat worked, and she looked away.
At the top of the ramp, movement drew his eye.
An enormous male had emerged from the freighter’s belly with a cargo crate balanced on one shoulder that he would have thought twice about lifting.
He didn’t recognize the species, bronze-skinned and slab-muscled, chest bare even in this cold.
The male set the crate down, straightened, and looked their way with unreadable silver eyes half-hidden beneath long, dark hair.
Tess went rigid beside them, and Polly’s hand tightened in his before she took a half-step forward, ready to put herself between Tess and the threat exactly as she’d once tried to put herself between Tess and him.
“Ah.” Glasach followed their stares and waved one plump hand, entirely unbothered. “That’s Brannik. He doesn’t talk. Don’t worry. He keeps himself to himself.”
She raised her voice again, cheerfully brutal. “Brannik! Get back to work, you’re frightening the humans!”
The huge male’s expression didn’t change, but he nodded and walked back up the ramp. Tess let out a breath she’d clearly been holding for a while.
“He really isn’t dangerous—” she started.
“He really isn’t,” Kamat said. “He’ll keep his distance. You’re safe.”
Tess looked at her for a long moment, and he saw something pass between the two of them—some silent recognition, one survivor to another. It was the first time he’d seen Tess look at a stranger without tensing.
“All right,” Tess said quietly. “All right. Yes.”
“Then let’s load your things before the wind picks up.” Glasach clapped her small plump hands together. “Brannik! Come get the human’s crate. Gently, mind, it’s got the healer’s medicines packed in.”
The next while passed in the ordinary bustle of departure.
Cera’s carefully packed supplies were handed over, the last of Tess’s few belongings stowed, credit chits and documents and Imperial transit stamps confirmed and re-confirmed by a captain who clearly trusted paperwork about as far as she could throw it.
He stood back and let it happen. This was Polly’s moment—she’d talked Tess down from the mountain, she’d sat with her through her terror, and she’d held her together in a collapsed ruin under half the weight of the world.
He was only here to lift heavy things and be a reassuring wall at his mate’s back.
He found he was entirely content in the role.
At last it was done, and there was nothing left but the leaving.
Tess turned to Polly. For a woman so quick to anger and so armored in suspicion, she suddenly looked very young and very lost, standing there at the foot of the ramp that would carry her off this frozen world forever.
“You’re sure,” Tess said, clutching Polly’s hand. “You’re sure you don’t want to come.”
He went very still.
He could have answered. He knew that Polly had chosen and he trusted what was between them, but this was her question to answer, and he would not answer it for her.
So he waited.
She looked up at him first, her eyes finding his face. Whatever she saw there made the corner of her mouth curl up soft and sure. She squeezed his hand once. Then she turned back to Tess, and she was smiling, and there was not one shred of doubt anywhere in her.
“No,” she said. “I’m not coming.”
The band around his chest let go all at once.
“I thought about it,” she went on. “Not out of fear, not because I felt trapped, just… honestly. Warm ocean. A whole world where nobody’s furred and nothing’s frozen.
” She shook her head, and her dark hair caught the grey light, and she lifted their joined hands a little, so Tess could see them, so there was no mistaking her meaning.
“But I’d be leaving home to go looking for one.
And I already found mine. He’s standing right here. ”
She let go of his hand at last, only long enough to step forward and pull Tess into a hard, fierce embrace.
“You go find yours. Somewhere warm. And you send word when you get there, or I’ll worry myself sick, and he’ll have to charter a whole ship to come check on you, and Glasach will never forgive either of us. ”
Tess laughed—wetly and roughly, but real. She held Polly hard for a long moment, and when she stepped back her eyes were shining and her jaw had, for once, gone soft.
“Thank you,” she said, and turned to him, direct and unflinching and completely without the old fear. “Take care of her.”
“Always,” he said roughly. “But she takes care of herself now. I only have the honor of standing near while she does it.”
Something eased in Tess’s face at that—some last suspicion, finally satisfied.
She nodded once, sharply, the way she did when a thing was settled.
Then Glasach called her name from the ramp, and Kamat held out one long marbled hand, and Tess Baker squared her sturdy shoulders, drew a breath, and walked up into the belly of the ship without looking back.
They stayed to watch her go.
The ramp folded up with a shriek of old hydraulics.
The freighter’s engines woke slowly and then turned loud, spitting steam and melting the churned snow to black slush in a widening ring, and he drew Polly back against his chest and wrapped both arms around her, shielding her small warm body from the wind and the roar.
She leaned into him without a flicker of hesitation, both her hands coming up to rest on his forearms, and together they watched Glasach’s ugly, honest, ungainly boat lift off the field, climb through the low grey sky, and dwindle to a point, and then to nothing.
One human female, gone from Hothrest by her own free choice.
The other, standing warm in the circle of his arms, staying because of hers.
For a while neither of them spoke. The wind moaned across the empty field, and the braziers of the market hissed and popped somewhere behind them, and the sky where the ship had been was just sky again, grey and vast and cold.
Then Polly turned in his arms, cheeks red from the cold, grey eyes bright.
“Njkall.”
“Mm?”
She rose on her toes and kissed the underside of his jaw.
“Take me home.”