1. Chapter 1 #2
"You're happy," Daska said, and it wasn't a question.
He could feel it, the same way I could feel the low contentment radiating off him.
It still caught me off guard, being read like that.
Being an open book to someone gentle, after a lifetime of hiding the pages from people who'd only ever wanted to see the balance sheet.
"I am." I turned the word over, testing it for the guilt that usually came stapled to any good feeling.
It was there, faint, the way it always was, the sense that I had no business being happy while everything we'd crossed twenty-five thousand years to fix was still broken, while Dev fretted over reserves and the modern world drained quietly toward its death and I walked through an ice-age morning warm from a man's hands.
But it was quieter than it used to be. I let myself have the moment anyway.
"I really am happy, and you're not to tell a soul, because I've a reputation for gloom to maintain. "
His answering smile crinkled the corners of his eyes.
The camp resolved out of the trees ahead of us: the low hide shelter Daska had rigged the night before, the fire Dev had nursed back to a decent blaze, the hobbled bundles of our gear.
Megan sat closest to the flames, drawn in on herself, her immaculate modern coat gone shapeless and stained with weeks of hard travel.
She'd been quiet since we broke from Hanging Rock, quieter than the cold alone explained, and the grey cast to her face snagged my attention before other things crowded it out.
Nathan crouched over the scanner where he'd been all morning, turning the dead device in his hands with a chemist's precision that never seemed to bring it back to life. He looked up as we came in, took in the firewood, took in whatever he took in from my face, and decided to dislike it.
"There's a route south the corridor keeps offering," Daska said mildly, dropping his limb by the fire.
He said it in the wolf-tongue and looked to me to carry it, since Nathan had made no more effort with the language than a man makes with a task he considers beneath him.
"Broken ground, but it keeps us wide of the water.
Rivik went to scout it at first light. He'll want to talk about it when he's back. "
I put it into English for him, and Nathan heard me out, then shook his head before I'd finished.
"We're not adding three days to skirt a river," he said.
"The scanner's dead, we're behind, and every day in this cold is a day Dev's leg doesn't heal and the reserves don't get where they need to be.
" He set the device down with the care of a man who'd like to have thrown it.
"Rivik identified a crossing east of here two days ago.
We use it, recover the lost time and keep the mission on schedule.
I'm not interested in detours dressed up as caution. "
"The crossing he flagged as possible," I said. "He never once called it good, and the difference between those two words is about a metre of meltwater."
"Then we cross carefully." He held my eyes.
Two years ago that flat, certain look had made me feel small, made me fold myself down into whatever shape gave him the least to object to.
It didn't do that anymore. Something had changed in me over the winter, some spine grown back where he'd worn it away, and I met the look and didn't drop mine.
"Leadership means making the necessary decision before everyone else has finished discussing their feelings about it, Eleanor.
You might understand that one day, if you ever stop playing house. "
Playing house. I felt Daska go still beside me, felt the bond flush hot with an anger that wasn't mine, and I put a hand on his arm before it could become anything. This wasn't the fight worth having, not here and not yet.
"Rivik knows this country and you don't," I said evenly. "I'd wait for him before I decided anything."
But Nathan had already turned back to the scanner, the conversation closed in his mind as everything closed once he'd decided it, and I knew what was coming.
We'd take his crossing and cut straight across, because the one man among us who could actually read the water wasn't back yet to say no, and Nathan had never in his life waited for permission he thought he could take.
I crouched by the fire and started feeding it the smaller branches, coaxing it wide enough to warm Megan properly, and tried to shake the cold that had nothing to do with the morning.
Off to the east, faint under the wind and the birdsong, the river went on grinding its ice downstream toward the place Nathan meant to make us cross.
Something low in my chest stirred at the sound of it, and it wasn't the bond.
It was something else entirely, a restlessness I had no name for, the borrowed power I carried and never touched shifting like a sleeper turning over, reaching, as if the running water had called to it and it wanted to answer.
I pressed my hand flat against my sternum until it settled.
That's new, I thought, and didn't like it.
I fed the fire another branch and said nothing, and waited for Rivik to come back and tell us all the thing I already knew.