2. Chapter 2 #2
Ellie went still, her humming dying in her throat.
She stood in the middle of a bison hunt with her dark eyes fixed on me and something moving behind them she had no name for, some pull she couldn't account for and it frightened her, I watched it frighten her, watched her reach for it and flinch from it in the same breath, because she was a woman who'd been taught that wanting things led nowhere good.
I knew what she was feeling, there was the cruelty, and I couldn't tell her, because the knowing was mine to carry and telling her would only hand her the terror of one more man deciding her life without her leave.
She'd had a bellyful of that from the one who'd thrown her away, and from her own father before him.
I'd sooner burn quietly than be another of them.
"Sing it again," she said. "Slower."
Don't, I told myself, and did. I sang it again, slower, and she came in underneath me on the second pass, uncertain, and got it right, and the two voices braided together for the length of one phrase in the cold spring air before I made myself stop.
"There," I said, and my own voice came out rougher than the song had. "That's the whole of it. You have it now."
"I've got it." She held my eyes for a moment I felt in my teeth, then mercifully broke it and crouched to the trail. "The bison went left. Blood there, by the stone."
She was right, and I'd have seen it myself in another breath, but she'd seen it first, and I smiled across at her.
* * *
We took the bull in a fold of ground beside a side-channel, the party closing on him from three sides with the wind in our faces, and it was clean, which mattered.
A beast that died frightened and slow soured its own meat, and I'd not have taught Ellie a wasteful kill.
Daska would have wanted to know it was done well.
He thought about such things, my brother, the word had come to fit him over the winter without any of the blood that usually earned it, and I'd stopped noticing the lack.
The wanting had a shape, on the nights I let it take one.
Not just Ellie in my arms, though the goddess knew I wanted that until it ached, but the whole of it, the thing Daska and I had never once said aloud and both of us carried anyway.
Her claimed and safe and ours. A place chosen for its shelter rather than its territory, well out of the road of slaver packs and of rivers that took what they liked.
Daska at one side of a good fire and me at the other, Ellie between us where nothing could reach her, warm for the first time in her life, wanted for herself and not for what her body could carry or her father could trade.
Children, someday, if the goddess was kind and the dying world let us, a fat brown-eyed brood of them tumbling underfoot while Ellie laughed that rich laugh she doled out so rarely, the two of us grown old and grey guarding the pack we'd made out of the wreckage of the ones we'd left.
It was a soft thought for a hard man, and I'd have died before I said it to anyone but Daska.
I turned it over anyway, there on the bank, because a man walking away from everything he'd been needed to know what he was walking toward.
Then I made myself put it down, because none of it was mine to want yet, and wanting it too hard would only make me clumsy when clumsy could get her killed.
Field-dressing a bison is long work, and while the others set to it I walked the riverbank a little way, reading the water because I couldn't help reading the water.
It ran high and fast, brown with churned silt, choked with slabs of rotten ice the colour of old bone that ground downstream and took chunks of the bank with them as they went.
Meltwater, and weeks of it still to come before the high country gave up its winter.
A man crossed this at his peril, and a man crossed it strung out and burdened at the peril of everyone he led.
Dev came to stand near me, favouring his mending leg, his breath clouding. He'd taken to seeking me out, the small dark carrier with the wry mouth, though we shared perhaps thirty words between his tongue and mine and made the rest up with our hands.
He nodded at the river and said something I didn't catch the shape of. Then he pointed downstream, then east, and made a gesture I'd learned meant Nathan, a flat, cutting motion, the man who decided things.
"The crossing, east, it's bad," I managed, in the handful of his words I had, and jerked my chin at the churning water to carry what the words couldn't.
"Bad," Dev agreed, and the weight he put on the one word carried further than any speech.
Then he did a thing he did sometimes, pressing his own chest with his spread hand and then the air in Ellie's direction, and his face when he did it had gone grave.
It had taken me a while to understand him.
He carried something inside him, he and Ellie both, some weight the mission needed that he was frightened of spending.
He held up his cupped hands as if they cradled water, then slowly turned them, letting the imagined water run out between his fingers, and shook his head hard.
It's not enough, and if it runs out, there's no getting it back.
"Not enough," I echoed, to show I'd understood. He nodded, grim, then clapped my arm and limped back toward the butchering.
I didn't fully grasp what they carried. I grasped that it couldn't be replaced, and that Dev lay awake over whether they had all of it they'd need, and that a woman who held something irreplaceable inside her had no business being marched across a river that wanted to pull her under. That much I understood in my marrow.
By the time we'd loaded the meat and started back, the light was going amber and long.
The smoke of the camp threaded up through the trees ahead, and beyond it, off to the east where the land dropped away, the pale broad scar of the crossing Nathan had chosen.
Even from here I could read it wrong; the banks slumped and undercut.
The current shouldered ice through the narrows hard enough to take a body's legs before the cold had finished stealing the wits.
Ellie came up beside me, following my line of sight, and her face set.
"He won't wait, will he?" she said, in the tone of a woman who already had her answer.
"No." I shifted the weight of meat across my back. "His kind never waits. He's decided, so it's already true to him, and the water's just a thing to be got through." I looked down at her. "You told him to wait for me."
"For all the good it did." She pulled her furs tighter against the failing warmth of the day, and something crossed her face, a flicker of that same nameless pull from the hunt, quickly smothered. "Rivik, that crossing tomorrow, tell me honestly what you make of it."
I could have softened it; I'd softened harder truths for gentler reasons. But she'd earned honesty over the winter, in blood and cold and the learning of a hundred small skills, and I'd not insult her with less.
"If we go careful, one at a time, roped, keeping to the shallowest reach, most of us make it across," I said, and let the word most sit between us, because neither of us was going to pretend it was a good word.
"But it's the wrong crossing. Nathan chose it because it runs straight, not because it runs safe, and I've buried men who died of a leader mistaking those two things for each other. "
She let that sit while, downstream, the river ground its ice through the narrows, patient as anything that's certain of winning.
"Then we make him do it carefully," she said at last. "Wisdom may be beyond the available materials."
I came close to smiling at that. She'd have made an alpha, this one, in another life, in a body the pack would have followed. As it was she'd have to lead the only way the world had left her, sideways, quietly, moving the men who thought they moved themselves.
We walked the last stretch to camp in the dark, and I let her voice run over the plan for the morning, and I didn't tell her that every instinct I owned was screaming that we shouldn't cross here at all.
There'd be no unmaking Nathan's mind tonight.
And the coal under my ribs, which cared nothing for rivers or crossings or the fate of the mission, burned only with the fact of her walking at my side in the dark, close enough to touch, and further from me than the far bank of any water in the world.