3. Chapter 3 #2
Cargo, some cold flat part of my mind said, even as the rest of me thrashed and screamed and swallowed river. You're cargo, cargo the way you were always cargo, your father's asset, the Council's vessel, and now theirs, and this is the only thing you've ever been.
I fought anyway, got a hand free and clawed at a muzzle and felt it not care in the slightest. The current had me, the wolves had me, and between one wave and the next I caught it all in broken flashes, Daska reaching the far bank and being met by three of them at once, Megan screaming, Dev dragged down.
Rivik was in the deep channel, driven back by the ice and the killing weight of the water, going under, surfacing, going under again, and the last clear thing I saw before they pulled me up the near bank was his head above the churning grey, his arm reaching across a distance that was already too far and getting further.
They hauled me out and up and slung me over the back of one of the shifted wolves across the wolf’s back as dressed meat.
My ribs cracked against the ridge of its spine and the breath went out of me.
Daska was gone from sight, and the river with him.
The bank tilted and swung and the willow scrub tore past, and Megan was somewhere behind me making a sound I'd hear in my sleep for a long time, and there was no more pretending it could go any other way: we had lost. That Nathan's straight line had walked us into exactly the funnel Rivik had read in the ground days ago, and that the men who'd have died to stop this were on the wrong side of a river that kept no debts.
Daska. I reached for the bond as I reached for it in the dark, groping after the warm sure thread of him, and it was there, frayed thin with distance and terror but there, and his anguish came down it with the force of a blow; he was alive, then.
He was alive and he couldn't reach me and it was killing him, and I pushed back everything I had, I'm alive, I'm alive, find me, not knowing if it carried, knowing only that I had to send it.
And then, under the roar of the water, crashing willows, and my ragged breathing, I heard it.
It was Rivik's voice, ragged, half-drowned, pitched to carry, and it was the hunting-song.
The one he'd sung low into my ear only yesterday with the party scattered on the trail, the old song wolves sang walking into country they didn't know.
He was singing it now across the river with the last air in his lungs, and I understood what he was doing even as the distance ate the sound of it.
He was telling me a message in the one language Karik's wolves would never parse, in the melody he'd braided with my voice in the cold spring air.
He was telling me they would come. That they would follow, and that being taken was not the same as being lost.
Twisting on the wolf's back, hair streaming water into my eyes, I found him for one last instant, Rivik, chest-deep in the killing river, driven back and beaten and singing anyway, his amber eyes fixed on me across everything.
I have it, I thought at him, fierce and drowning. I have the song and I'll keep it, so come and find me.
Then the willows closed over the sight of him, the wolf beneath me lurched into a ground-eating run, and the song thinned to nothing behind me until all that remained was the cold, the jolting dark, and the terrible arithmetic starting up again in the back of my mind, Megan, the thing I was almost certain she carried, and how long a body could be treated as goods before it started to believe it again.
Megan was the worst of it. Somewhere in the pack of running wolves behind me they carried her the same way, and she'd been grey with sickness for a week now, worn past exhaustion, and if I was right about the reason then every mile of this was a danger to more than just her.
I didn't want to be right. Two years I'd have paid good money to see Nathan Cole's perfect PA suffer even a fraction of what I'd suffered, and the wanting had curdled somewhere on this journey into something I liked much less about myself, because whatever she'd done or not done, no one deserved to be flung over a beast's back as carelessly as butchered meat with a life she hadn't told a soul about growing quietly inside her.
I filed the fear away where I filed everything I couldn't fix yet, next to the cold, the ache in my ribs, and Rivik’s drowning song.
There'd be time to be frightened properly later; there was always time for that.
And under it all, quieter and more shameful than any of it, ran the thought I couldn't stop: that being taken like this, handled and hauled and reduced to a thing worth trading, was not new to me.
It only wore a new shape. My father had done it in a boardroom and called it a good match; Nathan had done it at the Savoy and called it fate; and now a scarred monster of a wolf had done it in a river and called it nothing at all, because he didn't need a pretty word for it.
The pretty words, it turned out, had only ever been for the people watching.
They ran us until the river was long behind us and the light had gone flat and grey, and then they let the wolves drop back to a jolting trot that was somehow worse, because it gave me room to feel every separate ache.
My wrists had been bound at some point I didn't remember with a cord of twisted hide, and the wet had shrunk it tight.
When they finally halted in a fold of dead ground out of the wind, the wolf beneath me simply tipped sideways and let me fall, and I hit the frozen earth hard enough to see white.
I got my knees under me and looked for Megan first. She was a few paces off, dumped the same careless way, curled around herself with her bound hands pressed to her middle and her face the colour of tallow.
Our eyes met across the churned ground. Neither of us said anything, because there was nothing to say that wouldn't cost us breath we needed, but I held her gaze and tried to put into it the one thing I could still offer her.
I see you, and you're not alone in this, and I think I already know what you haven't told anyone.
Whether she understood, I couldn't tell, and after a moment she closed her eyes.
That was when the big one came to look at us.
He crossed the camp in man's shape, and even upright and unhurried he was enormous, a full head above the wolves who parted for him, the scar splitting one side of his face into something that had stopped being an expression a long time ago.
He stopped over me and looked down, and I made myself look back, because I'd learned in a hard school that dropping your eyes was the same as agreeing with everything a man like this believed about you.
He studied me as my father used to study a contract.
Then he crouched, took my chin in fingers thick as sausages, turned my face to the last of the light, and said something to the wolf at his shoulder in a tone of flat appraisal, this much meat, this much use, this much worth, before letting go and walking away without ever once having seen me as a thing that could see him back.
I breathed through it. Crying was out of the question, because crying was a thing you did for people who might be moved by it, and there was no one like that here.
But something happened while his fingers were on my face that had never happened at the Savoy or in my father's study, something that belonged to this cold new world, the borrowed weight I carried lurched under my ribs, hard, a wrenching heave a beast battering the bars of my ribs, and for one white instant I thought I might be sick with it.
Then it subsided, and left behind a dull curdled ache low in my chest that hadn't been there before, that didn't ease when I pressed my bound hands to it, that felt, obscurely, like the hidden power in me had taken the insult personally and had taken the insult worse than I had.
That's new too, I thought, and had no idea yet how much it would come to matter.
So I held on to the song instead, gripping it like a handhold I hadn't decided to reach for.
And somewhere under the fear, so quiet I almost missed it, the borrowed power I never touched stirred again at the sound of all that rushing water, restless, reaching after whatever the water kept promising it, and this time it took longer to settle.