4. Chapter 4
DASKA
The river had her, and then it didn't. Then she was gone, and I stood chest-deep in killing water with my hands empty and the bond in my chest stretched to a thread so thin I could have wept from the pull of it.
I'd have gone in after her. Every part of me that wasn't a healer was already going, the bear surging up under my skin ready to throw itself downstream after the wolves that had taken her, but the part of me that had spent a lifetime keeping bodies alive knew what the deep channel would do to a man who followed his heart into it.
The ice would break my legs. The cold would take my wits in the time it took to say her name.
And then there'd be one more body in the water and no one left whole enough to track her, and she'd be lost for good instead of only taken.
So I held where I stood. I stood in the flood with the current trying to unseat me and I held, shaking, while the far willows swallowed the last of her, and it was the hardest thing I have ever made my body do.
Beside me Rivik came up out of the deep channel on his hands and knees, water streaming from his hair, blue at the lips and a gash open above his eyebrow where the ice had caught him.
He'd gone in, of course he had, the bond he carried was newer and crueller than mine and it didn't have a healer's caution to leash it.
The river had thrown him back half-drowned and beaten him against the rocks for his trouble.
I got a hand under his arm and hauled him up the bank before the cold could finish what the current had started, and he fought me the whole way, coughing water, trying to turn back toward the far side where there was nothing left to reach.
"She's gone, brother," I said, and my voice came out of me wrong, thick. "She's gone, and going in again won't bring her back, it'll only give me a second body to grieve."
The fight went out of him at that. He knelt in the mud with the river roaring past and his amber eyes fixed downstream, and I watched something shut behind them, some door closing over the grief so the alpha underneath could get to work.
I knew that look; I'd worn it myself, an hour ago, when I made my legs stand still.
It was the look of a man setting his own heart aside because the people depending on him couldn't afford for him to feel it yet.
"Then we track," he said.
The others came together out of the chaos the way survivors do, drawn to whoever's still standing.
The two Hanging Rock men who'd shifted to fight had driven off the wolves on our side and taken wounds doing it, one had a foreleg torn that I'd need to see to, the other favoured his ribs.
Dev had been dragged half under before the third shifter reached him, and he came up the bank soaked and grey, swearing in a steady wretched stream that I understood the shape of without the words.
Nathan stood apart, dry to the waist, and the dryness told its own story: he'd never gone in.
The women had been taken off the far bank and the near, and the man who led this group had kept to the shallows and shouted while my brother threw himself into a river to die.
I filed that where I file everything. A healer learns people as he learns wounds, what shows on the surface, and what sits underneath it festering. I'd been learning Nathan Cole since the day I met him, and nothing I'd learned had improved my opinion.
But it was Rivik I watched hardest, in those first ragged minutes on the bank, because Rivik was the one who could unmake us.
I'd spent my whole life on the edge of other people's packs, a bear among wolves, tolerated for my hands and never once mistaken for kin, always the outsider who earned his place at the fire fresh each morning.
It teaches you to read a group as I read a body: where the strength is, where the rot is, which joint will fail first under load.
And I knew, watching Rivik kneel in the mud and drag the alpha back up over his own grief, that this ruin of a party would hold together or fall apart on the strength of him and me.
Nathan led by right of the scanner and nothing else.
Dev was heart and no muscle. The two shifters were loyal and would follow, but they were bound for home within the week and knew it.
What was left, when you scraped the rest away, was a broken alpha and a bear who'd never belonged anywhere, the two men in all this cold world who loved the same woman and would burn it to the roots to get her back.
It should have been the makings of a war between us.
In any pack I'd ever known it would have been.
Instead I looked at him and felt only the strange fierce gladness of not being alone in it, and whatever we were becoming, the two of us, it had stopped being rivalry somewhere back at Hanging Rock and turned into the only brotherhood either of us had left.
"Ellie," Dev said, and then a rush of his own tongue, gripping my wet sleeve, his eyes wild. He didn't need translating. Where is she, is she alive, can you feel her?
I pressed my hand flat to my own chest, over the thread, and made myself find it under the roar of my fear.
It was there, frayed to nothing, stretched past anything I'd known a bond could stretch, but there, and along it, faint as a heartbeat heard through a wall, came the whole of her.
Terror ran down it first, and then a pain that wasn't quite injury.
Under those, aimed at me like an arrow loosed in the dark, was the same thing she'd pushed down the bond with everything she had. I'm alive, I'm alive, find me.
The breath went out of me. I hadn't known until that moment that I'd been braced for the thread to go slack and cold.
"She lives," I said, to Dev, to Rivik, to all of them, first in the wolf-tongue and then in the handful of Dev's words I'd gathered over the winter. I pressed my hand to the bond so they'd understand. "I can feel her. Frightened. Hurt. Alive. She wants us to come."
Rivik's head came up, and for one breath the alpha in him gave way and I saw the raw thing under it, the same desperate relief that had just gutted me, and then it was gone, folded away, because he couldn't afford it either.
"Then she expects us to follow," he said. "We follow."
We worked fast, because fast was the only mercy on offer.
I set the torn foreleg and bound it, packed the bruised ribs, put a poultice and a wrap over the split above Rivik's eye while he stood rigid and impatient under my hands and I pretended not to notice the tremor of cold and rage running through him.
My own hands were steady, as they always were over a wound.
It's the one place in the world where I've never once doubted what I'm for.
Give me a broken body and I know exactly who I am.
Give me a woman I love slung over a wolf's back and a river between us, and I'm as lost and useless as any man alive.
The trouble was that no one else could see me be lost. That was my place in this group now, and I'd felt it settle onto me on the bank like a second wet hide, the steady one, the one whose hands didn't shake, the fire everyone warmed themselves at.
Rivik could rage and I'd hold him; Dev could break and I'd gentle him.
But if I let them see the bear in me clawing to go into that water after her, if I let the fear show for even a breath, then the last steady thing in this ruined party went out, and I'd watched enough people die of a healer losing his nerve to know I couldn't afford it.
So I kept my hands moving and my voice low, and I carried the terror where I carried everything I couldn't put down.
I told myself the same thing I told frightened patients when the pain got bad: not that it wouldn't hurt, only that we'd get through the next part, and then the part after that.
The Hanging Rock men turned back for home that morning, and it was right that they did, a torn foreleg would slow a pursuit to nothing, and their pack was owed word of what Broken Ridge had done at the crossing.
The eldest pressed his forehead to Rivik's in the old way before they went, alpha's honour to a man who held no pack anymore, and then the three of them were grey shapes going north and we were four.
Nathan wanted to talk about the mission.
He came at me through Dev, since I was the one holding the group together and he knew it, his words clipped and cold and Dev translating them flat with a face that said he'd rather be spitting them.
The scanner was across the river with the gear, salvageable; the women were a setback.
We'd lost time and two able bodies to injury, and the source didn't move for anyone's grief.
The sooner we recovered the equipment and pressed on the better our chances of reaching it before the reserves degraded past use.
I let him finish, then I looked at him for long enough that even a man like Nathan shifted his weight.
"We are going to get her back," I said. "Her and the other one. We're going to get them both back, and then we'll talk about your source. Tell him that, Dev. Word for word."
Dev told him, and added something of his own that landed on Nathan like a slap he couldn't acknowledge, and I decided I liked Dev.
* * *
We crossed back to the gear at the shallowest reach, roped and careful, and the crossing that had cost us everything an hour ago let us over now without a fight, which felt like an obscenity.
The scanner was where the rope had left it, sodden but whole.
Nathan seized on it like a drowning man on a spar, and I left him to it and went to read the ground, because reading ground was a thing I could do.