4. Chapter 4 #2
Every instinct that loved Ellie said we ran until we dropped and then crawled, though I knew pushing ourselves now would simply slow us down later.
For the first time in my life the two halves of me pulled against each other so hard I could feel the seam, and I hated that the loving half won without a contest, because a good healer doesn't spend bodies to buy time and I was about to spend these ones without a second thought.
I told myself I'd mend them properly when we had her back.
I told myself a great many things that afternoon, walking fast along the river that had taken her, and believed about half of them.
The trail was easy for the first stretch and I hated how easy it was.
Karik, the big scarred one; I'd not known his name until Dev said it, low, like a curse he'd learned over a winter of Hanging Rock fires, where Broken Ridge raids were half the cold season's grim talk, had made no effort to hide his line, and why would he have bothered?
He had the women, he had a start on us, and he had no reason to think the ragged remains of a mixed party would come after a Broken Ridge raiding band and live.
The churned earth of a dozen heavy wolves ran plain along the near bank, heading downstream and east, and I followed it at a pace that made my healer's heart wince for Dev's mending.
Rivik ranged ahead, half in and half out of his skin, reading signs in ways my nose could match but my eyes couldn't. The bond was carrying me a truer bearing than any track, her direction tugged beneath my breastbone like a lodestone, swinging as she moved, but I said nothing of it to Nathan, who'd only want to know its range and reliability and whether it could be used to work his scanner.
Some things a man keeps; the thread between me and Ellie was mine, and hers, and I'd not have it measured.
We'd gone perhaps two hours, the light beginning to fail, when the worry I'd been carrying since long before the river finally surfaced and named itself, and the name it wore was Megan.
I'd been watching her for weeks without letting myself finish the thought, circling it as a man circles a wound he's afraid to unwrap.
The pallor at dawn; her turning off the strong-smelling dried meat and going faintly green at the fish.
The new heaviness in how she moved, the tiredness that outran the march, the hand that drifted to her belly when she thought no one was near enough to read her.
On their own, each was nothing. Cold did all of that to a soft modern body unused to hard travel, and so did grief, and so did fear.
But a healer doesn't read symptoms one at a time; he reads the whole body at once, as you read weather off a dozen small signs, and the whole of Megan had been telling me a story for a fortnight that I'd kept setting down because it wasn't mine to pick up.
Now she was slung over a Broken Ridge wolf's back on a forced march east, and I couldn't set it down any longer.
If I'm right, I thought, and made myself think it plainly, as I'd make myself look at a wound that frightened me, then it isn't just Ellie in danger out there.
It's Ellie, and Megan, and the fragile life Megan carried, unable to withstand a hard road or a hard hand.
I didn't know it for certain. I'd never laid a hand on the woman to confirm it, and she'd sooner die than let me, given who she was to Nathan and who Nathan was to Ellie.
But I'd have staked my life I wasn't wrong, and the thought put a new kind of speed in my legs, an urgency the mission never could.
I said nothing of it to anyone; there was no one to say it to.
Nathan would want it as leverage or dismiss it as women's business; Dev I might have trusted, but the words weren't there between us for a thing this delicate; and Rivik had grief enough to carry without me handing him a second life to fear for.
So I carried it alone, as I'd carried it for a fortnight already, and I let it make me faster, and I promised the thread in my chest, the one still pulling east, still faintly warm, that I was coming.
That we all were; that being taken was not the same as being lost, whatever the river thought.
The trail held east and downstream through the failing light, plain as a road, until it reached a wide slow bend where the bank flattened to a shelf of mud and shingle at the water's edge.
And there it stopped.
Rivik reached the spot first and went still in that whole-body way of his, nose working, and I came up behind him and read the ground he was reading.
What I read there emptied me where I stood.
The wolf-sign crowded down to the water and simply ended.
No line continued along the bank; no trail climbed away inland.
The heavy prints milled and churned at the mud's edge and then there was nothing, only the river sliding past, brown and patient and telling us nothing at all.
"Boats," Rivik said, his voice flat with the effort of not despairing.
He crouched, touched a long straight scuff in the mud where something heavy and keeled had been dragged down into the current.
"He's put them on hide boats, on the water.
" He looked up at me, and for the first time since the river his mask cracked all the way through, because he knew what I knew.
"Water holds no scent, Daska. They could leave it anywhere for forty miles. The trail's gone."
Behind us Nathan was already asking, through Dev, what the delay was; I didn't turn round.
I stood on the ruined shelf of mud with the light going out of the sky and the bond pulling faint but steady in my chest toward a woman somewhere out on that dark moving water, and for the first time I let myself be afraid we might not reach her in time.
Then I pressed my hand to the thread, and felt it pull, and made myself a promise instead.
I have your bearing, I told her, though she'd never hear it. The river can hide your tracks. It can't hide you from me. Hold on, and keep telling me to come, and I will follow this thread to the end of the world if that's how far he takes you.